Rebecca Reisner, Author at Forensic Files Now

Kathleen Foley (aka Katy Doyle) Kills for a Player

Q&A with Prosecutor Michael McIntyre
(“When the Dust Settled,” Forensic Files)

After three hours of fruitlessly combing the internet for an epilogue for “Katy Doyle,” I tried watching “When the Dust Settled” one more time.

Murder victim Joseph Foley and Kathleen Foley — Joe and Kathleen Foley in happier times

Sure enough, the end credits of the Forensic Files episode said that some names had been changed.

It turns out that the woman who murdered her husband so she could divert all of her bandwidth to a workplace Romeo was actually named Kathleen Ann Foley.

Her husband, whom she shot four times in his sleep on July 30, 1998, was Joe Foley.

Kathleen, a 36-year-old psychiatric aide at Allentown State Hospital in Pennsylvania, probably didn’t know that her boyfriend, George Fleming, was romancing another woman on the side, but she certainly knew that he was married.

Nonetheless, Kathleen happily cashed in a $1,177 savings bond to give George, who worked in housekeeping at the hospital, a down payment on a Chrysler Concord.

Photo of the book Forensic Files Now — Book available in stores and online!

While the widow was looking forward to using her husband’s $212,000 life insurance payout to underwrite new escapades with her Casanova, the police were slowly building a case against her. They didn’t believe her story that an anonymous intruder killed her husband.

Results of an autopsy on Joe Foley, a union official and recreational therapist at the hospital, conflicted with the timeline of the story that Kathleen offered. And the clothing at the crime scene was arranged the wrong way.

Allentown State Hospital, where the Foleys and Fleming worked, closed in 2010

Still, Kathleen Foley maintained that an unknown thief took her husband’s life, and her defense lawyer tried to finger everyone from a local trade organization to a foreign terrorist group.

A Lehigh County jury rejected those contentions, and she received a life sentence on October 2, 2000.

But the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections doesn’t list a “Kathleen Foley” as an inmate, and newspapers haven’t mentioned her name in years.

What happened to her?

Fortunately, former District Attorney Michael P. McIntyre, who prosecuted Kathleen in 2000, agreed to fill in a few blanks about the case for forensicfilesnow.com. Following are excerpts from our phone conversation:

Michael McIntyre, Lehigh County prosecutor — Prosecutor Michael McIntyre in his *Forensic Files* appearance

Did anything about the case surprise you? I handled it from the arrest through the trial — I was the one pressing for the arrest. The amazing thing is how she remained free for 15 months after she shot her husband. It was soon after the time of the OJ Simpson trial, and the defense came up with the mantra “rush to judgment,” and investigators didn’t want to do that anymore.

What did you think George Fleming’s role was in the crime? The boyfriend was the whole impetus for this killing. Our theory was that he was selling Kathleen on something like “go ahead and kill him.” But he had an iron-clad alibi. We couldn’t find anything on him. He testified for the prosecution. In my heart of hearts, I thought he might have had something to do with it, but we couldn’t prove it.

George Fleming, seen in a Forensic Files screen shot — The other man: George Fleming

Why did Forensic Files use the fictitious last name “Doyle” for Kathleen and Joe Foley? No clue.

I read that Joe Foley was one of nine children. Did you meet any of the siblings? Yes, I met at least two of them and they pushed for the prosecution. They assisted me and told me to talk to this person, talk to that person.

Was Joe Foley a prominent citizen around the area? Joe Foley was well-known in the Irish community. He started a program that brought poor Irish kids to the U.S. for the summer.

What do you recall about the defense’s attempt to shift the blame away from Kathleen Foley? I think there was some kind of defense that had to do with Joe’s work life with the union. Or over the Irish program — they were saying maybe the IRA did it. I never put any credence in it. It’s the defense’s job to come up with theories.

Kathleen Foley only made one appeal attempt. Did that surprise you? It’s very rare. There’s no downside [to an appeal], nothing to lose.

Kathleen Foley served her time in the SCI Muncy prison — what’s it like? I’ve never been there, but I think it’s brutal, one of our toughest prisons for women.

Pennsylvania doesn’t list Kathleen Foley as an inmate. Was she released? No. She died a year or two years ago.

Was a fellow inmate to blame? I heard it was natural causes, nothing traumatic.

