He Killed His Parents, Then Lived With Their Bodies For 14 Days.

[00:00:02]This was the worst scene I've ever been to. Before you even went into the residence, you could smell the decomposition >> at a quiet suburban home in Walka, Wisconsin. Investigators walk into a scene that is straight out of a horror movie.

[00:00:18]>> At the time that I got there, we knew that there were two bodies found.

[00:00:22]>> Right away, we were asking questions.

[00:00:24]Where is their kid? Are they going to find the body? They found two and maybe there's a third.

[00:00:29]>> As terrifying as this situation is, this case becomes something so much bigger and darker. Once you're behind the curtain, it's very difficult to know what's going on.

[00:00:44]>> This was the worst scene I've ever been to. That's not a line from a screenplay.

[00:00:48]That's a sworn statement from a detective describing a house in Wakaua, Wisconsin on a quiet residential street where nothing was supposed to go wrong.

[00:00:58]Shares the image to hold on to for the rest of this video. Two parents wrapped in blankets and towels, laid out in their own home like something being stored rather than mourned. While upstairs in that same house, a 17-year-old boy kept sleeping, kept eating, kept walking the family dog for over 2 weeks. That house is the whole case. On one side of a bedroom door was a normal American family. On the other side was a plan. So extreme investigators initially assumed they were looking at a burglary gone wrong.

[00:01:27]>> This was [music] the worst scene I've ever been to. Before you even went into the residence, you could smell the decomposition.

[00:01:35]>> Once investigators go inside, they find a house of horrors.

[00:01:40]>> Tatiana was shot multiple times.

[00:01:43]>> She had been covered up by numerous blankets and towels.

[00:01:47]Towards the front of the residence, there was a small office area and that's where Donald was. And again, he was also covered with blankets and towels.

[00:01:56]>> It appeared that he might have been at his desk [music] or doing some type of work there.

[00:02:00]>> There were candles in the area of Donald Mayor's body. They were not lit when I got there. Um, they were extinguished, but it did appear that they had been lit in the past. Once we were able to remove some of the blankets and clothing from Dawn, you could see that there was a head wound, a very massive head wound.

[00:02:23]I noted that there were a lot of piles of clothing, blankets [music] in addition to where the two deceased individuals were. And my concern was, is the 17-year-old son somewhere under those those blankets or clothing, or was the family dog deceased? also hidden.

[00:02:43][music] >> Right away, we were asking questions.

[00:02:45]Where where is their kid? What's happening? And we're all thinking, has the kid been kidnapped? Has he run away?

[00:02:52]Are they going to find the body? Is the body just in the home? And they found two and maybe there's a third.

[00:02:58]When they first entered, they thought that this was possibly a burglary.

[00:03:02]Pictures were off the walls, beds were off the backr.

[00:03:07]If you had gone into the the closets, all the clothing was off any shelving units. It was laying all over the floor.

[00:03:14]It definitely looked like someone had gone there and burglarized the residence.

[00:03:18]>> There's also another small study area upstairs where paperwork was pulled out.

[00:03:24]We did find paperwork for a handgun, but we didn't locate a handgun in the house.

[00:03:29]So, was it something where a suspect located a handgun and then used it on the family? As the night progressed, we determined there was no other victims in the house.

[00:03:40]>> Before we go further into what the court record actually shows, make sure you're subscribed to the scam vault because we don't just cover the story, we follow the evidence. And this one has more layers than almost anything we've covered this year. The defendant's name is Nikita Cassap.

[00:03:55]His stepfather was Donald Mayor. His mother was Tatiana Cassap. According to charging documents filed in Wauaawa County on February 11th, 2025, Nikita shot and killed both of them inside their home. His stepfather first, then his mother when she walked in the door, still wearing her winter coat. He did not run. He did not call for help.

[00:04:17]According to prosecutors, he covered both bodies with blankets, lit candles near them, and then continued living in that house for more than two weeks, texting his school, texting his stepfather's employer, pretending to be the man he had just killed. Sit with that phrase for a second because it's going to come back twice more before this video is over. He covered them up and then he kept living. As police piece together what exactly happened during these last two and a half weeks, all signs are now pointing to Nikita as the perpetrator of these murders.

[00:04:51]>> I believe he murdered Don first and then he waited for Tatiana to come home. I mean, she was still wearing her her winter coat. She just had gotten in the door. I think it was pretty apparent that he had a plan and he enacted his plan to murder his parents.

