This week’s post starts a little sabbatical from Forensic Files to concentrate on some new developments related to the classic true-crime book In Cold Blood.
One of many editions
Truman Capote’s story of the slaughter of four members of a well-liked Kansas farming family in 1959 established a new literary genre: the nonfiction novel.
Cradle to gallows. Capote interviewed people connected with the Clutters, who were terrorized and shot during a home invasion — way before someone invented that term — waged by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, a couple of young ex-cons.
By interspersing that intelligence with information from interviews with investigators and Perry Smith, Capote created a 343-page narrative that included in-depth backstories of the characters, a moment-by-moment narrative of the murders, and coverage of the police work, convictions, and eventual executions of the killers.
Of the two truants, Smith by far had the more sympathetic story, or at least Capote portrayed it that way. The son of a Native American mother and white father who once had a happy marriage and worked together as rodeo performers, Smith suffered from a series of long-running tragedies.
Unexpected bromance. His mother sank into severe acoholism, her four kids lived in an orphanage for a time, and two of them committed suicide. An accident left Smith with mangled legs and constant pain.
Smith and Capote developed a bond during the time he was researching his book.
A Young Truman Capote
Capote, too, came from an unstable household damaged by alcoholism, but he found a way out and turned himself into a member of the glittering literati of his day.
He had early success with his novels OtherVoices, Other Rooms, published in 1948 when he was 23, and The Grass Harp three years later. His novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, later the basis for the Audrey Hepburn movie of the same name, came out in 1958.
But In Cold Blood was his blockbuster. It has sold 100 million copies, according to Study.com.
There are at least three movies based on the story.
Wholesome, meet dissolute. My favorite, the 2005 release Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener, portrays the author’s efforts to make a literary conquest out of the quadruple homicide that rocked the Kansas town.
I’ve seen the film about the same number of times I’ve read the book In Cold Blood, at least four. The story of the unlikely face-off between the high-functioning 4-H-meeting-attending Clutter family and the two margin-dwelling assailants makes for an unusual American tableau.
The means of storytelling was a precursor to books such as Sebastian Junger’s 1997 best seller, The Perfect Storm, which featured a reconstructed story of a commercial fishing boat that disappeared.
Fortunately, Capote’s book probably will never vanish from the public consciousness, and two new developments related to the story have recently emerged.
First, information about a manuscript that told the story of the Clutter homicides through the eyes of Dick Hickock has leaked out. A seven-part sparsely viewed story about the manuscripts exists on YouTube. I will give it a watch and report back.
Smith (top) and Hickock
Fresh retelling. And coming up in November, Soho Press is publishing No Saints in Kansas, a novel told from the perspective of a fictional friend to the real-life Nancy Clutter, the dynamic 16-year-old at the center of In Cold Blood.
The author, Amy Brashear, grew up near Holcomb.
No Saints in Kansas is written for a teenage audience, but I’m going to give it a read myself and report back on it just the same. It might make a nice holiday gift for a nascent true-crime fan in the family.
That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — R.R.
A Murdered Dad, a Broken Teen (“Shattered Innocence,” Forensic Files)
If there’s a Fredo Corleone of Forensic Files, it’s Brian Vaughn. He betrayed a family member, then incriminated himself by blurting out a few words.
Brian Vaughn at 16
Not that the 16-year-old Texan had formulated anything close to a foolproof plan for getting away with his father’s murder in the first place.
Own worst enemy. Investigators picked apart his story in weeks, issuing an arrest warrant two months after the shooting of San Antonio trial lawyer Leslie Vaughn, murdered in bed at home.
But it was the student-athlete’s own inadvertent admission to a 911 operator that guaranteed he’d end up in a jail cell rather than a dorm room.
“Shattered Innocence,” the episode about the November 10, 1998, crime, doesn’t make anyone want to see Brian get away with murder, but it’s still excruciating to hear his unforced error.
The story is also a bittersweet reminder of how small disadvantages feel like the end of the world to a teenager.