How did you like working with Forensic Files? It was a good experience. They found some gunshot residue on the nightgown that she wore, and we used that as evidence.

Are you still working for Lehigh County? I retired from the DA’s office in 2001, but they brought me back for one more Forensic Files, the Patricia Rorrer case. It was my half hour of fame — Foley was my 15 minutes.♠

The time in the spotlight was even more fleeting for Kathleen’s paramour George Fleming. It ended with the trial and the 2003 Forensic Files episode.

Scene of Joe Foley's murder in Fountain, Hill, Pennsylvania — Scene of the crime in Fountain Hill, a borough of Bethlehem, Pa.

The only subsequent mention of him that turned up in the media was a 2006 Morning Call item noting that his storage facility items would be auctioned off to satisfy a lien.

Incidentally, Kathleen Foley is not the only Forensic Files killer to sacrifice everything for a love object who ended up helping the prosecution. Sarah Johnson made the same mistake.

They both should have listened to my old hair-stylist’s advice, “Don’t lose your head over a little piece of tail.”

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

Rae Carruth: An Update

An NFL Player Wants the Son He Almost Killed

Rae Carruth’s name recently resurfaced in the news because of his release from prison. His story never made it into an episode of Forensic Files, but it should have.

It features elements of a Greek tragedy, including an NFL player (because professional athletes are the gods of modern-day mythology), a woman strong enough to defy him, and an innocent child born into a crucible.

Carruth would make a perfect anti-hero for an epic saga, except for one thing: He didn’t have an objective like glory on the battlefield or ruling the world.

He just wanted to save himself some cash.

After Carruth, a wide receiver for the Carolina Panthers, impregnated a real estate agent named Cherica Adams, he urged her to get an abortion. He was already paying $3,500 to $5,500 a month to support a son he had with girlfriend Michelle Wright in Sacramento five years earlier.

Adams, 24, decided to have her baby anyway.

Carruth was well-liked within the Panthers. In college, he set a record for receiving yards

Carruth, then 25, had a contract with the Panthers for $3.7 million over four years, which breaks down to $77,000 a month. A few thousand dollars more in child support every month wouldn’t have meant trading in his Expedition for a Fiesta or shopping at Jack’s 99 Cents Stores.

Nonetheless, Carruth, who had made a couple of minor bad investments in his young life, decided to intercept any new demand for funds.

He enlisted some hitmen.

Then, on November 16, 1999, he arranged for an outing to the movies with Cherica Adams that involved her car following his on the way to her home.

On Rea Road in North Charlotte, Carruth blocked her black BMW with his SUV so the killers could ambush her via a drive-by shooting.

She sustained three gunshot wounds to her back and one to her neck but managed to call 911, explain what happened, and say that she thought Rae Carruth was responsible.

It’s hard to listen to the recording. She sounds so sweet at a time when she was in excruciating pain (every third word out of my mouth would have been an obscenity) and needed help fast.

Doctors at Carolinas Medical Center delivered Adams’ son by emergency Caesarian section.

The baby, named Chancellor Lee, was premature and had cerebral palsy. His mother lapsed into a coma.

Meanwhile, investigators had tracked down the men in the rented Nissan Maxima used in the shooting. Two of them immediately gave up Carruth as the mastermind behind the plan.

Police arrested Carruth in connection with the shooting, and he made bail.

After Adams died of organ failure on December 14, 1999, Carruth fled. The police found him hiding inside the trunk of a friend’s car in a Tennessee motel parking lot. He had $3,900 in cash with him and a container he’d used to relieve himself in the vehicle.

At the trial, shooter Van Brett Watkins testified that Carruth paid him to kill Adams.

In addition to his testimony, the prosecution had notes Cherica Adams wrote while in the hospital. One piece of scrawled writing said she had heard Carruth say that “we’re leaving now” to someone on the phone the night of the shooting.

Amber Turner, yet another girlfriend who Carruth impregnated, testified that in 1998, Carruth directed her to have an abortion and threatened “don’t make me send somebody out there to kill you,” according to court papers. (She decided not to have the child.)

Carruth’s lawyer, however, claimed the murder had nothing to do with Adams’ pregnancy and that Watkins shot her to punish the upstanding Carruth for refusing to finance a drug deal.

