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Dr. Debora Green: An Update

An M.D. Goes Medea on Her Kids, Breaking Bad on Her Husband
(‘Ultimate Betrayal,’ Forensic Files)

Updated with news from August 31, 2023*

The world loves to hate mothers who kill their children, and Debora Green makes an especially incendiary target.

Just begun: Michael Farrar and Debora Jones Green

She not only plotted her kids’ demise but also chose the most horrific possible murder weapon, a fire.

Like Medea, the Euripides antihero 2,400 years before her, Debora carried out her awful deed to punish a husband who wasn’t exactly evil but betrayed her just the same.

Cinematic story. And like Walter White 19 years after her, she used ricin poisoning as part of her bid for revenge.

No wonder Debora’s crimes, which took place back in 1995, merited an Ann Rule book in 1997, a Forensic Files episode in 1999, and a Lifetime movie in 2021.

So, amid all the drama, are there any mitigating factors? Is sympathy possible for Debora Green, a medical doctor who violated her “do no harm” oath in a way that devastated her own family?

Normal childhood. For this week, I searched for answers to those questions and also looked for more background information on Debora’s life as well as updates on her status today, the life of ex-husband Michael Farrar, and the loyalties of the family’s surviving daughter.

So let’s get going on the recap for “Ultimate Betrayal” along with extra information from internet research:

Debora Jones came into the world on Feb. 28, 1951, in Havana, Illinois, as the second of three children born to Joan and Bob Jones. The couple had married as teenagers but apparently figured out how to parent competently. Debora described her childhood as happy, according to Bitter Harvest: A Woman’s Rage, A Mother’s Sacrifice by Ann Rule.

One of the cool kids. It became apparent early on that Debora was exceptionally intelligent. The Lifetime movie, A House on Fire, pegged her IQ as above 160.

But she wasn’t a nerd. At Peoria High School, she found time for cheerleading in addition to her schoolwork.

The Green-Farrar house at 2517 Canterbury Court has been replaced by a grass-covered vacant lot

Debora, who also played the violin and piano, got a perfect grade-point average and ended up as co-valedictorian of her class.

Next up, the attractive girl with symmetrical features completed an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois.

Two specialists. Debora married a fellow engineer named Duane M.J. Green in 1974, but the union lasted only a few years and he would later complain to police that Debora jilted him after he helped pay her tuition, according to the Kansas City Star.

While studying at the University of Kansas Medical School, she met Michael Farrar and they married in 1979. The former Eagle Scout was four years younger than his new wife but also a high achiever on the path to earning a medical degree.

Michael went into cardiology, and Debora specialized in oncology and hematology.

Nice spread. They had their first child, Tim, in 1982. Although A House on Fire portrays Tim as having only one sister, he actually had two, the younger girl named Kelly and a middle child whom Forensic Files identifies as Jennifer and Bitter Harvest calls Lissa — but her real name is Kate Farrar.

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Debora and Michael had no shortage of room for their kids: By 1995, the family had settled into a six-bedroom Tudor-style house in Prairie Village, an affluent section of Kansas City, Kansas.

At some point, Debora put her career on pause to stay home with the kids, although she still did some freelance medical peer-review work out of her house.

In the spirits. She became a soccer coach so she could spend more time with her children, who attended the private Pembroke Hill School.

Although by all accounts, Debora was dedicated to her job as a full-time parent, her marriage grew strained as she grappled with depression. She reportedly leaned on alcohol as a crutch despite that her doctor had advised her not to drink while taking antidepressants and antianxiety medications.

Still, she enjoyed playing sports and having fun. In a May 1996 Redbook article, her onetime tennis clinic friend Ann Slegman recalled:

“In this sea of affluent house-wives with their smartly cropped hairdos, tennis skirts, and Steffi Graf wanna-be attitudes, Debora was refreshingly different. Heavyset with short, razor-cut hair, thick glasses that were popular among the disco set in the 1970s, faded T-shirts, and sweat shorts, she joked and laughed her way through the tennis drills.“

International affair. In an effort to prop up their deteriorating union, Michael and Debora, along with son Tim, went on a hiking and boating trip to Peru sponsored by Pembroke Hill School.

Sadly, the excursion to South America did more harm than good for the marriage. Michael met a good-looking blond registered nurse named Margaret Hacker (called Celeste Walker in the Lifetime movie) and they starting seeing each other back in the U.S.A.

Debora “saw all the telltale signs” of an affair including “a new wardrobe, new exercise equipment, and a new, distant attitude toward her and the children,” according to the Redbook account.

Toxic person. She moved into a separate bedroom and started drinking more.

Soon, it was Michael’s turn to struggle with his health. On Aug. 7, he became violently ill with bacterial endocarditis, which causes severe diarrhea. His weight dropped to 125 pounds.

He eventually needed three hospitalizations, each time after he’d eaten food Debora prepared for him (Maynard Muntzing), but at first doctors couldn’t figure out what triggered his episodes. It was 1995, long before the AMC series Breaking Bad made ricin a household name.

Confides in kids. Once his health rallied, Michael vacated the family’s mansion on Canterbury Court and rented his own place in the Georgetown apartment complex across town.

Debora turned suicidal and ended up in a psychiatric hospital after Michael called police to intervene during an argument on Sept. 25. In the emergency room, she spat on Michael, called him an obscene name, and said he’d get the kids over her dead body.

Bitter and angry, Debora had also “used the crudest language to tell the couple’s children that Michael was having sex with other women,” the Kansas City Star reported.

Woman on the side. At some point amid the melodrama, Michael discovered in Debora’s purse packets of castor beans, which contain ricin.

At first, ricin didn’t show up in Michael’s lab tests. The chemical is hard to detect because it breaks down quickly. But eventually, a large number of ricin antibodies turned up in his blood.

Michael confronted Debora on the phone about poisoning him. She denied it and they had an angry discussion. On Oct. 23, he spent time visiting girlfriend Margaret Hacker at her house.

Great escape. On Oct. 24, 1995, Debora and Michael had another argument on the phone. An hour later, the Prairie Village mansion, where she and the kids were still living, caught on fire.

Debora, 43, got out through a bedroom door to the outside.

All sources agree that 10-year-old Kate escaped by climbing onto the roof through her second-floor bedroom window and jumping to the ground without injury. But accounts vary as to whether Debora caught her as she fell or tried to catch her and failed or just watched her descend.

The dog, too. Kate and her mother stood together as emergency workers arrived on the scene. The flames were so intense the firefighters couldn’t go inside.

Golden-haired Kelly, who at age 6 already showed signs of being a gifted student, died of smoke inhalation in bed.

Tim, 13 years old and a popular soccer and hockey player, died of burns.

The family dog, a black Lab named Boomer, died of carbon monoxide poisoning, according to Medium’s True Crime Edition.

Suspicious blaze. Reports about Debora’s behavior at the fire scene differ. Some describe her as without emotion as she watched the blaze that killed two of her children. Another account said she was yelling at emergency workers, accusing them of not doing enough to save Kelly and Tim.

Authorities suspected arson and, at first, believed either parent could have done it.

Debora explained to police that on the night of the fire, she woke up to the smoke alarm, opened the bedroom door, saw flames, and ran outside.

On the intercom, she told Tim to stay in his bedroom until firefighters arrived and then she ran next door to ask for help from neighbors, Debora said. They noticed that her hair looked wet. A lab would later find singeing to her hair.

The robe. At the house, police found what looked like an empty accelerant bottle. The stairway that the children needed as an escape route had flammable liquid poured on it. The path of the fire led to Debora’s door.

Because the doorjamb to Debora’s bedroom was covered with soot, investigators believed the door was open when the fire started.

Her bathrobe, found in a ball at home, had burn marks.

Actress Stephanie March plays Debora Green in A House on Fire

Investigators ultimately concluded that Debora both set the fire and poisoned Michael with the castor beans.

Girlfriend shows up. Detectives discovered records indicating Debora had made two purchases of castor beans at Earl May Garden Centers around the time of the couple’s woes. She claimed that son Tim needed them for a science project and that Tim — who wasn’t around to defend himself — might have poisoned his dad.

By this time, Michael had asked for divorce; he filed the papers the day after the fire. Debora was not happy that gal pal Margaret Hacker attended the memorial service for the kids.

“Michael was in her bed while our house was burning down,” she complained to Slegman.

But in between the fire and the time of her arrest, Debora and daughter Kate continued to live as normal a life as possible after such a tragedy.

Neighbors unnerved. Kate got a role in a State Ballet of Missouri production of The Nutcracker.

On November 22, 1995, after Debora dropped off Kate for ballet practice at the Midland Theater in Kansas City, police arrested her and charged her with two counts of murder, attempted murder, and aggravated arson. A judge set bail at the unheard-of amount of $3 million.

The developments shocked residents of Prairie Village, who weren’t accustomed to having drama and police activity in their corner of the world.

Dedicated parent. According to an AP account, neighbors had to contend with the smell of smoke that lingered for weeks after the fire and the sight of cars slowing down to look at the charred $400,000 house at 7517 Canterbury Court.

The Kansas City Star reported that most neighbors refused to discuss the tragedy with the media. The few who did said that Debora loved her children and, while clearly the couple’s marriage had seen better days, no one imagined it would end in a burning hell.

Locals didn’t have to look at the wreckage of the once-palatial home for long. By November 1995, the city was making plans to demolish it.

Getting fluid. In preparation for the trial, the prosecution noted evidence that Debora had been reading a book about arson and literature about people murdered by family members.

The Prairie Village Shopping Center is typically upscale for the area

Authorities believed that after the couple fought on the phone, Debora poured accelerant on Michael’s belongings and also used the fluid to cut off the children’s escape routes from the house. Her hair and bathrobe sustained burns because she used too much accelerant near her own bedroom door. Then she told Tim to stay in the house with little sister Kelly until the fire trucks arrived.

And one more thing: This was not the first time a blaze had broken out in a Green-Farrar household. On May 21, 1994, when the family lived in Missouri and was considering a relocation to Prairie Village, a fire damaged the Missouri house — reportedly right after Michael had nixed the idea of the move over concerns about the future of the marriage, according to court papers available on Murderpedia.

No legal action resulted from the Missouri fire.

Daughter faithful. But there was no escaping the consequences of the Kansas inferno. The state kept Debora in custody during court proceedings. “She’s very surprised that she would be charged with these kinds of crimes,” Ellen Ryan, one of Debora’s three lawyers, told the AP. “She lost everything in this fire including her children, everything, and she’s astounded.”

Debora’s defense lawyers floated the possibility that Tim had set the fire.

Meanwhile, Kate Farrar remained loyal to her mother. She left a vase full of roses at the courthouse for Debora, and the two talked on the phone.

Curiosity high. Michael, who had to make $5,400 monthly payments to Debora as a run-up to their divorce, showed up in court with a partially shaved head because he’d needed brain surgery to drain an abscess probably caused by the ricin poisoning. He would also need a heart operation to counteract the damage.

The murder case was such big news that true crime author Ann Rule, who wrote The Stranger Beside Me and Small Sacrifices, attended the preliminary hearing and brought an assistant to help take notes.

Prosecutors had assembled a roster of 300 prospective witnesses and planned to start out by calling 20 of them to the stand. Olathe courthouse employees outfitted a backup room for media outlets; there were only 60 seats in the courtroom

But the trial never happened.

Not her intention. On April 17, 1996, Debora Green pleaded no contest in a deal to take the death penalty off the table. The AP reported that, “in a fast monotone,” Debora read a statement maintaining that she wasn’t in her right mind on the night of the fire — her psychiatric and alcohol problems set the stage for the tragedy — and she didn’t want to compound the suffering of her family with a trial.

“She’s accepting responsibility for [the fire],” said Debora’s lawyer Michael Moore. “I don’t think she ever intended to kill her children. She’s a caring, living, breathing human being.”

On May 30, 1996, she received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years for attempted murder, premeditated killing, and aggravated arson.

Hair we go. Once Debora had spent a few years behind razor wire, she began recasting her story.

