"Daddy is Trying to Make You Die."

The murder of Mary Gingles, a landmark study, and the system that had every chance to save her

Nathan Gingles has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder and has pleaded not guilty; the facts described in this article reflect allegations supported by court records, police reports, and the Broward Sheriff's Office's own internal affairs investigation, not adjudicated findings of guilt.

Mary and Nathan Gingles were both U.S. Army Signal Corps officers, both captains when they left the service within a year of each other. They married on December 26, 2018. Seraphine was born in Germany in August 2020. By all outward appearances, a military family making it work.

Mary Gingles

But no one knows what goes on behind closed doors. Nathan was prone to violent outbursts even before the wedding. That detail would not emerge publicly until after Mary was dead.

Throughout the marriage, Nathan told Mary the same thing, over and over: “If you ever try to leave me, I’ll kill you.”

When the family relocated to Tamarac, Florida, in 2022, Nathan went to work for military contractor General Dynamics at Southern Command in Doral, earning more than $160,000 a year plus $4,000 a month in VA benefits.

Mary, a former captain with her own qualifications, was not allowed to work. She was not allowed to have a car. She was isolated in a South Florida subdivision with a toddler and a husband who controlled every dollar that came into the house.

On one occasion, Nathan dragged Mary up the stairs in a chokehold while Seraphine watched. On another, after staying up all night snorting Adderall, he sang songs about killing her. He owned approximately twenty firearms, six of them fitted with silencers.

Nathan Gingles

And then there was Seraphine. Four years old, absorbing everything. After one visit with her father during the separation, she came home and told her mother, “Daddy is trying to make you die.”

She was four years old.

Mary filed for divorce in February 2024. Her petition described a marriage built on control, isolation, threats, and terror. She named the firearms. She talked about the silencers. She described her terror.

Everything Right

On July 9, 2024, Mary agreed to drop her first restraining order in exchange for exclusive use of the marital home during divorce proceedings. It looked like a practical trade: the house for the order. It wasn’t.

People in coercive control situations frequently withdraw protection orders because the perpetrator escalates pressure around them, because compliance feels safer than the alternative, and because the legal process itself has become another arena where he exercises control. Mary wasn’t naive. She was choosing among options that someone else had spent years engineering to be impossible.

Two months after she dropped the order, in August, Nathan’s firearms were returned to him. All of them. Every gun. Every silencer.

The Sig Sauer P320 with a suppressor that investigators would later recover from a body of water near the murder scene carried the same serial number as one of the weapons on that original seizure list.

After the order was dropped, Nathan violated the terms of their divorce agreement whenever he felt like it. He came to the house when Mary wasn’t there. He stole memory cards from her security cameras. He erected a ladder and climbed in through a second-floor window.

On October 29, 2024, Mary’s divorce attorney advised her to check her car for tracking devices. She went outside, turned on her phone camera, and filmed herself. “It’s in the back of the car,” she said, her voice audibly panicked. She had found a GPS tracker in the wheel well of her 2023 Mitsubishi Outlander. She called the Broward Sheriff’s Office that same day and asked deputies to collect it as evidence.

A community service aide, a front-desk worker who takes reports of minor incidents, was assigned to her case.

The tracker sat in the wheel well of Mary’s car for months. Nobody picked it up.

On December 27, Mary’s home security camera showed Nathan breaking into the house while she was away. He left a backpack in the garage. Deputies came. Inside: plastic wrap, zip ties, rubber gloves, duct tape, and a note with the word “waterboarding” written on it. Her friends called it “Dexter’s murder kit.” Deputies took a report, left, and collected nothing. A search warrant was drafted weeks later and never signed. There is no record of it reaching a judge before February 16.

As the end of the lease approached, as the divorce inched toward finalization, Mary told friends she had moved past fear into something grimmer. She predicted she would be dead by the time her lease expired at the end of February.

On December 30, she filed another domestic violence injunction. She wrote that Nathan would likely try to kill her before their lease expired.