[00:05:05]>> He truly executed his parents. He ambushed them. He shot Don in the back of the head and he shot his mom, I believe, at one point through her throat. He leaves her where she falls and he leaves Donald where he falls and then just covers them up with some blankets and lives with them. And what's even freakier to me is that he's calling himself into school. He is pretending to be Donald to his work. He's pretending to be Donald to his mom, who is his grandma. He's covering his tracks and he's acting normal.

[00:05:41]>> Nikita went grocery shopping. He went uh and bought fast food. He went to Culver.

[00:05:45]He walked the dog. He took out the trash. He shoveled the driveway. He did all the kind of normal things that someone would do while living, but with his dead parents in the house.

[00:05:55]>> It wasn't that he just killed them and ran. He killed them and lived with them.

[00:06:02]and I don't know, walked over his mom every day, walked by Don every day, and they're dead.

[00:06:10]>> What's even more concerning is that what started with police thinking this was a burglar looking for loot actually seems to be Nikita working out a plan.

[00:06:22]>> We saw some money envelopes on the counter. So, I think he knew that they kept cash around and I think that's why he was looking through the house. I think he may have also been looking for valuables including jewelry and thought I mean a lot of people have safes behind their you know large pictures so he thought maybe that is why he took the pictures off the wall to see if there was anything behind it possibly if anything was taped behind the pictures.

[00:06:47]That's what he was doing every day. He spent two weeks searching that house, tearing apart that house. He went through everything and at that point it goes into why why did he kill his mom and his stepdad? And that's kind of the onion of the whole >> not fled, not panicked, lived alongside the people he killed, doing chores, walking the dog, buying fast food, all while working through what investigators would later describe as a methodical search of the house for cash, jewelry, and a handgun listed on paperwork he'd apparently gone looking for. Here's the part that turns this from a domestic tragedy into something closer to a national security case. According to the criminal complaint, Nikita wasn't hiding in that house out of fear. He was finishing preparations. Investigators say he was raising money, cash, jewelry, electronics, all later found packed into the stolen family car to fund a plan he had been building online for months. An attempt, according to court filings, to use a weaponized drone to assassinate the president of the United States in the belief that killing the head of state could trigger the collapse of the government itself. The notion is I'm going to go get a drone and I'm going to somehow get close enough to the president and I'm going to drop some sort of an IED or a bomb.

[00:08:02]>> That whole strategy was his plan. I'm going to use a drone. I'm going to weaponize it and somehow I'm going to be able to kill the president of the United States. He felt that by taking the president down, he could then push forward the collapse of society so that it could be rebuilt [music] to better fit what his ideals were. He had become so radicalized that he believed the greater plan of you know taking action against the government was more important than any individual life of someone that he may or may not have loved or you know may or may not have cared for. So now all of a sudden this isolated, very lonely young man has the potential of being in a group of 10, 20, 30 people. Now he has people who understand him. Now he has friends. Now he knows exactly where he's going. And that's what makes it so powerful.

[00:09:00]>> They're telling him all the things he wants to hear, offering him a life that he could have somewhere else. And they could be this group for him. That's >> ask yourself the question this case keeps circling back to the one that turns a missing person's report into something closer to a thriller. How does a 17-year-old honor society student ranked third in his class go from writing college applications to researching how to kill a sitting president without a single adult in his life seeing it happen? Because according to investigators, the radicalization wasn't hidden in some dark corner of the internet no one could find. His mother had already called the FBI about his online activity two years earlier in 2023. Agents opened an inquiry. They closed it. At the time, according to law enforcement statements, there wasn't enough to charge him with anything.

[00:09:50]That's not a documentaries editorializing.

[00:09:54]That's the bureau's own prior contact with this exact teenager. On the record, years before two people ended up dead in a Wisconsin living room. As it turns out, this story becomes a puzzle that is not what investigators expected at all.

[00:10:09]When they dig deeper into Nikita's cell phones and computers, they discover he's not just reading about the dark underworld on the web, he's actually participating in it.

[00:10:22]>> Nikita had some very concerning web activity and and and phone activity. It appeared he had a fascination with anti-government and other kind of far extreme political viewpoints.

[00:10:36]>> We know he was talking on the app Telegram. Nikita went on to this app looking for these people. He went looking for neo-Nazis. He went looking for extremists.

[00:10:50]>> These hate groups, they will actually target people very specifically because they want them to go out and do things.