Shiny, shiny. Here’s a recap of the episode along with additional information from internet research.
Brian Vaughn was born on May 20, 1982, to Madeline Vaughn, a registered nurse, and Leslie Vaughn, who the San Antonio Express-News described as a respected professional “who sometimes posted bonds for clients out of his own pocket.”
Brian played basketball well enough to make an athletic scholarship a possibility.
Madeline and Leslie Vaughn
But in 1998, he was wishing for an off-court score: a brand-new car. His used auto was cramping his style.
After his father refused to buy him a new one, the old car conveniently caught on fire. It looked like arson, but no charges were filed.
Leslie Vaughn then agreed to replace the burned-out vehicle with another used one. He and Brian had an argument about it at a car dealership on November 10, 1998.
Concerned older brother. Brian and his father left without making a purchase. Later at home, Chris, Brian’s 12-year-old brother, overheard Brian threaten to quit the basketball team if he didn’t get a new car.
That night, at 1:24 a.m., Brian took Chris to the neighbors’ house. Brian explained to Mr. and Mrs. Floyd that he had called 911 after hearing what sounded like an intruder. He wanted to make sure his brother was safely off the premises while he waited for the police.
On the 911 call, Brian said he heard a gunshot coming from his father’s bedroom, but he couldn’t get in to check on him because the door was locked.
When Deputy Edward Olivares broke down the door, he found Leslie Vaughn, age 44, lying in bed with a gunshot wound to the back of his head. A 10-pound piece of limestone lay on the floor; it had created a conveniently tall hole in the French doors leading to the balcony off the bedroom.
The Vaughns’ balcony
Noxious glass. Brian apparently wanted authorities to think that an unknown intruder had climbed onto the balcony, thrown the rock through the glass, shot his father, and exited the same way he came.
His mother was working the night shift at Methodist Heart Hospital, so Brian didn’t have to worry that detectives would suspect her.
It was he who became the No. 1 suspect early on. Investigators saw evidence that contradicted Brian’s narrative. There was broken glass on top of Leslie’s body, suggesting that he slept through the break-in — an unlikely scenario.
This was no burglary. And more glass shards lay on the rug in the hallway outside the master bedroom door. The fragments created a trail to the bathroom. How did it get there if the assailant came and left via the balcony?
Also, Brian had waited 25 minutes in between leaving the Floyds’ house and phoning emergency services, giving him time to shoot Leslie and stage the scene.
Nothing was stolen from the bedroom.
And the bedroom door handle looked rather flimsy. As a couple of online YouTube commenters put it:
• Indy Castleton If my dad was shot I wouldn’t let a locked door prevent me from going inside that’s for sure. • Jocelyn Vernon: I agree if that would of been my parent no door would stop me from getting in the room!!!!
Seeking a scapegoat. Investigators theorized that after dropping off Chris, Brian used his father’s own 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson to shoot him as he slept, then stepped onto the balcony, hurled the rock through the glass, exited through the bedroom door, locked it on the way out, inadvertently tracked shards to the bathroom, washed the gunshot residue from his hands, and called 911.
Brian insisted an unseen intruder was responsible; perhaps one of his dad’s unsavory clients had a grudge.
Leslie Vaughn, who started out as an assistant district attorney for Bexar County and later went into private practice, had defended drug dealers, organized crime figures, and other rough characters.
“My father was a strong man,” Brian told an AP reporter. “He would stand up to anybody, no matter what. I think that’s what happened to him.”
It was a nice try, but not enough, especially once investigators took the time to listen to the entire 911 tape.
Final nail. After giving his locked-bedroom-door-can’t-get-in spiel, Brian said that his father was “bleeding from the mouth area.”
“OK, so how do you know he’s bleeding from the mouth area?” the operator asked.
There was no walking back on that one.
According to court documents, Brian told the Floyds that his father was not moving or breathing, which confused them because he had also told them he couldn’t enter the bedroom.
Anguish: Brian Vaughn during his murder trial
The Floyds noted that Brian was wearing a different shirt when he came back to pick up Chris.
