Jill Coit: Some Snow Job

Gerry Boggs Dies for a Con Woman
(“Order Up,” Forensic Files)

How do folks who have been married say, four or more times, continue to find others willing to take a chance on them?

You’d think their prospective spouses would consider their track records and decide it’s best to stick with gambling on NFL games, not seductive mystery men or flirtatious femme fatales.

Friendly revisionism. If you watch Forensic Files often enough, you probably already have a clue as to how these operators pull it off: They simply lie about how many times they’ve been married.

Two or three former husbands or wives aren’t impossible to explain away — you were too young for the first one, the second one ran off with some jerk or bimbo, and the third one died tragically.

But once the numbers really start clicking upward, con men and con women begin expunging weddings from their records. (See Dante Sutorius.)

Store owner buys story. In what must be a Forensic Files record, Jill Coit managed to jump the broom as many as 11 times. “Order Up” tells the story of husband No. 9.

Wealthy retailer Gerry Boggs fell for the striking divorcée and ended up paying with his life on October 21, 1993.

For this week, I looked into Jill Coit’s whereabouts today and also tried to find out a bit about her early life.

Member of the in-crowd. So let’s get started on the recap along with additional information drawn from internet research:

Her father owned a marine business and her mother stayed at home to raise her and a younger brother. At age 15, Jill decided to live with her grandparents in Indiana.

According to a biographical timeline compiled by Radford University’s psychology department, Jill didn’t excel academically at school, but she was popular just the same.

Quite the tart. She married for the first time at age 17 and divorced after a year, eventually embarking on a pattern of marrying well-to-do men without necessarily divorcing existing husbands first.

Somewhere along the way, the tall-ish Jill found work as a model, according to Forensic Files. A Steamboat Pilot story referred to her as a former beauty queen who once held the Miss Eskimo Pie title.

Her good looks helped her land husband No. 3 in 1966.

Probable first victim. The prosperous William Clark Coit, described as an engineer or a gas pipeline worker, married Jill and adopted her son from a previous relationship. Together, the couple had another son. (Jill reportedly ended up with a total of three children, but there’s no information available on the third one.)

Unfortunately, William Coit turned up shot to death in his home in 1972 in Houston, Texas. Jill was never charged with the crime.

Next up, she married her lawyer, Louis DiRosa. They went on to divorce, remarry each other, and split up again.

Business-minded. Although Jill developed a skill for finding men with money, she didn’t just sit around the house eating chocolate-covered strawberries and watching The Young and Restless all day.

She had an entrepreneurial streak and at various times owned an ad agency, a noodle factory, a farm, and a bed & breakfast.

At some point, she started subtracting years from her true age and erasing weddings from her history.

Hardware man goes soft. She met Gerry Boggs circa 1990 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where she owned a bed and breakfast that was reportedly worth $1 million. Her son Seth managed the business.

Boggs ran a local hardware store established by his family in 1939. The business clearly sold plenty of screw anchors and drain stoppers, because media accounts describe Boggs as one of the wealthiest residents of Steamboat Springs. He was well-liked and respected in town.

Jill must have made quite an impression in order to get the lifelong bachelor to the altar. (One of her ex-husbands described her as the “greatest person” he’d ever met, at first.) It didn’t hurt that she claimed to be pregnant with Boggs’ baby. They married on April 4, 1991.

No baby, no way. Gerry Boggs may have been a bit of an old fool, but he came to his senses soon enough.

He had the marriage annulled after a private detective he’d hired discovered that Jill Coit was still married to another man and had lied about her number of husbands. Also, Jill, who was around 50 years old, wasn’t really pregnant. She’d had a hysterectomy.

But Gerry had invested $100,000 in Jill’s bed & breakfast, and the two continued to fight about it after the divorce. Jill decided to end the dispute via homicide.

Brother makes discovery. She and a boyfriend, Michael Backus, started off by trying to farm out the murder job for a few thousand dollars, but those solicited refused.

On October 21, 1993, Jill disguised herself as a man by wearing bulky clothes, a cap, and a fake mustache. She and Backus, who also tried to conceal his identity, headed over to Gerry Boggs’ house.

When Gerry, 52, didn’t show up for work at the hardware store the next day, his brother Doug decided to check on him. He found Gerry dead — beaten with a shovel, tortured with a stun gun, and shot with a pistol inside his own home. (Accounts vary as to whether the gun was .22 or .25 caliber.)

Nice try, you two. The murder shook up Steamboat Springs, a ski resort town known for its safety and community feeling.

The authorities quickly zeroed in on Jill Coit and Michael Backus. More than one local remembered seeing two odd-looking people near Boggs’ house.

Jill’s masculine disguise didn’t fool eye witnesses, who said it looked like a Halloween costume and it was obvious there was a woman inside it, the Steamboat Pilot recalled in a 2003 story.

Onion surprise. Jill claimed that she and Backus couldn’t be the killers: They were camping in the Poudre Canyon west of Fort Collins at the time of the homicide.

Boggs’ stomach contents became an important part of the investigation because they helped pinpoint the time of his death. Detectives found out he’d eaten breakfast at a local spot called The Shack Café.

The fact that the medical examiner discovered onions, despite that restaurant workers said Boggs had ordered his eggs and potatoes without onions, threw off the timeline of the crime, in favor of Jill’s alibi.

Gratuitous detective work? At that point in the episode, you could practically hear other viewers at home yelling at the TV screen, “It’s a diner — they cook stuff on a big grill and stray pieces of food end up on your plate.”

But a detective felt it necessary to go on a little field trip to The Shack to watch the short-order cook making breakfast before he came to the same conclusion.

On the other hand, maybe you can’t be too careful with evidence in a murder case, particularly because the police had very little to go on. Jill and her accomplice left no fingerprints or other forensic calling cards at the crime scene.

The finding about the onions helped prove that Boggs was murdered early in the day, before the suspects’ camping trip.

Prodigal mom. Jill Coit and Michael Backus were ordered to face homicide charges and held on $5 million bond each in February 1994.

By then, with her curly perm, Jill looked more like a soccer mom than a deadly temptress. But in pre-O.J. Simpson days, the trial of the “black widow” ensnared media attention from all over the country and some from overseas.

Jill tried to portray herself as an Elizabeth Taylor of sorts, a passionate woman whose only crime was her love of men and her fickle heart.

But the court felt more compelled by the depiction that her son Seth, who testified against her in exchange for immunity, had to offer. He said that his mother asked him to kill Boggs or at least help dispose of his body. He refused but allegedly told her, “If you do anything stupid, wear gloves,” the AP reported.

Hostile environment. In 1995, a jury convicted the couple of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. She received life without parole and a $1 million fine to prevent her from profiting off the crime in any way, according to the Steamboat Pilot. Backus got the same punishment.

Today, Jill resides in the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility and has virtually no chance of getting out on two feet. Her last appeal was rejected in 2006.

She also got nowhere with an earlier suit against Colorado that alleged she’d been sexually assaulted while behind razor wire.

Sadly, that might be one time when the con woman was telling the truth.

The prison has the highest rate of sexual assault of prisoners by corrections officers in the U.S., according to the Denver Post.

In an operation that sounds like a page from an Orange Is the New Black script, the state orchestrated a sting operation to catch a canteen supervisor who was assaulting prisoners, according to a Denver Post story from April, 12, 2018.

Today, at 74, Jill still looks like her old self and probably has retained some of her wily charm. Maybe she can use it to stay out of harm’s way while she serves her time.

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

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