A wheelchair-bound Texas man took his own life after being exposed by the Marine he hired to kill his ex-girlfriend. A shocking video obtained by KXAN appears to show Keith Cote, 63, recruiting Joey Sees to murder SanDee Jones because she was “dating a black guy.”
Cote was described as an “independently wealthy” man who ended up in a wheelchair after being injured in an accident. Cote offered Sees $10,000 to kill Jones and $15,000 more to “watch [Sees] put a bullet in her head” and “watch her slump over the wheel dead.”
Police said that Cote expressed that “if it were not for his accident, he would do the job himself, and would stab [Jones] in the heart with an ice pick so he could watch her die.”
The video shows Cote explaining the logistics of the killing as Sees drove by the places Jones frequented. He said Jones went to a Wells Fargo location on a nightly basis to deposit cash. “It’s like clockwork,” he said. Then he has Sees drive by Jones’ massage parlor.
“That’s it. So, she parks right here out in front,” Cote said. Eventually Cote pointed out a spot where there are no cameras.
“Essentially, you can back right up in there,” he continued.
Video of Cote plotting Jones’s murder was what got him arrested in Oct. 2017. About a year later, he posted bond, then killed himself. That was in September 2018.
Remarkably, Sees and Jones met after all of this transpired. She declared Sees a “hero, not only for our country, but for me.”
“What Joey did is about nothing except love. That’s the greatest and he didn’t even know me. Not everyone would do what Joey did,” she said.
When they met, Sees said that he was “sorry we had to meet this way.”
Cote apparently assumed that because Sees was a Marine and “had killed people before” that killing Jones would be “right up his alley.” The murder plot began at a barbecue Cote hosted. He invited Sees and his family.
“I guess he thought every Marine is a hitman,” Sees said. “We’re not killers. We just do our job, but our job isn’t to come home and murder someone because she’s dating a black guy.” At first, Sees thought Cote was just bragging about having cash when he put money “on the table.” That was not so, as the video proved.
“[H]e kept on and on pursuing the idea of me murdering this lady,” Sees said.
Jones revealed that she “survived [Cote] once” and that he had strangled her before.
Sgt. Darrell Gibson of the Travis County Sheriff’s Office surmised that Cote saw Jones as “a possession.”
“Domestic violence is murder in slow motion,” he said. “She’s a possession. She’s a piece of property to him and he treated her as such. When this piece of property was no longer useful to him, he wanted it disposed of.”
[Image via YouTube screengrab]
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