Robert Fry Murders a Mother of Five
(“Four on the Floor,” Forensic Files)
A combination of bad companions and bad luck led a woman named Betty Lee to a horrible end on a spring night near Farmington, New Mexico.
A divorced mother of five, Lee was taking a break and enjoying some drinks with a couple of girlfriends.
But her so-called friends ditched her, and she accepted a ride home with a stranger who seemed kind-hearted, but wasn’t.
With friends like these. For this week, I looked around for an explanation for why Betty’s girlfriends abandoned her that night and where the killer, Robert Fry, and his accomplice, Leslie Engh, are today.
But first, here’s a recap of “Four on the Floor,” the Forensic Files episode about the case, with additional information from internet research:
Robert Fry, 26, was cruising around in his Ford Aspire near a bar called The Turnaround on June 6, 2000.
Forensic Files gives Fry’s occupation as construction worker, but a newspaper account describes him as a “marginally employed Navy veteran” who served in Guam, then worked on and off as a bouncer, security guard, and driver.
In his spare time, Fry enjoyed playing Dungeons and Dragons and collecting knives.
Abandoned and stranded. Neither Betty Lee nor the authorities knew it, but the hot-tempered, beer-swilling Fry was a serial killer. He had already committed three murders and allegedly liked to prey on Native American people.
Lee, a Diné College nursing student from Shiprock, belonged to the Navajo Nation. Her hobbies were gardening and herb-gathering.
She and two other women went to The Turnaround together, but her friends met two men there and they decided to go to a motel together, leaving Lee without a ride home.
She tried to call her brother from a pay phone but couldn’t reach him and broke down in tears.
Desert nightmare. Bobby Fry pulled up beside the 36-year-old Lee, said that he hated “to see a woman cry,” and offered a ride.
Fry, who had his young buddy Lester Engh in the car, drove her to a remote dirt road in Farmington, saying he had to stop to relieve himself.
The powerful 6-foot-1-inch Fry then dragged Betty out of the car and attempted to rape her. When she resisted, he stabbed her in the chest. She fled on foot, but Fry caught up and killed her with a sledgehammer.
Mass tow job. Engh helped Fry conceal her body in some bushes. They threw her clothes in a ravine.
But there was no quick getaway for those two. The Ford Aspire got stuck in some soft sand as they tried to reach the highway. Around 4 a.m., Fry called his parents for help, but their pickup truck was paralyzed in the sand, too, as was the first tow truck they summoned, according to Forensic Files.
Finally, Bloomfield Towing owner Charlie Bergin answered a call and pulled all three vehicles free. They went their separate ways.
The Albuquerque Journal, however, gives a slightly different version of events.
Mom and Dad abetting? Although the ending is consistent with the Forensic Files account — three vehicles were immobilized in the sand and Bergin freed them all — the newspaper reported that when Gloria and James Fry initially came on the scene, they didn’t get stuck.
Instead, they left their son’s sedan there and gave him a ride home, where he “changed clothes and cleaned up.” They also dropped Engh at his place. The Frys’ truck got stuck when they returned to the scene to tow the Ford Aspire, according to an Albuquerque Journal story from December 8, 2000.
Clothing unravels tale. Bergin probably had no idea a homicide had taken place near the scene, but one has to wonder about Robert Fry’s parents.
The next day, an electrical-line inspector found Betty Lee’s body after following a trail of blood (he suspected someone had poached a deer) off the road.
Police recovered a cell phone Charlie Bergin had discarded at the scene.
Bergin identified Fry and Engh as the men who summoned for help, according to Forensic Files.
Partner sings. Investigators tracked shoe prints at the murder scene to footwear found during searches of Fry’s and Engh’s homes. Both sets of shoes had Betty Lee’s blood on them. A blood stain on Fry’s T-shirt suggested that he was the one who hit Lee with the sledgehammer.
Fry stayed quiet after the authorities detained him.
Engh, who was only 22 years old and looked like a baby chicken, cracked and told detectives everything, then testified against Fry.
The trial took place in Albuquerque because there was too much publicity around Farmington.
In April 2002, a jury convicted Fry of kidnapping, attempted criminal sexual penetration, and second-degree murder.
Trail of tears. Fry apologized to the more than 20 of Betty Lee’s relatives present in the courtroom and asked the jury to spare his life for the sake of his parents, the The Albuquerque Journal reported.
But the jury delivered a death sentence — not a common decision in New Mexico.
Engh got 40 years.
Investigators later tried Robert Fry for the homicides of Joseph Fleming, 24, and Matthew Trecker, 18. The murders took place in a shop called The Eclectic in 1996. Fry had sneaked away with some expensive knives and swords from the store and was afraid the two men would identify him.
