What Happened to Ashley After Forensic Files? (“Driven to Silence,” Forensic Files)
A decade after her mother’s homicide, Ashley Satterfield unwittingly helped catch the killer.
And it’s a good thing she did. After murdering hair salon owner Dana Chyleen Satterfield in 1995, teenage felon Jonathan Vick went on to accrue a lengthy police record.
Murder victim Dana Satterfield
Epilogue on a child. His 2005 arrest and subsequent conviction stopped what would have undoubtedly turned into an even longer streak of violence. It also provided some consolation to Dana’s family.
Forensic Files viewers will remember that the victim’s mild-mannered daughter, Ashley, appeared on “Driven to Silence,” the episode about Dana’s murder. It was produced and first broadcast back in 2008, so an update on the woman who lost her mother at age 8 seems in order.
But first here’s a quick recap of the episode along with additional information drawn from internet research:
Spotted fleeing. On July 31, 1995, a 17-year-old South Carolinian named Jonathan Vick bragged to his buddy that he planned to snag a date with Dana Satterfield. His friend thought he was a little out of line to assume a married — albeit separated — 27-year-old mother of two would take an interest in a teenage boy.
Little did the buddy, Michael Pace, know that his friend wasn’t just arrogant. He was a psychopath, who later that evening entered Dana’s South Carolina business, Roebuck Hair and Tanning Center, and raped and strangled her. He left her body hanging from a water heater in the bathroom.
Jonathan Vick in custody circa 2005. (Note: Some media accounts spell his first name ‘Jonothan’)
Diane Harris, a door-to-door saleswoman who had earlier that day sold Dana a bottle of cleaning fluid, saw a man jump out of the window of the mobile home that housed Dana’s salon.
Mystery informant. While running to summon help, Diane Harris (it’s not clear whether that’s her real name or a pseudonym) came face to face with the escapee for a moment and was thus able to help police work up a sketch.
Michael Pace tried to assist investigators, too — he just didn’t try quite hard enough.
He anonymously called the sheriff’s office multiple times to suggest checking out Jonathan Vick, but Vick’s fingerprints didn’t turn up at the murder scene. And an unnamed tipster’s claims don’t constitute enough evidence for an arrest.
Spotlighted on TV. Meanwhile, police had already ruled out the default suspect — Mike Satterfield, Dana’s estranged husband.
Anyone with two eyes could see that a mountain of a man like him would have trouble fitting through the door of a mobile home let alone a window. And he had an alibi anyway.
In 1997, Unsolved Mysteriesproduced a segment about Dana’s murder, but it didn’t yield any solid prospects.
The case went cold until 2005, when Ashley Satterfield, then around 18, inadvertently revved up the idled murder investigation.
Scurrying about. Michael Pace worked at a station that Ashley visited for an oil change. After seeing Ashley and learning she was Dana Satterfield’s daughter, he contacted authorities again — but this time he revealed his identity and gave them enough information to force Vick to submit a DNA sample.
It matched genetic evidence found at the crime scene.
Vick had long known that he was a suspect in the case and had changed his address twice to avoid the police, according to an AP account.
But that didn’t mean he stayed on his best behavior. By the time police hauled him in on Oct. 24, 2005, in Greenville, he was a married father with arrests for domestic violence and vandalism. Vick also had a history of antagonizing co-workers and being fired from jobs. And yikes, one of his girlfriends dropped out of sight in an unsolved disappearance.
Hair of a chance. Authorities charged Vick with murder, kidnapping, and criminal sexual conduct for his attack on Dana Satterfield.
At the trial, the prosecution’s arsenal included genetic evidence, at least one eyewitness account, and damning admissions Vick had made to a fellow detainee.
The defense didn’t have a lot of ammo but hoped that a hair belonging to someone other than Vick that was found on Dana Satterfield’s body would become the bombshell that blew up the case.
Ashley Arrowood as an infant with mother Dana Satterfield and in 2016
Escapes executioner. But evidence showed that the killer had dragged Dana across the floor of the salon where she had spent all day cutting and styling hair — of course stray hairs ended up on her clothes and body.
In November 2006, a jury convicted Vick of Dana Satterfield’s murder. Because he committed the crime at 17, he wasn’t eligible for the death penalty. He got life instead.
So what has happened to his victim’s daughter since she appeared on Forensic Files?
24/7 job. Now known as Ashley Arrowood, she went on to have two children of her own and dedicate herself to helping survivors of horrible crimes.
She became a victim advocate for the Spartanberg County Sheriff’s Office. In an interview with the Spartanburg Herald-Journalin 2016, Ashley said she makes herself available at all hours for victims in need of someone to talk to. She attends bond hearings with them and encourages them to draft impact statements and read them at sentencing hearings.
She also started a jailhouse program to make inmates aware of the effects their crimes have on victims’ friends and family.
Jonathan Vick in a 2018 mug shot
Perpetrator still denying. Entrepreneurial like her late mother, Ashley operates her own photography business.
In an interview with Channel 7 wspa.com, Ashley said that she hasn’t started forgiving Vick yet, because he’s still denying his guilt.
Vick continues to maintain that an unknown assailant killed Dana Satterfield. Meanwhile, he has proved himself a rough customer while incarcerated. On one occasion, he threatened the life of a Spartanburg County detention officer. That got him an extra three years.
Parole possibility. More recently, Vick landed himself in the special management unit — which means 23 hours a day in the cell — for six months as punishment for attacking a fellow inmate at Lee Correctional Institution.
Today, Vick resides in Lieber Correctional Institution, a maximum security facility in Ridgeville.
Ashley Arrowood’s knowledge of the criminal justice system should help her make a good case against granting Vick parole when he becomes eligible for review in 2035.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Zein and Maria Isa Kill Their Child for Being American in the U.S. (“Honor Thy Father,” Forensic Files)
For some parents, having a rebellious teenage daughter means she’s smoking marijuana and dating an ex-con with a neck tattoo.
In the case of one St. Louis couple, it meant that she snagged a part-time job at Wendy’s and went to the prom with a nice young man.
Matchmaker dad. Palestina “Tina” Isa’s mother and father didn’t take pride in their daughter despite that she wanted to earn her own spending money, got good grades, and secured a college scholarship so she could study aeronautical engineering.
Tina Isa, with prom escort Clifford Walker
Her parents wanted her to work at the family business, marry a Palestinian boy of Zein’s choosing, and move to the West Bank village of Beitin.
Tina’s rejection of the Isas’ cultural traditions upset them so much that they murdered her to save face, in a so-called honor killing.
Catch It If You Can. For this week, I looked around for more background on the family and what happened to Zein and Maria Isa between the murder and their own deaths.
“Honor Thy Father” is hard to catch on TV and unavailable on streaming services but, like the best Forensic Files episodes, it sticks with you after one viewing.
So let’s get going on a recap, along with some added facts drawn from internet research:
Do as I say not as I do. Zein, 60, was a Muslim Palestinian grocery store owner who became a naturalized U.S. citizen, and Maria, 48, was also a naturalized citizen but originally from Brazil, where the couple met and married.
Maria was Roman Catholic but had agreed to bring up the children as Muslims.
It’s not clear why it was okay for Tina’s dad to hitch up with someone from a different background but unacceptable for Tina to do the same. (And there was also the little matter of Zein marrying Maria despite that he already had a wife and three kids back on the West Bank.)
Spoiled the party. The Isas were frustrated with Tina, 16, because she lived outside the boundaries of their culture.
Maria and Zein Isa
The couple, who moved to the U.S. in 1985, objected to her joining the tennis and soccer teams and trying out for cheerleading.
After Tina stole away to the prom with 18-year-old Clifford Walker (media accounts vary as to whether they were dating or just good friends), her mother, sisters, and at least one male relative showed up at the dance, ambushed her in the women’s bathroom, and made her go home, according to a People magazine account from Jan. 20, 1992.
Witnessing evil. Zein and Maria began proceedings to withdraw Tina from school in her senior year. Her sister referred to her as a whore during a guidance counselor’s meeting, theNew York Daily News recounted. She also said Tina deserved to die.
But the family wasn’t taking advice from any public school professionals.
On the evening of Nov. 6, 1989, the Isas called 911 to report Tina’s death.
Bloodbath at home. Tina had come home late that night and demanded $5,000, then attacked Zein with a knife when he refused, he explained to first responders.
Out of fear for his life, Zein grabbed the weapon from Tina and stabbed her eight times, he said.
But the medical examiner determined that the number of defensive wounds on Tina’s body refuted her parents’ story that she was the attacker.
Prosecutor’s godsend. Her friends from Roosevelt High School told police that Tina was terrified of Zein and Maria and had said if anything bad happened to her, they should tell police that her parents did it.
The Isas lived in this modest neighborhood on the south side of St. Louis. Source: Google Earth
But the most explosive piece of evidence came as a surprise, and from the federal government no less.
The FBI had planted recording devices in the Isas’ apartment at 3759 Delor Street because they suspected Zein belonged to Abu Nidal, a terrorist group allegedly planning to blow up the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.
Disturbing recording. In what St. Louis homicide detective Mike Guzy called a “once in a lifetime evidential gold mine,” the FBI provided a seven-minute audiotape of the murder. (The federal agents couldn’t rescue Tina because no one was monitoring the recording in real time.)
According to “Family Dishonor,” an episode of TV series Arrest & Trial, the first translators who started listening to the tape, which featured a mix of English, Arabic, and Portuguese, were too horrified by Tina’s screams to continue.
The recording revealed that the confrontation started with Maria arguing with Tina about her lifestyle, followed by Zein announcing that “tonight you are going to die” and stabbing her with a seven-inch deboning knife while the 200-pound Maria held her down.
Tina begged her mother for help during the attack. Maria told her to shut up.
Contrary to the Isas’ claim, Tina never demanded $5,000.
Shaky story. In the run-up to the ensuing trial, the defense strenuously argued that the judge should bar the tape from the courtroom.
That process ate up about a year but didn’t win any concessions.
The Isas’ explanation for what happened to Tina could be summed up as “here’s why she deserved to die, but we didn’t really murder her.”
First assistant circuit attorney Dee Joyce-Hayes, who Forensic Files watchers may remember from “Slippery Motives,” led the prosecution.
A clipping from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch trial coverage
Sisters not protective. In addition to the murder tape, Joyce-Hayes had FBI phone recordings of Zein speaking to his older, married daughters, who encouraged the brutality.
Tina’s sister Soraia Salem, 24, suggested chaining the teenager in the basement and hiring a hit man, while another sister, Fatima Abdeljabbar, said that God should make Tina “sleep and not get up,” according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch account.
Fatima would later say in court she didn’t remember any such conversation.
The newspaper mentioned that the family owned some assets on the West Bank, so it’s possible Tina’s sisters wanted to get rid of her instead of share. Or perhaps Tina’s freedom made them jealous as they were trapped in drudgery-filled marriages, as Guarding the Secrets implies.
‘She’s the violent one.’ Whatever the case, the defense stuck to its story that Zein’s taunts of “Die, my daughter, die” were retorts in response to Tina’s knife attack upon him.
Defense lawyer Dan Reardon contended that on past occasions, Tina had attacked Zein with a meat cleaver and kicked him in his bad leg, the AP reported.
More doublespeak. Maria’s lawyer argued that Maria tried to protect Tina and was guilty of nothing but “being married to Zein Isa.”
At the same time, Maria told the judge that her daughter was disrespectful and that she and her husband “should not have to pay with our lives for something [Tina] did.”
Joyce-Hayes was careful to avoid stoking Islamaphobia as part of the prosecution’s case, according to a St. Louis Post Dispatch account:
“‘Many bad things have been done in the name of the Christian religion and in the name of Islam. We are not here to blame Islam or Islamic culture. We’re here to blame these people,’ said Joyce-Hayes, gesturing toward the defendants.”
Diabolical doings. The jury deliberated for just under four hours before returning with guilty verdicts.