In January 2025, she called the sheriff’s office again. Nathan was breaking into the house. The current court order wasn’t doing anything, she told the operator. In the background of that call, Seraphine can be heard saying, “Mommy.”

Deputies were called to the family’s Tamarac address fourteen times in the twelve months before the murders.

Fourteen.

Ten days before she died, Mary wrote in a court filing: “Because of Nathan’s psychotic behavior, his multiple threats, his drug use, his multiple/many silenced firearms, and my impending divorce action, I am afraid Nathan will kill me and my daughter.”

February 16, 2025

David Ponzer was sixty-four years old. He had come to Tamarac to be near his daughter during the most dangerous period of her life. On the morning of February 16, he was on the back patio of Mary’s home, drinking his coffee.

Nathan Gingles shot him in the head.

Mary ran. She ran out of the house and down the street, knocking on doors, looking for anyone who would open up. Seraphine, barefoot, ran behind her father, crying, “Daddy, please don’t.”

Andrew Ferrin was thirty-six years old, a neighbor, father of four girls. His uncle would later say, “I honestly believe that Andrew was the best part of all of us. I can’t have my nephew become a footnote in a tragic scenario.” It is unclear whether Andrew had ever met Mary Gingles before that morning. What is clear is that when a woman in terror knocked on his door, he opened it.

Nathan shot them both.

Mary Gingles, David Ponzer, and Andrew Ferrin

He then walked out of Andrew Ferrin’s house with Seraphine beside him and drove away in a silver BMW. An Amber Alert went out across Florida. Deputies found him at a Walmart parking lot in North Lauderdale, Seraphine in the car, uninjured.

She told deputies that her father had shot her mother “100 times.”

She is now in foster care. Relatives from both sides of the family are seeking custody. She is expected to be the key eyewitness at trial.

Nathan Gingles has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. He has pleaded not guilty.

Eight Broward Sheriff’s deputies were fired. Eleven more were disciplined. A captain was demoted. The internal affairs investigation produced a 246-page report. Sheriff Tony said publicly that his office had failed Mary Gingles, that there had been enough evidence to arrest Nathan six weeks before the murders, and that it didn’t happen.

“We had a chance to save their loved one’s life,” he said. “And we failed.”

What the Research Tells Us About Cases Like This

Every time an intimate partner homicide makes headlines, the question follows within hours: why didn’t anyone see this coming? A study published in 2024 in the journal Homicide Studies provides the most rigorous answer to that question we have ever had. And the answer, for true crime readers and domestic violence survivors and the professionals who work with both, is not what most people expect.

Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology examined all 855 homicides resulting in court cases in the Australian state of Victoria between 1997 and 2015. Their key methodological decision set them apart from almost everything that came before: they treated coercive control inside the relationship and post-separation stalking as distinct, sequential constructs rather than collapsing them into a single category.

Stalking preceded nearly two-thirds of all ex-partner homicides in the sample. Most killings of former intimate partners were not impulsive or unpredictable. They followed documented patterns of post-separation pursuit. But here is the finding that must accompany that statistic everywhere it appears: stalking alone is not a useful predictor of homicide. Stalking is common; homicide is rare. More than 99.99% of post-separation stalking cases do not end in death. Suggesting otherwise creates needless fear for the overwhelming majority of victims and misdirects the limited resources available for risk management.

What the research identifies instead is a specific cluster of dynamic, observable factors that together characterize the cases that do turn lethal. And this is where it gets both surprising and important.

Planning appeared in roughly 85% of stalking-precipitated homicides. Not some cases. Not most cases. Eighty-five percent. This is the finding that should permanently retire the phrase “crime of passion” from how we talk about intimate partner homicide. These men did not snap. They obtained weapons, surveilled victims, researched methods, and prepared. The courtroom narrative of the heartbroken man overwhelmed by emotion in a single terrible moment describes almost none of the cases in this data. It describes a legal strategy.