Thrill killer? Authorities also discovered that both Fry and Engh were responsible for the unsolved murder of a Navajo reservation resident named Donald Tsosie, 40, who had traveled to Farmington to sell plasma. The men offered him a ride home, then robbed and beat him and pushed him off a cliff in 1998, Engh admitted to police.
Fry received life sentences for those crimes.
“There’s no motive or past acrimony,” Assistant Attorney General Steve Suttle told local news site KRQE. “[Fry] just kills people, and apparently he enjoys killing people.”
In addition to seeing her son condemned to die, Fry’s mother suffered a career setback. A petition signed by 250 advocates for the murder victims called for Gloria Fry to be removed from her job as adult misdemeanor administrator for the San Juan County probation department.
Behind razor wire. An investigation revealed that Gloria Fry had driven onto the Betty Lee crime scene as police officers were studying it. The fact that she lent her son a county-owned cell phone, which he used on the night of Lee’s murder, didn’t help matters either. Gloria Fry was fired on June 7, 2002.
So what happened to the killer and his accomplice?
Engh is still inmate No. 419862 in the custody of the New Mexico Corrections Department.
Fry hasn’t been executed and lives in supermax at the Penitentiary of New Mexico near Santa Fe. His lawyers lost at least one appeal but have stayed busy with various other delay tactics over the last decade.
Justice delayed. As of April 2018, Fry was one of only two prisoners on death row in New Mexico and defense lawyers were arguing for both men’s sentences to be reduced to life without parole because the state repealed capital punishment in 2009.
While awaiting a decision, Fry began toting a Bible.
Apparently it worked, because in 2019, the New Mexico Supreme Court set aside the death penalty for Fry and the other inmate, Timothy Allen. They’ll serve life sentences instead.
BFF fail. Finally, courtesy of the mass-market paperback Monster Slayer by Robert Scott (Pinnacle, 2005), a few scraps of information came to light about the two female companions who abandoned Betty Lee.
As Forensic Files did, the book identifies one only as Tina. But it gives the other a full name, Gloria Charley. (Curiously, one of Betty’s children was named Roxann Charley.)
Gloria Charley said that Betty had turned into a fifth wheel on the night of the murder and she simply didn’t feel like giving Betty a ride back to the reservation.
Really worth it, ladies? Although Lee’s girlfriends apparently were chomping at the bit to check into that motel with those two men, it doesn’t sound as though it turned into a magical evening.
Charley got only the last name of one of them and the name the other one gave — Johnny Miller — was either fake or he didn’t get around to telling her where he lived. Police never found either of the one-night Romeos.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. – RR
Watch Forensic Files episode “Four on the Floor” on YouTube or Amazon Prime.
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Another version of this event had the tow truck driver, Bergin, losing his cell phone when he bent over while working to free the stuck cars, and it tumbled out of his shirt pocket, without his realizing it. When he discovered it was missing, he looked and looked all over, but couldn’t find it, so he gave up, finished the recovery job and left.
Wow, what a story.
“It doesn’t sound like it turned into a magical evening.”
So many poor decisions turn out just that way.
So many of these true-crime reviews are genuinely fascinating events. But nothing good ever came from going into a bar, and these stories tend to get kind of predictable.
Bars aren’t exactly in the same category as rainbows and unicorns and shooting stars.
Is someone saying they are? If so, I missed that.
I was agreeing with your point about bars … not the greatest venues to improve one’s life, to be sure.
Oh, OK. That’s the truth! I’ve noticed so many of these true-crime programs deal with allegedly intelligent women who go into bars, then wonder why they turn up dead somewhere.
They all could have used a good life coach.
Hello, RR, and thanks for this — an ep I haven’t seen. These two — Fry particularly — sound like monsters; Fry surely deserving the death penalty as a thoroughgoing psycho seemingly killing for pleasure (as would Engh given his part in two egregious murders – I wonder why he didn’t?) I feel a bit sorry for the two friends of hers: not the best, maybe, but I bet they felt, and maybe still feel, terrible about their want of men’s bits that night…
It’s one of those cases where it wasn’t their fault it happened, but they could have prevented it just the same.
Betty Lee’s then boyfriend lost everything to drinking because he felt so bad not picking her up when she called home. He’s Daniel Joe. He’s my ex brother-in-law and children’s uncle. Betty, her brothers, and dad were friends of mine. I was the one who answered the phone and handed it to Daniel. Nobody in the world ever knew she had called for a ride from him first before she called her Navajo cop brother. She was crying because Daniel said, “You got yourself there, you get yourself back.” I didn’t want to leave this world without revealing the mystery to why she was seen crying on the phone.