Judge Charles Shaw gave Zein and Maria Isa sentences of death by lethal injection.
Maria Isa, top left, works on a quilt with other inmates
In 1993, Zein Isa briefly faced another indictment on racketeering charges for plotting the terrorist attack. (In fact, an alternative theory about Tina’s murder conjectures that Zein’s primary motive was to silence his youngest daughter because she knew too much about his activities in Abu Nidal.)
Goodbye to you. The feds decided to drop the terrorism charges against Zein because he already had virtually no chance of getting out of prison.
And fortunately, the state of Missouri didn’t have to pay for Zein’s three hots and a cot for very long.
His health deteriorated on death row. In 1997, authorities moved him to Boone Hospital Center with corrections officers guarding him 24 hours a day.
Mom gets a break. He died of diabetes and other complications a week later, according to the St. Louis Post Dispatch and a New York Daily News retrospective from Nov. 10, 2013.
In 1997, Maria’s capital punishment sentence was reduced to LWOP because a court ruled her brutality should be considered separately from her husband’s, according to the NY Daily News.
Her son-in-law Azizz Hamed called Maria “a victim of her husband, and society here,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 17, 1997.
Tina with a school friend. Classmates planted flowers and dedicated the yearbook to her memory
Inappropriate terminology? Maria died of natural causes at age 70 on April 30, 2014, in the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center, commonly known as the Vandalia.
Good riddance.
Finally, it should be pointed out that some observers believe that categorizing deaths like Tina Isa’s as “honor killings” is to falsely normalize them, because they’re aberrations that most Islamic peoples find horrifying. And they are caused by sexism, not Islam.
Or as one YouTube commenter summed it up, “This isn’t Islam, it’s Hislam.”
That’s all for this post, until next time, cheers. — RR
Nicole Walker’s Killer Works the System (“Journey to Justice,” Forensic Files)
Before launching into this week’s post, I should mention that Filmrise, the company that uploads Forensic Files to YouTube, has begun changing the URLs for most of the episodes.
I’ve been updating older blog posts with the correct links. In the meantime, if you end up clicking on a broken one, know that the episode is still available on YouTube — you just have to search for it by name.
Littlest victim: Nicole Rae Walker
And speaking of missing links, Kenneth Pierce is definitely a criminal with compromised humanity.
Drunk history. The Florida resident, whose story was told in the Forensic Files episode “Journey to Justice,” started out as a teenage vandal, when he and his buddies slashed tires for fun. By middle age, he had a criminal résumé with 20 misdemeanors and felonies, including two hit and runs.
Not one to learn from his mistakes, Pierce topped off his record at age 53 by plowing his pickup truck into a group of children ages 6 to 12, then fleeing the scene.
Pierce was charged with vehicular homicide and received 60 years for that crime, which killed one girl and put another one in the hospital for two months.
Surprising epilogue. So, at last, it seemed like the end of the road for Kenneth Pierce — the state of Florida would forever cut off his access to any wheeled vehicle except maybe a laundry cart.
But Forensic Files tacked a note onto the HLN closing credits saying that Pierce was released from prison in 2017.
But why and how?
I got in touch with the Broward State Attorney’s Office for some answers. But first, here’s a recap of “Journey to Justice,” along with extra information from internet research.
Water hazard. On June 23, 1992, after a rainstorm in Dania Beach, a small city near Fort Lauderdale, a group of neighborhood children were headed home on a stretch of Southwest 33rd Street without a sidewalk.
The accident took place in front of this apartment building in Dania, Florida
They waded through a large puddle between the street and a parking lot on block 4600, according to Forensic Files. (Earlier media accounts said that the kids were “playing” in the 75-foot-long puddle, but that’s still no excuse for what happened next.)
A Chevrolet Silverado suddenly swerved toward the kids. While pushing his 10-year-old sister, Gina, out of the truck’s path, 12-year-old Joel Mansey noticed the letters “F” and “O” on its grille, according to court papers.
The vehicle struck Nicole Walker, 6, Brooke Mansey, 9, and Michelle Vitello, 10.
Tragedy in an instant. Neighbors heard the thud and ran outside. One of them, Lydia Jones, described the scene to a South Florida Sun-Sentinel reporter:
“[The] girls were lying face up in the water. I went to Michelle first. She was going in and out of consciousness and I gave her CPR. I could see her leg was broken. Brooke got up and ran inside to her mom. Little Nicole, we just lost her pulse.”
Nicole Walker, 6, who was blind in one eye, died of multiple injuries at Memorial Hospital in Hollywood that night. Brooke Mansey had been carrying Nicole, and the Silverado hit Nicole directly in her back.
Let’s grille him. Brooke sustained a fractured shoulder and Michelle had so many injuries she needed a body cast.
After seeing Nicole Walker in the hospital, sheriff’s detective Bruce Babcock vowed he’d spend “the rest of my career looking for the guy,” the Miami Herald reported.
Fortunately, a bystander who worked at a body shop had chased the vehicle. He identified it as a 1989 or 1990 Silverado with regular street tires, according to court papers. Someone found a piece of the death vehicle’s grille in the shallow part of the puddle.
Brooke Mansey at Nicole Walker’s funeral
Hiding in plain sight. With the community now on high alert about the hit and run, an anonymous caller told police of seeing a parked Silverado matching the metallic blue one that killed Nicole Walker.
Police found it parked in Kathryn and Kenneth Pierce’s driveway in Davie, Florida. Someone had partially blocked the Silverado from view by surrounding it with other vehicles and a washing machine. Detective Baron Philipson stayed with the Silverado for 23 hours to make sure no one tampered with it before police obtained a search warrant, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
Still, no one could connect the car with the hit and run right away.
Lucky chips. Detectives noted that the tires differed from the ones that made impressions at the crime scene. The truck had an intact grille, although blue ties held it into place. Someone had wiped away any fingerprints inside the vehicle.
A neighbor told police that Kenneth Pierce had removed the camper top from the Silverado, which belonged to Kathryn Pierce, after the accident. Kenneth had asked for help repairing damage to the grille of the vehicle. Apparently, he changed the tires as well.
Investigators determined that colored chips found on the injured children’s clothing matched the paint on the Silverado. They concluded that the piece of grille found at the scene also came from Pierce’s vehicle.
Pathological reoffender. In October 1992, when the authorities finally arrested Pierce, it probably didn’t come as a shock to anyone in law enforcement. Pierce was out on parole for lying in an attempt to get a driver’s license (his aliases included Jay Carl Mishler and Jay Carl Mitchell); his own had been revoked.
His aforementioned legal record also included looting parked cars as a juvenile in the 1950s in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, leaving the scene of an accident in 1965 and then again in 1975, a 1977 no-contest plea for a DUI hit, then a cocaine-smuggling charge in Baltimore in 1985, and a DUI in Key West, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal.
Michelle Vitello, seen here while recovering from bone and liver injuries sustained in the crash, went on to appear on Forensic Files
Pierce’s words were as sloppy as his driving. He told one friend that he only clipped a garbage can and another that he hit a dog on the night his car mowed down the children. A cell mate would later tell authorities that Pierce told him he heard a scream but didn’t stop at the scene because he didn’t have a valid license.
Son ensnared. It later came out that Pierce bragged that authorities wouldn’t be able to connect the Silverado to the accident.
And Kenneth Pierce didn’t seem to mind dragging his loved ones into his problems. He enlisted his son, a 27-year-old construction worker named Trent, to help replace the grille after the accident — making Trent guilty of altering evidence.
When police first came to arrest Trent, he slipped through a window, but they snagged him anyway and put him in Broward County Jail along with his dad. Trent eventually pleaded no contest in return for probation and community service.
Toon time. Kenneth Pierce went to trial in April 1993.
The prosecution showed off a forensic animation presentation, purported to accurately re-create the car’s slam into the girls. Media accounts made a big deal of the “state of the art” science, but I tend to believe it was basically a high-tech cartoon. There’s no proof it replicated the accident exactly.
The physical and circumstantial evidence against Pierce seemed more sturdy — and there was a ton of it, thanks to his own loose lips as well as the remnants of the Silverado on the victims’ clothing and at the crime scene.
Vehicular murder weapon. Pierce’s court-appointed lawyer, Bo Hitchcock, managed to find some witnesses who said the car that hit the children was green, not blue, and newer than Pierce’s vehicle, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
That was about all the ammo Pierce’s side had.
In March 1993, one hour into deliberations, jury members went outside to study dents in the Silverado. After a total of 4½ hours, they convicted Kenneth Pierce of vehicular homicide, leaving the scene of a fatal accident, tampering with evidence, and violation of parole.
Keep him forever. Brooke Mansey and Michelle Vitello, who were in the courtroom, “cried, smiled, and giggled,” according to the Sun-Sentinel.
The judge gave Pierce 60 years. His wife, Kathryn, left the courtroom “crying hysterically,” the newspaper reported.
Under a habitual offender rule, he would have to serve two-thirds of his sentence before consideration for parole, at age 94. Broward County prosecuting attorney Kenneth Padowitz noted that the sentence would end the “revolving door” approach to justice that allowed Pierce to serially reoffend.
“Nicole can rest now,” Suzanne Walker, the little girl’s mother, said, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “Mom got her baby justice.”
A Sun-Sentinel clipping shows Suzanne Walker (far left) and her remaining family members in court to hear the first sentencing of Kenneth Pierce (far right). Suzanne and her husband ended up divorcing
In free fall. But for Suzanne Walker, the anguish caused by her daughter’s death triggered self-destructive behavior that ultimately landed her in legal woes of her own.
She began drinking heavily and using crack cocaine, and stole $2,000 from the local Griffin Little League — she was the group’s treasurer — to fund her drug habit, according to the Sun-Sentinel.
Suzanne Walker admitted her guilt to a DUI charge from 1994, pledged to reimburse the Little League, and entered a residential drug problem. She received probation for her offenses in 1995.
Just two years later, her daughter’s killer would test her emotional strength again.
Not again — and again. As the result of an appeal Pierce filed in 1997, a court ruled that his 60-year sentence had been miscalculated. Pierce’s lawyers pushed for a new sentence of just 15 years. The judge gave him 40. He would have to serve 85 percent (34 years) before parole consideration, according to the Sun-Sentinel. “Pierce, 57, will likely spend the rest of his life in prison,” the newspaper noted.
But Pierce somehow finagled another sentencing go-round in 2000. Pierce claimed that prison had changed him for the better, begged for a chance to reunite with his family, and finally apologized to the Walkers (“I’m sorry for all the problems I’ve caused this family and the children”). The unimpressed judge declined to reduce the 40-year term.
In 2012, Pierce got a shot at parole because of a clerical error, but Circuit Judge Lisa Porter put the kibosh on it and sent him back to his cell. Upon hearing the news, Suzanne Walker cried with joy and said she was “ecstatic,” and Brooke Mansey and her mother, Sherry, also in the courtroom, expressed gratitude, according to CBS-TV Miami reporting.
Guess who got out. Not everyone was on Team Nicole that day, however. “He never gets a fair deal,” a woman identifying herself as Pierce’s daughter, Tammy, told CBS-TV. “He’s a good father and he’s a good man.”
Tammy got her way on May 1, 2017, when the justice system let Pierce back on the streets.
So, how did a man who repeatedly proved himself a menace to society serve only 24 years — instead of at least 34 (85 percent of the 40-year sentence)?
Extra-credit opportunities. Apparently, the guidelines for keeping an offender in prison are more complicated than they sound.
Kenneth Pierce in an undated mug shot
“Prisoners can get credit for all kinds of things,” an attorney who worked on the Pierce case told ForensicFilesNow.com. “Nothing surprises me.”(See also Ron Gillette.)
In an e-mail to ForensicFilesNow.com, Broward State Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Paula McMahon confirmed that, contrary to old media reports, the judge actually sentenced Pierce before the 85 percent rule went into effect.
