Deana Wild (aka Donna Hartman) Falls for a Con

With Friends Like Virginia McGinnis…
(‘Financial Downfall,’ Forensic Files)

Before jumping into this week’s recap, I want to address something that readers brought to my attention: Forensic Files has exited Netflix. I usually watch the show on HLN or YouTube and thus was asleep at the switch when the news broke.

Gary Lico, Forensic Files global marketing executive, officially confirmed the change.

“Forensic Files is indeed off Netflix, much to the dismay of many,” Gary said in a statement to ForensicFilesNow.com. “Viewers were concerned they’d lose their favorite show. This will be a boon to our other streaming partners: FilmRise, Pluto, Discovery +, and HBO MAX, in particular. We’ve all seen the power of one program, in this case, Forensic Files, increasing a platform’s audience.”

In other words, we won’t need GPS or sniffing dogs to find places to watch Forensic Files in 2022. So let’s enjoy the new year and turn our attention toward “Financial Downfall”:

Forensic Files evildoers who plan ahead often rely on feigned sentiment, staged death scenes, and insurance fraud to win their fortunes.

In 1987, Virginia Agnes McGinnis did just that. Fifty-year-old Virginia and her husband bamboozled a trusting 20-year-old woman whose real name was Deana Jalynn Hubbard Wild but whom Forensic Files calls Donna Hartman.

After manipulating Deana into taking out a $35,000 insurance policy, Virginia and Billie Joe “B.J.” McGinnis killed her and made it look like an accident.

Virginia, we discover, didn’t limit her betrayal to friends. She allegedly killed one of her husbands and two of her own blood relatives as well.

So what made Virginia into a scheming killer who felt loyalty to no one but herself? And why was Deana Wild spending her time with a middle-aged couple instead of making friends her own age?

For this week, I looked for answers. So let’s get going on the recap along with extra information from internet research:

Deana Hubbard was born in Kentucky in 1967, and her parents divorced three years later. Her mother, Bobbie Jo Roberts, who worked as a school teacher, then married a law student whose last name was Marshall, according to the True Crime Brewery podcast. That union also ended in divorce.

Bobbie’s high hopes for her little daughter’s future fell when a school test revealed Deana’s IQ as 85, right on the marker between normalcy and mild intellectual impairment —if one trusts those kinds of metrics to gauge a person’s potential (I don’t).

A couple of Deana’s best girlfriends from high school who appeared on the Oxygen show Accident, Suicide or Murder described Deana as fun to be with and part of a lively social circle.

At 17, she fell in love with a Navy man named Jay Wild. Two years later, they married and moved to San Diego, where he was stationed, but his absences while at sea strained the marriage and they separated in 1987.

Deana stayed in California and met Virginia and B.J. McGinnis.

Virginia was born in 1937 in Ithaca, New York, to a dairy farmer named Christie Hoffman and his wife, Mary. The family lived in poverty, and Virginia suffered sexual abuse, according to research from Radford University. In childhood, she exhibited the three conditions of the MacDonald triad theorized to presage violent behavior in adults.

Virginia had a son named James Coates, and media accounts vary widely on his relationship status with Deana. They were anywhere from headed to the altar to mere strangers

Like Deana, Virginia and B.J. had lived in Kentucky, which made her feel comfortable with them. Deana moved in with them in their Chula Vista, California house in December 1986 while she looked for a job and an apartment, according to the Oxygen Network.

Deana’s mother tried to check up on her, but Virginia reportedly interfered. After Bobbie sent her a plane ticket, Deana visited her in Kentucky, but the two clashed and she returned to the McGinnises.

On April 1, 1987, Virginia brought Deana to an insurance agency and they took out a $35,000 policy on Deana. Virginia claimed Deana was traveling to Mexico and thought life insurance made sense.

In reality, the McGinnises were taking Deana on a sightseeing trip to the Big Sur region of California, where the Pacific Ocean’s dramatic coastline lies at the foot of the Santa Lucia Range of mountains. The three tourists arrived at Seal Beach on April 2, 1987.

Deana enjoyed gazing down at the waves crashing into rocks so much that she stayed behind after her friends headed back to the car, the couple later explained.

Suddenly, Virginia and B.J. realized that Deana had disappeared, they said. One of her blue high-heeled shoes lay at the site.

Virginia ran to a nearby art gallery to call for help. A Monterey County rescue team arrived at the scene.

The couple told Police Officer Jess Mason that they didn’t hear Deana yell or scream; she silently vanished.

Mason would later describe the McGinnises as calm — but it didn’t seem suspicious because the missing woman wasn’t a blood relative.

By the time first responders found Deana’s body, she had dried blood covering her face. They could also see severe wounds on the backs of her hands and fingers. She had fallen anywhere from 390 t0 500 feet and died of head trauma.

Once the McGinnises learned about the discovery, they seemed appropriately distraught.

Authorities at first believed the couple’s story about an accidental fall. Sadly, things like that happened a lot on the cliffs of Big Sur.

