Munawar Toha's handy work may have been caught on camera, but it's his inability to tell a good lie that pointed police in his direction about his missing wife.
Toha was arrested earlier this week and charged with killing his wife, Surya Toha, and then dumping her dead body and her car in a canal next to his job. Police fished the body and vehicle out of a canal on Monday.
According to an arrest affidavit, Munawar Toha couldn't keep his lies straight to investigators or family friends after he reported his wife missing.
Toha initially told friends that his wife may have run off with another man and that she had done it before. Then, he told police that she withdrew over $5,000 from her bank account and had hinted that she was going to leave the family.
That money was actually going toward clothes for the couple's two sons, family members told detectives.
There was of course the very public emotional plea Toha made on Monday, claiming he wanted his wife back home, but by then cops were on to him.
The lie that may have did Toha in was when investigators asked the 63-year-old Toha when was the last time he spoke to his wife. He told police that he hadn't talked to her since she dropped the kids off to their school at 8 a.m. on March 23.
Cell phone records showed that the couple spoke a couple of times, including once around 1 p.m. Toha also presented police with a handwritten letter that he claimed was from his wife that talked about her plans to leave.
The note was written in the couple's native Indonesian, but Toha was thoughtful enough to also have an English version handy for the cops. Thoughtful and suspicious, cops said.
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After debunking a few lies, detectives turned their missing persons case into a potential homicide investigation, with Toha being the main suspect. That's when a detective decided to swing by Toha's job and noticed a gaping hole in the fence that led to the canal.
Video surveillance tape of the area captured someone driving Surya Toha's car and driving through the fence, into the canal.
Police believe it was her husband, who now sits in a Broward jail awaiting trial.