Bad influence on progeny. The state placed Pierce under “conditional release supervision” through 2033, and the Department of Corrections website listed his most recent home as on Oak Garden Lane in Hollywood, Florida.
He has since died, according to Suzanne Walker (thanks much for writing in with the tip).
Sadly, it looks as though the legal problems of Kenneth Pierce’s son continued. A felony-records website lists a “Trent Pierce” as under “probation felony supervision” as recently as 2017.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
David Davis Preys on a Nurseon the Rebound (“Horse Play,” Forensic Files)
Shannon Mohr’s romance started out as a fairy tale and ended as a cautionary tale: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
The “it” in this case was David Davis, a self-proclaimed millionaire.
David Davis and Shannon Mohr
As YouTube commenter BellaMarley1 wrote: “Never trust anyone who tells you he’s a millionaire…nobody decent would do that.”
Fortune hunter. Maybe it’s not so much decency as wisdom. People with a lot of money usually know that announcing it can attract scammers and gold diggers or at least mean getting stuck with the check.
Of course, David Davis didn’t need to worry about being victimized for his money — he didn’t actually have any.
He wanted a cash infusion and tried his hand at the ever-popular Forensic Files murder and insurance fraud combo.
Delving into personal history. For this week, I looked around for more information about what David Davis was doing in the eight years between Shannon Mohr’s homicide and his capture on a tropical island.
I also searched for biographical details on Shannon Mohr. Forensic Files mentioned only that she was a nurse who wanted a family.
So, let’s gallop into a recap of the Forensic Files episode “Horse Play,” along with extra information drawn from internet research:
Wholesome girl. Shannon Mohr was born on Sept. 1, 1954, in Toledo, Ohio, to a devout Catholic family.
The sweet, caring child was “daddy’s girl and mommy’s best friend,” according to a 2013 episode of Happily Never After.
She fulfilled her dream of becoming a registered nurse, but hadn’t made progress on the marriage and children front.
One night in 1979, she reluctantly went to a friend’s wedding without a date. She had recently broken up with a Toledo firefighter. “Go, maybe you’ll meet somebody,” her well-intentioned mother told her.
Shannon moved to David Davis’ farm after they married.
It worked.
At the nuptials, Shannon, 25, met David Davis, 35. He was handsome and charming enough to make her forget about the age difference.
Play for sympathy. David told her he owned farms all over the country and was worth seven figures.
He said that he was a veteran who had sustained an injury in the Vietnam War, then attended the University of Michigan, where he was on the football team — and played in the Rose Bowl — and graduated with a psychology degree.
Oh, and his fiancée died in a car wreck and he thought he’d never love again, he told Shannon, according to “Gallop to the Grave,” the Happily Never After episode about the case.
Shannon’s parents, Lucille and Robert Mohr, liked the charismatic bachelor, too. (Even the judge who later presided at the murder trial noted that he was smooth, articulate, and clever.)
Whirlwind romance. There were some negative indicators early on, nonetheless.
Shannon and David married in Las Vegas (bad sign) on Sept. 24, 1979, after knowing each other for eight weeks (really bad sign), and they took out $220,000 dollars of insurance on her eight days after the wedding (worst possible sign).
But the warning signs were probably lost amid all the joy of a new relationship.
Shannon Mohr years before David Davis entered her life
Sole breadwinner. Shannon moved to David’s 100-acre farm in Hillsdale County, Michigan. He grew corn and soybeans. She got a nursing job at Flower Hospital in Sylvania.
Shannon’s pay was the only income the couple had, according to the Chicago Tribune, but he most likely came up with some Dirty John-esque story to explain it away. And the lovebirds weren’t together long enough to start arguing about money.
On July 23, 1980, just 10 months after the wedding, the couple rode their Tennessee walking horses to visit neighbor Dick Britton. While at Britton’s property, David helped him repair some machinery, and then he and Shannon trotted off toward home.
Teary-eyed. But David came rushing back to Britton’s house, saying Shannon’s mare bolted and Shannon hit her head on a rock.
Shannon was lying on her back with no shoes on and her blouse partly unbuttoned.
She was lifeless by the time the two men rushed her into the emergency room. Doctors attributed the death to head and spinal injuries.
Lucille and Robert Mohr arrived at the hospital to find David Davis crying.
Cash flow problem. In his grief, he managed to articulate that he wanted the body cremated, but he ultimately agreed to let the Mohrs bury Shannon back in Toledo.
Lucille and Robert Mohr’s house in Ohio
David sheepishly told his in-laws that he couldn’t afford to pay for a funeral because his money was tied up in the farm and he didn’t have any life insurance on Shannon.
The Mohrs funded the funeral, which took a surprising turn when David Davis’ mother and stepfather, Joyce and Theodore Powell, showed up.
David had told the Mohrs he was an orphan.
Parents galore. His father, David Ellsworth Davis, was still alive, too. The Mohrs also discovered that their daughter’s husband wasn’t a millionaire, didn’t own multiple farms, hadn’t really served in Vietnam, never played college football, and hadn’t graduated.
So, who was he, really?
David Richard Davis was born in Flint on Sept. 27, 1944, and his parents split up when he was 12. His father described him as a good student at Southwestern High School who enjoyed archery and other outdoor activities.
Premium story. He had two daughters from a previous marriage, to a woman named Phyllis June Middleton (Shannon didn’t know he had an ex-wife). Phyllis and David lived together on the Michigan farm. Alleging physical abuse, she filed for a court protection order and the couple divorced in 1976, according to reporting from Gannett News Service on Jan. 10, 1989.
Phyllis probably didn’t realize how lucky she was to get out of that marriage alive — or maybe she didn’t have enough life insurance to put her in danger.
Although David denied it at first, he had a total of $330,000 in life insurance — the original policy plus some subsequent smaller ones — on Shannon Mohr. The policies were due to expire at the beginning of August 1980, just days after Shannon’s untimely death, according to the Sun-Sentinel, a Florida newspaper that always has great crime coverage.
Shannon Mohr
David would later give various explanations for the existence of the policies, including that he didn’t pay attention and never knew about them, they each took out insurance on the other to help pay farm expenses in case one died, and that an insurance salesman sought them out and sold them on the idea of insurance.
Need that piece of paper. The Mohrs also discovered that David had plans to go on a trip to Florida with a girlfriend shortly after Shannon’s death, according to the Toledo Blade. David claimed he needed to get away and regroup — and his gal pal had invited herself.
While away, the grieving husband had neighbor Dick Britton forward him his mail. He needed multiple copies of Shannon’s death certificate for insurance purposes.
To the police, however, Shannon’s demise still looked like an accident, and they closed the case.
Intrepid reporter. The Mohrs launched a letter-writing campaign to persuade the Michigan attorney general’s office to continue investigating. Dick Britton also urged authorities to take a new look at the evidence against his former friend.
A month after Shannon’s death, her body was exhumed and an autopsy revealed a severe gash on her head and bruises on her face, hand, and arm.
Still, no forensic alarm bells sounded, and the case stayed closed.
Caught: Fugitive David Davis under arrest
Then, a Detroit Free Press reporter named Billy Bowles started poking around and discovered sketchy incidents from David’s past. He had twice profited from fire insurance on his farm — he “insured everything,” his father-in-law would later say — and collected worker’s compensation from a suspicious injury supposedly incurred while working for a car manufacturer.
Out at sea. Bowles also found out that David had taken some advanced courses in pharmacology at the University of Michigan. Investigators theorized that David used succinylcholine in the murder.
Michigan reopened the case of Shannon Mohr’s death.
Meanwhile, David had sold his Michigan property, collected five-figure payouts from Shannon’s smaller policies, and taken up residence on a sailboat in the Bahamas with a girlfriend. He was waiting for the final results of Shannon’s latest autopsy so he could get his hands on the bulk of the insurance money.
After a third autopsy, investigators farmed out lab work to Swedish scientists who had developed methods for detecting succinylcholine. They found high concentrations in two areas of Shannon’s body, suggesting someone had given her two shots of the drug, which is often used on horses.
Media aid. Investigators eventually concluded that the injections, not the head injury, killed Shannon. Succinylcholine paralyzes every muscle except the heart and makes it impossible to breathe without a ventilator. The drug probably left Shannon conscious as she slowly suffocated.
The authorities moved to arrest David Davis in Haiti in December 1981, but he fled, leaving his sailboat behind. He eluded them for eight years.
Then, Unsolved Mysteries broadcast an episode about the case.
A Beverly Hills dentist named Cheri Lewis later said that the fugitive looked like a man with odd thumbs whom she had dated, according to the Detroit Free Press. Lewis later noted that David garnered sympathy by speaking of his wife Shannon, “who drowned.”
And Hollywood stuntman Beau Gibson thought David Davis’ picture resembled his best buddy, “Rip Bell,” who had given him flying lessons, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Detroit Free Press clipping shows one of the wives David Davis didn’t kill
You’re busted. But only one of David Davis’ associates — who remained anonymous — actually called the toll-free number on Unsolved Mysteries. The tipster said the fugitive was living under the name David Myer Bell in American Samoa, where he and his 23-year-old wife resided in a tin-roofed shack.
Four FBI agents arrested David Davis at Tafuna International Airport in Pago Pago, where he was working as a pilot for Pacific Island Airways. (He met his wife, Maria Koleti Sua, on the job. She also worked for the airline.)
He admitted his real identity and peacefully submitted to the arrest, according to the Detroit Free Press on Jan. 7, 1989.
Tropics-wear. “Oh God, I don’t know what to say,” Lucille Mohr told the Detroit Free Press upon her ex-son-in-law’s capture. “It has been eight years of hell…my heart’s coming out of my chest.”
At a stopover in Hawaii, David, 44, wore a blue and white Aloha shirt during FBI questioning, according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
In addition to identifying himself as a pilot, David had posed as a doctor, nurse, and “even as a harpsichord player” while on the run, according to an FBI spokesman quoted in an AP account.
Only the pilot claim was genuine. He earned FAA certification while on the lam.
Cold-hearted husband. By the time the feds nailed him, the once-rugged-looking David Davis was “overweight, slovenly” and “gray-bearded” but he “nevertheless cut a dashing figure,” according to the Detroit Free Press.
His trial kicked off in November 1989.
The prosecution would conclude that on the day Shannon died, David Davis suggested they have sex outdoors. While Shannon was getting undressed, he sneaked up on her and gave her one or two shots of succinylcholine to immobilize and kill her, but she fought back before the drug took effect. She left scratch marks on his arm, which the Mohrs noticed at the hospital. (He said they came from tree branches he brushed by in his hurry to summon help for Shannon.)
He then staged the horse accident by hitting her head with the rock, the prosecution believed.
Popping the question. Early on, sheriff’s deputies had noticed that the rock with the blood on it was the only rock anywhere near the scene of Shannon’s death.
First communion: Shannon considered becoming a nun
And evidence of David’s con jobs and lies came spilling out.
David had asked a series of women to marry him after knowing them for just weeks, investigators discovered. Shannon was apparently the first one who said yes.
A gal pal named Jeanne Hohlman testified that David said he was a CIA agent assigned to protect Shannon. After Shannon died, he told her the mission was over and they could start dating again, according to Happily Never After.
David Davis chose not to take the stand.
Escape from execution.The jury took 21⁄2 hours to find him guilty of first-degree murder. Noting that Shannon’s death by suffocation was “more despicable than a contract murder,” Hillsdale Circuit Judge Harvey Moes sentenced the wife-killer to life without parole.
Lucille Mohr said she wished Michigan still had the death penalty, but her husband noted that “being locked up in a cage the rest of his life is probably 100 times worse,” the Gannett News Service reported on Jan. 8, 1989
In captivity at Marquette Branch Prison, David continued to profess his innocence.
Bid rejected. “I could never have hurt her,” he told the Toledo Bladein 2001, still maintaining that Mohr fell from her horse and hit her head.