Van Brett Watkins, Stanley Abraham, and Michael Kennedy

Numerous witnesses for the defense testified that Carruth, who had no criminal record, was mild-mannered, kind, and never violent.

But there was no explaining away the evidence that Carruth blocked the victim’s car right before the shooting and then drove off without calling 911.

On January 2, 2001, a jury convicted Carruth of conspiracy to commit murder. He received a sentence of 18 to 24 years.

According to North Carolina Public Safety Department records, Carruth served his time in minimum security and didn’t make any trouble. He worked as a barber for his fellow inmates for $1 a day.

But shortly before his release from Sampson Correctional Institution on October 22, 2018, Carruth began making waves by declaring that he wanted custody of Chancellor.

He expressed regret about the death of Cherica Adams and apologized in a letter to her mother, Saundra Adams, who has had custody of Chancellor since he was a baby.

Carruth claimed that both he and Cherica were seeing a number of different people, and he wasn’t worried about her pregnancy at all because it wasn’t necessarily his.

A newspaper clipping with a *Charlotte Observer* photo of Saundra Adams with her grandson, Chancellor

In his handwritten 15-page note, he praised Saundra Adams for helping Chancellor overcome the challenges from his cerebral palsy. He learned to walk and talk, which doctors originally thought was impossible.

But Carruth also wrote a number of things not particularly endearing to the mother of a murdered daughter. For example:

"Never was Cherica under the illusion (or delusion) that I was ever going to propose marriage to her. Lust was the tie that bound us, not like or love... We randomly 'hooked up' a hand full of times and never made it about anything more than that."

Now, to be sure, Rae Carruth is not the kind of athlete who played too much football without his helmet. He double-majored in English and education at the University of Colorado in Boulder and made the academic All-Big 12 team.

But it bears repeating: He really should have done a more intelligent job of editing his declaration of contrition to Saundra Adams, including the part where he reminded her that she wouldn’t “be around forever” to take care of Chancellor.

Rae Carruth exits prison on October 22, 2018 — Rae Carruth exits prison in 2018

He insisted that Saundra Adams shouldn’t have to raise her grandchild — it was his job to do so.

Carruth walked out of prison on October 22, 2018, free except for nine months of supervised parole.

He moved in with a friend in Pennsylvania and began working from home, according to a Charlotte Observer story from December 11, 2018.

The article by writer Scott Fowler, who has followed the case since the beginning, reports that Carruth is now asking Saundra Adams to let him spend time with Chancellor rather than seeking custody.

For her part, Adams, who went on to become a board member of Mothers of Murdered Offspring, has said she will never relinquish custody — but she forgives Carruth and will consider allowing him to visit Chancellor, now 19.

Carruth speaks to his older son, Raelando, age 24, every day, according to Fowler’s story.

So, overall, it sounds as though Rae Carruth’s outlook is getting brighter — or at least as upbeat as a saga about a father who kills his child’s mother can be.

As for Carruth’s accomplices in the murder, driver Michael Kennedy received a sentence of 14 years and tag-along Stanley Abraham got 90 days. They’re both free now.

Triggerman Van Brett Watkins, whose attitude in the courtroom ranged from remorseful to menacing, got 50 years and is scheduled to stay behind razor wire until 2046.

Watkins apologized to Saundra Adams at the trial, and she forgave him.

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

Watch the American Justice episode about the case.

Rachael Mullenix: A Thankless Child

A Teenager Overkills Her Mother
(“Runaway Love,” Forensic Files)

Note: Updated with a development from October 2022

The story of Rachael Mullenix brings to mind a couple of descriptive terms: pure evil and bad acting.

Rachael Mullenix before her mother Barbara Mullenix's murder — Rachael Mullenix

With the help of her boyfriend, 17-year-old Rachael stabbed her mother 52 times, then headed to Florida for some R&R.

That’s the evil part. The bad acting came during her police interview.

Rachael’s weepy explanation about why she’s the real victim is more excruciating than your friend’s cousin’s one-woman off-Broadway show.

Forensic Files told Rachael’s story in the 2010 episode “Runaway Love.”

For this post, I checked on what’s happened to Rachael since then and also looked for some background information on her late mother.

So let’s get started on the recap along with additional information drawn from internet research:

On September 13, 2006, a member of California’s Newport Beach Yacht Club spotted a dead body in the water.

