AFTER his wife refused to go on a home renovation show to save their disastrous fixer-upper, David Tronnes committed an unspeakable act.
David Tronnes and Shanti Cooper-Tronnes are the subjects of a 20/20true crime episode, A Killer Renovation, airing on Friday, February 23, 2024, at 9 pm ET and available to stream the following day, exclusively on Hulu.
Who is David Tronnes?
David Tronnes first met his wife, Shanti Cooper-Tronnes, online, while both of them were going through a divorce.
Their whirlwind romance began in 2013 on Match.com.
After dating long-distance, David moved from his Minneapolis, Minnesota home to join Shanti in Orlando, Florida.
He then bought a $600,000, 4,000-square-foot house on East Copeland Drive in April 2015.
He put the home’s deed in trust with his mother.
It was an older-style Victorian home and came with a pool, garage apartment, and even some eccentric accents, like gargoyle statues.
David claimed that Shanti wanted a more modern, open-concept abode, and so the duo began renovations almost immediately.
The couple also ended up taking their relationship to the next level and got married in 2017.
Even then, David never added Shanti to the deed.
At the time, David reportedly told Shanti that he had inherited between $4 to $6 million from his father.
Shanti, meanwhile, ran a lucrative financial software business out of her home office.
Since David didn’t work, he oversaw the home’s renovations, and Shanti paid all of the bills.
Just months after they married, the renovation got out of control, leading David to sleep in the garage while Shanti lived in a studio apartment on the property.
By then, the costly renovations had all but spiraled, nearing nearly $250,000 with no end in sight, leaving Shanti to foot the bill.
To try and alleviate the stress – and costs – of the renovation, David reached out to a neighbor, Keith Ori.
Ori appeared on the reality TV show Zombie House Flipping, which aired on A&E from January 2016 to September 2019.
The premise of the show is simple.
Ori, the builder, and his team – a realtor, project manager, designer. and helper – search for foreclosed or “zombie” properties, renovate them, flip them for a profit, and end up “bringing the properties” and “communities of Orlando, Florida, back to life.”
“When I got there, they had fully disassembled this house to a degree that I’d never seen before,” said Ori, as reported by CBS News.
“It was rather astonishing,” he added.
“Typically, when you talk about disassembling a house, you say that it was taken down to the studs…but they [also had] taken away the studs,” he said.
“It was largely wide open like you’re inside of a giant shoe box,” he added.
Still, Ori and his team were up for the challenge, and in April 2018, agreed to renovate the home in the show’s next season.
Filming would begin in early May.
Ori recalls going back to the home to meet with both David and Shanti one last time to go over logistics and make sure they were both on board with the show.
“They both agreed, and said, ‘Yes, we understand.’ And then she took off immediately,” Ori said.
“I got a sense that she was pissed off at him,” he added.
Just a few days after storming out of their meeting, Shanti would be dead.
What did David Tronnes do to Shanti Cooper-Tronnes?
From crimes of passion to hefty insurance payouts, there are many motives for murder – but for David Tronnes, it was a renovation gone wrong that may have led him to murder his wife, Shanti Cooper-Tronnes.
Ryan Vescio, a former prosecutor with the Orlando State Attorney’s Office, led the investigation into Shanti’s death.
“This house became more than just a project to David Tronnes. It was his life,” said Ryan Vescio.
“He obsessed on it…this house is the center point to the story,” he added.
On April 24, 2018, David called 911, hysterical.
“My wife. I found my wife, she’s not breathing. I tried to do CPR, I can’t get her to breathe,” he told the operator.
When first responders arrived, they found and pronounced Shanti dead.
David willingly went to the Orlando Police Department headquarters, even without an attorney.
For 14 hours, police questioned David about Shanti’s death.
He told detectives that he had gone out to walk the couple’s dogs in the afternoon.
When he came home, he decided to check on Shanti, which is when he found her floating in the bathtub, in her pajamas, with the water still running.
“I think something went wrong. Either she slipped and she fell or blacked out or something caused her to collapse,” he said.
Police immediately questioned his story.
When they had arrived on the scene, the tub was dry and there was no sign of water in the bathroom.
Shanti’s injuries, including multiple bruises on her head, suggested blunt force trauma.
Shanti’s autopsy would later confirm that she was also strangled.
Vescio questions, “What would somebody do when they were about to lose the most important thing in their life?”
“Because in April of 2018, the most important thing in Dave’s life was that house,” he added.
Investigators began to speculate that Shanti finally told David she had had it with the renovations, and that she was unwilling to continue paying for them.
They claimed that she had found out that he had been lying about receiving millions of dollars from his father’s inheritance.
Authorities also claimed that Shanti had found out that David “allegedly had a penchant for going to bathhouses for anonymous sex with men,” as reported by People.
“We all thought we knew David Tronnes,” a friend of Tronnes previously told People.
“Come to find out, what we knew was a facade. He was living a total lie.”
Following their investigation, they believed that David had fatally beaten and strangled Shanti to death, and then tried to clean up the scene of the crime.
They also uncovered Shanti’s $250,000 life insurance policy, listing David as the beneficiary.
In August 2018, four months after investigators found Shanti dead, David was arrested and charged with her murder.
Where is David Tronnes now?
David Tronnes’ trial began on October 12, 2023.
It had been delayed partly as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2021, David’s lawyers also filed paperwork claiming he was not competent to assist in his defense due to a recent diagnosis of schizophrenia.
However, in early 2023, an Orange County judge ruled him competent to move forward.
David notably did not take the stand during the trial, and his defense team did not call any witnesses.
Prosecutors chose to show the jury photos from the crime scene and claimed David had altered the scene before he called the police.
On October 18, 2023, at around 2 pm, a jury began their deliberation, just six days after the trial began.
Within a few hours, the jury found David Tronnes guilty of first-degree murder for killing his wife, Shanti Cooper-Tronnes, in their Delaney Park fixer-upper in 2018.
After the verdict was read, the judge presiding over the case handed down his sentence.
While the death penalty had already been taken off the table years ago, David was sentenced to life in prison in the Florida Department of Corrections.
Following the verdict, Shanti’s family finally felt a sense of relief.
“It’s like a weight that’s been lifted off of our shoulders,” said her son, Jackson Cooper, as reported by Click Orlando.
“It feels good inside that he’s finally where he is,” Jackson Cooper said of Tronnes.
“We can move on knowing that he’s where he’s supposed to be – where he’s meant to be.”
“Your honor, my mom was the best person I ever knew,” he added.
“The only word I come back to is evil. Only evil would do what he did to her,” James Cooper, Shanti’s ex-husband and Jackson’s father, said.
Shanti’s stepfather, Norman Dow, said he’s been “angry and hurt” over her murder.
“This has affected me so much that it withdrew me from my grandson…” Norman said.
“Every time that I think of Jackson, it brings to my mind my daughter, and it upsets me,” he added.
As of December 19, 2023, David Tronnes is serving his sentence at the Northwest Florida Reception Center Annex, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.