According to Bitter Harvest, Debora made claims that Michael and his girlfriend might have hired someone to start the fire. She also told Ann Rule that the homewrecking Margaret drove Margaret’s former husband to suicide.

Debora also noted that she cut off her singed hair not to obscure it as evidence but rather to look her best for Kelly and Tim’s funeral.

About-face. In 2000, Debora briefly tried a new tack. She requested new sentencing based on a claim that her no-contest plea to arson resulted from her own confusion caused by prescription psychiatric drugs.

She would also need to defend herself over the ricin allegations. “No one in an alcoholic fog would have been capable of the intricate planning it took to locate, purchase, and grind up the deadly castor beans,” Ann Rule wrote in Bitter Harvest.

Once Debora realized the motion might put capital punishment back in play, she withdrew it.

Too late. Four years later, she made a bid to have her plea thrown out because new advances into arson investigations refuted the pour pattern evidence against her, she contended. The fire might have come from a vanity in her bedroom that ignited on its own, Debora said.

Kate Farrar, then 19, attended a hearing on that matter — and sat with Debora’s supporters, according to the Kansas City Star. Michael Farrar showed up as well but sat away from his daughter. In 2005, District Judge Peter Ruddick ruled against Debora.

In 2015, a judge scuttled Debora’s request for resentencing because she based it on recent state and federal rulings on “Hard 40” prison terms that didn’t apply retroactively. Johnson County District Judge Brenda Cameron also noted that Debora understood the terms of her plea deal when she agreed to it.

Author touched. Today, Debora Green resides in Topeka Correctional Facility in medium-high security, with the first prospective release date in 2035. According to the Kansas Department of Corrections, she has a job in prison. At 5-foot-4 and 188 pounds, she’s not staging any hunger strikes.

So does Debora Farrar deserve any sympathy? To this writer, it sounds like a long-sustained period of temporary insanity resulting from her husband’s infidelity, her clinical depression, and the loss of a career that brought her respect, personal fulfillment, and a high salary.

“Even though I could not believe she was innocent,” wrote Anne Rule, “I thought her tears [for her children] were genuine.”

New wife. As for the husband she tried to eliminate, Michael Farrar survived and worked as a cardiologist at North Kansas City Hospital for 29 years. He recently served as medical staff president and enjoyed traveling, bird hunting, dining out, and learning more about history, according to a recent interview on the hospital’s website.

And what of the extramarital relationship that helped fuel the modern-day Greek tragedy? According to Medium writer Lori Johnston, Michael Farrar and Margaret Hacker broke up. He ended up marrying a lawyer, and daughter Kate Farrar eventually went to live with them — but at the same time, Kate, now 36, still believes in her mother’s innocence, according to Medium.

*Michael Farrar died on August 23, 2023, at the age of 68. Media outlets have yet to disclose his cause of death.

If you can’t find the movie “A House on Fire” on TV, you can watch it on Amazon for $2.99. I was able to see it on the Lifetime website free of charge, but the link no longer works.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

P.S. Read Part II, ‘Dr. Debora Green: Tennis and Madness’
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Mark Hofmann’s Deep Dive into Deviousness

A Dealer of Bogus Mormon Documents Just Might Be the Devil
(‘Murder Among the Mormons,’ Netflix, and ‘Postal Mortem,’ Forensic Files)

When Mark Hofmann delivered the bombs that killed two people and rattled all of Salt Lake City, he didn’t bother to disguise himself.

Instead, he wore his own green varsity jacket and rode the elevator with two strangers — who remembered him — in the Judge Building, where he placed a box outside of Steve Christensen’s office. Although Hofmann used darkness as a cover when he left a similar parcel at the home of the Sheets family, he drove his tan minivan, which a neighbor recalled seeing there.

Full-time faker. The oversights were a departure from the deviousness Hofmann had been honing since adolescence, according to the 2021 Netflix miniseries Murder Among the Mormons. (Forensic Files covered the case in 1997.)

At 14, he began altering collectible coins to make them more valuable. By his 20s, he was earning five-figure sums for documents he attributed to Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Jack London. And Hofmann, who grew up in a strict Mormon family, acquired a reputation as the “Indiana Jones” of discovering antique writings important to his church, which has its headquarters in Salt Lake City.

But nearly everything that Hoffman sold was forged or faked. He used ancient ink recipes and oxidation-hastening methods to fool authenticators. He concocted imaginative stories to surprise and alarm those faithful to the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.

Foundation shaker. According to the three-part Netflix offering, Hofmann resented the restrictions of his upbringing and delighted in challenging his religion’s most sacred narrative — that in 1823, an angel named Moroni led Joseph Smith to buried golden plates that would form the basis of the Book of Mormon.

Perhaps in an effort to catch and kill, Mormon collector Steve Christensen paid $40,000 for an instrument that Hofmann called the White Salamander Letter, which said that a talking amphibian, not a winged messenger from God, led Smith to the plates.

For the church, the story was as devastating as “Moses saying, ‘I got the 10 Commandments from the ghost of Elvis Presley,’” according to Murder Among the Mormons, which was co-produced by Joe Berlinger (Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich).

Bid to throw off cops. Hofmann went even bigger with his next phony offering, a set of diaries and papers titled the McLellin Collection. They included a claim that Smith’s brother was actually the one who discovered the gold plates.

A reenactment shows the same model Toyota Mark Hofmann drove Courtesy of Netflix © 2021

Worried that Christensen was catching on to his deceptions, Hofmann murdered him with the exploding package. To throw off investigators, he planted the bomb that killed schoolteacher Kathy Sheets. Her husband, Gary, and Christensen operated a troubled financial company, and Hofmann hoped investigators would suspect a disgruntled investor as the culprit for both homicides.

Hofmann’s plan was working out nicely until he accidentally set off a bomb in his own sports car and police scrutiny uncovered evidence of his scams.

Youthful laddie. With interviews of Mormon historians from the 1980s interspersed with interviews of the same people today — minus their aviator frames and fluffy hair — Murder Among the Mormons portrays the shattered innocence Hofmann inflicted with his duplicity.

The series also includes audio from the boyish-voiced earnest-sounding killer‘s full confession to police in 1987. But even then, Hofmann wasn’t done with his scheming.

Here’s that story preceded by three other examples of his deviousness:

1. He made his wife into an inadvertent accomplice.
Hofmann planted a phony version of the Anthon Document — which contained characters that Joseph Smith transcribed from the gold plates — in a bible he gave to his wife, so she would “discover” it, thus adding heart-warming allure to the backstory he gave investors. He also turned the family home into a crime scene by keeping a locked laboratory with all the tools of his forgery trade. “He fooled me every day,” said Doralee “Dorie” Hofmann, a former teacher who gave up her career to raise her kids. Although Dorie considered her husband a good provider, it’s not clear whether she knew Hofmann spent a bundle on fancy dinners with associates and enjoyed a binge-drinking session during a business trip. — or whether or not he let Dorie drive the blue Toyota MR2 he enjoyed showboating around town.

2. He fooled the FBI and the Library of Congress
Hofmann summoned all his tricks to create a forged copy of a real document bearing the Oath of the Freeman, a pledge taken by new members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 1600s. To imitate ink seepage that takes place over centuries, he used a vacuum cleaner to suck the pigment to the back side of the paper. Because of the Oath of the Freeman’s significance as the first printed document in the Colonies, the FBI and Library of Congress examined Hofmann’s copy. They declared it genuine. He planned to sell it for $1.5 million but never got a chance.

3. By the time the police gave him his first lie detector test, he was a pro
Apparently, even as a child Hofmann had an inkling he’d face off with a polygraph someday. In his teens, he began practicing methods for beating the machine. When the Salt Lake City police gave him a lie detector test in the wake of the bombings, Hofmann scored +13. (A negative score suggests deception and anything greater than zero indicates truthfulness.)

4. Just because Hofmann ultimately confessed and said he deserved incarceration didn’t mean he felt remorse
He admitted to investigators that not only did he enjoy the power trip of fooling collectors and Mormon officials but also that he felt zero sympathy for his homicide victims because dead people don’t suffer. And once in prison, Hofmann began secretly plotting the homicides of members of the pardons boards as well as George Throckmorton, the forensic document expert who figured out Hofmann’s Oath of a Freeman was a fake. Fortunately, Hofmann never carried out those murders, and the mild-mannered but unrelenting Throckmorton is alive and included in the Netflix series. (The 67-year-old Hofmann, better known today as No. 41235 at the Central Utah Correctional Facility, declined to appear.)

Along with his deviousness, Hoffman did display some humility, albeit in a back-handed way. He told an interviewer that his forgeries seemed ingenious only because document experts inflated his talents to save face for failing to put him out of business sooner.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

See Murder Among the Mormons on Netflix

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

P.S. If you watch the Forensic Files version of Mark Hofmann’s story on YouTube (link above), you’ll bump up against an “inappropriate or offensive to some audiences” warning — probably because the episode includes a graphic black & white photo of the murder scene.

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MaryAnn Clibbery and George Hansen: Unsalvageable

A Murder Wrecks a Remodeling Business
(‘Frozen Assets,’ Forensic Files)

Local TV commercials starring small-business owners have an innate charm in spite of, or maybe because of, their low production values.

George Hansen and MaryAnn Clibbery urged, ‘Don’t move, improve’

The folksy ads become part of a community’s sense of place and security, particularly in the case of Al Zullo Remodeling Specialists, who for decades told homeowners that “one call does it all.”

MaryAnn Clibbery and George Hansen were partners in the Loves Park, Illinois, company, named after the original owner, Anthony “Al” Zullo.

Retiring type. Before he died in 2000, he decided to leave the business to MaryAnn and George to reward their loyalty. She had started there as a secretary in 1959, and he got on board at some point in the 1960s, according to reporting from the Randolph County Herald Tribune.

By 2004, MaryAnn, 69, was thinking about retiring from the business.

But she never got the chance. Her business partner bludgeoned her to death in a back hallway of Al Zullo first.

Caring boss. For this week, I checked on George’s whereabouts today (he’s still alive) and looked for more information about the victim’s life and also what happened to the business after one owner died and the other traded his white button-down for an unfitted light-blue prison-issue shirt.

By the time of MaryAnn’s murder, Loves Park’s reputation for tranquility had already been marred by another 2004 crime — a deceased newborn left on the side of a road

So let’s get going on the recap of the 2008 episode “Frozen Assets” along with extra information from internet research:

At Al Zullo Remodeling Specialists, George Hansen handled sales and MaryAnn Clibbery did the finances. MaryAnn was known for her kindness to workers and sometimes fronted them their wages with her own money if they got in a jam, according to Forensic Files.

Quintets of kids. Born MaryAnn Romain, she had grown up in a family of five children who lived in the projects in Chicago, then moved to a house with no hot water in Rockford, Illinois, according to the Beloit Daily News. An obituary for MaryAnn’s father notes he owned a Gulf station for 15 years, so perhaps things improved financially for the family.

MaryAnn went on to have five children of her own and two marriages. At least one of her husbands left her widowed and it’s not clear whether she divorced the other or he passed away. By 2004, she was unmarried but had a long-term serious boyfriend.

Background information on George Hansen is skimpy except for the fact that he was married with children. An employee named Raymond Beardsley told the Beloit Daily News that he had a temper and could become “unhinged.”

Bereft boyfriend. Still, on the surface, everything looked great at the local institution until the early morning of Dec. 22, 2004. George and co-worker Randy Baxter discovered MaryAnn’s body when they showed up for work. Randy called 911 and reported MaryAnn wasn’t breathing and rigor mortis had set in.

Investigators determined she sustained three blows to the back of the head plus other blunt force trauma inflicted during two separate attacks.

Harold “Gene” Sundeen, her boyfriend of 12 years, was heartbroken. “I remember the dress she wore for our first date,” he told the ID network’s Murder in the Heartland. “It was blue with white polka dots.”