Police could see it wasn’t the work of a shark or barracuda. A killer had left a butter knife embedded in the victim’s eye.

The body was in a degraded condition, but investigators managed to identify the victim as Barbara Mullenix from the serial number on her breast implants.

Members of the Newport Beach Yacht Club were unaccustomed to finding homicide victims in their midst

Barbara, 56, lived in an apartment in Huntington Beach, California, with her ex-husband, Bruce, and their teenage daughter, Rachael.

The couple had divorced years earlier in Oklahoma City, where Rachael Scarlett Mullenix was born in 1989, but ended up sharing the condo in California for financial reasons.

Barbara had dreams of stardom (which probably explains the implants) as an actress. She snagged work as an extra on films and TV shows, including several episodes of her favorite series, CSI.

Sources vary on whether Barbara, who was born on May 29, 1950, had been married once or twice before she met Bruce. She definitely had a son named Alex from a previous husband. Her obituary mentions a daughter named Traci.

Multiple media accounts report that Barbara was raped as a teenager. One story said that the attacker had impregnated her and she gave up the resulting baby for adoption. It’s not clear whether Traci was the daughter.

Rachael was the only child she and Bruce had together.

Ian Allen was Rachael Mullenix’s boyfriend

The mother-daughter relationship had highs and lows.

Rachael said home life was, on one hand, fun-filled “like Disneyland,” but on the other, stressful, with drinking and arguments about money between her parents, according to CBS News.

Although Barbara was understanding when Rachael got pregnant at age 15, she was none-too-supportive when, at 17, Rachael acquired a 21-year-old boyfriend named Ian Allen.

Barbara threatened to file statutory rape charges against Ian. She also showed up at Ian’s home and made a big embarrassing scene, according to Rachael. When she broke curfew, Barbara grounded her, preventing her from gallivanting around with Ian.

The lovebirds wanted to dispense with all the restrictions and run off together. After all, they’d known and loved each other for three whole months.

They decided murder was the best solution.

Days after Barbara made a commotion at Ian’s place, she turned up floating in the harbor. Bruce Mullenix had a solid alibi, so police turned their attention toward his daughter.

Rachael and Ian had disappeared after the murder, but they left enough forensic evidence to keep investigators busy.

In the Mullenix condo, they uncovered traces of cleaned-up blood splatter in a bedroom and Rachael’s DNA on a bloody sponge. They found fingerprint evidence from both Rachael and Ian.

They took note of an empty bed frame in Barbara’s room. A missing mattress is a veritable blinking sign that says Foul Play.

The kitchen contained knives that matched the one found in Barbara’s eye.

Detectives found that someone had withdrawn $300 from Barbara’s credit union account right after the murder.

They traced Rachael and Ian’s escape route from Florida to Louisiana, where authorities arrested the couple. A secret recording device in the backseat of a police car caught Rachael encouraging Ian to plead insanity.

LA Times clipping of Rachael Mullenix and her lawyer at the sentencing hearing — *Los Angeles Times* clip

The pair had left a mile-long electronic trail by texting each other dozens of incriminating messages about their plan. “After what my mom has done 2 U you can do what you want as long as U don’t get hurt or in trouble,” said one of Rachael’s texts.

But for criminal boyfriend-girlfriend duos, it can be a short trajectory from committing capital murder for the sake of love to turning against each other in legal proceedings. (Diana Haun and Sarah Johnson.)

Rachael fell first.

Once detectives got her alone in an interrogation room, she whined out an unconvincing story about how Ian killed her mother and she tried to stop him, but she was knocked unconscious and woke up bound and gagged in a hotel room with Ian.

As mentioned, it was a performance far worse than any high school production of Our Town.

And speaking of drama, prosecutor Sonia Balleste found out that Rachael had made a failed attempt at slashing her mother to death two years earlier, in 2004. Balleste suggested that the incident made Rachael realize that killing Barbara was a two-person job.

Rachael also made sure to be better-equipped her second time. Detectives determined that the couple used three different knives during Barbara’s murder.

Rachael Mullenix with boyfriend Ian Allen — Really worth murder?

Once completed, the murder didn’t seem to weigh on Rachael’s mind too much. Her jury got to see security footage of the couple acting friendly during their post-homicide victory tour in the south. She didn’t look like a kidnap victim.