Low-profile release? A jury convicted Brian Vaughn in 1999. “Oh, God, no. I can’t lose them both,” his mother cried out upon hearing the verdict, according to an AP account.
A judge sentenced Brian to 33 years in the Institutional Division of the Texas Department of Corrections. Brian served time at the Hamilton Unit in Bryan, Texas, as well as the Ramsey I prison.
As of 2016, he was still incarcerated, according to Inside Prison.
It always seemed a little unfair that the court tried him as an adult when he committed the murder for a child’s reasons. Also, it sounded as though he did so in a fit of anger rather than out of diabolical blood lust.
He became eligible for parole in 2017 — and it looks as though he won it. Inmate lookup websites for Texas have no listing for a Brian Leslie Vaughn anymore.
What could have been. I searched online for any media coverage related to his release, but nothing turned up. Brian would be 35 today, not old, but past his prime in his sport.
“He was a good athlete,” Bexar County Homicide Detective Al Damiani said in his interview with Forensic Files. “He could have played basketball in college and had the time of his life.”
Perhaps, unlike Michael Corleone, Brian’s younger brother will be forgiving and the two of them, along with their mother, can be a family again.
That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR
A Nice Woman Marries a Bad Hombre (“All The World’s a Stage,” Forensic Files)
On the outrageous meter, Ted MacArthur’s explanation for his wife’s death would pretty much make the needle fly out of the machine.
Pilar Sones MacArthur
A detective for the Miami-Dade police force, MacArthur, 38, told the authorities that just for fun, he woke up Pilar MacArthur by squirting her with a water gun on the morning of August 1, 1989.
Sympathetic victim. That’s the relatively believable part. Here’s where he really pushed it. He said that Pilar, who was a corrections officer with firearms training, reacted by playfully putting a real gun up to her own head and pulling the trigger as a joke.
Pilar, 35, thought she had unloaded the weapon, he explained, but she had mistakenly left in one bullet and given herself a fatal wound on the left side of her skull.
Putting aside the insult to our intelligence, “All the World’s a Stage” is a sad and touching episode of Forensic Files.
Pilar MacArthur’s sister, Carmen Barraford, and a good friend, Jenny Alvarez, appear on camera, and they both seem like such sweet, mild souls. But just the same, they rip apart Ted McArthur’s credibility.
European background. Alvarez said that Pilar had found out Ted was cheating on her and she was giving herself a makeover in hopes of winning back the father of her two children.
For this week, I poked around to find out where Ted MacArthur is today and whether he’s still peddling the same story that paints his late wife as reckless and foolhardy.
But first, here’s a recap of the episode plus some additional facts drawn from internet research.
Pilar and Ted MacArthur
Pilar Sones was born in Valencia, Spain, the daughter of a fisherman and a maid. The family moved to Paris, France, where her parents secured better-paying jobs.
Following her older sister, Pilar moved to Boston. She worked as a nanny at first.
Slippery guy. Something or other drew the dark and striking Pilar to Theodore MacArthur, then a motorcycle policeman who was living in his mother’s basement.
Pilar didn’t know that Ted was still married to his first wife, Betty Lou Williams, and had a child, according to the book Cracking Cases: The Science of Solving Crimes by Dr. Henry Lee with Thomas O’Neil (Prometheus Books).
Days after Ted’s divorce came through, he married Pilar. They moved to Miami, where she began a career with the prisons system, and he worked his way up to homicide detective.
It was in that capacity that he met and began an affair with a Miami Herald crime reporter. Their romance put a strain on the MacArthur family’s budget.
Bath ploy. At first, Pilar’s efforts to keep her marriage together seemed successful. Ted said he that was just going through a midlife crisis, claimed he broke off his affair, and offered up a lie — that he would buy Pilar a new house and new car.
It’s not clear why Pilar believed him. According to Alvarez, Pilar was concerned that Ted was already “spending money faster than they could make it.”