The business occupied a strip mall on North Second Street

Convenient suspect. MaryAnn’s son Robert Cleere, who also appeared on Murder in the Heartland, recalled that he was working on his mail route when his supervisor told him about his mother’s murder.

Her well-attended funeral mass took place at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church.

Police at first focused on Kevin Doyle, an employee MaryAnn had recently let go after he messed up on a job. He had kept a set of keys to the business.

Drank and drove. But there was also the matter of MaryAnn’s relationship with George. In everyday business life, they didn’t get along quite as well as they seemed to in the commercials. According to Forensic Files, George felt MaryAnn didn’t deserve the partnership Al Zullo left her.

When questioned by police, George denied any conflict and gave an extensive alibi: The night of the homicide, he enjoyed several vodka-and-Squirts at the Backyard Bar and Grill with his wife, followed by some Brandy Old Fashioneds at Singapore Bar and Grill, where he bought a $50 gift card for MaryAnn. Then, he took his granddaughter to Safety First Driving School and visited a tanning salon before heading home.

Witnesses confirmed George’s alibis.

Canary jumper. But things fell apart for George after a citizen notified police about a black garbage bag sitting on top of some ice on Rock River.

It contained a hammer, gloves, MaryAnn’s tan suede purse, and a yellow sweater.

The sweater, which had originally belonged to founder Al Zullo — and was kept around the office for whoever caught a chill — had MaryAnn’s blood on the outside.

Evidence cornucopia. Skin cells found inside the collar of the sweater matched George’s DNA profile.

MaryAnn Clibbery shows off a remodeled kitchen in her early years with Al Zullo

Likewise, the gloves contained MaryAnn’s blood on the outside, George’s DNA inside.

Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but MaryAnn had already had at least two suspicious brushes with death before the murder.

Sneaked-in sedation. According to Fraud Magazine, on one occasion, the brakes in her car failed right after George had borrowed it. Another time, someone set fire to a sofa MaryAnn was sleeping on.

But if MaryAnn was snoozing at the office, it didn’t necessarily mean she was lazy. Police found the remains of the prescription sleep medication Zolpidem in her mug at the office. George used to deliver coffee to MaryAnn in the cup, and employees had seen her asleep at her desk.

He had good reason to keep MaryAnn a little woozy. She was investigating him.

Risky rendezvous. That year, some of the Christmas cards received from vendors and subcontractors included notes saying that they hadn’t been paid. MaryAnn discovered George was pocketing the money owed to them. He falsified the books to hide his theft, which totaled around $100,000.

MaryAnn had told police and her doctor about her suspicions, according to Fraud Magazine.

The day she died, MaryAnn stayed late at the office to confront George about the embezzlement. It’s not clear why she chose to meet alone with him after the frightening incidents. (Her friend Linda Cleveland recalled that over breakfast at Johnny Pamcakes — not a typo — in early December 2004, MaryAnn said that she feared something bad was on the horizon.)

Hard landing. Police believe George was wearing the yellow sweater while beating MaryAnn with a hammer during an argument over the missing money. After the initial attack, George opened some drawers to make the place look ransacked, then realized MaryAnn was still alive and beat her again, the authorities theorized.

He stuffed the evidence into the garbage bag and included her purse so the attack would look like a burglary that turned into a homicide. But police would find that nothing else was missing from the office.

As attested to by this Rockford Register Star clipping, MaryAnn participated in numerous community activities

George threw the murder bag off the Roscoe Road bridge into the Rock River. But it landed on the ice (John Lotter and Thomas Nissen). A witness saw George’s white truck with its “Zullo 51” vanity license plate driving back and forth on the bridge. Police believe he was trying to figure out how to retrieve the bag but gave up.

Tablet tattler. Investigators found out that the business had a $150,000 life insurance policy on MaryAnn, which would have come in handy for George to pay off the vendors and subcontractors he cheated.

On Dec. 27, 2004, Loves Park police interrupted George’s game of video poker at Croc’s Pub to arrest him. He reportedly didn’t ask for a reason or make any comment. His pants pocket contained a single pink pill, which was identified as the same sleeping aid found in MaryAnn’s mug. (George’s sister would later admit to investigators that she had been illegally selling the prescription drug to him.)

The evolution of the quaint hometown business into a hub for murder and betrayal shook up the community. “These were people who had been in their homes, and it just gave everyone a horrible feeling,” Jessica Olstad, a former Wptz-TV Newschannel 5 reporter who covered the case, told ForensicFilsNow.com.

Some other dude did it. With so much forensic evidence pointing his way, George changed his story.

He now said he stopped by the office to look for his gloves around 7 p.m. on Dec. 21, and saw MaryAnn lying dead. Because the yellow sweater, hammer, and gloves that some anonymous evildoer used in the attack were associated with George, he was afraid he’d be blamed, so he panicked and covered it up (Brad Jackson) by disposing of the evidence, he said. Then he retrieved his granddaughter from driving school and stopped off for a sandwich.

A vintage ad from when Al Zullo was alive

At the trial in 2005, prosecutor Margie O’Conner asked George why he didn’t come to MaryAnn’s aid when he saw her lying on the floor the evening before Randy Baxter notified authorities.

“It was the dumbest and worst thing I ever did,” Hansen told the court.

Courtroom cool. George also claimed MaryAnn was in on the financial crimes and that he had no motive to kill her because they needed each other to keep the scam going.

“All I remember is wanting to go over the rail and strangle that guy,” MaryAnn’s brother Robert Romain — who was sitting just a few feet away from George at the trial — told Murder in the Heartland.

In a dramatic moment, after testifying about finding MaryAnn “in a big scab” of dried blood, Randy Baxter became so rattled that he needed to take a break before looking at the crime scene photos, the Beloit Daily News reported.

Wily guy. Despite emotions running high, “it was the most civil trial I’d ever covered, eerily quiet,” Jessica Olstad recalled. “MaryAnn’s boyfriend sat there every day. He was incredibly friendly, but not boisterous and certainly didn’t seek the limelight.”

In her closing statement, Margie O’Connor warned the jury about George’s guile: “He made his living as a salesman” and “is trying to make the sale of his life.”

Assistant Public Defender Frank Perri maintained that George was guilty only of “stupidity” and “selfishness” and that the contents of the garbage bag added up to nothing more than circumstantial evidence — there was no blood in his car.

Somber but satisfied. A jury didn’t buy it and convicted him of first-degree murder.

According to the Rockford Register Star, after the verdict: Hansen’s family and friends filed out of the third-floor courtroom tight-lipped and headed straight for the elevators, trying to avoid TV cameras and other media. Clibbery’s family and friends walked out looking somewhat haggard but relieved.

Lengthy sentence. Outside the courthouse, George Hansen’s 35-year-old daughter sobbed and told the media that her father had been convicted without evidence.

During the sentencing proceedings on October 13, 2005, MaryAnn’s boyfriend as well as her brother Louis Romain and her daughter Charmaine Shelf addressed the court about their painful loss.

Winnebago County Judge Daniel Doyle gave George a 60-year sentence.

Major disconnect. Meanwhile, what about the fate of Al Zullo Remodeling Specialists — a staple service whose friendly low-budget commercials became part of Loves Park’s identity?

Well, George’s crime rendered it unsalvageable, leaving creditor Amcore Bank and vendors unpaid.

The bank sued in an effort to get the $92,000 Al Zullo owed for a loan, according to the Rockford Register Star, which also noted that just one month after the murder, phone calls to the business were greeted by an answering machine with no room for messages and no forwarding number.

Still slim. The newspaper also reported that one homeowner who paid Al Zullo in full for renovation services was “hounded” for money that the business owed to a lumber provider. Homeowners with half-finished construction work were out of luck. With MaryAnn gone and George about to begin a life of strip searches and Nutraloaf, the business ceased to exist.

George Hansen in a recent prison mug shot

Today, the man who brought about its demise is better known as inmate #R47647 at the Pontiac Correctional Center. The Illinois Department of Corrections notes that George has a projected parole date of Dec. 23, 2064 — when he’s 123 years old.

Unrequited love. In the meantime, he has kept his 5-foot-7-inch body tattoo-free and trim at 139 pounds, according to the state’s DOC website.

As for MaryAnn’s boyfriend Gene Sundeen, who Forensic Files watchers will recall for his grief during his on-camera interview, he never remarried. He died a single man in 2019 at the age of 89.

You can watch the Murder in the Heartland episode “Bad for Business” on Hulu. It’s also on YouTube, but there’s a $1.99 fee to watch it in standard definition.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files on YouTube or Hulu

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Jane Dorotik: Trotting in and out of Prison

A Horse Farm Lies at the Center of Bob Dorotik’s Murder
(“Marathon Man,” Forensic Files)

The Forensic Files episode about Bob Dorotik’s murder stands out because the case was so easy to solve. Police arrested Jane Dorotik just four days after she reported her husband missing.

The couple were warring over their horse farm, and Jane was so impatient to get Bob out of her way that she rushed into a foolish, poorly executed homicide plan.

Good year for someone. A number of YouTube commentators decried Forensic Files for even taking up its bandwidth with such an obvious whodunit.

But 2020 brought a surprise for true-crime viewers and Jane herself: Innocence advocates managed to get her guilty verdict overturned because of advances in DNA technology.

For this week’s post, I looked into the new evidence and ended up finding other intriguing intel about the Dorotiks that Forensic Files didn’t mention. I also checked on the status of her relationship with her daughter — whom Jane’s defense lawyer tried to blame for Bob’s death.

So let’s get going on the recap of “Marathon Man”:

Bucolic bliss. On February 13, 2000, Jane Dorotik notified the sheriff that her husband never returned home after going for a jog on a rainy afternoon.

Scene of a crime: the Dorotiks’ master bedroom. Pretrial, prosecutors suggested the motive was a $250,000 life insurance policy

Jane and Bob lived on a huge horse farm on Bear Valley Heights Road in Valley Center, a rustic area an hour from San Diego.

The couple, who married in 1970 and briefly separated and reunited circa 1999, had three grown children.

Respected RN. Nick worked in construction and was a semi-professional snowboarder. Alex was attending law school. Middle child Claire, 24, still lived at home on Charisma Farms while she was finishing a graduate degree in psychology at San Diego State University and working as a personal trainer.

Their mother brought home a six-figure salary as an executive of operations for area psychiatric hospitals. Earlier in her career as a registered nurse, she worked at UCLA Hospital and later helped found programs to assist teenagers struggling with mental health and substance problems in Tucson.

Bob worked as an engineer at Lockheed at one point, but his professional trajectory was a little uneven.

Mane conflict. Claire and Jane loved horses and kept more than a dozen on the farm, including an Oldenburg named Nimo who shared a special bond with Claire.

Bob resisted when Claire and Jane wanted to increase the amount of family funds spent on the ranch operation — they bought, trained, and resold horses there — but he liked the equine critters well enough.

Unfortunately, he wouldn’t get any more opportunities to ride one. The day after Jane called 911 to report Bob missing, sheriff’s deputy James Blackmon found him dead on Lake Wohlford Road, near his favorite jogging path, at 4:35 a.m.

Claire, Bob, Nick, Alex, and Jane Dorotik back when no one imagined their life would become the subject of 48 Hours, Snapped, and Forensic Files episodes

Sneaks too spiffy. Bob, who was physically fit and ran marathons, had on a T-shirt and dark-red jogging pants. Someone had wrapped a rope around his neck and beaten him about the head.

As mentioned, law officers had plenty to work with from the get-go. Bob’s sneakers lacked any mud, water, or dirt marks, which conflicted with Jane’s story that he had gone for a run. Someone had tied his shoes awkwardly, with the bows askew.

Next to Bob’s body, they saw tire tracks and drag marks.

Some nosebleed. Jane, who apparently considered herself above suspicion, allowed a search of the house right away.

The police found a damp stain tinged with red, which Jane’s sister-in-law said came from a dog who sustained a cut to its dewclaw.

Investigators also discovered blood splatter on the ceiling and the underside of the mattress, which they suspected someone had recently turned over. There was so much blood in the room that it had dripped to the lower floor. Jane would later explain that Bob got a lot of nosebleeds.