[00:10:57]And the real problem is because they can do it through this this internet process and through apps and platforms, they're very difficult to stop. And so that's what makes them so dangerous.

[00:11:09]>> My understanding is that Nikita had similar political views to some of these other individuals who are committing terror attacks. And so when he saw these people out taking action, he was almost inspired by them to harm people himself in the name of his political belief. We didn't even know how deep is this, how real is this, [music] how big of a plot is this? Is he working with other people? Is this a terrorist situation?

[00:11:36]And it just randomly got uncovered when he killed his parents.

[00:11:41]>> That's when police call in the FBI.

[00:11:44]Turns out though, this isn't new. The FBI had actually investigated Nikita Cassap 2 years earlier. Back in 2023, Nikita's mom actually called the bureau and the FBI showed up to do an investigation, decided that it was nothing of consequence and moved on. But there was that concern of his being online, being in contact with some of these more extremist organizations. At the time, there wasn't enough to charge Nikita Cassap with anything. This time, very different. When agents discover the extent of his plot, >> he truly believed he was going to murder the president.

[00:12:28]>> He covered them up and then he kept living. And according to court records, part of that living involved deleting nothing, hiding nothing about who he really was online, while hiding everything about what he'd done at home.

[00:12:39]Investigators say he was active on Telegram, communicating with individuals connected to extremist networks, some of whom, according to law enforcement's account, appear to have recognized an isolated, wealthy, radicalizable teenager and worked to draw him further in, encouraging him, according to investigators, toward the kind of action that would benefit their cause rather than him.

[00:13:00]>> Get you. I think they also saw we've got a kid here who we can take advantage of.

[00:13:07]He did provide them with some thousands of dollars. He has more than $14,000 in cash. He has jewelry. He has other valuables. And the question is, was this driven for just that purpose to exploit this young man just so they could take all of his assets?

[00:13:27]>> Certainly, he was in these chat rooms in which people were talking about their hatred of the US government. But I believe it was him who decided that maybe I need to buy a drone and weaponize it so I can do this.

[00:13:41]>> But this assassination plot wasn't the end of Nikita's scheme. No, he actually gave some thought to what would happen next.

[00:13:49]>> After he completed his mission to try to kill the president, he had planned to lay low in Ukraine for an amount of time for some years and then eventually move on to other countries or to other things. He had this belief that he would be able to kind of fly under the radar as long as he hid for an amount of time.

[00:14:08]>> He was looking not to necessarily live in the US, but to do this destabilize the country and then move to Eastern Europe. He was looking for a place to kind of start over his life after he kind [music] of destroyed the country. I really think in his mind he thought he was going to end up in Ukraine and he'd be living a normal life and maybe that's why he took the family albums with him.

[00:14:34]Surely that would be the reason why he would take birth certificates of his mom and himself. When police finally caught him, it wasn't through a manhunt. It was a rolled stop sign in rural Kansas more than 2 weeks after the murders driving his dead stepfather's car without a license. The plate had just been entered as stolen. Officers searched the vehicle and found a.357 handgun, cash, jewelry, family photo albums, birth certificates for himself and his mother, and according to the criminal complaint, a memory card containing photographs of his parents' bodies arranged with candles, which investigators described as evidence of what may have been ritualistic behavior around the killings.

[00:15:15]>> Nikita Cassop's car. And what they find is both shocking and confusing.

[00:15:23]There were some things that were found in the car when Nikita was stopped, including a 357 handgun.

[00:15:29]On top of that, there were clothing that smelled of the odor of decomposition.

[00:15:34]There was a Bible.

[00:15:36]>> There was cash found throughout the vehicle, jewelry, electronics.

[00:15:41]There were photo albums, which I thought was very interesting, containing pictures [music] of he and his family. We also found birth certificates for Nikita and his mom.

[00:15:55]>> There was some cameras. So, I don't know if he thought that the cameras that he had taken had evidence on them. Older laptops, electronics, cell phones. It was just very eclectic stuff that he had with him.

[00:16:09]>> He did take the dog with him on his road trips. I believe that the dog was the only thing left that was kind of someone who could comfort him or someone who was known to him. Maybe he didn't want to be alone and he probably didn't want to leave the dog there alone. I was very glad that the dog was still alive.

[00:16:25]>> In one of the cameras, investigators find this memory card that contains some truly disturbing images.