David filed an appeal with a federal court that year. There was continuing controversy over the lab work purported to reveal the presence of succinylcholine — a number of industry professionals regarded the tests as junk science — but it didn’t help David’s case much.
The real smoking guns were the insurance policies, David’s tall tales about his life, and the murder scene appearing staged.
He lost on appeal.
The death he deserved. In prison, David boycotted the television room when other inmates watched the TV movie about Shannon’ murder, according to the Toledo Blade story, which also noted he sported a “white beard and wrinkles.”
Ultimately, David got a taste of his own medicine.
He acquired neuromuscular disease and died at the age of 70 in a prison health care facility in 2014.
Lucille and Robert Mohr, who ultimately received the bulk Shannon’s life insurance payout, died in 2008 and 2012, respectively.
Intrepid cop. Billy Bowles, who Forensic Files viewers will remember from his appearance on the show, died the same year David Davis did. A colleague credited him with spending seven years toiling over a “10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle” until a picture emerged in the Shannon Mohr murder case.
David Davis in a mug shot
According to the Chicago Tribune, another hero of the whodunit challenge was “tenacious state police officer Detective Sgt. Don Brooks,” who never bought the story that Shannon’s death was an accident. Brooks went on to appear on Forensic Files.
The obituary for Dick Britton, who died in 2021, notes that assisting with the investigation was among his favorite accomplishments. (Thanks to reader David Lewis for sending in the update.)
Shannon Mohr’s murder spawned many episodes of various true crime shows. No luck finding anywhere to see them for free online, but you can watch the made-for-TV movie, Victim of Love: The Shannon Mohr Story, on YouTube. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it “great trash TV.”
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
A Young Heir Tries to Hasten His Fortune (“Family Interrupted,” Forensic Files)
Two years before a masked assailant shot them in their own house, Kent and Patricia Whitaker found out that their son had formulated a plan to kill them.
Kent and Patricia Whitaker with Kevin and Bart
But how could parents believe such a thing? Their mental highlight reel was probably playing footage of an 8-year-old Bart teaching his little brother how to ride a bike.
At it again. So the couple believed Bart’s explanation that it was all a joke or misunderstanding when a college friend tipped off police about a murder plot.
Instead of thanking his lucky stars that his parents bought his story, Bart decided to push his luck again. (a common Forensic Files pathology — see Barbara Stager and Mark Winger.)
Bart, then a wholesome-looking 22-year-old with a Princess Diana complexion, came up with a new plot to wipe out his mother, father, and brother, and get his hands on all of the family’s assets, worth $1 million to $1.5 million.
Jekyll and Hyde. He succeeded in annihilating two-thirds of the other Whitakers but, instead of an office visit with an estate attorney, Bart got himself a trial with a judge and jury. They handed him a death sentence.
The scene of the crime in Sugar Land, Texas. The house is part of a planned community
I’m curious to find how the community in and around the family’s home in Sugar Land, Texas, reacted when the justice system bared the id of the respectable-seeming young man in their midst.
Partners in crime. There’s also the question of what turned Bart Whitaker into a homicidal fiend. Was he a born a sociopath or did some kind of abuse taint and mold him?
And finally, I checked into where Bart’s young accomplices are today.
So, let’s get going on the recap of “Family Interrupted” along with extra information drawn from internet research:
Gathering place. Thomas Bartlett Whitaker was born on Dec. 31, 1979, to Kent Whitaker, a comptroller for a family-owned construction business, and Patricia, known as Tricia, who gave up a career as an elementary school teacher to stay at home with Bart and his younger brother, Kevin.
Bart would later tell ABC’s 20/20 that he never felt as though he fit in. In a jailhouse interview with Lisa Ling in 2014, Bart said he committed the murders because he felt inadequate and thought his parents didn’t love him.
But from the outside, his home life and social life seemed near perfect.
The Whitakers had the “cool house to be at” and Kent and Tricia “were the second parents to so many people,” according to Kevin’s friend Brittany Barnhill, who appeared on the 48 Hours episode “The Sugar Land Conspiracy.”
Mr. Popular. During her teaching days, Tricia was known for her kind and fun-loving approach to her job, according to friends who appeared on 20/20.
Kent spent lots of time with his sons. He and Bart enjoyed biking long distances together.
Bart was close to 19-year-old Kevin, a college sophomore who looked up to him. After all, Bart was graduating from Sam Houston State University with honors. Barnhill also noted that Kevin’s friends considered Bart “cool.”
House of horror. Little did Kent, Patricia, and Kevin Whitaker know that their life together was just a house of cards.
On Dec. 10, 2003, after the Whitakers returned from a dinner to celebrate what Bart said was the completion of his final exams, an unknown gunman shot all four of them as they entered their house in Sugar Land, a wealthy suburb of Houston.
Tricia and Kevin sustained fatal chest wounds from the Glock pistol. Kent was also hit in the upper body but survived, and Bart escaped with a wound to his upper arm. He had been the last one to walk into the house; he lagged behind while checking his phone messages.
Waking nightmare. Sugar Land had a practically nonexistent murder rate and Kent would later recall that, when he saw the armed intruder, he figured it was one of his kids’ friends playing a prank with a paintball gun.
Then, things took a horrifying turn for Kent. As an NBC account later quoted a Whitaker lawyer:
Bart (left) and Kevin were always close
“He watched his son Kevin walk into the house, heard the first and fatal shot, and saw his son’s fallen body in their darkened home. He heard Tricia’s last, wet coughs as Kent himself lay dying from his own gunshot wound. The bullet hit Kent nearly six inches from his heart.”
Convenient scapegoat. But Kent didn’t die. A neighbor named Cliff Stanley raced onto the scene and used his own T-shirt to stanch Kent’s bleeding bullet wound.
Bart called 911, explaining that he was shot in the arm and had just chased the shooter out the back door. When asked about the race of the assailant he said, “Maybe black — I don’t know.”
Homicide detective Marshall Slot, who appeared on both Forensic Files and the 20/20 episode about the murders, recalled that he thought the operator was joking when she said a shooting of four people had taken place in Sugar Land.
Red herring. But he arrived to find a real firearm, not a paintball gun, on the scene and four people with one bullet wound each. It turned out the gun was registered to Kevin Whitaker. Someone had pried open his gun safe.
Police initially thought they had a suspect in an armed robber who struck a different house soon after the Whitaker attack, but bloodhounds didn’t pick up his scent at the Whitakers’.
In the meantime, a newspaper reporter discovered that Bart never finished college. He had transferred from Baylor University in Waco — where an informant tipped off police about Bart’s aborted plan to kill his family in 2001 — to Sam Houston State University. Apparently he skipped a lot of classes, then stopped going entirely, and blew his tuition funds on some form or recreation; it’s not clear what kind.
Blueprint for murder.Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but Bart had a prior arrest record for breaking into his high school and stealing computers — after which his parents sent him to a private Christian academy, according to the LA Times.
Chris Brashear in court. A newspaper account described the gunman as slight in build
Investigators also found it troubling that a picture of Bart taken at the “graduation” dinner showed him giving the finger (although I’d file that one in the “kids like to make obscene gestures, no big deal” folder).
Then, a buddy of Bart’s named Adam Hipp came forward five days after the murders and told police that Bart had tried to enlist him to shoot Bart’s parents two years earlier. Adam had replicated a diagram of the house’s layout and where the triggerman was to lie in wait.
Hipp said that Kent and Tricia had heard about the plot, but didn’t take it seriously.
Phones bugged. Police first checked out Adam Hipp himself as a suspect, but he had an alibi for the night of the shooting.
Next up, they focused on two of Bart’s co-workers from the Bentwater Yacht & Country Club near Lake Conroe. Chris Brashear and Steven Champagne denied any involvement in the homicides and provided DNA samples and scent-test specimens.
Cops secretly tapped Brashear’s and Champagne’s phones, but they never picked up any incriminating conversations.
Friend starts singing. Still, in an effort to unnerve the young men, police continually made it clear that they were watching them.
The authorities also directed Adam Tripp to try to get Bart to admit he planned his family’s murder. Bart didn’t specifically refer to any plot, but a phone call recording caught him trying to bribe Adam to keep quiet in return for $20,000.
Finally, a year and a half after the shootings, Champagne admitted that Bart hired him to help kill his family.
Money tangled. Champagne explained that he staked out the Whitakers at the graduation dinner at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen — where Bart enjoyed bread pudding with “Congratulations” spelled out in chocolate sauce — and called Brashear to let him know when the group left the restaurant.
Champagne also drove the getaway car although, he claimed, he really didn’t want to get involved with the homicide plot but felt trapped.
Brashear was the shooter, he said, and Bart had promised to cut both of his buddies in on a $1 million life insurance payout he would receive after his family’s death.
Rudy Rios allowed Bart Whitaker to assume his name while hiding out in Mexico
Sack of evidence. Champagne led police to the spot where he and Brashear threw a bag with the murder evidence into Lake Conroe. Divers recovered it.
The bag contained a chisel with paint matching that on Kevin’s gun safe. It also held a glove that matched one left at the murder scene and a water bottle with Chris Brashear’s DNA sealed on the inside of the cap.
Brashear and Champagne were arrested almost two years after murders.
Bart never paid his accomplices for their hit man services. He helped himself to $7,000 to $10,000 of his dad’s cash and fled to Mexico with the help of his friend Rudy Rios.
Tall tale. Rios got Bart settled in the town of Cerralvo, where he soon found a girlfriend and got a job at a furniture store owned by her family, according to 48 Hours.
The popular new guy in town explained to his south of the border friends that he sustained the bullet wound to his arm while fighting in Afghanistan. (Murderers like to tell war stories, whether they happened or not — Michael Peterson and John Boyle.)
Bart also reportedly told them his mother was a prostitute and he was essentially an orphan.
But Rudy Rios couldn’t resist a $10,000 reward offered for information on Bart’s whereabouts. Rudy ratted him out, and the law hauled Bart back to the U.S.
Trio of convicts. A grand jury indicted Bart, then 25, and Steve Champagne and Chris Brashear, both 23, in October 2005.
Chris Brashear pleaded guilty in 2007 and received life with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
Steve Champagne got 15 years in exchange for testifying against Brashear and Bart.
Police believe that while the Whitakers were out celebrating, Brashear entered the house, pried open the safe, and made an attempt at giving the master bedroom a ransacked look.
You missed something. But investigators couldn’t help but notice that the drawers were all neatly pulled out to the exact same length and nothing had been removed from them. The Whitakers’ cash, jewelry, and computer equipment remained untouched.
Bart, right, and his lawyer in court
Brashear shot Kent, Patricia, and Kevin as they entered the house and then gave Bart his courtesy wound in the arm. In his haste to exit the scene, Brashear gathered up Bart’s cellphone instead of the gun.
Then, Brashear entered a getaway car driven by Champagne, and they dumped the bag with the murder items in the water.
Would-be Waco whackers. After the shootings, Bart did a good job of pretending that he was happy that EMTs saved his dad’s life, but at some point, he told Champagne he wanted to finish off the job and really kill his dad the next time, according to 20/20.
Apparently, Bart’s bloodlust had been brewing for even longer than originally thought. Investigators found out that in addition to Bart’s 2001 and 2003 attempts to eliminate his family, there was at least one prior plot: In 2000, Bart had a couple of his Baylor acquaintances break into the Whitakers’ home to kill them, but the henchmen fled when an alarm went off, according to an AP account.
On March 8, 2007, after deliberating for two hours, a jury found Bart Whitaker guilty of murder.
Serious needling. Before the sentencing phase, both Kent Whitaker and Tricia Whitaker’s brother asked that Bart be spared the death penalty. Bart had admitted his guilt and expressed remorse for the murders and for roping his friends into the plans, they stressed.
Bart had also said he always felt he couldn’t live up to his parents’ expectations (a halfway decent explanation for lying about college, but way short of mitigating murder).