Incriminating mark. Also inside the house was some of the same type of rope found around Bob’s throat.

In the bathroom wastebasket, officers found used syringes, one of them with an animal tranquilizer known as acepromazine.

On the outside of the discarded syringe, a lab would find Jane’s fingerprint in Bob’s blood. And his blood was on the needle, too.

The blood in the bedroom belonged to Bob as well.

Auto problem. An exam revealed Bob had died from bruises, fractures, and lacerations to the skull. The lab found flecks of color in his wounds as though someone had hit Bob with a painted object, possibly a hammer. Strangulation had contributed to his death.

The vehicle tracks at the murder scene matched the tires on a white Ford F250 pickup parked in the Dorotiks’ garage. It belonged to Jane.

Inside the 1996 truck, investigators found evidence of the victim’s blood partially cleaned up, not exactly a hallmark of innocence (Bette Lucas, Michael Peterson).

Daughter off-premises. In addition to the lady of the house, police at first suspected ranch hand Leonel Morales and Claire, who were both on Team Jane as far as sinking more cash into the horse farm.

At first, Nick (left, next to older brother Alex) was supportive of his mother, but his feelings shifted

But Claire was visiting a relative when Bob disappeared, and Leonel had an alibi as well.

Jane, on the other hand, “did everything but sign her name to the crime,” narrator Peter Thomas said in one of the all-time greatest Forensic Files quotes.

‘All my sisters with me.’ Authorities arrested Jane on Feb. 17, charged her with murder, and held her on $2 million bail.

Her sisters Bonnie Long and Marilyn Ryan immediately came to her defense.

Jane had a bad back and was still suffering from a hip injury sustained after a drunk driver hit her in 1987, Bonnie pointed out.

“How could she have overpowered her marathon-running husband?” Bonnie told the North County Times. “And even more, sling him over her shoulder and carry him 50 feet across a deck and down a flight of stairs?”

Bail back-and-forth. Other family members, friends, and Jane’s boss also vouched for her good character, prompting a judge to knock her bail down to $1 million so she could go home. With the help of her sisters, Claire, and Nick, she moved herself and her horses off of the farm.

But Superior Court Judge Marguerite Wagner suddenly upped the bail to $3 million, which sent Jane into tears and back to the county jail.

Claire Dorotik said her emotional connection with horses helped her heal

The trial kicked off in May 2001, just a little more than a year after Bob Dorotik died.

Quite a chunk of cash. The prosecution made a case that Jane had injected Bob with acepromazine in his sleep, hit him on the head repeatedly, inadvertently tied his shoes awkwardly when she was dressing him, dragged or carried the body to her truck, and left it on the side of the road. She threw away her bloody clothes and the murder weapon in the trash at a shopping center where friends had seen her around the time of the homicide, the prosecution alleged.

Investigators found evidence Bob was looking for a new job, perhaps in anticipation of a divorce.

Jane earned more than Bob, so a split would mean paying him 40 percent of her income in alimony — which would have curtailed her budget for hay, horseshoes, pitchforks, and the like.

Not made of china. Bob’s buddy Jim Goudge, who Forensic Files viewers might remember as the interviewee with a ton of magnets on his refrigerator, told 48 Hours Monday Mystery that Bob said if anything happened to him, authorities should look at Jane.

And here’s the really devastating part of the case: Jane’s sons testified for the prosecution. Both said their mother was physically strong — Alex noted she’d helped lift a heavy drainage pipe on the farm. Nick said that when he asked Jane how his dad’s blood got on the syringe, she didn’t answer.

As for the tire marks at the murder scene, the prosecution said Jane’s car made them when she dumped the body. (She told 48 Hours that the tracks got there when she went out looking for Bob before notifying authorities he was missing.)

Disharmony in the family. Jane’s lawyer, Kerry Steigerwalt, hit back hard. He lobbied aggressively to get the evidence collected from the house thrown away because of lack of probable cause for a search. The judge said no.

*Jane and sister Marilyn Ryan (left) lost their mother just 10 days before Bob’s* death

But Steigerwalt had more ammo in store. He claimed Claire Dorotik and ranch hand Leonel Morales killed Bob.

Although Claire and her father shared a love of running marathons, they didn’t get along well overall. Steigerwalt read aloud from a letter Claire wrote to her father. “I must take all precautions to protect myself from you,” it said, also accusing her dad of being vicious and untrustworthy. It mentioned her father’s threat to sell the horses, to whom Claire was emotionally tied.

Shunning the stand. Steigerwalt contended that evidence pointed to Claire’s having purchased the acepromazine. (None was found in Bob’s blood, but it might have been there in an amount too small to test.) He suggested that Claire or someone else other than Jane “went crazy” and “blew up” in the bedroom.

Claire and Leonel invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to testify.

Steigerwalt also argued that police ignored a witness who could have helped exonerate Jane. A woman claimed she saw Bob slouched between two men on the night of the murder.

Gone into OT. After deliberating for four days, the jury found Jane guilty.

But before the sentencing, the judge allowed the defense to present a new witness, Sheri Newton, who said that not far from the murder scene, she saw two strange, scary men in a black truck driving on the wrong side of the road on the night Bob disappeared. She recognized one of them as Leonel Morales.

Prosecutor Bonnie Howard-Regan pointed out that Sheri Newton also said she saw Bob Dorotik that night and described him as 6-feet-tall and more than 200 pounds — when Bob, in fact, stood at 5-foot-9 and weighed 147 pounds.

Clink time. The guilty conviction remained in place. Judge Joan Weber, who noted the possibility that someone had helped Jane dispose of Bob, handed the fallen horsewoman 25 years to life.

Off Jane went to women’s prison, where she spent her time reading, praying, meditating, and working outdoors on a yard crew, according to a TV interview from 2002. She would later say that going behind razor wire was like visiting a new country where you can’t communicate and everyone hates you.

In the meantime, most of the Dorotiks’ horses were sold. Sources vary as to whether the family owned Charisma Farms or merely rented it. Either way, it changed hands and no one from the family lives there now.

Advocates win. But in April 2020, after 20 years of incarceration, something positive happened for Jane. Prison officials gave her temporary leave from the California Institution for Women in Corona because of Covid risks.

Despite a rocky relationship with her dad, Claire wrote to him that she wanted to let go of her anger and try therapy together

Even better, in July 2020, a judge wearing a newsprint-patterned PPE mask overturned Jane’s conviction after Loyola Law School’s Project for the Innocent made a case for new evidence that might exonerate Jane. Her advocates pointed out that the murder scene lacked any of Jane’s DNA and that test results of fluid found in the bedroom were inadequate and misleading.

“Spending almost two decades in prison falsely convicted of killing the man I loved has been incredibly painful,” Jane said upon her release. “I lost literally everything in my life that Bob and I had built together. Thanks to my great legal team at Loyola Law School, I feel like I can finally breathe and I’m able to start thinking about making plans for the future.”

‘They out here saying.‘ A spokeswoman for the innocence project said its team was ecstatic over the new ruling

San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan’s office said it would use the latest DNA technology to retest blood evidence from the case.

As far as why Jane allowed Steigerwalt to attempt to pin the murder on her own daughter, Jane said that she trusted her lawyer and that the accusation about Claire was “already out there.”

Partners in crime? After the trial, Claire stated that she planned to stand by her mother. Once released from prison, Jane lived with Claire.

For me, those factors put Jane’s innocence in doubt. If Claire had nothing to do with Bob’s murder, why would she forgive her mother for trying to shift the blame to her? It sounds as though they both conspired to the homicide, then took a chance Jane would be acquitted based on the Claire-did-it defense — but there wouldn’t be enough evidence to convict Claire in the aftermath.

Whatever the truth about Claire, she managed to make a lot of her life after seeing her family torn apart.

Horse sense. She became a marriage and family counselor and is now known as Claire Dorotik-Nana. “As a practicing therapist, I not only found myself facilitating growth through adversity, but became curious about it myself,” she said in an Oxygen interview.

She’s also a published author who’s written about the healing power of her horses. Nimo, the stallion she bonded with when he was just a few hours old, was able to sense Claire’s pain three years later when the murder happened, she wrote.

Claire’s Amazon bio notes that she “has run 39 marathons, three 50-mile races, and nine 100-mile races to honor her father.”

Jane Dorotik in a 2020 interview and exiting prison the same year for coronavirus safety

Flanking falsehoods. Her mother, who’s past 70 and appeared meek in an on-camera interview with a regional CBS affiliate, said her experience as a convict has inspired her to work for prison reform.

Jane also told the media outlet that it should be illegal for police to lie while questioning suspects.

She has a point — Forensic Files has covered cases in which police coercion resulted in false confessions — but something tells me Jane was the one doing most of the lying during her interrogation.

You can view the 48 Hours about the case online.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

Tina Biggar: Escort and Scholar

Con Man Ken Tranchida Murders a College Student
(“Deadly Knowledge,” Forensic Files)

Tina Biggar turned an academic research project about prostitution into a personal foray into sex work.

The Michigan college student quietly went to work for escort services and made a tidy sum to use toward the costs of school and housing. Sadly, one of her clients, a sleazy little ex-con named Ken Tranchida, murdered her after the two argued about a car loan.

Ken, who would ultimately give the court quite an original excuse for ending Tina’s life, pleaded guilty just weeks after the 1995 murder.

Gratuitous occupation. But the Forensic Files episode about the case leaves some questions not completely answered.

Why did someone like Tina take a chance on a wild card like prostitution? She was studious and came from a stable home with a caring father. She had a nice boyfriend and close girlfriends.

And she already made good tips serving up James Beard New England clam chowder and 22-ounce rib-eye steaks at a popular local restaurant.

Unsettling fact. Plus, once she took on high-paying escort work, why did Tina still need to borrow cash for a car? And how did the slimy Ken charm the intelligent Tina into believing he could be her personal hero?

Finally, what was the Biggars’ reaction when they found out that the tragedy of losing their daughter came wrapped in a salacious secret?

For this week’s post, I looked for some answers and also checked on Ken’s incarceration status. So let’s get going on the recap of “Deadly Knowledge” along with extra information drawn from internet research:

Military dad. Tina Suzanne Biggar was born in South Dakota on Dec. 31, 1971, the daughter of a Coast Guard commander and a registered nurse.

The Biggars moved around a lot, to Florida, Alaska, and Michigan. They educated their kids at Catholic schools and participated in church activities and community goings-on.

Friends would later describe Tina as a hard worker who was friendly and fun to be with.

As a teenager, Tina gave up a baby girl for adoption after her relationship with the father — a Coast Guard enlisted man — turned abusive, according to the Already Gone podcast.

Government project. Tina got her life back on track and started college at South Dakota State University, then transferred to Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, to be closer to Traverse City, where her father was stationed.

By summer 1995, the psychology major was getting ready to start her senior year in college and had plans to attend graduate school.

Although Forensic Files didn’t mention it, before Tina began her independent study about sex work, she was one of eight Oakland students who worked on a larger project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to educate prostitutes about HIV and AIDS, then follow up to gauge their retention.

Different world. Tina interviewed prostitutes both on the streets and in jail. A friend told the Oakland Post that Tina “put her all in this study.”

Her own separate project, “A Survey of Sexual History and Health Practices Among Women Employed as Escorts,” involved higher-priced prostitutes, the ones who don’t work on corners. Tina reportedly sought financing for the project, but the university declined.

While doing research, Tina lived in an apartment in Farmington with her boyfriend, Todd Nurnberger, who attended the University of Michigan and worked as a chemical engineer.

Plea for help. On Aug. 23, 1995, Todd returned home to find Tina gone despite that the two had plans together that night. “Since we’d lived together, that never happened,” Todd would later testify. He called the Rochester Chop House and found out that Tina had quit her waitress job four months ago. She’d been play-acting by ironing her uniform at home.

The escort service faced some minor legal consequences after Tina Biggar’s death

By Sept. 13, 1995, Tina was still missing. Her parents offered a $5,000 reward for help.

Back at Tina’s apartment, boyfriend Todd had discovered an “OMG, my girlfriend’s moonlighting as a call girl” bag. The red duffle contained thigh-highs, KY Jelly, condoms, and correspondence with the LA Dreams escort service.

Multiple employers. LA Dreams didn’t know anything about a Tina Biggar, but the service did have a popular escort named Crystal who matched her description — 5-foot-7 with blond hair and perfect white teeth.

Narrator Peter Thomas gently explains what an escort service is and, because even a tasteful show like Forensic Files can’t resist the myth that prostitution is sexy, the episode features visuals of women wriggling out of front-zipped miniskirts while anonymous customers watch.

It turned out that Tina also worked for two other escort services, Elite Desires and Calendar Girls, and had dozens of clients. She’d been in the biz for about a year.

Busy biz. According to the City Confidential episode “Detroit: A Coed’s Secret,” she sometimes freelanced by cutting out the agencies.

So what kind of wages did Tina snag as an escort?

LA Dreams charged its clients around $250 of which Tina got $150, according to author Fannie Weinstein, who appeared on Forensic Files. Max Haines, a columnist for the Times-Colonist, reported that Tina netted just $100 per date but sometimes did three a night.

A real lowlife. Phone records revealed she’d talked frequently to a 42-year-old named Ken Tranchida. He would later say that he met Tina by chance at a restaurant and she gave him the number of her escort service.

Ken, born in Detroit in 1953 and brought up in Southfield, was a drifter and con man who held a series of menial jobs. He’d served time for passing bad checks, embezzlement, and breaking and entering. After a gig working the front desk at an E-Z Rest Hotel, Ken helped himself to its cash and fled, leaving behind new jewelry and baby items in his room there, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Among Tina’s belongings, investigators found a love letter with a poem from Ken.

‘Lot’ of trouble. Ken told police he last saw Tina when he dropped her off at the airport. She had a business trip in Ohio and left her car at his place. Oh, and Tina liked him so much that she starting dating him free of charge, he said.

As for the car loan that played a role in the story, a Honda dealership told investigators that Ken and Tina together signed a contract for a $15,000 car. She put up her share of the money,$5,000, but Ken failed to produce his $10,000. He said the remainder was coming via his “ex-mother-in-law who was flying in from England.” Neither she nor the money materialized. Tina and Ken had a loud argument at the car lot.

But lacking forensic evidence against Ken —a tracker dog that searched the woods around his house came up with nothing — police released him.

Magnificent Five. Meanwhile, Tina Biggar’s father, Bill, launched into action in hopes of finding his daughter alive.

Todd Nurnberger and Tina Biggar had an on-and-off relationship

He put together a team of amateur sleuths consisting of escort-service co-owners identified as Donna and Debbie, tow-truck driver Jerry Holbert (who was friends with Ken but sympathetic to the Biggars), and Todd. They stayed close to Ken Tranchida in an effort to get information.

When Ken landed in jail for skipping meetings with his parole officer, Bill & Co. paid $250 to bail him out. They shadowed Ken while he was staying at the Pink Flamingo Trailer Park.

‘Trunkated’ evidence. Bill even took Ken out to dinner at a local Ram’s Horn. According to the Detroit Free Press, Ken offered various stories about Tina’s whereabouts: She was at a Hilton Hotel in Dayton or his friend knew where she was but he lost his number and would page him later.

But police soon made a grim discovery. During a second search of Tina’s Honda Accord, they found a pool of her blood under the carpeting in the trunk. It indicated too much bleeding for her to have survived.

On Sept. 21, Southfield police located the badly decomposed body of Tina Biggar behind a house once owned by Ken’s aunt.

Drama king. Sadly, the Biggars first learned about the positive ID of Tina’s body from a TV report.

The family buried Tina in a light blue and silver casket in Elkton, South Dakota. About 100 students attended a service for Tina at Oakland University and raised $500 for the Biggars.

Meanwhile, Ken Tranchida went on the lam. When investigators tracked him down in a rundown Detroit neighborhood, he made a pretense of committing suicide by slitting his wrists and drinking chemicals.

Really, euthanasia? His arrest came as a relief to law enforcement, but Tina’s grieving mother, Connie, told the media it brought her no comfort.

Ken, who said he was in love with Tina, broke down and told police that Tina died accidentally when she fell and hit her head during a scuffle in his rented room. After placing her on the bed, he blacked out and couldn’t remember what happened next, he said.

But a forensic examination didn’t find a fatal head injury, so Ken came up with a revision to his story: He purposely mercy-killed Tina because she was unhappy and worried about financial problems. Ken also said he would “switch places with Tina in a heartbeat.”

Press pain. Prosecutors alleged that Ken beat and strangled Tina to death on his bed and then hid the bloody mattress in the attic. (He had told his landlady that he got rid of the mattress because he threw up on it.) Ken put Tina in the trunk of her car, dumped her body in the woods, and drove the vehicle back to his place.

Ken ended up pleading guilty to second-degree murder in a deal that the Biggars agreed to in order to avoid publicity. Judge Rudy Nichols handed Ken Tranchida two life sentences, one for homicide, the other for habitually offending.

The family felt the court handled the case well but had no warm words for the media. Bill Biggar said journalists profit by others’ pain. “Put your name in the headlines,” he said to reporters. “Put your daughter’s and son’s names in the headlines. The sustaining hurt is right here.”

*A Detroit Free Press clip shows Todd Nurnberger, Tina’s friend Aimee Vermeersch, and Bill Biggar attending a vigil*

Prospective breakup. So, getting back to the question of why Tina needed money so badly, some insight surfaced. First off, although Oakland is a public school, it’s expensive. Today, tuition costs as much as $27,000 a year.

Second, Tina needed to replace her old Honda Accord — it would have required a huge cash outlay to fix it after a recent accident — and her credit cards were maxed out, said Fannie Weinstein, who co-wrote the mass market paperback The Coed Call Girl Murder. According to the Already Gone podcast, Tina’s 25-mile commute to school also strained her budget.

Third, Tina and Todd enjoyed wining and dining themselves at nice restaurants, and the apartment the two shared in Farmington was in a high-rent gated community. Forensic Files asserts that Tina was thinking about leaving Todd and getting her own place, another big expense.

Workin’ at the car wash. And fourth, Tina was the oldest of six kids and probably wanted to minimize any financial burden she put upon her parents.

But why did she choose work as a call girl? As part of the CDC study, she no doubt heard harrowing tales from drug-addicted prostitutes working for abusive pimps on the streets. Perhaps employment for an escort service looked like a safer, easier way to earn better money.

Tina was probably just young enough to believe at least a little bit in fairy tales, and maybe Ken was the closest thing to a Prince Charming/Richard Gere she could find among the escort-patronizing population. Ken could make a good impression when it suited him. Former employers described him as well-liked and conscientious. Although he was working as a laborer at the Classic Touch Auto Wash when he met Tina, it’s a good bet that he told her he owned the place and had a string of other businesses as well.

Eventual acceptance. As far as how the Biggars reacted to revelations about Tina’s work, at first Bill denied it. He said that “people of good heart can see through much of what’s printed” and that “escorts make more money than she had,” according to accounts from the Associated Press and Detroit Free Press. Likewise, coworkers from the Rochester Chop House believed that Tina worked for the service for research only, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Once it looked certain that Tina had indeed been a call girl, Bill said he loved his daughter regardless.

When some women from the escort service attended a funeral for Tina in Traverse City, the Biggars offered them a place to stay and gave them homemade food, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Benevolent words. According to an AP account, the funeral eulogy delivered at Christ the King Catholic Church was also kind-hearted:

Ken Tranchida in a recent prison mug shot

“Rev. Edwin A. Thome noted that Jesus had spent time with prostitutes and sinners. ‘And he, too, suffered the consequences,’ the minister said. ‘The self-righteous did not understand. Eventually, they put him to death. Tina had that spirit of adventure, which took her into uncharted waters. And she died for something she believed in.‘”

Today, the client who ended Tina’s sabbatical into sex work resides in Muskegon Correctional Facility. Although one media source reported Ken won’t be eligible for parole until 2030, news recently broke that the Michigan Parole Board will have a public meeting on May 18 to decide whether he deserves early release. (Thanks to reader John Q. for writing in with the tip.)

I still believe it’s a good bet this killer will die behind razor wire.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

James Elmen: Fright in Florida

A Homicidal Sex Criminal Eludes Justice in Jacksonville
(“Cold Feet,” Forensic Files)

Julie Stoverink Estes in a yearbook photo — Julie Estes in a yearbook photo

By chance, 17-year-old James “Jimmy” Elmen Jr. escaped prosecution for a homicide in Florida in 1984. But as viewers of Forensic Files know, some criminals who get away with murder once just can’t stop pushing their luck (Barbara Stager, Bart Corbin).

Instead of reforming after his acquittal, Elmen went on to terrorize three women and kill one of them, a 21-year-old newlywed named Julie Estes.

Very bad hombre. Elmen’s crimes and his Charles Manson-like mannerisms make him especially disturbing. He’s among Forensic Files’ most frightening subjects.

“I would say that James Elmen was an outlier,” former Jacksonville detective Frank Mackesy, who helped investigate Elmen, told ForensicFilesNow.com. “Fortunately, most law officers don’t deal with such offenders regularly.”

Nonetheless, as true crimes fan know well, even especially cruel murderers sometimes win release despite life sentences. (Wood-chipper killer Richard Crafts recently got out).

Sunshine State child. For this week’s post, I checked on James Elmen’s incarceration status in hopes that he’s securely locked away for good.

So let’s get going on the recap of “Cold Feet” along with extra information drawn from phone interviews and internet research:

James Elmen posing for an early mugshot and relaxing in an interrogation room. He was short in stature but had a menacing way about him

Julie Stoverink came into the world on Dec. 12, 1963, and grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida, as the eldest of four kids born to Kathleen and John Stoverink.

Night shift. As a teen, she enjoyed playing video games and working at Burger King along with her best girlfriend, according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story. She graduated from Fort Zumwalt High School in 1982.

Julie married a truck driver named Rod Estes in April 1985 and took a job as a late-shift cashier at a Jacksonville convenience store.

Unfortunately, she didn’t get much time to enjoy adulthood or married life.

Missing person and money. On Oct. 22, 1985, a passerby called police after noticing that the Lil’ Champ store at 6892 Old Kings Road South, where Julie worked, was dark at 10:30 p.m. It normally didn’t close until 11 p.m.

The next morning, an employee arrived to find the store had been robbed of $500.

And Julie had never returned home on the night of the theft.

Shrimpy driver. A police helicopter spotted Julie’s blue Camaro stuck in some mud in woods about four miles from the store.

Her body, with her hands tied with her own sneaker shoelaces, lay under some cardboard and other debris nearby. She’d been raped and killed via a blow to the head.

Investigators believed someone shorter than Julie had driven her car that night; the seat had been moved forward. Inside the vehicle, they found Julie’s purse and the store’s empty cash bag.

The Lil’ Champ chain originally belonged to boxer Julian Jackson, who sold it in 1958. It has changed hands at least twice since then. Today, the Jacksonville store where Julie Estes worked is called Old Kings Quick Mart

Early focus on spouse. The trunk had traces of Julie’s blood. Investigators believed someone had tied her hands first, then put her in the trunk.

The No. 1 suspect, husband Rod Estes, told detectives that he spent the night of the murder home alone and didn’t report Julia as missing because they had a fight that day.

Police don’t particularly like unverifiable alibis like Rod’s, but they found him cooperative and ultimately cleared him.

Case revived. Investigators began to suspect that Jacksonville had a serial killer on the loose.

Months before Julie’s homicide, police had discovered a 15-year-old girl named Christina Casey murdered just a few miles away from Julie’s crime scene. And Dana Loomis, a missing 10-year-old, had turned up dead and hanging from a tree in the area.

Still, Julie’s homicide went unsolved until 2003, when Frank Mackesy, who had been promoted from patrolman to chief of detectives in the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, suggested a cold case squad reopen the investigation.

“Her family came and thanked me because they thought she had become forgotten,” Mackesy recalled.

Rescued by cop. Detectives discovered that shortly before Julie’s murder, a woman Forensic Files calls Carla Nobles (probably a pseudonym) had been abducted from a different convenience store, about 30 miles away in Callahan, but survived. Carla, 19, had given a ride to a man she met in the parking lot, none other than the impish-looking James Elmen.

After raping Carla, Elmen forced her at knifepoint to get behind the wheel and drive. Along the way, she managed to stop the car and get the attention of a law officer, who arrested Elmen.

Elmen ultimately pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, armed kidnapping, and four counts of unarmed sexual battery. (Some of the charges stemmed from an incident a few days before the rape — Elmen grabbed a woman and threatened her with a knife, but she escaped.)

Suspect connection. For those crimes, Elmen got a sentence of 42 years, with parole eligibility after 22 years.

Meanwhile, cold case investigators found another tantalizing piece of circumstantial evidence: The 10-year-old murder victim found in the tree circa 1985 was a half-sister to James Elmen.

So who was this button-nosed psychopath? A few biographical details on Elmen came up.

Troubled youth. He was born on Sept. 12, 1966, and reportedly dropped out of school after ninth grade.

Although he had parents who gave him moral support during at least one of his court dates — his mother, Pamela Loomis, “kissed him and handed him a pack of cigarettes as he was led back to jail,” according to a Florida Today story — at some point he moved in with his aunt and uncle in Titusville.

Wanda and Randall Gurr hoped the “small-town atmosphere” would “straighten him up” — and were shocked when their tousle-haired nephew was arrested in connection with the murder of 18-year-old Steven Linthicum in 1984.

Buddies turn. Prosecutors had a strong case that the then-teenage Elmen stabbed Linthicum to death after he and an accomplice stole Linthicum’s Walkman, jewelry, and decorative swords.

Elmen associate Tom Pack, 22, told the court that he and Elmen committed the burglary and later took the stolen goods to Glen Stroman, also a friend of Elmen’s. Stroman admitted to selling some of the stolen jewelry and got immunity for testifying against Elmen.

Plus, Elmen had been seen wearing bloody clothes around the time of the murder, according to an Orlando Sentinel story.

Menace to society. Despite the strong case against Elmen, an oddball factor unexpectedly kneecapped the prosecution. A tracking-dog handler named John Preston, who had provided some evidence for the trial, was discredited as a phony. That was enough to tip the jury’s verdict to not guilty.

By the time cold case investigators took up Julie Estes’ murder, however, Elmen was in prison for the 1985 attack on Carla Nobles, but he was eligible for parole. The cold case squad wanted to ensure he’d never get out. He was way too dangerous. Police, doctors, medical workers, and public defenders were all afraid of Elmen, detective James A. Parker said during his Forensic Files appearance.

Frank Mackesy seen with dark hair in the 1980s and with gray in the millennium — Frank Mackesy — seen toward the beginning of Julie Estes’ case and during his Forensic Files appearance — said that the unsolved homicide stayed on his mind for 20 years

“I was so worried he would reoffend that we made a case to put him on 24-7 surveillance,” Mackesy recalled.

Planned attack. Fortunately, authorities were able to hold Elmen in prison thanks to the Jimmy Ryce Act, which allows extended incarceration for convicted violent sexual offenders because they’re a threat to society. The court classified Elmen as a “mentally disordered sexual offender.”

Elmen probably had no intention of ending his attacks on women. “I think Julie Estes’ murder was definitely premeditated,” Mackesy said. “She matched all the physical traits of all his victims. They had the same body style, hair color, and hair style.”

After reopening the case, detectives hit some forensic pay dirt when a lab identified Elmen’s DNA on Julie’s socks.

Sudden confession. Investigators believe that on the night of Julie’s murder, Elmen noticed there were no customers inside the Lil’ Champ store, entered and turned off the electricity, and forced Julie to empty the safe. He made her drive to a lot, then raped and killed her and ditched her car.

Just as Julie’s family was preparing to attend Elmen’s trial at the Duval County Courthouse in 2008, Elmen surprised them by pleading no contest to Julie’s rape and murder. He got life without the possibility of parole.

“This was probably the better of the two options,” Julie’s dad, John Stoverink, said in a TV news interview. “You never know what a jury is going to do. This way, he doesn’t have a chance to get out.”

Throw away the key. Despite the guilty plea, Elmen’s defense lawyer Frank Tassone thought the judge made some wrong decisions.

“People picked and chose the facts they considered,” Tassone told ForensicFilesNow.com. “There were some mitigating things the judge didn’t allow.”

Nonetheless, it looks as though James Elmen has zero chance of leaving prison on two feet. “His plea deal was contingent on him not being able to appeal or get out,” Mackesy said. “Part of that deal was our prosecutor didn’t go after the death penalty.”

Grief relief. Today, Elmen lives in Graceville Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility in Florida and is on the sex offender registry. The Florida Department of Corrections lists his status as life without the possibility of parole, and he’s in close custody, meaning maximum supervision.

The sentence relieves Julie Estes’ family of having to attend parole board hearings for the killer of their eldest child.

According to Florida Times-Union account, as a tribute Julie, her brother Tom Stoverink “named his daughter Samantha Julie after his big sister, whom he followed everywhere when she was living at home.”

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. – RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

Roy Beck: Mullet-Wearing Maniac

Virginia Russell Exits Prison and Meets a Sociopath
(“Trouble Brewing,” Forensic Files)

If Roy Gene Beck Jr. had any redeeming qualities, they didn’t come across on Forensic Files or any other sources of intelligence about him. The young man from Columbia, South Carolina, financed his crack cocaine habit by robbing women. He raped at least one and killed another.

Once the law caught up with Roy, he tried to blame his crimes on a friend — a nice guy who had helped him.

Speedy read. Fortunately, the criminal justice system sorted out the truth and convicted Roy.

For this week, I looked into where Roy Beck is today. This will be a quick update (which for my blog means 1,200 words) because the case didn’t get a huge amount of press coverage, although a tantalizing tidbit about Roy bubbled up.

So let’s get going on the recap of “Trouble Brewing,” along with extra information drawn from internet research. Because Virginia Russell is the murder victim in this episode, let’s start with her story:

Boyfriend killed. Virginia Russell had long struggled with a drinking problem, which played a role in a horrible accident.

While the South Carolina resident was driving her boyfriend home after a party, her car veered out of its lane, did somersaults, and ejected both of them.

He died.

Virginia, whose blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit, got a six-year sentence for vehicular homicide.

Final page. In an effort to get back on her feet financially after she served her time, Virginia began working for an escort service, although she told her family it was a house-cleaning company that paged her when jobs came in.

Forensic Files notes that some names and images were changed for TV, but this shot of Virginia Russell, shown on more than one series, looks like the real deal

On Nov. 12, 1996, her beeper went off at 8:54 p.m. and she left for what she called a cleaning job.

While Forensic Files portrays Virginia as at home with family when she got the page, the New Detectives reported that she was at a hospital visiting a cousin’s sick baby.

Scattered evidence. Whatever the scenario, the next day, a man walking his dog found the body of a woman lying face down near Owens Field Park in Rosewood, South Carolina. Her hair was soaked with blood, her stockings had runs in them, and she was missing a shoe.

At the scene, investigators found two Michelob Light bottles, shell casings, a small purse with $2 in coins, and a handbag with no money inside.

Fingerprints identified the victim as Virginia Russell, age 30.

Ruse bought. Inside her car, which was abandoned in a parking lot in Olympia, police discovered Virginia’s blood, a bullet casing, the missing shoe, and a Michelob Light carton with one full bottle inside.

They theorized Virginia and the killer drank beer in the car before he shot her, dragged her to the soccer field, fired two more bullets into her, and stole the bills from her bag.

The victim’s aunt, who still believed the nighttime cleaning job story, mentioned to investigators that Virginia always had a lot of cash. They believed the murderer robbed her of hundreds of dollars.

Charitable pal. Police traced the pager call to an apartment occupied by a young man called Justin Bullard on Forensic Files (he’s referred to as Richard Bullard in court papers — it’s not clear what his real name is, so we’ll keep it at Justin for now).

Justin owned an aquarium-cleaning business and lived with a roommate, Trevett Foster. Lately, Justin had allowed his hard-up friend Roy Beck Jr. to stay there, too.

The Columbia-area athletic field where Virginia Russell’s body lay

Although Justin insisted he himself had no involvement in the murder, the forensics and circumstantial evidence suggested otherwise.

Yeah, right. First of all, Justin had no way of proving his alibi that he was home alone when the homicide occurred. He owned a Makarov semiautomatic 380-caliber, which ballistic tests showed was used to execute Virginia. At his apartment, police found a phone book with pages advertising escort services ripped out. And Justin’s black military-style boots had high-impact splatter of Virginia’s blood.

Police officers must have rolled their eyes out of their sockets upon hearing Justin’s explanation — that someone else must have used his stuff in the murder and then returned it to his apartment to frame him.

But tests on a hair found at the murder scene showed it more likely came from Roy than Justin.

Prior felony. And it turned out that a crime against another professional escort had taken place at Roy Beck’s former residence on Whitney Street in Olympia.

Inside, the call girl found the place was lit by candles, but it wasn’t because Roy was a romantic: His electricity had been turned off due to lack of payment.

Roy, who had used the name David Davis when requesting the date, held a knife to the woman’s throat, raped her, and robbed her of about $300, according to court papers. He told her to run away and not look back.

That guy. The escort, age 20, identified Roy Beck from a photo lineup. Cops found Michelob bottles in Roy’s place and confirmed they came from the same factory and batch as the ones from Virginia’s murder scene.

Roy Beck’s new
haircut was more
appropriate for
court but it couldn’t save his case

And Richland County South Carolina’s law officers already knew Roy Beck Jr. He had started committing burglaries to finance his crack cocaine addiction in his teens.

Under police questioning, Roy insisted that Justin Bullard — the kind-hearted friend whom Roy was freeloading off of — committed the murder.

Premeditated. But prosecutors had little trouble proving Roy did it.

An associate named Larry Barlow testified that Roy told him about a plan to rob and rape prostitutes and invited him to participate, but he declined.

Investigators believed that Roy and Virginia already knew each other before the night he robbed her, so she would have been able to ID him. After they enjoyed Michelob Lites together, he shot her, took her money, then abandoned the car and quietly returned the boots and gun to Justin’s apartment to transfer the blame to him.

Disobedient con. Prosecutors won a conviction against Roy, and in November 1997, Circuit Court Judge Thomas Cooper handed him a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Roy lost an appeal three years later.

Today, he’s still in prison and making his share of trouble on the inside.

Don’t Be My Guest. According to South Carolina’s Department of Corrections, Roy has committed 21 infractions involving possession of a cell phone or narcotics, plus one violation for possession of a negotiable instrument, which apparently means he got hold of a forbidden form of payment.

For those misdeeds, he’s received losses of visitation privileges for as many as 720 days (nonetheless he’s kept himself trim and presentable with just 124 pounds on his 5-foot-6-inch frame), plus revocations of canteen, TV, and telephone privileges.

Over the years, the state has moved Roy around to a number of prisons. Since 2017, he has resided in Perry Correctional Institution in Pelzer.

Obscure fact. The DOC website lists Roy, who was born on Jan. 19, 1972, as ineligible for furlough, parole, or release.

There his story pretty much ends, but as mentioned, an interesting piece of trivia did pop up via a message board on the Columbia Closings website.

A commenter said that Roy is the son of Roy Beck Sr., who owned a gentlemen’s club called ChippenDolls that riled up some Columbia residents in 1990 by switching from topless entertainers to completely naked ones.