Another part of Ted’s atonement consisted of doing nice little things for Pilar, like the time he drew her a relaxing bath, lit candles, and placed a powered-on TV on a ledge near the tub so she could watch her favorite shows.
Once she was in the tub, he caught his foot on a wire and sent the TV plunging toward the bathwater.
Tampa Bay Times item from February 1, 1994
Colleagues suspicious. Fortunately, Pilar wasn’t electrocuted. She accepted his excuse that it was an accident. She had no reason to believe her husband would kill her; they had two sons together.
Just a few days after that mishap, Ted called 911 to report that Pilar had shot herself by accident. As a detective, Ted surely knew an investigation would take place. But, overestimating the strength of his reputation, he thought it would be an open and shut matter.
Lead detective Donald Slovonic, however, planned to make the investigation thorough and in-depth. “Most of the people that I spoke with didn’t share a good impression of him,” Slovonic later recalled.
According to Lee’s book:
Sergeant David Rivers, one of MacArthur’s colleagues and a veteran detective with an excellent reputation, later commented, “It was unspoken, but from the first day, there were sidelong glances across the office. We knew he did it.”
The case against Ted MacArthur congealed once the forensic evidence started rolling in. Pilar had no high-velocity blood splatter on her alleged trigger hand, and her fingerprints weren’t on the gun.
Story dissolves. Lee noted that the amount and condition of Pilar’s blood on the bed contradicted Ted’s contention that he immediately moved her body to the floor to begin CPR.
A ballistics expert determined that the fatal gun wound was in the wrong place on Pilar’s head to support Ted’s story about how she shot herself — that the right-handed woman aimed at the left side of her own head.
How did an experienced homicide detective like Ted MacArthur orchestrate his own crime so poorly?
Pilar as a bride
“It’s kind of like the doctor who tells his patients to give up cigarettes but smokes himself,” remarked Slovonic during an appearance on a 2016 Dr. Drew episode that looked back on the case.
Justice delayed. Or maybe it’s more like the way professional hair stylists tend to do a better job on their clients’ hair than on their own.
Whatever the case, Ted’s motivation was rather obvious: A new, $250,000 life insurance policy he took out on Pilar a few weeks before her death would bring his total payout to $470,000.
Investigators theorized Ted shot his wife while she was sleeping and then staged the scene.
The trial started four years after the shooting, on October 24, 1993. By this time, Ted’s newspaper-reporter girlfriend, Joan Kite, had already moved in with him, moved out after a fight during which he allegedly threatened her with a knife, and offered to testify for the prosecution, according to Lee.
Courtside boast. Dade County assistant state attorney Susan Dannelly prosecuted the case, during which MacArthur remained notably calm. He had testified at numerous trials over his career, so perhaps his own didn’t rattle him. According to Lee:
MacArthur was supremely confident of his acquittal and even held a news conference predicting this outcome and promising legal action against his accusers.
The jury delivered its verdict on December 8, 1993, after nine hours of deliberation: guilty of first-degree murder. A round of applause broke out in the courtroom.
Ted then began his life as prisoner #123207 with the Florida Department of Corrections. But it wasn’t the last time his name surfaced in a legal action.
History of lying. In 2002, MacArthur’s dubious record came up during a battle over whether a drug-related murder conviction against a criminal named Rolando Garcia should be overturned because MacArthur had worked for the prosecution.
Miami-Dade Assistant Public Defender Christina Spaulding cited the discovery of MacArthur’s dishonesty as one reason to review the Garcia case.
A Sun Sentinel story about the Garcia case mentioned that MacArthur was known to use the phrase, “A lie is as good as the truth if someone believes it.”
MacArthur circa 2017
In regard to his own murder conviction, MacArthur, 65, is still maintaining his innocence — and that his late wife, who spoke three languages fluently, didn’t know enough not to play with guns.
Different kind of ink. He resides in the SFRC South Unit prison in Doral. At 5’10” and 250 pounds, he is presumably finding prison fare appetizing. (Update: A 2018 revision of the Florida Department of Corrections website indicates he’s lost height and weight, at 5’9″ and 224 pounds.)
