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This is a well-documented case, and I have enough information to write a comprehensive brief.This episode covers the 2008 murder of 20-year-old Justin Newman by Ari Squire, a 39/40-year-old building contractor and diesel-truck-pulling enthusiast in Lake Barrington, Illinois (a Chicago suburb). Lake County authorities said Ari Squire, 40, lured Newman, 20, to his home in February 2008 on the pretext of offering him a construction job. Authorities said he then murdered Newman, switched clothes with him, stuck his own wallet and identification on Newman, set the body on fire and dropped a heavy diesel truck on it, staging it to look like his own accidental death in order to collect on a $5 million life insurance policy naming his wife, Denise, as beneficiary.
After the alleged killing of Newman, Ari Squire fled to Missouri. On March 2, 2008, Ari Squire shot and killed himself when several police officers came to the hotel room where he was staying to investigate the presence of Newman's car in the parking lot. Because Squire died before facing charges, there was no criminal trial or conviction for him. The plaintiffs contended Denise Squire was liable for the wrongful death of Newman because she conspired with Ari to fake Ari's death, and the murder was the result of that plan, and in February 2010 a Lake County jury decided the widow of the man who murdered an Arlington Heights man in a scheme to collect on his own life insurance should pay the victim's family $6 million. However, Denise Squire has not been charged criminally, though Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran said that his department has turned over its findings in its investigation of her to the FBI and federal prosecutors. No further criminal charges against Denise Squire have surfaced since.
Beyond the original 2010 Forensic Files episode ("A Squire's Riches"), the case has continued to draw true-crime interest. It was revisited in Oxygen's Accident, Suicide, or Murder series (episode "Deadly Double," aired December 2025), and has been covered by multiple true-crime podcasts and YouTube channels. Local news outlets extensively covered the original investigation, the manhunt, and the subsequent civil trial.
Ari Squire was never formally convicted, as he took his own life before he could be arrested or tried. He is deceased — he died by suicide on March 2, 2008, in Eureka, Missouri, when police closed in on him. This was not a death-penalty case; no execution occurred, and no death sentence was ever imposed since he never stood trial.