A trigger event preceded virtually every ex-partner stalking-precipitated homicide with available data. Not always something dramatic: a custody hearing, a financial settlement, a lease expiration, a divorce date approaching. For the perpetrator, the trigger represents the final foreclosure of control over a person who has already left. For professionals, this means the calendar matters. A scheduled hearing, an approaching settlement date, a lease ending in February are not just administrative details. They are countdown clocks.

Last resort thinking, the mental state in which a perpetrator concludes that no lawful means will produce the outcome he needs, appeared in 67% of the homicide sample, compared to roughly 4% in a general forensic stalking population. When someone signals, verbally or behaviorally, that he has run out of options, that signal belongs at the top of every risk assessment.

Here was a surprising finding: in the ex-partner group, rates of prior stalking-related physical violence were actually lower than in cases involving acquaintances and strangers. In other words, the men who kill former intimate partners do not always have a long history of physically attacking them.

The lethality does not come from a pattern of escalating beatings. It comes from the controlling dynamic combined with the catastrophic loss of that control at separation. The absence of a history of physical violence is not reassurance. It never was.

The finding that connects everything else: prior coercive control inside the relationship was documented in approximately one-third of ex-partner stalking-precipitated homicide cases. The researchers note this is almost certainly an undercount, since coercive control is notoriously difficult to establish from court records alone, and the study’s definition required evidence of both coercive and controlling behavior, setting a deliberately high bar.

Even so, the direction is clear: coercive control during the marriage and post-separation stalking consistently appear together in the cases that end in death. They are not two problems. They are one problem in two stages.

For someone currently in a relationship that looks anything like what Mary described, the research says this: the most dangerous period is not when the abuse starts. It is after you leave, particularly when something on the horizon represents to him the permanent end of his access to you. That could be a court date. A new relationship. A move. A finalized divorce. Document everything before that moment arrives, not after. Do not drop a restraining order without a safety plan that accounts for what happens to the weapons. Make sure someone outside the house knows the full picture, not the edited version you tell people to keep the peace.

For professionals, the study argues for something that most current risk assessment frameworks do not yet reflect: coercive control history and post-separation stalking need to be assessed together as sequential stages of a single trajectory, rather than as separate concerns from different clinical literatures. A history of financial control, isolation, and surveillance within the relationship is directly relevant to what a perpetrator will do after the relationship ends.

The questions should be asked together: What was this relationship like before the separation? What has his behavior looked like since? Is there a trigger event approaching? Has the victim directly stated fear? When the answers to most of those questions point in the same direction, the combination represents an elevated and specific risk profile. Observable. Documentable. Actionable.

Nathan told Mary throughout their marriage that he would kill her if she ever tried to leave. When she left, he placed a tracker on her car, climbed in through the second-floor window, and left a kill kit in the garage. Their four-year-old daughter came home from visits and reported his plans. The lease was expiring. The divorce was approaching finalization. The trigger was the approaching loss of his last foothold in her life.

Mary wrote all of this down. Ten days before she died.

The System That Received Her Reports

She called fourteen times. She filed twice for protection. She photographed the GPS tracker and filmed herself finding it. She described the kill kit to deputies and told them on a recorded call, with her daughter’s voice in the background, that the current court order wasn’t doing anything.

Nathan’s guns had been seized under her first restraining order. She dropped that order so she and her daughter could stay in their home. The guns were returned. One of them was used to kill her.

A search warrant was drafted and never signed. The kill kit sat in a garage while paperwork went nowhere. A deputy who tried to call Mary about the tracker reported her number was disconnected and sent that report to a supervisor, who denied approval and told him to talk to the lead detective instead. Nobody did. The lead detective called Mary in January to say she was working on it.

Three weeks later, Mary was dead.

Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony said his office had probable cause to arrest Nathan six weeks before the murders. That a 35-minute interview with Mary had been “very robust in terms of the threat spectrum.” That “we had a chance to save their loved one’s life, and we failed.”

Eight deputies lost their jobs. The investigative report ran to 246 pages.

Mary Catherine Gingles got a military burial in Missouri.

The Lifetime Documentary

Mary once told her friend “Zahra” that she would one day be on a Lifetime documentary talking about her murder.