[00:16:33]>> There was his mother and his stepfather's bodies and kind of odd arrangements of candles and how they were wrapped in blankets. It appeared that based on the pictures that there was some sort of fascination with their death and that it was found to be extremely concerning behavior. I believe the reason for the candles and the blankets, there may have been some ritualistic element to it.

[00:16:57]On top of that, there was a video that was recovered in which Nikita can be heard on the phone talking about his stepfather's body saying you can see his rotten body right there. So, as he's in the house with his stepfather, he's making comments about how his body is decomposing.

[00:17:15]>> It's unbelievable to say, but it seems that Nikita Cassop was living in this house with his parents' decomposing bodies for more than 2 weeks.

[00:17:28]Here's the moral center of this story, and we're going to land on it one final time before we're done. a plan to destabilize a government began with a plan to erase the two people who trusted him most. Whatever ideology he'd absorbed online, whatever group had gotten inside his head, the first casualties of that ideology weren't strangers or symbols of the state. They were the mother who raised him and the stepfather who, by every account in the record, had treated him as his own son.

[00:17:55]>> Have they been targeted? Well, it turns out their story is very unusual. First of all, Nikita and his mom are from the Eastern European country of Muldova.

[00:18:06]>> Muldova is just north of the Black Sea, right next to Romania, just to the southwest of Ukraine.

[00:18:14]>> Dakina and his mom were living in Malddova and they came over to the US when he was 7 years old. And his mom met Donald and moved here, got married, and Donald really took him [music] in and treated him like a son.

[00:18:30]He excelled in school. He enjoyed academics greatly.

[00:18:35]>> He kind of got transplanted right into the American dream and grew up in a in a nice house in a nice neighborhood going to a nice school.

[00:18:45]>> Two questions. Where is Nikita now? And what happened [music] to his family? In September 2025, Nikita Cassat pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree intentional homicide, avoiding a trial that prosecutors said the state was fully prepared to win. In exchange, several additional charges, including hiding a corpse and theft, were resolved as part of the plea, though the two homicide convictions alone carried a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

[00:19:13]What remained undecided was narrower but consequential. Whether he would ever be eligible for release on extended supervision or whether the court would close that door for good. At sentencing, prosecutors argued for the maximum life with no possibility of ever returning to the community, describing the killings as a calculated act carried out with, in the state's words on the record, a total disregard for human life. the step aunts and uncles and the grandparents, they were in court to blast him. They were in court to tell him, "You destroyed our lives." [music] I mean, they were not in court to support Nikita. No one was in court to support Nikita.

[00:19:52]>> We hear from Michael Dabona, a childhood friend of Donald Mayor, Nikita's stepdad.

[00:19:58]>> Don is my best friend. He was also a son, a brother, a husband, and a source of love, laughter, strength to everyone who knew him. His wife was his partner in life, someone he loved deeply and planned a future with. In a single act of unimaginable violence, the defendant erased not one life, but [music] two. I ask that the court fully recognize the gravity of what was tak what was done here and not just the taking of two lives but the destruction of everything those lives touch. Your honor, I have come here today as a representative of my family to share the profound impact that the loss of my brother Dawn and his wife Tatiana has had on our family and their friends.

[00:20:47]Their lives were intentionally taken in an act of senseless and unforgivable violence. The manner in which Dawn and Tatiana were killed is something no family should ever have to endure.

[00:21:04]I believe a person capable of such betrayal and violence poses a continued danger to others.

[00:21:16]For the safety of the community and in honor of Dawn and Tatiana's lives, I ask that he be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison without any possibility of release.

[00:21:32]Then it's time for district attorney Leslie Baisy to make her case.

[00:21:37]>> This isn't a kid who just went off one night. He was mad at his parents. This was a kid who had it all. He had a loving home. He had good schooling. He had support. Um he really he went on vacations with his family. And do I believe that some of his researching of the internet caused him to start having strange ideas? I do. But it wasn't the internet that told him to come up with this plan. It was not the internet who told him that he should kill his parents. [music] That was this defendant's decision. Um what he did showed a total disregard [music] for human life. This shows an individual who does not deserve to ever be back in the community. So I'm asking the court to do the maximum penalty life without the possibility of extended supervision. The defense argued the opposite, that this was, according to their filing, a child manipulated by adults online who understood exactly how to exploit a vulnerable teenager's isolation, and that the law's own protections for juveniles existed precisely because adolescent judgment is not adult judgment. Before sentencing, Cassap addressed the court directly.