Thank you for writing in with this — it’s the missing story within the story.
The friends ditching Betty Lee is definitely the most disturbing part of this story. It was a d-bag move but who would have thought that it would set in motion a chain of events that would end in Betty being murdered. The takeaway — always do the right thing.
“Leave with the people you came with.”
Best caveat, stay the Ach Eee Double Toothpick out of bars. If you can’t do that, at least take your own car, rather than riding with drunks. Remember, all drunks are nice when they’re sober.
Alcohol is certainly instrumental in much crime, including murder, with the obvious being drunk-driving, though now in the UK, and probably in the US, (illegal) drug-driving is an increasing problem.
Country % of road traffic deaths involving alcohol
Uruguay 38%
Canada 34%
New Zealand 31%
United States of America 31% (c 11,600 persons in ’16)
Portugal 31%
Australia 30%
Slovenia 30%
France 29%
Argentina 27%
Belgium 25%
Estonia 25%
Italy 25%
Slovakia 23%
Luxembourg 22%
Finland 22%
Iceland 20%
Croatia 19%
Sweden 19%
Netherlands 19%
Norway 17%
United Kingdom 17%
Switzerland 16%
Poland 16%
Ireland 16%
Not surprised that the UK has low rates — I remember how good people were about calling cabs to take them home from pubs. Thanks for the interesting post!
Very interesting stats (if they’re indeed accurate.) In America, we have a new way to encourage people to get stoned and drive. It’s called marijuana. America has given up on trying to persuade people not to smoke or drink and drive. So, they figured, ‘what the hell? Let ’em smoke dope.’ Brilliant country, this stupid America.
Hi RR and Jason: To be fair to the US, in its vastness compared to UK and Ireland, a car is much more of a need than here in UK, where we also have a reasonable public transport system. Where that is lacking, and in any case where one has to travel further to get anywhere, this encourages car use (cabs are ‘expensive’), so from this perspective, I’d expect more US drink-driving. Re RR’s observation about us being good at getting cabs, the law has really cracked-down here in the last 20 yrs: Drunk driving is heavily penalised (though prison is rare). I have a sense that it is even more so in US, which may be because it’s so high on the fatality stakes.
You have no idea how stupid AND crooked the US has become. Even lazy, 3rd world countries are laughing their butts off at America. Legalizing illegal drugs. Sociopaths holding public office. Increasing bigotry. Corruption in every form, nook and cranny of government. Coin-operated politicians. Too many damned guns. Worst education system in existence. Automobiles and medications that are constantly being recalled. Rapid erosion of basic freedoms. ass assaults on kids, minorities, churches, events, schools, etc. and nobody gives a shit. Laws and jails that don’t work. If these immigrants knew what they were getting into, they couldn’t be paid to come to America.
Hi Jason: Whatever’s wrong with the US — and we have an immigrant problem in the UK, which is essentially the reason for the citizens’ vote to leave the European Union (EU insists on ‘freedom of movement’) — I suspect the immigrants are attracted to the apparent wealth of the US and don’t care about anything else. Whether The Donald’s treatment of them will change that I don’t know…
We can’t blame immigrants from trying to better their lives (as they see it) — I might well do the same — but at least on this small island of Great Britain we don’t have the resources to cope with them, and, frankly, I’m concerned at the negative effect I perceive they have on society (including Islamicisation — something many in the US share). Many will disagree, but in UK the citizens have spoken, and I’ve no doubt that The Donald’s appeal was his tough talk re Mexico…
Liberals are appalled — who cares? — but I for one thing protecting our borders is fundamentally important. Sorry I’ve gone off on a tangent here….
Liberals, who cares? Well, if you studied what makes America different from England, you would learn America broke off from abusive England for a lot of good reasons, the most important being they don’t want to be told what religion to follow, as well as having an open policy, that anybody who wanted to be free of oppression could come to America and do whatever job they liked, live wherever they want, follow any religion they wanted, as well as a ton of others. England never had such a polic. The problem with Americans is they are now unable to adjust the balance; they have become so stupid, they just want to paint everybody with one brush.
You can defend Donald Trump all you wish, but it won’t change the way most of the world feels about the smelly pig. Now, some 50% more of his faithful republicans have turned on him, the result of his evil, vindictive family separation he’s afflicting on everyone.
Hi Jason:
1. I neither stated nor implied that I approved of Mr Trump, merely that sufficient Americans did to make him President (or rather, they disliked Hilary even more, and I can understand why…), and that was in no small part due to his position on immigration, which he made central to his canvassing.