According to a Houston Chronicle account, after an emotional, contentious 12 hours during which some jurors at first disagreed about whether Bart constituted a “continuing threat to society,” Bart got a sentence of death by lethal injection.
The Bentwater Country Club, where Bart got to know his two accomplices
Corrections officers’ pet. The kind-hearted Kent Whitaker forgave Bart and fought for years to stave off his looming execution. (Kent also said he forgave shooter Chris Brashear.)
Kent believed his son had reformed.
Although no one knows whether Bart’s remorse was genuine, his polite, cooperative behavior behind razor wire impressed the guards so much that several of them wrote letters asking for clemency for Bart, according to the LA Times.
His lawyer Keith Hampton urged the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to remember the Old Testament story of Cain, who killed his brother but was himself spared by God.
Last-minute reprieve. In February 2018, each of the seven board members separately voted to commute Bart’s sentence, and the governor concurred.
“Mr. Whitaker’s father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death the last remaining member of his immediate family,” said Gov. Greg Abbott.
Texas halted Bart’s execution within hours of his date with a gurney and syringe. The state reduced his sentence to life.
In return, Bart agreed to give up any rights to parole.
Faithful father. Today, Bart resides in the William G. McConnell Unit, or McConnell for short, in Beeville, Texas.
Along with his second wife, Tanya Youngling, Kent Whitaker visits Bart regularly, speaking to him from behind a glass partition. Tanya also accompanied Kent for court proceedings related to Bart’s fate.
Second chance: Kent Whitaker marries Tanya Youngling
Kent came out with his own book about the shootings and their aftermath, and he travels around the country to speak about forgiveness.
As far as an epilogue on Bart’s accomplices, Chris Alan Brashear occupies a cell in the Eastham Unit and will reach parole eligibility in 2035, when he’s 53.
Parents provided. Steve Champagne got out and stayed out. He’s no longer listed with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Finally, as to the question of what turned Bart into such a callous and motivated killer, no mention of any type of abuse or trauma came up.
Quite the opposite, his parents were kind and generous by all accounts. They bought him a townhouse to live in while he was supposed to be attending college and gave him a Rolex for his faux graduation.
Bart Whitaker, it seems, was born— rather than made — a sociopath.
Update on Thomas Berry — Rapist and Killer (“A Cinderella Story,” Forensic Files)
If you’re looking for a defendant who’s undeserving of sympathy and makes you thankful the U.S. has life sentences without parole, Thomas Jabin Berry is just the ticket.
Janet Siclari
As Forensic Files watchers will remember, Berry’s excuse for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl was that he thought she was 13.
Fortunately, that victim survived the attack. But Berry killed the next person he raped, an ultrasound technician from New Jersey named Janet Siclari.
Her story. For this week, I checked on Berry’s whereabouts today and also looked for additional biographical information on Janet Siclari.
So, let’s get started on a recap of Forensic Files episode “A Cinderella Story,” along with extra information drawn from internet research.
Janet Siclari came into the world on Dec. 30, 1957, and grew up in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, with three brothers.
Favorite getaway. She earned a certificate in radiology in 1979 and got the highest academic awards in her class. Janet moved to North Arlington and worked at General Hospital in Passaic.
For Janet, visiting North Carolina’s Outer Banks in the summer was a family tradition that started in her childhood.
In August 1993, the 35-year-old vacationed there with her brother Robert Siclari and two friends, Celeste Bethmann and Nancy Matt. They stayed at a rental cottage in Southern Shores for a week, then decided to spend an extra day in the area and checked into the Carolinian hotel in Nags Head.
Eerie feeling. Siclari, who was athletic but tiny at 92 pounds, disappeared after a night out at a comedy club followed by drinks and dancing at the Port O’Call Restaurant & Gaslight Saloon on Aug. 28. Robert was asleep when she came home but remembered waking up briefly and hearing her say she was going outside to smoke.
Janet Siclari, left, with her brother Robert and two friends
In the morning, Robert noticed his sister’s bed hadn’t been slept in and saw police on the beach outside his window, according to an account from the Bergen Record.
A local maintenance crew worker had found her body, dressed in a blue tank top, outside the hotel. Someone had stabbed her repeatedly, slit her throat, and left her to die.
Stormy circumstances. “Blood seeped in the white sand 25 feet in either direction,” according to a Bergen Record account from Feb. 2, 1999. Apparently, Janet had survived for a short time after the attack and tried to crawl back to the hotel.
The day after the murder, Hurricane Emily caused tens of thousands to flee the area temporarily, but police didn’t let it get in the way of their work.
A tantalizing suspect soon emerged in a burly bartender, Edward Read Powell, who had flirted with Janet and later admitted to police that he was sitting around eating pepperoni with a knife near the scene of the murder.
Hostile waitress. Although Forensic Files didn’t mention it, three additional prospective perpetrators came to light as well, according to “Murder in Paradise,” a 2013 episode of Nightmare Next Door.
There was Powell’s waitress girlfriend, who exchanged surly words with Janet’s brother when he sent his food back at her restaurant — and she’d seen Read socializing with Janet.
The third suspect, a cabana attendant who hit on Janet and reportedly made her a little uncomfortable, was also questioned by police, who discovered he had a past conviction for stabbing a relative.
Bring in the feds. Next, thanks to a tip from Janet’s mother, investigators checked out Janet’s ex-boyfriend, a New Jersey mechanic and biker club member. He had served time in prison as an accessory to the murder of a man from a rival gang.
Thomas Berry in court
But one by one, the four suspects fell away.
An autopsy revealed that Janet had been raped, so investigators ruled out the waitress as the killer. And none of the DNA samples collected from the male suspects matched the rapist’s genetic profile.
The FBI came in to help local authorities, but a year after the murder, they hadn’t found a single eyewitness despite interviewing 100 people in connection with the case, according to the Bergen Record. The area had a low stranger-on-stranger crime rate, so there weren’t a lot of usual-suspect types to haul in for questioning.
Funds offered. Robert Siclari, who owned an environmental consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia, put together a $20,000 reward for information that would help solve the crime.
“We lost Janet and we can’t bring her back,” Robert told the Virginian-Pilot. “But we don’t want something like this to happen to someone else.”
Still, the case turned cold.
Then, in 1997, something wonderful happened in the world of forensic science. CODIS — the combined DNA indexing system — was created so police across the U.S. could share genetic profiles of convicted felons.
Knife wielder. When authorities entered Janet Siclari’s rape kit sample in the database, they got a match with Thomas Jabin Berry. The roofer and commercial fisherman, who was 27 at the time of the murder, had undergone DNA testing after committing a parole violation.
The Carolinian, seen here in a vintage post card, fell into disrepair and closed, but East Carolina University maintains a webpage where former guests can share old memories of the Nag’s Head property.
Berry’s ex-girlfriend told police that he always carried a fishing knife and that a pair of shoes and socks found near Janet Siclari’s body belonged to him.
The findings about Berry, who lived in the North Carolina towns of Engelhard and Manteo, weren’t exactly a shock. His record included “indecent liberty with a child” involving the aforementioned 12-year-old girl.
Talk about a lowlife. During his on-camera interview with Forensic Files, Berry — who had three children by two different women — called his actions toward the girl “consensual.”
Apparently no one had informed him that children can’t consent.
The girl would later testify that Berry had lured her into the woods under the guise of helping him find a lost nephew. Then he raped her in a fort, according to court papers from North Carolina vs. Berry in 2001.
Crack defense. Berry got a 10-year suspended sentence for his crime against the 12-year-old girl.
Under police questioning for the attack on Janet Siclari, Berry said he had been smoking crack cocaine at the time and couldn’t remember whether he had raped and killed Janet, according to the court papers.
In his Forensic Files interview, Berry said that, if he did have sex with Janet, “it would have been consensual” and he never killed anybody. He also said he sometimes had sex with people he just met on the beach and that was how he met his wife.
Third victim. Doris Berry, the suspect’s mother, strenuously defended him, saying he was “not capable of committing murder” even “to save his own life.” Meanwhile, her son had a history of sex crimes dating back to when he himself was 12 years old, according to a Bergen Record account.
At the trial, a woman named Shelley Perry testified that Berry had tried to rape her after breaking into her house in 1992. She managed to escape and never pressed charges.
In 1999, a jury convicted Thomas Berry of the rape and first-degree murder of Janet Siclari.
Sympathy for the devil. At the sentencing hearing, Janet Siclari’s mother, Damy Siclari Daber, spoke of how the death had devastated the family and said that son Robert Siclari felt guilty. “I tell him it’s not his fault … It’s that maniac’s fault,” she said, as reported by the Virginian-Pilot on Jan. 28, 1999.
Thomas Berry in a recent mug shot
Meanwhile, Doris Berry portrayed her son as a victim — a sweet guy who was severely abused by his father and used to hide in the woods to escape him, the Virginian-Pilot reported.
The defense also attempted to win the jury members’ sympathy by showing them a childhood photo of Thomas Berry holding a fish he had caught.
Good prisoner. But in the end, the jury didn’t think his case held water.
Berry received two consecutive life sentences.
Today, Thomas Berry resides in Warren Correctional Institution in Manson, North Carolina. He lost a 2001 appeal and is not eligible for parole.
Berry is housed in medium security. Born on Jan. 4, 1966, he has a lot of years ahead of him, and all of them are highly likely to be spent behind razor wire.
That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR
If Forensic Files got an annual performance review, it would always exceed expectations in telling a story in 22 minutes without making viewers feel cheated — but at the same time leaving them interested in finding out more.
Kathleen Peterson
Forensic Files produced “A Novel Idea” back in 2006, but any murder story that includes well-educated mansion owners plus a cheerful male escort on the witness stand is sure to be revisited many times.
Pop-culture phenom. Over the years, Dateline has continually covered the case of how writer Michael Peterson’s wife, Kathleen, ended up dead at the base of a staircase in their 14-room house. The NBC series most recently broadcast an update of “Down the Back Staircase” in 2017.
But public interest in the case didn’t really explode until the following year, when Netflix expanded and updated a documentary by French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade to create a 13-part bingefest called The Staircase.
For this week, I looked into what’s happened to Michael Peterson since the Netflix series ended in 2018 and whether a theory that a rogue owl played a role in Kathleen’s death ever got any traction. But first, here’s a recap of “A Novel Idea” along with extra information drawn from internet research:
Full house. Michael Ivor Peterson graduated from Duke University, where he was editor of the school newspaper, then joined the Marines and earned silver and bronze stars for service in Vietnam.
As a young man, he divided his time between North Carolina and Germany. He and his first wife, schoolteacher Patricia Sue Peterson, had sons Todd and Clayton — then acquired two daughters, Margaret and Martha, when the couple’s friend Liz McKee Ratliff died. Ratliff had assigned Michael as guardian of her kids and left him her entire estate.
Michael later became a novelist, weaving his real-life experiences in the military into the plots of his books.
He and Patricia split up, and he began a relationship with his neighbor Kathleen Hunt Atwater in Durham, North Carolina, in 1992.
Brainy bunch. Kathleen Hunt grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and was so bright that she took advanced Latin classes at a nearby college while still in McCaskey High School, according to the Lancaster New Era newspaper. She graduated first in her class.
She was the first woman accepted into Duke University’s school of engineering. At the time of her death, she was a vice president at Nortel Networks at the company’s Research Triangle Park offices. She had a net worth of around $2 million, according to Forensic Files.
By the time Michael and Kathleen became a couple, his two daughters and Kathleen’s daughter from her first marriage, Caitlin Atwater, were already good friends.
Michael and Kathleen Peterson’s former house at 1810 Cedar Street is worth $1.7 million, according to Zillow. It has a fancy winding staircase in addition to the set of back stairs where Kathleen Peterson met her end.
Hosts with the most. Michael and Kathleen married in 1997. By then, one of Michael’s books, A Time for War, had made its way onto the New York Times bestseller list and generated enough cash to pay for the Colonial Revival-style house containing the now-famous staircase.