Virginia immediately filed a claim for the insurance payout on Deana.

Meanwhile back in Kentucky, after Deana’s funeral, her mother was having trouble collecting on a $2,500 burial insurance policy that her employer provided, according to the book Death Benefit by David Heilbroner. The insurance company was holding up the claim pending some fact-finding. At church, Bobbie approached a fellow parishioner, a tax attorney named Steve Keeney, and asked for help.

Independently, Keeney started checking out Virginia’s background and discovered her history as an insurance payout queen. She pursued small amounts of money because — as Forensic Files watchers know well — it’s not cost-effective for the companies to investigate modest claims. Virginia went for quantity, with each policy amounting to around $35,000.

In one fishy case, second husband Sylvestor “Bud” Rearden, a cancer patient in the hospital, was released to Virginia after she falsely identified herself as a nurse qualified to care for him. He promptly died on Virginia’s watch.

The same thing happened to Virginia’s mother.

In both cases, Virginia benefitted from their life insurance policies.

And horror of horrors, it turned out that more than two decades before Deana’s death, Virginia’s 3-year-old daughter, Cynthia Elaine Coates, had been found dead in a barn. The little girl was riding a pony and somehow got tangled up in cords, accidentally hanging herself from the ceiling, Virginia said. Again, she collected an insurance payout.

She had also profited from a number of suspicious fires earlier in her “career.”

With Virginia’s track record exposed, police investigated Deana’s death as a possible homicide. A sequence of photos that the McGinnises took at Seal Beach suggested that Deana had grown sleepy as the day passed. In the last images, B.J. appeared poised to push Deana off the cliff.

A lab found that Deana’s blood contained Elavil, an early treatment for depression. The drug, usually taken just before bedtime, causes drowsiness.

And one more thing: James Coates — Virginia’s son and insurance co-beneficiary — was in prison for a parole violation and married to someone else.

Still, the McGinnises maintained that Deana and James were engaged and it was only natural for them to have an insurance policy on their future daughter-in-law.

Investigators would ultimately conclude that the McGinnises took the naive Deana out for a bite and sneaked the Elavil into her beverage before heading off to Seal Beach. Once they thought she was too drowsy to fight back, B.J. pushed her off the cliff.

Deana’s medical records showed that Deana never had a prescription for Elavil.

But B.J. did.

The wounds to the back of Deana’s hands and her fingers suggested someone had stomped on them, perhaps as she tried desperately to hold onto a ledge or brush.

Virginia and B.J. McGinnis were arrested and charged with murder on Sept. 15, 1989, under a no-bail warrant. (One source says that the judge did set bail, for $5 million. Either way, the authorities were not letting this killing machine and her spouse out of their sight.)

The trial kicked off on Jan. 6, 1992. The court transported jury members to Seal Beach so they could study the drop-off where Deana died in horror.

During the open-air part of the trial, the jurors could hear sea lions barking on the coast below, an AP account noted.

Virginia’s lawyer, Albert Tamayo, blamed Deana’s death on her high-heeled shoes.

In typical smear-the-victim fashion, Virginia claimed that Deana was a pill popper who would help herself to any drug, hence the presence of her husband’s Elavil in her blood.

It took the jury three days to convict Virginia of forgery, insurance fraud, and first-degree murder.

“I don’t for a moment entertain the thought of Deana wanting life insurance for herself,” said Superior Court Judge Bernard Revak. “I don’t think this 20-year-old girl thought about her death.”

He also noted, “There are too many coincidences for this to be a coincidental death.”

Virginia went off to prison.

B.J. McGinnis had already died from complications due to AIDS while in jail awaiting trial.

On an interesting tangent to the legal drama, some controversy arose over Steve Keeney’s portrayal as the crusading lawyer who cracked the case wide open.

In an April 10, 1993 review of the book Death Benefit, Louisville’s Courier-Journal newspaper suggested that the tome overglorified Keeney, depicting him as “a cross between Perry Mason and Mother Teresa, a character whose only sin is working too hard and caring too much.”

Keeney supposedly sank $250,000’s worth of time and expenses into the investigation, all pro bono. But he reportedly had a deal for a portion of the proceeds from David Heilbroner’s book (which got great views on Amazon), and both men allegedly got money for a Lifetime Channel movie based on the case.

Forensic Files interviewed Keeney on camera, but the episode also focuses on the work done by homicide detective Scott Lawrence and prosecutor Luis Aragon.

As for the Lifetime production, Justice for Annie: A Moment of Truth Movie first aired in 1996 and starred Peggy Lipton and Danica McKellar.

No word on whether Virginia got to watch actress Susan Ruttan play the character based on her in Justice for Annie, but she definitely missed her portrayal on the Oxygen show in 2021 — Virginia died in prison at the age of 74 on June 25, 2011.

You can watch Justice for Annie on YouTube, where it’s collected 2 million views. If you have a cable subscription, you can see the Accident, Suicide or Murder episode “Fallen” online for free.

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

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Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube