A Charismatic Real Estate Agent Meets His End
(“Separation Anxiety,” Forensic Files)
When it came to brokering deals on houses, David Nixon had great instincts. He “could sell a screen door to a submarine,” according to one friend.
In the 1990s, the personable 6-foot-4-inch Texan’s name dotted the Fort Worth Star-Telegram‘s real estate ads, where he advertised homes with “commercial grade appliances” and “pool & cabana.”
Early exit. By the millennium, he was collecting commissions on million-dollar spreads.
But he didn’t always make the right decisions when managing his money or his personal relationships, and it ultimately cost him his life at age 40.
For this week, I looked for additional information on the case and whether Tracey Frame — the younger woman who cut down David Nixon in the early years of his mid-life crisis — is still in prison. So let’s get going on the recap for “Separation Anxiety,” the 2010 episode of Forensic Files, along with extra information drawn from internet research:
Friendly skies. In 1990, David Nixon married Donna Lella and they had a son the following year.
They enjoyed a happy union until David began an affair with a big-haired flight attendant referred to as Lisa Hill on TV and Lisa Hemby in court papers.
After divorcing Donna, he married Lisa. That relationship lasted for just a couple years, and things had turned so stormy toward the end that David obtained a temporary protective order against Lisa.
Making a splash. Soon after, he met Tracey Frame at a party. A number of sources give her occupation as accountant, but she was really a bookkeeper who had taken some accounting classes and liked to tell people she was a CPA, according to Detective Larry Hallmark’s interview on the “Tracey Frame” episode of Snapped.
Whatever the case, David found her crystal green eyes and confident personality irresistible, and they settled into a house on Pecan Hollow Court in Grapevine, an upscale lakeside community known for socializing, boat-riding, and general high living.
Tracey and David were a popular, fun-loving couple, but they began arguing about money a lot, according to acquaintances.
Uncle Sam in pursuit. Despite that he bought Tracey a Lexus and took her on ocean cruises, she reportedly resented the child support he paid Donna for their son, Nicholas.
The finances behind Tracey and David’s shared home aren’t completely clear, but one report said that she had contributed about $80,000 of her own money toward the four-bedroom three-bathroom abode and he paid for the rest. (Not sure of the purchase price in 2002, but the house is worth $488,000 today, according Zillow.)
At the same time, David was also around $100,000 in debt to the IRS and, as Forensic Files watchers know, folks who owe money to the government sometimes turn to inadvisable solutions (Amy Bosley) instead of sucking it up and finding a way to pay off their tax bill.
Cops called. In David Nixon’s case, he attempted to shield his house by putting it in Tracey’s name. But once their relationship deteriorated, she intended to keep the property all to herself.
On April 9, 2002, he called 911 for help after he came home to find she had changed the locks. “Basically, it’s my house,” he told the operator. “I was dumb enough to put it in my girlfriend’s name.”
Tracey eventually allowed him in the house that night, and the visit from the police ended in no arrests.
Off the radar screen. Little did David Nixon know that Tracey had far more insidious plans to ensure she could stay ensconced at the 2,647-square-feet residence in Grapevine.
On April 20, 2002, Donna Lella called police after David skipped a dinner date with Nicholas, then age 10, and didn’t answer his phone.
No one remembered seeing David Nixon after April 18, 2002, when he showed a property in Southlake to a prospective buyer, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Horrifying sight. Four days later, a motorist alerted emergency services of a fire in the parking lot of an abandoned building in Grand Prairie, Texas.
Police found a burning body wrapped in blue camping tarp and a blanket with fibers characteristic of electric blankets; gasoline had been used as an accelerant.
It looked as though someone tried to stuff his body into a drainpipe at the scene, failed, and then left him there to burn beyond recognition.
Chief suspect. An investigator would later tell 48 Hours Mystery‘s “Secrets and Lies on Grapevine Lake” that the blaze consumed the body to such a degree that he couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. Dental records identified the remains as those of David Nixon.
Although Forensic Files made the investigation into the murder sound like a long haul with early leads centering on second wife Lisa as well as Donna — whose son would be receiving David’s $500,000 insurance payout — the police actually arrested Tracey Frame just a few days after the body turned up.
“Once everybody heard that David was missing, I don’t think there was a soul who didn’t say, ‘Tracey did something,'” his friend Karl Ekonomy later told Snapped.
Seat shifter. Donna Lella told 48 Hours Mystery that David had a premonition Tracey would kill him.
Investigators would ultimately conclude that Tracey shot David in his sleep, then wrapped him in the electric blanket and tarp. In the house, police had found electric blanket controls without the blanket.
She used a hand truck to move his body — he weighed nearly 100 pounds more than she did — into a rented Penske moving vehicle, and abandoned his white Lexus in a Tom Thumb supermarket parking lot, investigators alleged. The driver’s seat had been moved forward, as though someone shorter than 6-foot-4 had driven it; Tracey is 5-foot-7.
Penske problem. Employees from H&H Janitorial Supply told police a woman matching Tracey’s description came into their store to buy cleansers and asked how to get blood out of her carpet. They suggested trying muriatic acid.
Next, investigators found video footage of a woman who looked like Tracey buying muriatic acid at the Tom Thumb supermarket. She used her customer loyalty card when she paid. (Forensic Files, Snapped, and 48 Hours Mystery all made a big deal of how cheap Tracey was to risk getting caught to save less than 50 cents on her purchase but, to be fair, getting out your plastic discount card is pretty much an automatic reflex these days.)
Additional security footage caught Tracey parking David’s Lexus in the lot and also leaving the Penske truck there, presumably because it would have raised suspicions to have it parked in front of her house for a long period of time.
Get your story straight. And Tracey seemed to know, before anyone told her, that David’s body suffered trauma. When authorities informed Tracey about the murder, her first words were, “How did they identify him?” according to trial reporting from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
An unregistered small-caliber gun that David kept in the house was missing and Tracey had recently bought a new mattress.
It also came out that Tracey had given varying explanations for why David disappeared. She told Donna Lella that he had gone on vacation, but told an investigator he had moved and was working out of state. When Gary Yarbrough, the managing director of David’s real estate office, asked about his whereabouts, Tracey said she had no idea.
Speak ill of the dead. On the police video of her initial interrogation, Tracey came off as weepy and pathetic, but she was confident and articulate three years later in her interviews with 48 Hours Mystery, which covered the case from pretrial (Tracey had been free on $100,000 bail with an electronic ankle bracelet since 2002) to conclusion.
At the 2005 trial, a buddy of the victim, John Hartenbower, testified that their friendship dwindled after he got involved with Tracey Frame. The prosecution alleged that Tracey interfered with David’s other relationships.
Tracey’s defense claimed the woman in the security footage wasn’t Tracey and that someone else had used her customer loyalty card at the Tom Thumb. Her side also tried some smear-the-victim tactics, alleging that David was involved with prostitutes and had gambling debts that might have prompted someone to kill him.
New Man in Her Life. Team Tracey contended that Jerry Vowell, a used car salesman who owed money to David, might have killed him to cancel the debt. (Vowell said on TV that he had repaid David.) Or maybe an anonymous robber killed David, who often walked around with large amounts of cash on his person, according to Tracey.
Tracey’s new fiancé, a British dentist named Roland Taylor, maintained she was nothing like the intimidating shrew the prosecution portrayed. He would later tell 48 Hours Mystery that Tracey had a strong motive to keep David alive because he owed her money. He also said Tracey was a sweet person who just wanted to “love and be loved.”
In March 2005, a jury took four hours to convict Tracey Frame, then 35, of first-degree murder. She got 40 years and will be eligible for parole after 20.
She lost an appeal in 2006.
Sweet gig? Today, Tracey Ann Frame resides in the William P. Hobby Unit in Marlin, Texas. Although she will have a shot at parole, her Texas Department of Criminal Justice record makes no mention of a date, but it notes that she’s eligible for visitation.
“Hobby” seems an apt name for the institution because it offers prisoners opportunities to work in a peach orchard or with horses or security dogs.
Her release date is Sept. 29, 2044, when she’ll be 74 years old.
You can watch the 48 Hours Mystery about the case on YouTube (thank you to reader Kattrinka for sending in the new link).
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
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