Nathan had written a list of names in the notebook inside the kill kit. Zahra was on it. That is why, more than a year after her friend’s death, she still cannot be identified publicly. The kill kit wasn't just evidence of a plan to murder Mary. It was evidence of a plan that extended beyond her, to the people she had confided in, the people who knew what he had done. That is also why the 85% planning statistic in the Australian research is not an abstraction. It has a name. It has a list. It has a notebook in a backpack in a garage that deputies photographed and left behind.

Mary Catherine Gingles was thirty-four years old. She was a veteran, a captain, a woman her obituary described as having an adventurous heart and an unwavering love for her daughter. She documented her own death in advance with a specificity that should have made it preventable.

Somewhere in Florida, a four-year-old girl is in foster care waiting for a custody hearing. She ran barefoot after her father on a Sunday morning in February, telling him to stop. She told deputies afterward that he shot her mother one hundred times.

She will grow up. She will read the 246-page report.

She deserves to understand why it exists.

If you or someone you know is in danger, please get in touch with the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, available 24 hours a day.

References

Aguila, G., & Robertson, L. (2025, April 6). Terrorized by her husband, she warned police he would kill her. They failed to stop him. Miami Herald. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article300935284.html

Broward Sheriff’s Office. (2025, February 16). BSO homicide detectives investigate triple murder in Tamarac. https://www.sheriff.org/PIO/BSONews/Pages/BSO-HOMICIDE-DETECTIVES-INVESTIGATE-TRIPLE-MURDER-IN-TAMARAC.aspx

CBS Miami. (2026, February 18). New evidence released in Tamarac triple murder case, one year later. https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/tamarac-triple-murder-new-evidence-1-year-later/

Mary Catherine Gingles obituary. (2025). James & Gahr Mortuary. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/mary-gingles-obituary?id=58482721

NBC Miami. (2025, February 18). A fleeing mother, her father, and a neighbor who tried to help: Victims of the Tamarac killing spree. https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/victims-of-tamarac-killing-spree-shooting-abduction/3545900/

NBC Miami Investigates. (2025, May 3). Video captures Tamarac mother’s panic as she finds tracker on car — months before she was murdered. https://www.nbcmiami.com/investigations/video-captures-tamarac-mothers-panic-as-she-finds-tracker/3606079/

Local 10 News. (2025, February 25). Video shows woman running for help before deputies say she, 2 others were murdered in Tamarac. https://www.local10.com/news/local/2025/02/25/video-shows-woman-running-for-help-before-deputies-say-she-2-others-were-murdered-in-tamarac/

Local 10 News. (2025, March 5). Records reveal weapons were never collected before the Tamarac triple murder. https://www.local10.com/news/local/2025/03/05/records-reveal-weapons-were-never-collected-before-tamarac-triple-murder/

Police1. (2025, September 22). Timeline: Internal report details investigation failures throughout the year leading up to the Florida triple murder. https://www.police1.com/investigations/timeline-internal-report-details-investigation-failures-throughout-year-leading-up-to-fla-triple-murder

Sheed, A., Brandt, C., & McEwan, T. E. (2024). The relationship between stalking, homicide, and coercive control in an Australian population. Homicide Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10887679241268032

Stars and Stripes. (2025, March 7). Army vet accused of slaying wife, her father, and a neighbor in Tamarac, pleads not guilty. https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2025-03-07/army-veteran-accused-murder-wife-father-in-law-neighbor-17067895.html

WLRN Public Media. (2025, September 22). Timeline: How Broward deputies failed to help Mary Gingles before triple homicide in Tamarac. https://www.wlrn.org/law-justice/2025-09-22/tamarac-triple-murder-broward-bso-gingles

As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoyed it, please pass it along to your true-crime-reading friends.

Joni E. Johnston, Psy.D., is a forensic psychologist, licensed private investigator, and author of Serial Killers: 101 Questions True Crime Fans Ask. She writes about crime, psychology, and the legal system at The Mind Detective.