Cary Underwood’s business partner had the most to gain by Cary’s death. He would take over Cary’s 60% of the business, which, with the new, healthy vines, could be quite lucrative. Provided, of course, that Cary was declared dead.

Did you compare the handwriting on the note left on Cary’s desk (explaining his disappearance) with the letter written by Marc to that French winery? If you did, you would see that although the note was written so as to forge Cary’s handwriting, certain letters such as the “y,” the ”g,” and the “t” in the note were exactly the same as in Marc’s letter, different from the way Cary did it in his letter to Mike on March 8th and his note on the recipe. And the only reason someone would have written that “disappearance” note was if he was the person guilty of that disappearance, i.e., the murder of Cary Underwood.

There are the little things, like when Marc said he didn’t know Cary was missing until the police came to his house on Monday afternoon. But Marsha had called him Saturday to ask if he had seen Cary. Then there is the third set of shoeprints in the cellar that did not belong to Cary or Sandi (as we, too, affectionately call her). Were they Marc’s prints? Surely, the business partner had been in the private cellar more than a few times.

And then there’s Marc’s alibi. If I may abuse Shakespeare, "Methinks he doth protest too much" (you know, Lady Macbeth in Hamlet), only it wasn’t so much protesting as it was his careful detailing of his alibi. He would have done better to keep his mouth shut. First off, he stated that he was on the phone between 8:30 and 9:00 PM, “around the time Cary was killed.” Cary disappeared between 5 PM and early the next morning, during which time he was probably killed, but his time of death was never announced, recorded or written in the papers, so how did Marc know that was when he died? Secondly, Marc went to great lengths to describe the time difference as being eight hours instead of nine, because Europe, including France, of course, was on Daylight Saving Time but the U.S. was not, not until Sunday night. True, there was an eight-hour difference at that time instead of the usual nine. The only problem there is that the eight-hour difference was in the other direction, meaning that it was not 12:30 in the afternoon in France, as Marc claimed, it was 4:30 in the morning, 4:30 AM since France is 8 or 9 hours later than the U.S. I doubt he could reach a French business at that hour.

We’ll never know whether Marc’s killing of Cary was a moment of rage or a moment of opportunity—I’m not sure even Marc knows. We doubt it was premeditated—if it had been, Marc would have been more careful with the note he scribbled out and left on Cary’s desk suggesting Cary just up and left.

When confronted with the facts, Marc Toulouse admitted that he sometimes met in the hidden cellar accessible only through Cary’s office. This was Cary’s “thing,” he said. And if they ever got into one of their arguments, the raised voices couldn’t be heard outside. Marc said he didn’t know what possessed him to grab the bottle out of Cary’s hand and swing it against his partner’s head, and that he never meant to kill him. But once he became aware Cary was dead, he realized he could just leave the body there and it would never be found. (Obviously Marc wasn’t thinking about the mistress at the time.) He didn’t have to dispose of the body, but he did have to get rid of Cary’s car. He drove it to the nearby lake and pushed it down the bank. Then he walked back and drove his own car home.