Murder of Patrick De La Cerda

Patrick Kane De La Cerda, 25, was shot to death at his home at 2525 Howland Blvd. in Deltona, Florida, on the morning of February 27, 2018, according to the Volusia County Sheriff's Office. His girlfriend went to the house after she and his father could not reach him by phone and found him dead on the floor. Investigators believe De La Cerda was lured to his front door: his father had received a call that morning from an unknown man about a package delivery, which he relayed to his son, and De La Cerda was then shot multiple times through the front door with a high-powered rifle.

The Sheriff's Office said the investigation quickly focused on Gregory Bender, a 50-year-old Windermere, Florida, hedge fund manager who had previously dated De La Cerda's girlfriend. Bender had sent the couple threatening messages for months after that relationship ended, and the girlfriend obtained a protective injunction against him in December 2017. On the morning of the shooting, she received two calls from Bender — the first contact from him in months — before finding De La Cerda dead.

The case moved forward after Bender's estranged wife told the lead detective, Chad Weaver of the Volusia County Sheriff's Office, that she had found a blue spiral notebook in Bender's handwriting describing what looked like a plan to kill De La Cerda. That tip supported a search warrant, and investigators searching Bender's home on February 28, 2018, recovered crumpled notebook pages from a trash bin outlining an attack plan, including De La Cerda's address, sketches of the property, and instructions for entering and leaving undetected, along with ammunition and a shell casing matching evidence from the crime scene. Bender was charged with first-degree murder and booked into the Orange County Jail on March 1, 2018.

Bender went to trial in Volusia County in May 2021. Prosecutors presented the notebook pages, ammunition, and cell phone records; his defense argued the notebook reflected "fantasy" rather than an actual plan. On May 28, 2021, a jury convicted Bender of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Bender appealed, arguing that the search of his home was unlawful. On April 14, 2023, Florida's Fifth District Court of Appeal affirmed his conviction and sentence, holding that the search did not violate his rights and that, even if it had, the evidence was independently admissible because the search warrant relied entirely on the Sheriff's Office investigation rather than the disputed search.

The case has since been covered by CBS's "48 Hours" and Oxygen's "A Plan to Kill."