2. The latest Gallup poll, three days ago – widely used and respected – refutes your claims about his popularity (i) with Republicans (90% approval) and (ii) the wider citizenry (overall approval not much less than predecessor presidents. Democrats loathe him – no surprise there. Has what ‘most of the world’ thinks ever mattered to him, his predecessors, or to Americans – and should it? I suspect what irks Democrats so much is that he’s not messed-up nearly as much as they predicted by now, so they’ve failed to be able – yet – to say ‘told you so.’ This is not a defence, merely an analysis. Now – Hilary for prison?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/235751/trump-job-approval-tying-personal-best.aspx
C’mon, Marcus. “I neither stated nor implied that I approved of Mr Trump”? Well, Bubba, you really didn’t need to. What you’re trying to call “an analysis” is really nothing but your thinly veiled defense of the indefensible.
Half of America is educated with college degrees and the other half is just bibble-banging, gun-slinging, jesus-jerk rednecks who belong to The Flat Earth Society and who still live in the 17th century. Those are the fools with their heads some place the sun doesn’t shine, and who think Donald Trump is some kind of savior.
Yeah, blame the bar. Idiots.
Some guy: Who’s blaming the bar?
Marcus: your position is well-thought-out, neutral, and eminently reasonable.
Now, back to Betty Lee –
I’ve hung at a few bars and found what my brother’s football coach said was true: nothing good happens after midnight.
Harder in places where the bar is the only place to socialize, I know.
Hello Laurel: Thanks for the kind remarks. Taking you over-literally viz nasty events post-midnight, I’ll have to disagree on this probable statistical contention. Taking a few examples, war-related deaths largely happen in daylight; murders and robberies too, though I’m unsure about sexual assault against unknown (to the perp) victims, which may rely on darkness. Then there’s the moot point that when it’s midnight in the US it’s morning here in UK – so the contention is time zone-specific.
What we can confidently say (I think) is that some dangers are disproportionately (if not absolutely) higher at the time in question – maybe related more to alcohol than darkness, with the combination causing a perilous situation. So, many fewer cars around to crash, but a greater proportion and absolute number ‘drunks.’ Whether there ARE absolutely more injuries and fatalities between 1200 and 0600 I don’t know but doubt – but there certainly are proportionate to the number of cars on the road. Maybe this counts as bad stuff after midnight. Domestic and work-related accidents are, if course, vastly fewer.
One difficulty is confirmation bias. We ‘sense’ from childhood that dark is dangerous (cf children’s fiction), possibly forming inaccurate perception of how much so relative to daytime. Apparently, you’re more likely to die in the late morning – around 1100, specifically – than at any other time during the day.
Conclusion: you’re probably more at risk of certain types of ‘misfortune’ in the early hours – as Betty was, of alcohol-fuelled violence – and less of others. Note too that deaths at night get reported more than in the day as the night is ‘slow’ and journalists need copy to meet early deadlines.
Coach, then, ought to stick to predicting baseball scores… Lest all this sounds horribly rational, I say my prayers and carry my St Christopher (not that I’m implying Christianity’s irrational – I’m a firm believer).
There are many instances it seems, of a woman being ditched late at night by her intended rides, and bad events ensue. A bar trip doesn’t have to be involved. Look at the case of Chelsea Bruck, murdered by Daniel Clay. Also, young pre-teen Dawn Rene Backes was walking home to meet a strict curfew, after an intended ride didn’t materialize, when she was kidnapped by Anthony and Nathaniel Cook, raped and killed. Missing a late night ride can be deadly for a woman. There are other cases I have seen on these true-crime shows but the names elude me.
Hello R.R….I’ve read nearly everyone of your posts on the show Forensic Files. I love to try and research them after viewing. On this particular episode in the dramatization, it shows Betty Lee attempting to call her brother from a pay phone at the Police Dept. The pay phone’s number showed the area code to be “610”. I looked this up, and it’s the area code to Allentown/Reading Pennsylvania. Seeing this particular episode’s crime occurred in Farmington, NM, I thought this was odd, and wondered if they filmed certain scenes in different locations. I love your site, you do an incredible job!
Chad, thanks so much for the kind words about my blog!
Forensic Files covered a lot of murders that took place in Pennsylvania, so maybe the phone number was originally used in a different re-creation.
The producers of the series spent a lot of money on re-creating the various crimes, but every so often they probably re-used a little something here and there.
You’re very welcome! Your attention to detail, and interviews are fantastic…keep up the good work, and I’m a loyal follower!!