The couple combined their families into one household in the 5-bedroom 5½-bath abode in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Durham.
By all reports, Michael and Kathleen enjoyed a close, happy marriage and were sought-after guests on the local social scene. The New York Timeswould later describe Michael as having a “theatrical personality.” Kathleen was a live wire, too. The couple threw dinner parties for dozens of friends at their spread, which included a swimming pool with decorative fountains.
Horrifying discovery. But Michael hit a rough patch when he decided to run for mayor of Durham. It came out that a leg injury he said happened during battle actually came from a car accident. He lost the election.
Still, there was no serious drama until Dec. 9, 2001, when Michael Peterson made a desperate 911 call to report his wife had fallen down the stairs but was still breathing.
Kathleen was dead by the time first responders got there.
Michael said he and Kathleen were relaxing by their pool, and she went inside to work on the computer. He stayed outside to smoke for 45 minutes or so and found her at the bottom of the stairs when he came back in.
Charnel house. She had been drinking and was wearing floppy shoes, so she probably tripped, Michael told police.
But there was one circumstance that Michael Peterson couldn’t explain away.
The accident scene was a bloodbath — inconsistent with a tumble down the stairs. Homicide detectives were called to the Peterson residence.
Caitlin Atwater initially acted as the family spokesperson, but she ultimately broke with her stepsisters and stepbrothers
They noted that Michael was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Investigators later brought in a forensic meteorologist who determined it was 51 to 55 degrees outside that night, a little too cold for beach clothes, which made investigators question whether he was really at the pool when Kathleen fell.
Son uncooperative. That part of the prosecution’s case doesn’t seem impressive. Everyone knows at least one wacky guy who wears shorts in cold weather. (And those investigators must have had money to burn — they could have looked online or asked an autistic savant to recall the temperature that evening.)
But other evidence pointed convincingly to Michael’s guilt. Paramedics said that Kathleen’s blood had congealed, suggesting she died hours before he called 911.
Todd Peterson, 25, was at the house when the police came but refused to talk to them, according to Forensic Files.
And it looked as though someone had tried to clean up blood from the wall near the stairs.
Not inebriated. The police found blood splatter between the legs of Michael’s shorts and his bloody footprint on Kathleen’s clothes, which suggested he was standing over her and beating her.
Although testing would later confirm that Kathleen had some alcohol in her system, it was nowhere near the stagger and face-plant level.
Oh, and one more little thing: Investigators found thousands of gay male porn images and hookup conversations on Michael’s computer.
Male escort Brent Wolgamott, aka Brad, was hardly a hostile witness
Email trail. In one of his messages, Michael wrote that he was happily married to a “dynamite” wife but that he was “very” bisexual. Other online correspondence allegedly proved he was trying to hook up with men on the side, including a chipper prostitute called Brad.
Prosecutors would later contend that Kathleen stumbled upon the trove of photos and messages while using Michael’s computer — she had left her own machine at work that day. She confronted Michael about cheating on her, there was an argument, and he beat her to death with a fireplace implement, they alleged. He made a futile attempt to get rid of blood evidence and then called 911, the prosecution contended.
According to Power, Privilege, and Justice, which produced a 2004 episode about the case titled “Murder He Wrote,” Peterson went upstairs to work on the computer while police were still on the murder scene. Perhaps he was trying to delete some files.
Insurance jackpot. In addition to the salacious activity, investigators discovered evidence of financial woes in the family. Michael hadn’t generated any income in two years, and Kathleen was the mainstay.
The couple had three daughters in college and credit card debt of $142,000. The value of Kathleen’s Nortel stock had dropped from more than $2 million at its peak to $50,000.
But Kathleen had life insurance worth $1.2 million to $1.8 million, with Michael as the beneficiary.
Then, yet another bombshell came up. Investigators found out how Liz Ratliff, Margaret and Martha’s mother, died.
On Nov. 25, 1985, when Michael was living in Germany and married to his first wife, Ratliff turned up dead at the bottom of a staircase — just as Kathleen Peterson did 16 years later.
Missing murder weapon. Previously, Michael had told people Liz Ratliff died from a brain hemorrhage, never mentioning a fall on the stairs, according an interview with Kathleen Peterson’s sister, Candace Zamperini, on Power, Privilege, and Justice.
The authorities exhumed Liz Ratliff’s body in 2003 and discovered multiple scalp lacerations, similar to those found on Kathleen Peterson.
Elizabeth Ratliff died the same way Kathleen Peterson did
Ultimately, no charges involving Ratliff were brought, but North Carolina used the information about her death to strengthen the Kathleen Peterson case, which lacked a murder weapon. Police believed it was a fireplace blow poke that someone took outside to hide, leaving bloodstains on the door.
Nonetheless, all five of Michael’s children believed in his innocence at first. Caitlin Atwater, Katherine’s daughter from her first marriage, later switched sides.
Call-guy talks. Friends of Liz Ratliff, who lived on the same German military base as Michael and his first wife, testified about the bloodiness of the scene of her demise. A medical examiner testified that Ratliff’s cause of death was homicide via blunt force trauma.
And as if the trial needed more sordidness, Brad the hooker was called to the stand, where he congenially answered the prosecutor’s questions about his services. They ranged from simple companionship to “just about anything under the sun” sexually.
The defense, led by David Rudolf — the same lawyer who represented NFL player Rae Carruth in his murder trial — had some impressive courtroom drama to offer, too. Forensic expert Henry Lee gave a live in-court splatter demonstration to refute some of the blood evidence against Michael.
Team Michael also furnished a fireplace blow poke they said they found in the house. It had cobwebs on it but no blood, which appeared to snuff out the prosecution’s theory that the implement acted as the murder weapon.
He’s a SHU-in. Michael claimed that Kathleen had been suffering from blackouts due to stress. Nortel had forced her to lay off some well-liked employees, according to an AP account from May 22, 2002. Kathleen worried that she would lose her own $145,000-a-year job amid the downsizing, the AP reported.
Nonetheless, in the end, there was just too much evidence against Michael Peterson. His 2003 trial ended in a first-degree murder conviction and a sentence of life without parole.
Off he went to North Carolina’s Correctional Facility in Nash.
Corrections officers at the prison didn’t always find him as charming as his old dinner party friends did, and he earned some time in solitary for mouthing off, according to the Raleigh News & Observer.
Tide turns. A 2009 motion for a new trial based on the owl attack theory was unsuccessful.
Then, after serving eight years in prison, Michael got a huge break.
Michael Peterson and Kathleen Hunt long before they met
He won the right to a new trial after authorities discovered that “expert” prosecution witness Saami Shaibani had misrepresented his own professional credentials. And the happy hustler was off the table too — the seizure of Peterson’s computer messages was ruled unlawful, so Brad couldn’t testify again. Plus the death of Liz Ratliff in Germany was deemed inadmissible.
Irresistible deal. North Carolina released Michael Peterson on bond in 2011.
In 2017, the then-73-year-old avoided a second trial by taking an Alford plea to voluntary manslaughter in return for six years of house arrest.
But there was no 9,429-square-foot palatial home with a redwood-paneled author’s study for Michael to return to. The family had sold the Cedar Street showplace, reportedly the largest house in Durham. Michael moved into a two-bedroom condo, according to reporting from Cosmopolitanon June 11, 2018.
Marked man. So what about the owl? The Cosmopolitan story includes information from ornithology experts who believe a barred owl could have tangled its claws in Kathleen’s hair and made the gashes in her head that prosecutors alleged came from a metal implement. Kathleen might have fallen down the stairs while struggling to extricate herself from the bird of prey’s talons, they opined.
Nonetheless, Michael Peterson’s lawyers never brought up the owl theory in the courtroom — it was too bizarre and potentially fodder for, well, hoots of laughter.
Instead, Michael laid the blame for his murder conviction on humans. The police were out to get him because he criticized them in columns he wrote for the Herald-Sun before Kathleen’s death, he told Dateline.
Time for a tome. So what’s happened to Michael Peterson since the 2018 Netflix series turned his story into an international entertainment sensation?
In April 2019, an extensive News & Observer story by Andrew Carter reported that Michael had written an e-book titled Behind the Staircase to exonerate himself, with any profits going toward charity. If Michael received any money for the literary effort, it would have to go toward a $25 million award Caitlin Atwater won against him, he said.
Michael also told the News & Observer that well-to-do friends from his and Kathleen’s napkin-ring and place-card days had deserted him. He did find himself a post-lockup girlfriend, however, in one of the editors of The Staircase. The couple lived together for a time after his release, he said.
Dr. Phil interviews Michael Peterson in 2019
Sociological errands. Also in 2019, Michael Peterson made a two-part appearance on Dr. Phil. Although skeptical, the TV psychologist gave Michael a chance to defend himself.
Michael told Dr. Phil McGraw that medical reports confirmed Liz Ratliff died of a stroke. He also explained that after Kathleen’s death, he engaged legal help immediately — a move that raised suspicion at the time — only because his son insisted upon it, calling in Michael’s lawyer brother, Bill Peterson.
A video accompanying the in-depth News & Observer piece gave Michael an opportunity to talk about his everyday post-prison life. He mentioned receiving a chilly reception from the primarily white upper middle class shoppers at Whole Foods. But at Target, a less affluent, more diverse crowd welcomes him because they know firsthand how unfair the law can be, he said.
Margaret, Martha, Todd, and Clayton also believe the justice system failed their father. Although I tend to agree with the prosecution that Michael Peterson is responsible for Kathleen Peterson’s and Liz Ratliff’s deaths, it’s still sweet to see the loyalty of his children and their willingness to accept him as he is.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. — RR
A Baseball Coach Makes a Fatal Error (“Broken Promises,” Forensic Files)
Barbara Stager demonstrated a recurring Forensic Files theme: People who get away with murder once just can’t stop pushing their luck.
Like fellow Forensic Files hall of shamers Jill Coit and Mark Winger, Barbara Ford Stager killed a spouse for financial gain and didn’t face any legal consequences at first. But, like the other two, she was too greedy to stop scheming and eventually landed behind razor wire.
Happier days: Russ and Barbara Stager’s family
Four-eyed girl. For this week, I checked around to find out whether Barbara, whose two marriages ended in gunfire and insurance claims, is still in prison and whether she has a chance of getting out on two feet. I also looked into what the North Carolina native, who looks more like a librarian than a free-spending femme fatale, did with the money she squeezed out of both of her husbands.
So let’s get started on the recap of “Broken Promises,” along with extra information culled from internet research:
Barbara Terry was born in Durham, North Carolina, on Oct. 30, 1948, the daughter of a secretary and a longtime Duke Power Company employee.
She had to wear thick eyeglasses from early childhood and was described as shy and sexually repressed, according to the book Before He Wakes by newspaper reporter Jerry Bledsoe, who viewers may remember from his appearance on Forensic Files.
Open house. Barbara married at a young age and had two sons. She crossed paths with Allison Russell Stager III, known as Russ, after her first husband died.
Russ was a well-liked driver’s ed teacher and baseball coach at Durham High School. He cared about the school kids and even paid for some of his students’ baseball uniforms himself, according to a 2015 Fatal Vows episode titled “No Accident.”
His first marriage, to Jo Lynn Snow, didn’t work out, but the two of them remained friends after their divorce.
Barely a year later, Russ met Barbara when she came to look at a house he had on the market.
Newly formed family. No real estate transaction occurred between them, but a red-hot romance did after Barbara, 31, ended up buying a place near Russ’ house. Russ proposed after just a couple of months and they married in 1979.
Residents of Durham, home of Duke University, were not accustomed to sensationalized black-widow trials in their community
Russ adopted her sons, ages 6 and 11, from her previous husband.
The newlyweds were both devout Baptists and involved in their local church’s activities.
