Investigators said that the motivation for a man accused of killing his brother and three family members in New Jersey was an ongoing dispute over money.
Investigators said Keith Caneiro became "frustrated with Paul and the amount of money Paul spent from their business accounts," so he planned to stop paying him. According to prosecutors, Paul Caneiro allegedly stole $78,000 from his brother sometime between January 2017 and the day of the murders.
The anger over his brother's plan prompted Paul Caneiro to carry out the brutal killing of not only his brother, but also his brother's family, investigators said.
After the killings, Paul Caneiro allegedly set fire to the mansion before going home and setting fire to his own house to try to throw suspicion off of himself.
Evidence
After police officers arrived at Paul Caneiro's house, they found him and his family outside as the fire burned. According to the court documents, reported Patch, officers noticed a charred rubber glove and a red gas can in the driveway. There were three identical gas cans in a shed behind a house, with a space missing in the row where it looked like a fourth can had been removed.The house had surveillance cameras but Caneiro told police he turned them off because he thought "they were slowing down his WiFi." The last footage showed him walking into the garage and turning off the cameras; the cameras were later found to be hardwired. Caneiro's wife Susan told police that her husband usually kept the cameras on.
Security footage from a neighbor's security camera showed Caneiro's white Porsche SUV leaving the house at 2:08 a.m. the day of the fire and returning about two hours later.
K9 dogs were brought to the house to search for accelerants and the dogs found three accelerants, including one inside the Porsche. Investigators obtained a search warrant to search Caneiro's other three cars and inside one, a Porsche Cayenne, police found a backpack containing a laptop, his passport, a 9 mm barrel, and gun accessories including a silencer.
Later, police found a large gun and other firearms at the house.
On the same day, officers were called to the mansion in Colts Neck and police found the bodies of Keith Caneiro and his family. A third Caneiro brother, Corey, later spoke to police and revealed that Keith Caneiro forwarded him an email the night before he was killed that he had sent to two business associates. Caneiro said he found that there was money missing from the two businesses he ran from his brother and until he could locate the money he was stopping payments to Paul Caneiro.
Several days after the murders, a police cadaver dog found a plastic container at Paul Caneiro's house that contained a pair of jeans and a latex glove with red stains that later matched the blood of Sophia Caneiro.
Paul Caneiro was arrested and indicted on 16 counts, including murder, and faces life in prison. New Jersey has effectively outlawed the death penalty, the lead prosecutor said, otherwise prosecutors would pursue that in this case.