According to his inmate profile, MacArthur has acquired a number of intricate tattoos, including one that says “Pilar.”
That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR
And an Even Worse Husband (“Bad Medicine,” Forensic Files)
The Forensic Files episode about Dr. Anthony Pignataro isn’t in heavy rotation on TV, so you may not have caught it multiple times.
Debbie and Anthony Pignataro in better days
But really, all one needs is a single viewing to remember it forever.
“Bad Medicine” tells of how a cosmetic surgeon accidentally kills a patient, then deliberately poisons his wife.
Overconfident. And here’s the part that’s pretty much impossible to forget.
Years before his crimes, Anthony Pignataro made a name for himself as the inventor of the snap-on toupee, which attaches to a man’s head via bolts surgically implanted in the skull.
Pignataro started losing his hair at age 23 and was his own first customer.
I’m not sure whether it was the hairpiece or not, but Pignataro thought an awful lot of himself. Once he opened his own plastic surgery facility, he didn’t see the need to hire an anesthesiologist or a qualified nurse to help him.
Those deficiencies eventually led to prison time and the loss of Pignataro’s livelihood. For this week’s post, I looked around to see what Pignataro, who was released in 2013, is doing today.
The house the Pignataros shared in West Seneca
Summer love. But first, here’s a recap of the episode, along with other information culled from internet research as well as Ann Rule’s book about the case, Last Dance, Last Chance.
Deborah Rago, born in 1957, came from a financially strained family in Williamsville, New York.
In 1978, when Debbie was working as a pharmacy technician, she met Lehigh University student Anthony Pignataro, who Rule described as almost 6 feet tall with classic, balanced features.
One night, they fell in love on the dance floor to the Donna Summer hit “Last Dance.”
Anthony was the son of Ralph Pignataro, a respected surgeon in Buffalo, New York. He wanted to follow his father into the profession. The mainland U.S. medical schools Anthony applied to rejected him, so he enrolled at the San Juan Bautista School of Medicine in Puerto Rico.
None-too-impressive. Debbie waited for him to finish, and they finally married in 1985. Within the first year, a concerned party tipped her off that Anthony was cheating on her.
She took her father’s advice to “forgive once” and decided that Anthony deserved another chance.
The professionals at the hospitals where the young surgeon worked, on the other hand, didn’t think the guy merited any chance as a physician.
They figured out pretty quickly that the arrogant doctor in their midst had some scary gaps in his knowledge.
But incompetent people rarely get kicked out of their fields right away.
Pignataro eventually opened his own plastic surgery practice in the Buffalo suburb of West Seneca, New York.
He made a fortune doing breast implants and other cosmetic procedures.
Moneybags. To widen his profit margin, Pignataro skimped on overhead costs. He hired a licensed practical nurse (instead of a registered nurse) and a high school student to assist him during procedures.
Victim Sarah Smith
The Pignataros had a son and daughter by this time and lived in a big house in West Seneca. Anthony and his toupee cruised around in a red Lamborghini.
Meanwhile, he made some bad surgical mistakes. After performing an abdominoplasty on a patient named Teri LaMarti, he allegedly left her with open bleeding wounds, then yelled at her when she complained.
But back in those pre-Yelp days, word didn’t get around fast enough, and the practice continued to thrive until tragedy struck.
Utter fraud. In 1996, a 26-year-old mother of two from Depew, New York, stopped breathing during a breast augmentation operation. Pignataro’s facility didn’t have a ventilator, and Sarah Smith died.
The investigation that followed laid bare the incompetence of Anthony Pignataro for all the world to see.
It turned out that he wasn’t a board certified plastic surgeon or even a qualified plastic surgeon. He hadn’t administered Sarah Smith’s anesthetic properly. The New York state health board ended up charging him with 30 counts of professional misconduct.
Anthony pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide and received six months in jail, a $5,000 fine, and community service. He lost his medical license. Judge Ronald H. Tills noted that Pignataro would “never practice medicine again — anywhere in the world.”