Auto lovers. Although Forensic Files portrays Barbara as the spendthrift of the pair, Fatal Vows depicts both of them as frequent and enthusiastic shoppers. They loved outfitting themselves in new clothes and even sported matching Rolex watches, according to the show.
They liked larger items as well. Friends joked that instead of changing the oil, the Stagers would get a new car. The couple also bought a beach getaway.
Barbara, who was in charge of the couple’s finances, worked as a secretary at Duke University and an ad salesperson for a radio station. She was also an aspiring author.
Regular June Cleaver. Except for the fact that friends couldn’t figure out where the couple’s seemingly limitless supply of disposable income came from, everything seemed great on the surface.
Neighbors described Barbara Stager as a “perfect homemaker, loving mother of two, valued employee, and staunch Baptist,” according to a Knight Ridder account.
Russ and first wife Jo Lynn had a short marriage but a long friendship
At some point, however, Russ discovered that he and Barbara were deeply in debt. Barbara, it turned out, had been running a mini-Ponzi scheme, whereby she’d borrow money from a bank, then pay it off with a loan from a different bank. Russ found out that she had been forging his name on financial paperwork.
Paper hanger. She had also lied about the manuscript of her novel being purchased for $100,000. The letter from a publishing house that Barbara showed off to Russ turned out to be a convincing fake — she’d created it by cutting out a logo from a rejection notice and then used the document as collateral of sorts to secure bank loans.
Barbara also wrote a lot of bad checks, according to Before He Wakes.
It’s not clear how she duped Russ into thinking the family could afford the many extravagances, but my guess would be that she exaggerated the amount of the windfall from her first husband’s estate.
Cover story accepted. Whatever the case, Russ reportedly forgave Barbara for botching their finances — but he insisted on taking control of the couple’s bill-paying himself. To get back on their feet budget-wise, the Stagers quit their country club and moved to a smaller house. As for the existing debt, Russ’ parents agreed to help the couple pay it off, according to Fatal Vows.
Then, on Feb. 1, 1988 — shortly after the austerity plan went into effect — Barbara Stager called 911 to report that she’d accidentally shot Russ. He kept a loaded gun under his pillow for protection and it went off when she tried to move it because she thought she heard an intruder.
Russ was still alive when the EMTs arrived, but died hours later from a bullet wound to the back of his head.
Barbara’s story about the gun accident sounded plausible enough to police, who had all but closed the case until Jo Lynn came knocking at the lead detective’s door.
Barbara Stager in custody
Jo Lynn filled in a little history about Barbara — namely, that the grieving widow’s first husband, James Larry Ford, known as Larry, had died of an accidental shooting in High Point, North Carolina, where the couple were raising their sons. They’d been married for nine years.
Victim’s premonition. Barbara claimed that Larry’s gun had gone off while he was cleaning it.
At the time, Larry Ford’s parents encouraged the police to investigate the shooting extensively, but they declined. The authorities bought Barbara’s explanation that it was a tragic mishap and closed the case.
After Russ’ death, Jo Lynn told police that Russ had confided in her that Barbara mistreated him and he was afraid of her.
Now, armed with the knowledge of Barbara’s track record, the police began to dig a little deeper into the circumstances surrounding Russ Stager’s death.
‘Wake up, you need to sleep.’ Fortunately, a tantalizing piece of evidence came to light, and it backed up Jo Lynn’s claims.
A student cleaning out a locker at Durham High came across an audiocassette that Russ had recorded on Jan. 29, 1988 — just three days before his own death.
In a voice from the grave, Russ Stager explained that Barbara had been cheating on him (by this time, she had apparently broken free of any sexual inhibitions of her youth) and that he suspected Barbara’s previous husband’s death was no accident. And Barbara’s behavior had been suspect. Russ recounted that, on two occasions, Barbara woke him up during the night to offer him some pills to help him sleep.
On a prior occasion, Russ had told Jo Lynn that if anything awful happened to him, Barbara probably did it.
Friends blindsided. After a thorough investigation of the forensics, police theorized that Russ’ pistol was actually kept in a drawer — he belonged to the army reserves and knew better than to leave a gun under a pillow. He also didn’t keep his guns loaded.
Barbara Stager, seen here in her youth, may have looked like a reference-desk aide, but she reportedly had a tawdry streak
Ballistic tests showed that pulling the trigger on that particular .25-caliber model would require 4 pounds of pressure — way too much to have occurred accidentally as Barbara contended.
Police noticed the placement of the casing didn’t jibe with Barbara’s version of how the shooting took place.
Nonetheless, friends and neighbors of the couple were “astonished” when the seemingly ideal wife and mother in their midst was arrested for murder, according to a Knight Ridder account.
The Stagers’ church held a fundraiser to pay Barbara’s bail.
No agonizing wait. The prosecution contended that Barbara sneaked the gun out of the drawer, loaded it, shot Russ, lay a shell casing near his pillow, and called 911.
Barbara was in a hurry to rid herself of Russ because she wanted his $170,000 life insurance payout fast, investigators believed. Apparently, the lower-budget lifestyle the couple had adopted was cramping her style.
After a highly publicized trial in May 1989, a jury deliberated less than an hour before convicting Barbara Stager of murder.
She received a death sentence and the execution date was set for just two months later — they like to do things speedily in North Carolina, or at least try to.
Possibility of release. The state Supreme Court later voided that death sentence over a technicality. At the 1993 resentencing trial, Barbara’s younger son, Jason Stager, testified that he felt his mother was innocent.
This time, she got a life sentence, which allowed for the possibility of parole. (North Carolina lawmakers revoked parole eligibility for lifers the following year, but Barbara was grandfathered in.)
Sources vary as to the reason the authorities decided not to try Barbara for Larry Ford’s death. Either they thought it unnecessary under the original death sentence or they didn’t have enough evidence.
So where is Barbara Terry Ford Stager today?
She’s safely tucked away in the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh.
Not walking the line. The facility notes that she’s committed a few infractions while incarcerated.
She disobeyed orders in 1989. In 1994, she attempted an unspecified “Class C offense,” a category including such misdeeds as failing to show up for work or fighting with other inmates. In keeping with her pattern of not learning her lesson the first time, she disobeyed orders again in 2017.
Barbara Stager in prison mug shots
In 2018, she was denied parole.
As for what happened to Barbara Stager’s sons after her imprisonment, the younger one went to live with an uncle and the other was old enough to get by on his own.
Russ Stager’s first wife, Jo Lynn Snow, married again, to a kitchen remodeler whom she helps run his business, according to the News & Observer.
Blast from the past. In an interview with the Raleigh-based newspaper, Jo Lynn said that she’s haunted by the fact that Larry Ford — whom she didn’t know — never got justice.
Jo Lynn went on to appear in Fatal Vows. Unfortunately, there aren’t any quality uploads of the Fatal Vows episode available online for free, but you can see a decent upload of the made-for-TV movie version of Before He Wakes on YouTube.
The dramatization got so-so reviews, but it stars Jaclyn Smith — that’s right, one of the original Charlie’s Angels — as the character based on Barbara Stager.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
A Bomber Murders a Judge and a Lawyer (“Deadly Delivery,” Forensic Files)
Nothing made Walter Leroy Moody more angry than authorities who held him accountable.
Helen Vance and Robert Vance Sr.
It never seemed to occur to Moody that, if he stopped committing more and worse crimes, the law would stop showing up at his door with arrest warrants.
His criminal record started with an accidental maiming and ended with lethal bomb attacks that created a panic throughout Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.
Moody also directed his rage at his victims for having the audacity to seek justice. Forensic Files didn’t mention it but, somewhere in the middle of his criminal years, Moody allegedly attempted to drown three of his own business associates, then sued them for pressing charges against him.
In the final tally, he killed two innocent people, destroyed his own life, and made some FBI agents put in a lot OT.
Mail aggression. For this week, I searched for any clues from Moody’s personal history to explain what made him turn into a terrorist and murderer.
So let’s get started on a recap of the Forensic Files episode “Deadly Delivery,” along with information culled from online research:
On December 16, 1989, a package arrived at the brick mansion owned by Robert and Helen Vance in Mountain Brook, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama.
When Robert, a federal court judge, untied the string on the box, it exploded and sent him flying across the room.
He died on the scene.
Here come the feds. One of the nails that came spewing from the package pierced Helen’s liver, but she survived.
Robert and Helen Vance’s house, the scene of Walter Leroy Moody’s first homicide
Days later, a security guard at an Atlanta courthouse spotted a bomb during a routine X-ray of mail.
By this time, federal authorities, who don’t particularly like it when people send explosive devices through the U.S. Postal Service, had come out in full force to help local law enforcement.
Uncivil attack. ATF investigators determined that the two bombs came from the same individual. They were meticulously constructed and had been sprayed with black paint to cover any fingerprints.
The bombs resembled a device that had exploded four months earlier at an NAACP office in Atlanta. Fortunately, it held only teargas — not nails — and no one died. A letter enclosed with the teargas bomb wrote of unfairness at the 11th Circuit Court
Then, on Dec. 18, 1989, Savannah alderman and civil rights lawyer Robert Robinson — who had been one of the first black students to integrate Savannah High in 1963 — opened a package he found on his desk. It exploded and Robinson, 42, died three hours later.
Saved by the bell. In just a few days, the anonymous bomber had the 11th District states of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia gripped by fear.
Rep. Willye F. Dennis, who was president of the NAACP in Jacksonville, Florida, received a package shortly after Robinson died, but a friend called to warn her before she had a chance to open it. It contained a bomb like the others.
Inside the box, the sender placed letters taking credit for the NAACP teargas attack and the other bombs. The killer said he was hunting NAACP officers.
Murder victim Robert Robinson
Declaration of vengeance. His motive, it seemed at first, was revenge for a case that had no connection to him whatsoever — the rape and murder of preschool teacher Julie Love by Emmanuel Hammond on July 11, 1988.
“Anytime a black man rapes a white woman in Alabama, Florida, or Georgia, Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System shall assassinate one federal judge, one attorney, and one officer of the NAACP,” one of the bomber’s letters stated.
He sent around 30 threatening letters to various federal judges, civil rights groups, and news organizations, including one to popular local TV anchor Brenda Wood.
‘One’ holds the key. The U.S. Marshall Service spent nearly $5 million on 24-hour bodyguards to protect Helen Vance and federal judges in the district and to upgrade courthouses’ video and X-ray equipment.
Noting that the typewriter the bomber used to write his letters and address the mailing labels had a replacement “1” key, the FBI put a huge effort into searching for the machine. In fact, the Feds nearly hectored an innocent junk dealer named Robert Wayne O’Ferrell to the point of suicide after they found out that he once owned a similar typewriter.
The big break in the case came when an ATF chemist named Lloyd Erwin remembered a bomb discovered by a Georgia woman in her home 17 years earlier, in 1972.
Charismatic at times. Hazel Strickland Moody had opened a still-unmailed box she found in her home. It was addressed to an auto dealership that repossessed a car belonging to her husband, Walter Leroy Moody. The explosion blew away parts of her finger and thigh and wounded her face and shoulder. She needed six operations to recover.
So who was Walter Leroy Moody, commonly known as Roy? Born the son of an auto mechanic on March 24, 1935, in Rex, Georgia, Moody was alternately depicted as a charmer and a loner.
The Atlanta Constitution, which covered the bombing cases extensively, noted descriptions of Moody as an obsessive and manipulative man who could “sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Certifiable. As a young man, Moody studied chemistry and physics at Mercer University and enrolled in John Marshall Law School. He never finished at either school but enjoyed successful stints in the army and air force and received honorable discharges.
The May-December marriage of Susan McBride and Walter Leroy Moody benefited neither of them in the end
In 1967, psychiatrist Thomas M. Hall diagnosed Moody as having “ambulatory schizophrenia” and general trouble readjusting to civilian life, according to reporting from the Atlanta Constitution. Moody “knew right from wrong, but couldn’t seem to keep from impulsively going ahead and doing whatever he thought of,” according to the analysis.