[00:22:44]According to the hearing transcript, he apologized to his family and said he had become obsessed with what he called hateful thoughts, describing his actions as something he had once believed were justified by a war he thought he was fighting, while acknowledging in his own words on the record that he could not blame the people who influenced him because the choice had ultimately been his.

[00:23:04]>> You see tears like this, especially when you have young people, I think they're real. I mean, people want things to be logical.

[00:23:16]People want to believe that there's good on one side and there's evil and they don't bleed together. And yet, you see a boy who's crying about the death of his mother that was caused by his own hands.

[00:23:33]Some things truly are irreconcilable.

[00:23:36]>> There is no excuse for what I did. The truth is I became obsessed [music] with hateful thoughts and feelings. I felt like the world was a sick evil place and that my extreme actions to try to change it were justified. I thought I was part of a revolution, part of a war.

[00:23:59]And I told [music] myself the bad things have to happen in war. I cannot blame the videos, propaganda [music] and people that inspired my actions because I had the ability to choose right instead of wrong. [music] I am very sorry for what I have done.

[00:24:17]The judge was not swayed toward leniency. Citing the calculated nature of the killings and the unresolved question of whether someone capable of this could ever safely reenter society, the court sentenced CASAP to two life sentences with no possibility of extended supervision. Meaning, according to the ruling, he will spend the remainder of his life in prison. I'm not immune to the fact that I have a very young man here and that uh whatever decision I make is a decision that is going to affect that young man for the rest of his life. I have no choice but to impose two life sentences.

[00:25:00]But this court can set an eligibility date for extended supervision at least 20 years in the future or I can choose to find that the person is not eligible for release to extended supervision.

[00:25:16]>> There was a lot of talk about could he be rehabilitated? He's 17. Could he become somebody that we could let out into society 60 years from now? Could he have a chance at parole? as I look at, you know, like a pros and cons. What are the pros about Nikita Cassid? He took he's taken responsibility for what he did, but I weigh that as to the horrific, terrible, inexplicable, not understandable acts that he involved himself in. So, what do I do with Nikita Cassid? And I weigh these things and I'm led to the determination that I choose to find that he's not eligible for release to extended supervision because I don't know given the nature of these acts. I do not know given what occurred here when [music] and if and whether a profound and significant change can occur. So what the judge did is he did give him life without the possibility of parole which will mean he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

[00:26:27]>> I think the sentence is appropriate is >> he covered them up and then he kept living. That sentence describes 14 days in a Wisconsin house. It could just as easily describe an entire radicalization pipeline that operated in plain sight. a teenager researching mass killers, engaging with extremist channels, receiving what a witness described to investigators as violent propaganda, all while maintaining to his teachers, his classmates, and apparently even to himself the image of a normal kid with a normal future. Investigators have been careful to note that the extent of any organized foreign or extremist coordination behind this plot remains part of an active review, and no additional individuals have been publicly charged in connection with the assassination plot itself. as of this recording.

[00:27:12]>> What made [snorts] him go over the edge?

[00:27:14]What made him actually do what he did? I don't know if we'll ever know um 100% why he did what he did.

[00:27:22]>> Look, we're left with as many questions as answers in this case. It seems incomprehensible that a teenager from a caring family would brutally kill his own parents and plot to overthrow the government. But there is one thing that's clear. This is a cautionary tale for parents out there who are concerned about what their teens do online.

[00:27:46]>> What I think that the takeaway should be is the internet can be a very dark and dangerous place and can be a very sinister place.

[00:27:56]>> What can't be reviewed away is the outcome already on the record. Two people are dead, convicted by their killer's own guilty plea. And a president who never knew his name was, according to federal investigators, an intended target of a plan built inside a suburban home that looked from the outside like nowhere anything could ever go wrong. If you want to look past what we've covered here, the criminal complaint and sentencing transcript in state of Wisconsin versus Nikita Cassap are part of the public court record in Wauaaw County. Read the plea hearing in full. Then ask yourself the question this case never fully answers and tell us your answer in the comments. Was Nikita Cassap a radicalized predator who used his family as a stepping stone towards something larger? Or a manipulated teenager whom the adults meant to protect him and the systems meant to flag him failed to catch in time where you draw that line says as much about how we monitor extremism online as it does about this one case.

[00:28:50]If this case affected you the way it affected us, hit like, share it with someone who needs to see how radicalization actually starts.

[00:28:56]Subscribe to the Scam Vault and turn on notifications because we're back every week following the evidence wherever it leads.