And there wasn’t any fancy legal footwork to delay jail time. The judge had Pignataro taken directly from the court room to a prison cell, while Debbie Pignataro “sobbed in the back row,” according to a 1998 AP story.
Loyal wife. After his release, Anthony had trouble finding another job, but Debbie stood by him. His well-to-do mother, Lena Pignataro, helped out the family financially.
Anthony had another affair, and Debbie took him back again.
But soon, emotional anguish was the least of her problems.
In 1999, Debbie started feeling ill with nausea and numbness of the limbs. She had severe pain elsewhere. The symptoms came and went. When they were bad, she had to stay in bed.
Debbie Pignataro in an appearance circa 2004
Debbie began having memory loss and needed to use a wheelchair at times.
Anthony told her the answer was to have her gall bladder removed, but her doctors vetoed that plan; they said surgery would kill her in her weakened state.
Finally, one of her doctors did a hair test and found Debbie had consumed 29,580 milligrams of arsenic.
Convoluted idea. Anthony suggested that the family of Sarah Smith, the patient who died, was poisoning Debbie to punish him. But the arsenic was traced to some ant insecticide the good doctor had purchased himself.
He was sneaking arsenic into his wife’s food, investigators determined.
The prosecution found evidence suggesting that Anthony hoped the arsenic poisoning would cause Debbie to die during surgery so that the medical establishment would see it was normal for operations to kill people sometimes — and he would thus be absolved for Sarah Smith’s death.
Anthony Pignataro ended up pleading guilty to charges related to the arsenic poisoning. Judge Mario J. Rossetti labeled the former surgeon’s life “a charade of misrepresentation,” called him self-centered and manipulative, and said he showed “disrespect for the value of human life.”
Rossetti gave him 15 years.
Despite his guilty plea, Anthony at various times claimed that Debbie Pignataro poisoned herself in a suicide bid, an idea ridiculed by Erie County District Attorney Frank Sedita.
Back at it. Debbie, who appeared on Forensic Files, remarked without bitterness that a) she would never harm herself and b) her ex-husband should be forced to ingest arsenic himself.
She has also stated that her former spouse will never take responsibility for attempting to kill her.
But universal disdain and a second stint behind razor wire couldn’t crush Pignataro’s ego. Not long after his release in 2013, he returned to the Buffalo area, changed his name to Tony Haute, and opened a business called Tony Haute Cosmetique LLC.
The company sold a line of skin-care creams formulated from “one’s own DNA-derived plasma.” His website referred to him as a doctor.
Log off, dude. The Erie County District Attorney subsequently opened a criminal investigation into Pignataro’s new venture, and the ex-convict ended up taking down his website, according to a Buffalo station WKBW story by Charlie Specht in 2017.
Pignataro responded to WKBW’s report by stating that he changed his name in an effort to make a new start. He apologized to his ex-wife and the Smith family, although he didn’t make any specific admissions about his guilt. Pignataro also said that he works as a delivery driver.
I didn’t have any luck finding out how Debbie Pignataro is faring with the aftereffects of the poisoning today. I didn’t look too hard because she already cooperated with Forensic Files and Ann Rule and probably prefers privacy at this point.
Anthony Pignataro in a recent incarnation
The show stated that much of the damage to Debbie’s health is irreversible. On the bright side, the book said that she has found nice people to help her in her daily life.
Her former husband will probably reinvent himself as something or other, but let’s hope the only person he’ll ever incapacitate is himself.
That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR
Update: Pignataro’s e-tail skin care site was back up as of February 2018 and included an imitation version of the classic medical logo of two serpents wrapped around a staff. Thanks much to reader Sean K. for discovering it and sending the link. Update to the update: The site was down again as of July 2018, but you can still see the content via a link to the archived site. Many thanks to reader LC for finding and sending it. New update: Pignataro is now in Florida, advertising himself as a geriatric-care giver. Many thanks to reader Rosemarie for sending in the link.