Multiple media sources give Moody’s latter occupation as “literary consultant.” Although he didn’t exactly seem like someone Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis met for high tea at the Plaza, Moody had founded an organization called the Associated Writers Guild of America. For a fee, he offered to publish writers’ work in a book called Authors to Watch. The Better Business Bureau received complaints from consumers in 48 states about the organization, which Moody claimed was a nonprofit.
According to Deadly Vengeance: The Roy Moody Mail Bomb Murders by Ray Jenkins, it was Hazel Moody who provided the more steady income to the couple and their son, Mark, via her job with Ralston Purina.
POTUS plea. When he was tried for creating and possessing the bomb that injured his wife in 1972, Moody strenuously denied the charges, but was convicted anyway. Judge Robert Vance Sr. sentenced him to six years. (Hazel divorced him despite his legal salvos to fight the split, according to Deadly Vengeance.)
He served his time at a state penitentiary and spent the latter 1970s and early 1980s trying to get his conviction overturned, fighting bitterly with the 11th District Court to no avail. He wrote to President George H.W. Bush for help, but had no luck there either.
Sprung from prison after two years, Moody started a boat equipment company, then allegedly tried to drown three of his employees — he had taken out life insurance policies totaling $2.2 million on the men — whom he tasked with shooting underwater photos, according to the New York Times.
One of the men claimed that Moody had stomped on his hand while he was desperately trying to climb the ladder to get back on the boat. After a 1983 trial, the jury couldn’t reach a decision and prosecutors declined to retry the case against Moody.
Race or restiveness. Moody filed lawsuits against the three former employees plus law enforcement involved with the case. A panel including Judge Vance scuttled the suit.
Now it was 1989, and Moody — a free man — was the No. 1 suspect in two fatal bomb attacks.
It seemed that he was so indignant about being accused of making one bomb that injured his wife back in 1972 that he decided to make more bombs to hurt more people.
Scattered living quarters. Or were the bombings motivated by the racist reasons Moody proclaimed in his letters? Like Robert Robinson, Judge Vance had a long history of supporting civil rights.
We’ll get to that question in a minute but, first, the takedown: Investigators yielded a suspicious number of typical bomb-making items while searching three locations — Moody’s antiseptically clean house in Rex, an apartment he rented in Chamblee, and an airplane hangar he somehow had access to.
Long before his special counsel gig, Robert S. Mueller III was an assistant AG who helped prosecute Moody
Investigators also found a letter-folding machine. The bomb letters had been perfectly folded.
Spouse starts spilling. On July 13, 1990, authorities arrested Moody, who looked as though he used leftover Rust-Oleum to paint his own mop top.
What really sealed his fate was information from the one person he probably never expected to betray him: his mousey second wife.
Susan McBride Moody, 28, was arrested along with her husband, but she got out on bail.
Dressed to kill. At the federal trial in 1991 — which was held in Minnesota before a sequestered jury — Susan testified about the couple’s special shopping trips, when he would instruct her to fill a cart with such items as metal pipes, nails, safety glasses, gloves, and shower caps. He figured no one would suspect the innocent-looking Susan of anything.
Authorities believed that, to avoid leaving evidence, Moody outfitted himself like a surgeon while making the bombs.
Susan, who allegedly suffered from Battered Woman Syndrome and received immunity, testified that she had purchased a secondhand typewriter for Leroy like the one used to write the threatening letters; the machine was later thrown away and never recovered.
Solitary conversations. The prosecution, led by future FBI director Louis Freeh, had plenty more ammunition in store: The authorities had matched a fingerprint on one of the bomb letters to an employee at a copy shop in Kentucky where Susan said she had Xeroxed documents related to the bombings.
Plus, the authorities had surveilled Moody at home and in jail (where he talked to himself) and picked up some incriminating utterances, according to the FBI’s website.
Although Forensic Files and Moody himself portrayed his string of 1989 bombings as racism-motivated, in the end, the FBI concluded that it was just a ruse to throw off investigators so no one would suspect him of killing the primary target of his resentment: Judge Robert Vance.
Not doing himself any favor. Meanwhile, Moody blamed the exploding packages on the Ku Klux Klan.
Against his lawyer’s advice, Moody took the stand as the only defense witness, giving “rambling, sometimes bizarre testimony during which he interspersed details of his sex life,” according to an AP account.
As for the shopping trips for the bomb components, the defendant explained that he had been duped into buying them for someone else.
On June 28, 1991, the jury found Moody guilty of 70 charges, including the murder of Vance and mailing threats to Vance’s colleagues as well as to area journalists.
Ultimate punishment. Judge Edward J. Devitt sentenced Moody to seven life terms plus 400 years.
Because Moody’s second murder victim, Robert Robinson, was a local official rather than a federal one, his case was a state action. Moody argued loudly and created disruptions toward the beginning of the trial but, by the time it wound down, he was quietly reading a paperback, the Atlanta Constitution reported.
William C. Holman Correctional Facility is notorious for understaffing but managed to hold onto Moody for two decades
In 1997, Moody received a sentence of death by the electric chair.
By this time, Susan Moody had divorced him.
The four children Walter Leroy Moody had accrued over the years weren’t in his corner either. They wanted nothing to do with him and refused to use his last name, according to Ray Jenkins’ book.
Moody denied his guilt right up to the end, claiming a government conspiracy framed him. He appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the federal court had no right to hand him over to Alabama, which was slated to carry out the execution.
Feigned empathy. His lawyers took a stab at persuading Alabama’s governor to grant Moody clemency because the murdered judge wasn’t a fan of capital punishment.
Moody even tried to get Robert Vance Jr. — the son of the murdered judge — on his side, claiming that Vance deserved to see the “real killer” of his father revealed.
Those bids were unsuccessful.
And with an IQ of 130, Moody couldn’t play the last-resort “no execution because I’m retarded” card (Ronnie Joe Neal and John Lotter).
Walter Leroy Moody Jr. in a mug shot taken shortly before his death
In the end, Walter Leroy Moody succeeded only at postponing justice — until April 19, 2018, when was 83 years old.
Moody declined to order a last meal, although he had earlier enjoyed cheesesteak sandwiches and Dr Peppers with some visiting friends at William C. Holman Correctional Facility.
He refused to give any last words.
By this time, Alabama was offering death row inmates a choice of lethal injection or the electric chair.
Moody took the needle.
Newspapers all over the world reported on the “execution of the oldest inmate in modern times.”
Widow’s mixed feelings. It’s not clear whether or not homicide victim Robert Robinson’s family witnessed the event. Robert Vance Jr., who by this time had become a judge himself, didn’t attend.
Neither did Helen Vance, who opposed the death penalty but admitted she wasn’t too sorry to see her husband’s assassin exit this world.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Tubi
Where Is Tommy Smith’s Killer from Peoria? (“A Wrong Foot,” Forensic Files)
Dangerous criminals seem to get out of prison too often and too early — Forensic Files killers Ron Gillette and Caleb Hughes come to mind, for example.
So a check on the incarceration status of knife-wielding intruder Gene A. Brown Jr. seems in order.
Murder victim Tommy Smith
Like the others, he’s just the kind of bad guy we all fear will slip through the justice system’s fingers.
Impromptu trip. “A Wrong Foot” tells the story of the Illinois home invasion waged by Brown, which left one dead and put two others in an intensive care unit.
So, let’s get started on a recap of the episode along with additional information drawn from internet research. This will be a quick one (for me, that means 1,000 words) because the Peoria Journal Star is the only newspaper that carried detailed accounts of the case:
On July 19, 1991, Gene A. Brown Jr., a married dad out on parole for a burglary conviction, grabbed a kitchen knife, removed his shoes, put socks on his hands, and entered his next-door neighbors’ house through an open window at around 3 a.m.
Chilling with pals. He probably didn’t realize that his fellow Peoria residents Kasey Johnson, 17, and roommate Jennifer Logsdon, 19, weren’t alone.
Jennifer’s fiancé, Richard T. “Tommy” Smith, 20, was visiting.
The two women and Tommy had been lounging around in what looks like everybody’s first post-school rental, with ugly wall-to-wall carpeting and a mattress on the floor doubling as a couch. The three watched a movie together and fell asleep in front of the TV.
Brown would later tell police that he had just enjoyed a rock of crack cocaine and went over to Logsdon’s house with the intent of stealing money to buy more drugs.
Scene of the crime: The 2-bedroom house at 3007 W. Proctor last sold for $31,000 in 2006, according to Zillow
Went down fighting. He used his knife to attack Tommy Smith, who fought back with his bare hands and attempted to restrain him in a chair. That gave Kasey Johnson an opportunity to run into a bedroom and call 911.
When Tommy fell to the floor from loss of blood, Brown went after Kasey and Jennifer, slitting both their throats. He left them for dead and stole Kasey’s purse on the way out.
Neither woman was sexually assaulted, and emergency services arrived quickly enough to save their lives. They recovered from their wounds in Saint Francis Medical Center.
Tommy died at the scene.
Jennifer Logsdon Updike during her 2003 appearance on Forensic Files
Zero cleanup effort. Although it was too dark inside the house for the women to identify the killer — despite that he was their next-door neighbor — testing confirmed that a footprint at the scene matched Brown’s.
He hadn’t made much of a cover-up effort at home. Police found a trove of incriminating blood and weapon evidence at Brown’s house.
Brown didn’t even bother to shower. He had blood from all three victims in his hair.
After a horror story like that, let’s get right to the welcome news: Gene A. Brown Jr. is still in prison and has virtually no chance of getting out on two feet.
Remorse spoken. After authorities arrested Brown and set his bail at $1 million, the 27-year-old agreed to a plea deal.
Judge Robert Manning gave Brown a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole for murder, two 30-year sentences for the attempted murders, and 15 years for residential theft.
He apologized for killing Tommy Smith. “I wish I could take my own life and give it to that young man,” Brown said in court, the Peoria Journal Star reported. “If I had known drugs could do that to me, I would have never got involved.”
Hidden agenda? Judge Robert Manning’s words which, like Brown’s, referenced drugs, may have been less relevant than they seemed: “If there is anything to be gained from these senseless acts, it is the message to those who play the dangerous game of drugs to stop that game,” the judge said.
Gene Brown in 1991 and in a recent Illinois DOC mug shot
Drugs surely played a role in the ferocity of the attack, but did Brown really go next door with the primary intent of stealing money for crack cocaine?
Murderous intent. A rental unit occupied by two struggling teenagers seems an unlikely target for someone hoping to nab a pile of cash.
Plus, in his shoeless state, where was he going to buy drugs?
It seems more likely that, as Forensic Files contended, he went next door with sexual assault and murder on his agenda. He covered his hands to prevent fingerprint evidence, but he didn’t worry about his face being ID’ed — the victim or victims would be dead.
Fortunately, Tommy Smith’s presence at the apartment prevented any rape plans that Brown had in store.
Safely tucked away. The most recent mention of Brown in the media was in a 2016 obituary for his father, Gene Autry “Sonny” Brown Sr., a U.S. Air Force veteran who worked at Caterpillar.
It gives Gene Jr.’s locale as Menard — the same Illinois prison that houses another Forensic Files killer who’s never getting out, Mark Winger.
But today, the 6-foot-tall 220-pound Brown is locked up in the Western Illinois Correctional Center, according to state records.
Mother’s illness. No recent information came up about Jennifer Logsdon Updike, who had married and had kids by the time Forensic Files produced the episode, or Kasey Johnson.
Tommy Smith, lower right, with his sisters and parents
Tommy Smith’s sweet-natured mother, Cornelia “Connie” Smith, who viewers will remember from her appearance on Forensic Files, died of multiple system atrophy at the age of 65 in 2014, leaving a husband and two daughters.
She seemed to take comfort in knowing that her son fought back instead of running away, and saved two women’s lives.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. —RR
