PROVO, Utah (Court TV) — The woman prosecutors have accused of masterminding the murder of her son-in-law took the stand on Monday and denied having any involvement in the victim’s death.
Tracey Grist testifies on April 20, 2026. (Court TV)
Tracey Grist, 60, has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, criminal conspiracy, obstruction of justice and domestic violence in the death of her son-in-law, Matthew Restelli, 42. Matthew Restelli, who was married to Grist’s daughter, Kathryn Restelli, was shot to death in Grist’s home by Grist’s son, Kevin Ellis. Ellis was previously convicted for his role in the shooting. Kathryn Restelli also pleaded guilty to charges in the case.
On Monday, prosecutors rested their case and the defense called Grist as its first witness. Grist said she was aware that her daughter was having problems in her marriage and had encouraged her to come visit Utah from California, where the couple lived. “I offered her a safe space to think things through,” Grist said in court.
Kathryn Restelli took the couple’s two young children and drove to Utah, where she would later testify she lured her husband to his death. Kathryn Restelli was the first witness called to testify for the prosecution in its case against her mother, and she said that while she initially came to her mother’s Utah home for some space from Matthew Restelli, her mother began making jokes about killing her husband.
Grist testified that any jokes she made were just that: jokes. Grist also said texts previously shown to the jury in which she told her daughter that she wanted to “strangle” the victim were just flippant comments. “I was frustrated with him, but it was more I couldn’t do anything about calming that down,” she said. “I couldn’t be there to support Kate physically, but I could just kind of say, ‘Hey, I’ll drive nine hours and strangle him.’ It was so ridiculous. That’s why I could say it like that, because it was ridiculous. I would never do that.”
Grist flatly denied recruiting her son into a murder plot. While Kathryn Restelli testified that her mother and brother had gone out for a sushi dinner to map out the plan for her husband’s death, Grist detailed a completely different conversation. “I asked [Ellis] if he would please not go out that night, so he could just be around the house when Matt showed up. We talked about Kate’s options, like, if he comes out, so they can have a conversation in the living room. And if he got there, and was really too tired, I let Kevin know that I had invited Matt to stay at our house if he wanted to, because he would have gotten there after a long day of driving.”
Matthew Restelli arrived at Grist’s home late on July 12, 2024. Kathryn Restelli had led him to believe that he was coming to pick her up along with their children and they would drive back to their California home as a family. Prosecutors say the entire thing was a trap.
Grist told the jury that she was sitting in her kitchen when Matthew Restelli arrived and described him as walking into the house without knocking. “I was extremely surprised. I didn’t expect him to be standing him my dining room,” she said. “I knew he was coming, but I didn’t hear the doorbell. I didn’t hear a knock and I didn’t expect him to walk into the house.”
But the texts shown to the jury indicate that Kathryn Restelli gave her husband the gate code and instructed him to enter the house. When asked if Matthew Restelli was “threatening,” Grist demurred. “He was just kind of, like, jerky. He was like, ‘So, where’s Kate?'”
Grist said she directed the victim upstairs, but moments after he turned the corner to go into the living room, she heard gunfire.
Grist: “I went to the foot of the stairs, and that’s where I saw Matt lying down where he had fallen down and I saw Kevin and I said, ‘Kevin, what happened? What happened?'”
Grist’s attorney: “What did Kevin say?”
Grist: “He said he had a knife.”
Grist said that when she went to check for a pulse, she saw a knife in his hand. But prosecutors say that the knife was planted there after the fact. Grist admitted that she went upstairs to tell her daughter what happened and then returned down the stairs before calling 911, allowing approximately six to seven minutes to elapse after the shooting. Grist said she was “operating slowly because on the fight, fight or freeze spectrum, I freeze. But I was so stunned by everything that happened, I was not moving fast at all.”
At Ellis’ sentencing in March, prosecutors played a jail phone call from after his conviction in which he told his sister that he “should have said no” when his mother asked him to kill Matthew Restelli. Grist denied any phone call ever took place and suggested that Ellis was lying to his family. “Kevin was trying to shift some of the blame for what he had done off of him because Tara Lynn and his brothers and sisters are his loving support system while he has been incarcerated in jail, and he doesn’t want to lose out while he’s in prison. It’s completely not true. It’s not true what he said on that call.”
Ellis was sentenced to 15 years to life for murder, one to 15 years for obstruction of justice and two sentences of up to five years for domestic violence in the presence of a child, to be served consecutively. Kathryn Restelli was sentenced to one to 15 years; a parole board will determine when they are eligible for release.