In December 2021, an email from a reader who worked at the (now-defunct) club as a cocktail waitress confirmed that the two Roys were indeed father and son — and Jr. was one scary dude.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

Book cover of Forensic Files Now — Book available in stores and online

Karyn Slover’s Killers: An Update

Jeannette and Michael Slover Murder Their Grandson’s Mother
(“Concrete Alibi,” Forensic Files)

Updated on June 30, 2022

Although she liked her job as an advertising sales rep at an Illinois newspaper, Karyn Slover was looking forward to making more of a splash in the world after she clinched her first gig as a model.

But her colleagues at the Herald and Review never got to throw her a going-away party or publish a story about the local girl who made it to the big time. Instead, her co-workers attended a memorial service and wrote headlines about Karyn’s murder — after she turned up dead, her body dreadfully abused, at Lake Shelbyville.

Model citizen. It took more than five years to solve the case, but the justice system convicted ex-husband Michael Slover Jr. and his parents, who probably thought they were too upright-seeming to even be suspected of a homicide.

For this week, I looked into where the Slover gang is today. I also tried to find out whether Karyn was the victim of not only homicide but also false advertising by her modeling agency.

So let’s get going on the recap of “Concrete Alibi,” the Forensic Files episode about Karyn Slover’s short life and horrible death, along with extra information drawn from online research:

Sweetheart’s ride. On Sept. 27, 1996, a police officer spotted an abandoned car on the side of Interstate Highway 72 outside of Champaign, Illinois.

Inside the black Pontiac Bonneville, police found a purse, a half-eaten candy bar, and scattered coins.

The vehicle was registered to David Swann, who worked as a circulation district sales manager.

In the bag. David said he’d lent the car to his girlfriend, Karyn Slover, who was going to pick up her 3-year-old son. Forensic Files calls the little boy Christopher, but newspapers identify him as Kolten.

He had spent the day with his grandparents. They claimed Karyn never showed up to retrieve Kolten.

Two days after Karyn’s disappearance, boaters spotted a gray plastic bag on the shore of Lake Shelbyville.

The float. It contained a female head with blond hair and at least six bullet wounds fired to the back with a .22-caliber gun.

Other bags, found in the water, held the rest of her body. The bags as well as the car had chunks of concrete in them. The killer probably used them to weigh down the bags, but body gasses caused them to rise to the surface (another case of criminals who don’t watch enough Forensic Files).

Investigators believed someone had used a power tool to cut up the body.

Grim news. Dental records confirmed the victim was 23-year-old Karyn Hearn Slover.

She had disappeared after leaving the office for the day.

Publisher Bill Johnston called a meeting to tell employees about the tragedy.

Well-liked. “He did spare everyone the gory details,” former co-worker George Althoff recalled in a Herald and Review story from August 2020. “But the emotion was quite raw and evident around the whole place.”

“Karen didn’t have enemies,” her friend Jill Scribner said in an interview with the series Cold Blood. She “was a very lovable person.”

Her ex-husband, Michael Slover Jr., had been violent during the relationship, but he had an alibi for the night of the murder. He’d been working as a security guard at Cub Foods. A coworker remembered seeing him in his office with a shoplifter the store had just caught.

Conveniently forgotten. After work, Michael Jr. taught a karate lesson, went home to shower, and left for his second job as a bouncer at Ronnie’s Tavern.

The newspaper office where Karyn worked before she became the news

Police next turned their attentions toward David Swann, who had been dating Karen for just a few weeks. He had some legal problems in his past, including impersonating a law officer (yikes, David Draheim).

David Swann also had a felony conviction for aggravated battery. (Years later, at the trial, he would claim he didn’t remember what crime he committed.)

Distress call. At first, David couldn’t account for his whereabouts for 45 crucial minutes on the day of the murder. He’d been late to a rehearsal dinner — he was slated to serve as best man — at Tater’s Family Grill. Police interrogated him for four hours before he mentioned that he’d stopped to get money at an ATM during the 45 minutes.

The bank had video footage of David that proved his alibi.

Meanwhile, investigators had appealed to the public for help identifying the place where the murder and desecration happened. Surely, there must have been signs of a bloodbath hidden somewhere.

Unlikely suspects. A law enforcement taskforce including FBI agents said they suspected Karyn met her grisly end in a location with tall grass and a gravel or rock base. They asked owners of remote properties matching that description to look around for signs of foul play.

“Because the offense was so odious, it also left an entire community clamoring for vengeance,” according to Dusty Rhodes, a reporter for the free weekly newspaper the Illinois Times.

A former FBI profile cautioned that individuals “can commit these horrendous crimes yet they can act like the person sitting next to you in church.”

The three Slovers in court. Michael Jr., center, and Michael Sr., right, look more like brothers than father and son

‘Feudal’ family. The newspaper offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the killer or killers. Funds were set up for a memorial to Karyn and an education for Kolten.

By now, police had found out that Karyn and her ex-husband’s family didn’t get along.

Mother-in-law Jeannette Slover reportedly hated Karyn.

Tight grasp. Jeannette enjoyed an excessively close relationship with Kolten and acted as though she were the mother.

Karyn had won custody of Kolten in the divorce, but the court ruled that Jeannette and husband Michael Slover Sr. would have the right to babysit him while Karyn was at work.

An ex-boyfriend of Karyn’s would later explain that Karyn sometimes had to physically pry Kolten away from Jeannette and that she had told her grandson that “one day you’ll be all mine,” the Herald and Review reported.

Lot of trouble. Karyn’s father-in-law, Michael Sr., who worked as a pipe insulator at the Clinton Powerhouse, claimed that he’d gone to Kmart and bought a Play-Doh Factory for Kolten around the time of the murder, according to Cold Blood. But the store said that it had never carried that particular toy.

Jeannette, whose occupation has been described as either full-time homemaker or employee at a drive-through liquor business, lacked an alibi.

Investigators couldn’t find a blood-splattered murder scene, so they concentrated on Miracle Motors, a poorly maintained Mount Zion used-car lot owned by Jeannette and Michael Sr.

Fasten down the case. The lot had concrete and cinders that resembled remnants used to weigh down the bags with Karyn’s body.

Authorities called in the U.S. Army to help sift through the soil on the 5,000-square-foot expanse — despite that the Slovers had given the property a makeover shortly after the murder (FF red flag).

Six months into the forensic archaeological dig, the taskforce hit a small but valuable piece of pay dirt: a metal button that matched the ones on Karyn’s jeans. They later found rivets from the jeans and a fabric-covered button that appeared to come from her blouse.

Relocation rebellion. Authorities uncovered evidence that Michael Jr. had participated in the planning and cleanup — he and his folks talked on the phone 12 times on the weekend of the murder. One theory was that Mary Slover, Michael Jr.’s sister, babysat Kolten while her parents “performed the gruesome work necessary to dispose of Karyn’s body,” prosecutors would later allege.

Friends said Karyn was thinking about moving away from Illinois to pursue her modeling career after she landed a job in Georgia (more about that in a minute). The Slovers reportedly feared she would move there and take Kolten with her.

Police arrested Michael Jr. and his parents and charged them with first-degree murder.

Car trouble. Prosecutors made a case that Jeannette shot Karyn in the back of the head when she showed up to get her son.

The loving grandparents dismembered her body at the car lot, bagged the pieces, and weighed them down with concrete from the property, then threw the bags in Lake Shelbyville, the prosecution maintained.

The presence of the Pontiac on the Slovers’ property would have raised suspicions, so they abandoned it along the highway.

Doggone killers. Neighbors remembered seeing Michael Jr. trimming weeds along the Miracle Motors parking lot around the time of the murder, important because investigators believed tall grass grew at the scene of the crime. Witnesses also remembered that the Slovers had been burning items at the lot during the same period.

And as though we needed more reason to root against the Slovers, Jeannette and David Sr. euthanized their dogs after a laboratory matched DNA from Cassie — one of the couple’s black Labradors — to a hair that was found stuck to tape on a bag from the lake, according to Cold Blood.

In 2002, the loathsome trio were convicted of first-degree murder.

Buh-bye. Jeannine got a 60-year sentence. The men got 65 years each.

The Slovers lost a June 2003 appeal.

Nonetheless, Mary Slover continues to fight for brother Michael Jr. and their parents — who probably still can’t believe an outwardly respectable couple like them got caught.

Got the blues. According to an article in the Illinois Times from 2005:

“’Homebodies’ is the word Mary and Michael Jr. use to describe their parents. A night out meant dinner at a fast-food restaurant and maybe a movie. Usually, they were happy to simply hang around their Mount Zion home, grill some pork chops, and watch PBS or the History Channel.”

In 2008, a court filing mentioned an untested human hair found at the scene as well as a fingerprint near a spot of the victim’s blood on Findley Bridge — and ordered a hearing to consider potential new evidence in the case. The Slovers’ camp also called attention to unidentified short blue wool fibers found in Karyn’s car and with her body parts.

Prosecutor’s vow. In an impressive development, the Slovers garnered the support of the Illinois Innocence Project, a legal studies seminar sponsored by the University of Illinois at Springfield. (It’s not clear whether the group is affiliated with the better-known Innocence Project founded by Barry Sheck.)

In 2014, they won a ruling allowing DNA testing on fingerprint evidence from the case.

But that went nowhere, and Assistant State’s Attorney Jay Scott, who prosecuted the Slovers, pledged to work to keep the conviction in place.

Locked up. So where are the Slover three today?

Well, two of them are still behind razor wire, but with some chance of release in the next decade.

Michael Slover Sr., Jeannette Slover, and Michael Sloven Jr. in recent mugshots — Michael Slover Sr., Jeannette Slover, and Michael Slover Jr. in recent mugshots

Jeannette Slover, 72, resides in Logan Correctional Center, with a parole date in 2029 and projected discharge date of 2032. Apparently, she’s been visiting some version of Laverne Cox’s beauty shop, because she now sports blond hair.

Hail Mary play. Michael K. Slover Sr., 74, occupied a bunk at Pontiac Correctional Center. He had a date with the parole board in 2032, but he didn’t need it. According to a reader (thanks for writing in, Steph Nihi), he died in June 2022. Good riddance.

Mike Jr., 50, is incarcerated at the Illinois River Correctional Center, with a parole date of 2031 and projected discharge in 2034.

As for Kolten, Mary Slover adopted him in 1999 — but that was before authorities had charged Mary’s parents and brother with murder.

Custody contest. And there were allegations of abuse and neglect, according to court papers.

Kolten spent some time in a foster home. After a legal battle, a Macon county judge ruled Mary unfit as a parent because the judge believed she took part in concealing her sister-in-law’s murder.

At some point, cousins of the Slovers also threw their hat into the ring in the custody competition.

Reason to smile. Ultimately, Karyn’s parents, Larry and Donna Hearn, won custody of Kolten. (He must have been a sweet little guy — everyone wanted him.)

“We’re goofy,” Larry Hearn told the Herald and Review after defeating Mary in the battle for Kolten. “We’re just both giddy as a couple of kids.”

So, what happened to Kolten?

Today, he’s in his late 20s and uses a different name. According to a social media account, he works in the home-improvement industry as a flooring remodeler.

Runway ruse? And on the subject of occupations, as previously mentioned, I was curious about the legitimacy of the agency that supposedly snagged Karyn a modeling engagement — there are so many scams associated with that industry.

Paris World, the Savannah-based agency, “would seek applicants through newspaper ads and then sign potential models and place their photos on the internet,” according to testimony from Paris World owner Alan Tapley at the 2002 murder trial.

Tapley said that he couldn’t remember any of the particulars about the modeling job his agency secured for Karen except for the fact that it was temporary, not longer than a month.

Not fee-free. Karyn paid $92 in processing fees in order to get the modeling gig, Tapley said, adding that he returned the money to her family after the murder.

Paris World no longer exists and Yelp didn’t saunter onto the stage until 8 years after the murder, so the modeling agency’s repute remains hazy.

(BTW, the Federal Trade Commission offers guidelines to help prospective catwalkers avoid scams.)

More in store. Whatever the case, Karyn Hearn Slover was a lovely person who never got the future she deserved.

That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

Karen Pannell: Written off Too Soon

Tim Permenter Pins a Murder on Another Ex
(“Writing on the Wall,” Forensic Files)

Tim Permenter isn’t the first Forensic Files killer to cast suspicions on multiple dupes so if investigators cleared one, they could target another. But he did distinguish himself by doing so in a speedy manner.

Murderers Christopher Porco and Richard Lyon, for example, brewed up multifaceted plans — including blaming the Mafia and a victim’s own brother — well ahead of their crimes. Tim, on the other hand, made a spontaneous decision to kill, then brainstormed with himself on a cover-up while eating pizza at the crime scene.

Accused in print. Of course, Tim had a lot more experience in manipulation than the others: He was a former pimp.

Tim’s onetime girlfriend, popular airline professional Karen Pannell, 39, didn’t learn about that particular aspect of his past until a few months into the relationship. When she insisted on breaking up, he flew into a rage and stabbed her to death in her townhome in Oldsmar, Florida, in 2003. Then, he scrawled the name of her ex-boyfriend on the wall in hopes that he would take the fall.

For this week, I looked into how investigators picked off that and other false leads one by one. I also searched for more information on murder victim Karen Pannell and on Tim Permenter’s whereabouts today — as well as some details on his early career as an escort-service owner.

Kid sister. So let’s get going on the recap of “Writing on the Wall” along with extra information from internet research:

Karen Pannell was born the last of a family of six kids and the only girl on February 10, 1964, in Germany, where her father was serving in the Air Force.

She had a vivacious personality, symmetrical features, and a beautiful smile — the kind of individual any business would want as the face of its brand. She worked as a model and then got a job as an American Airlines gate agent at the Tampa International Airport, where she acquired a reputation for being able to pacify irate travelers. She worked her way up to customer service supervisor.

Drama king. In her spare time, she liked diving and other outdoor activities and also became her family’s informal event-planner. She encouraged togetherness as her brothers grew into adults.

“Karen, being the only girl and the youngest, she was always very special to her brothers,” Randy Pannell told the North Pinellas Times.

In October 2003, Timothy Permenter dialed police, telling them that he dropped by Karen’s house at 2030 Montego Court and found her dead on the kitchen floor. He used a teary, pitiful voice on the phone. He was so upset that he threw up in the front yard after law officers arrived.

Furniture fight. The word “Roc” was written in blood on the wall — it looked as though Karen used her right index finger to spell out the name of her attacker as her last act before dying.

Someone had stabbed Karen 16 to 17 times in her back, neck, and heart and left her face-up in a pool of blood.

She had a previous boyfriend named Roc Herpich, an insurance adjuster known to have struggled with drug problems and minor legal troubles. The couple had lived together for about a year and were still in a custody battle over a $900 roll-top desk.

Nice try, buddy. Karen and the Harley-Davidson-riding Roc had a stormy relationship in general and she had filed a domestic battery complaint against him. He admitted to kicking in the door after they had a fight.

If all was as it appeared on the surface, police had an open and shut case against Roc.

Or so the real killer thought.

The forensics indicated someone wrote “Roc” over spots of blood splatter that had dried earlier than the letters, suggesting that it had happened after Karen died. And Karen’s right hand had formed the letters, despite that she was left-handed.

MS diagnosis. After suffering minor indignities like having police photograph the bottoms of his feet and take nail clippings, Roc was cleared.

At the time of the murder, he was home with his current girlfriend and her son, who was having a backyard sleepover with a bunch of his little buddies.

The ever-helpful Tim advised investigators to check out Karen’s dark and handsome former husband, Jeff Paine. The two had been married for five years and were now having an alimony dispute. Karen needed more money because she had recently found out she had multiple sclerosis.

Ransacking ruse. But Jeff proved he was in South Florida on a diving trip at the time of the homicide. And a British Airways pilot who Karen had once dated was out of the country.

By this time, officers had also ruled out a theft as the cause of the murder, although they found some disarray — an overturned birdbath, a purse with its contents emptied — at Karen’s place. Random home invaders don’t generally overkill their victims or know the names and spellings of the homeowner’s former boyfriends.

Meanwhile, Tim was cooperating with police. He answered questions and allowed a search of his home.

Ready for his closeup. And Tim had one more trick up his sleeve: an alibi. He had been with his friend and former co-worker George Solomon in New Port Richey, he said.

Soon enough, however, police discovered that a cell phone call to George that Tim had made around the time of the murder bounced off a cell tower near Karen’s home.

Having cleared all of Tim Permenter’s intended patsies — Roc, the ex-husband, and the fictitious surprised burglar — investigators could at last turn all eyes toward Tim and only Tim.

Engine trouble. So who was this guy and how did a nice woman like Karen end up with him?

Tim Permenter was born on May 10, 1967, to a teenage mother, Donna Finch, and had little contact with his father, according to a Tampa Bay Times account. Donna’s parents helped bring up Tim. His grandfather, Alex Finch, a lawyer and onetime mayor of Clearwater, was murdered by a client in 1989.

Karen met Tim, who drove a blue BMW convertible, when he was working as a VW salesman. She was shopping for a new vehicle.

Passed intelligence test. They began dating. He took a page from the classic sleazy-criminal playbook (Richard Crafts, John Meehan ), using fake war stories to gratify his ego. Tim falsely claimed that he served as a Navy Seal and participated in a mission.

But the Pannells had no reason to suspect that he was lying. Tim seemed bright, according to Michael Pannell, brother of the victim. The Ph.D.-holding Michael noted during his Forensic Files appearance that Tim impressed the family by beating him at Trivial Pursuit.

But there was some knowledge about Tim that the Pannells had yet to discover — and it wasn’t trivial.

Interesting ‘hook.’ Tim had at one time operated a small chain of prostitution outfits in Gainesville and Tallahassee, Florida. After the law caught up with his criminal enterprise, he explained that he started by placing newspaper ads for escorts. He discussed his best practices with the Associated Press:

“You could tell over the phone if a woman knew what she was getting into or not. For example, if a woman called up and said, ‘What exactly is this escort service?’ they wouldn’t be hired.“

Tim’s service, called Esquire Escorts, charged $100 per hour; the woman would get $65 and Esquire got $35. (One source noted that new hires had to go out on a practice date for free with a member of Esquire Escort’s management team.)

Pimp vs. pimp. He grossed $6,000 to $7,000 a day by the time he turned 20, he told Dateline during an episode titled “Written in Blood.”

But Tim was hungry for more. In 1990, at Tallahassee’s Capital Ridge Apartments, Tim had a shoot-out with a pimp who owned an escort service called Exclusively Yours. According to the Solved episode “Written in Blood,” Tim was the aggressor, and he shot the rival pimp twice.

Tim’s name had also popped up in the media amid allegations that a University of Florida supporter had paid for prostitutes supplied by Esquire Escorts to have sex with basketball player Dwayne Schintzius.

(The mullet-wearing Schintzius survived the scandal and went on to play professionally before dying of leukemia at 43 in 2012.)

Cash frittered away. Esquire Escorts also figured into the downfall of University of Central Florida president Steve Altman, who claimed he used the service for nonsexual massages only.

Although Tim said he started his empire to finance his University of Florida tuition, he also admitted to the AP that he blew all the money on “cars, a motorcycle, Jacuzzis, that sort of thing.”

He spent 12 years in prison for attempted murder, racketeering, and other related crimes.

Bad marks. Toward the end of his three-month relationship with Karen, he had given her a watered-down version of his criminal record. (Not sure how he explained the “Escort King” tattoo on his arm, however.)

When Karen told Tim it was over, he reportedly tried to choke her. Her airline colleague Catherine Mallet said that Karen had worn a turtleneck to work on a hot day and pulled it down to show her the strangulation marks.

Authorities investigating Karen’s murder slowly put together a case against Tim. At the crime scene, they found his prints on a pizza box with three missing slices (Karen’s autopsy found no pizza in her stomach). The delivery time of the pizza contradicted his contention that he left Karen’s place at 7:30 p.m.

The Pizza Hut deliveryman, who chatted with Karen in the doorway for around 10 minutes, told investigators that Tim had scowled at him.

Tim’s skin was found under Karen’s nails.

Poor placement. Investigators believe Tim went to her house in hopes of rekindling the romance. They ordered a pizza at some point, but when Karen made it clear she wanted to discontinue the relationship, he got angry and strangled her. While figuring out how to foist the blame on someone else, Tim ate three slices of pizza.

Next, he used Karen’s lifeless right index finger to write “Roc” in order to frame Roc Herpich. But the letters were too high up on the wall for a partially disabled victim to write.

Lab tests showed Tim’s DNA mixed in with Karen’s blood at the scene.

Horrible death. Tim was indicted in 2004. The trial wouldn’t take place for three more years, but the law took him into custody right away for violating his parole for crimes related to his pimping; he had traveled to Pasco County to see a friend without permission from his parole officer.

Karen Pannell with husband Jeff Paine — Ex-husband Jeff
Paine called Karen
‘amazingly bright’

Prosecutors maintained that Tim started the attack by surprise, putting a knife in Karen’s back, which paralyzed her. Blood splatter placement suggested he then got on top of her and continued to stab her. “She was looking up into the eyes of her murderer,” according to Assistant State Attorney Bill Loughery.

In court, the prosecution decimated Tim’s already-compromised alibi about visiting George Solomon. George, his ex-colleague from the car dealership on Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard, testified that on the night of the murder, Tim met him at a gas station, where he asked him to provide an alibi. Later, over drinks, he confessed to killing Karen. “She’s gone. I killed her. I killed Karen,” Tim said, according to George’s testimony.

Loose lips. Tim said the two had argued after he told Karen that he had just quit his job at the car dealership, according to George Solomon.

Also to Tim’s detriment, after finding the body, he had called Catherine Mallet to let her know Karen had been stabbed — before investigators made the determination of cause of death.

Tim’s defense team came out swinging.

They labeled George Solomon a “big fat liar” and pointed out that Tim had no blood on his clothing the night of the gory murder.

Missing wardrobe. Tim, who testified calmly at the trial, said that his statements about the logistics regarding the cell phone and his arrival at Karen’s house were simple errors. During an appearance on the On the Case with Paula Zahn episode “Message in Blood,” he maintained that he didn’t wear a wristwatch and often didn’t keep track of the time.

“I’ve been off on times,” Permenter told prosecutor Bill Loughery. “Does that make me a murderer? No, sir.”

Police never found the murder weapon, believed to be a knife taken from Karen’s kitchen, or any of Tim’s bloody clothes.

Kind souls. Aside from his mother, known as Donna Finch or Donna Markham, Timothy had no supporters in court, according to the Tampa Bay Herald. Donna had cancer and sometimes came directly to court after chemotherapy treatments, the St. Petersburg Times reported.

After deliberating for four hours, on October 24, 2007, a jury found Tim guilty of first-degree murder.

While pleased with the verdict, Karen’s camp showed sympathy for Tim’s mother. “My heart goes out to her,” said Karen’s stepmother, Yvonne Pannell. “I know his mother is in pain. And we’ve been in pain for four years.”

Eye kept on guy. In November 2007, the jury voted 7-to-5 for the death penalty, but the judge sentenced Tim to life without the possibility of parole, which disappointed Karen Pannell’s family, according to her brother Randy.

Tim’s various efforts for a new trial have failed. In 2013, a U.S. district court denied a petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

Today, Timothy Permenter is inmate #570672 at Liberty Correctional Institution in Bristol, Florida. The state lists him as in close custody, meaning he requires armed supervision at all times.

Wait, there’s more. Sadly, Roc Herpich, whose animated personality livened up the Forensic Files episode, died in 2018 at the age of 60. (Thanks to reader Joe for writing in with the tip).

If you’d like to check out other true-crime programs about the case, you can choose from a few. You can see the Dateline episode, divided into six segments with different URLs, on the NBC News website. It costs $1.99 to view the On the Case with Paula Zahn episode on Amazon.

The shows aren’t as compact and easy to watch as Forensic Files, but nothing is.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Tubi

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