At first, however, Ian backed up Rachael’s version of the story and accepted all the blame. But he did a 180 later and said it was Rachael alone who had killed her mother.

“He did the not-so-smart but chivalrous thing by saying, ‘I did it. I killed her,’ ” public defender Julia Swain told the jury, the LA Times reported on October 16, 2008.

Ian contended that Rachael committed the homicide in a fit of rage over Barbara’s years of verbal abuse and mean drunkenness — and that he only helped cover it up. Rachael couldn’t put the body into a cardboard box and throw it into the Pacific Ocean by herself.

While Ian betrayed Rachael, her dad stayed loyal. Bruce Mullenix denied that his daughter would ever kill her mother despite that his ex-wife could be abusive toward Rachael. As the Huntington Beach Independent reported:

“When she was drunk she would say things like, ‘I’m going to go up to school and go to class and embarrass you,’” [Bruce] said. “‘I’ll call up your friends and say things that humiliate and embarrass you.’ … You have to understand she was a completely different person when she was drunk.”

Nonetheless, the jury found Rachael guilty of first-degree murder.

After Rachael’s trial, a victim impact statement from one of Barbara’s friends denounced the teenager as having a “black heart” and throwing out her mom like “garbage,” the LA Times reported on October 11, 2008.

Rachael, wearing French braids for the sentencing hearing, looked like “a school girl with a broken heart,” the Orange County Register reported.

Little Rachael Mullenix and mom Barbara Mullenix — Rachael and Barbara Mullenix

When the judge gave her 25 years to life, her grandparents broke into tears and her grandmother cried out, “She’s innocent!”

Two years later, in 2010, Rachael lost an appeal claiming prosecutorial misconduct.

When I first wrote about the case, Rachael was residing in Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, with parole eligibility for 2027 at age 38.

But, according to a source close to the situation, Rachael Mullenix was released from prison on October 14, 2022 and is with her father, Bruce, in Southern California. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation no longer lists her as an inmate.

Ian Allen, also found guilty and given 25 years to life, is in Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe and eligible for parole in November 2024.

Rachael’s half-brother, Alex, apparently had no involvement in the legal proceedings and didn’t speak to the press, although he and Rachael weren’t strangers. They lived in the same house in Oklahoma before the divorce.

It’s sad that his mother was robbed of a chance to shake off her troubles and try for a second act in life.

You can watch the 48 Hours about the case on YouTube.

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

P.S. Rachael’s brother, Alex Hagood, reached out to Forensic Files Now and defended Rachael in a subsequent interview.

Watch the episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

Jill Coit: Some Snow Job

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

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

Jill Coit, called a black widow killer, murder husband Gary Boggs. — Jill Coit in her siren days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Lonita Billiot was born in Louisiana on June 11, 1943 or 1944, and had what the crimemuseum.org called a normal life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill at the time of her marriage to William Coit

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steamboat Springs offers visitors good clean fun

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Coit’s sons, Seth and William, didn’t believe in their mother’s innocence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Coit in a recent Colorado DOC mugshot

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

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

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

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

Tim Boczkowski’s Kids: Where Are They Now?

Their Father Made Them Orphans
(Forensic Files, “All Wet”)

On November of 2018, media outlets all over the country ran an AP story reporting that Tim Boczkowski was up for parole in North Carolina.

Tim Boczkowsi and Elaine Pegher at their wedding — Tim Boczkowski’s wedding to Elaine Pegher

The prospect of the Tar Heel State releasing a man found guilty of drowning both of his wives — one in a bathtub in Greensboro in 1990 and the other in a hot tub in Pittsburgh in 1994 — made for scintillating headlines.

Sentence has teeth. But the fact is that Boczkowski, who the press has called an American Bluebeard, has almost no chance of getting out and snagging a new spouse on Match.com.

Even if the onetime owner of a dental-supply business wins parole, North Carolina will immediately turn him over to authorities in Pennsylvania, where he has a separate life sentence waiting for him.

For this week, I looked for a story with more possibilities: What happened to Boczkowski’s daughter and two sons, who were school-aged when they lost their loving biological mother and then their kind-hearted stepmother?

Second wife Maryann Boczkowski formally adopted Tim’s children

Media-friendly. At the time of the second murder, of Maryann Boczkowski in 1994, Todd was 9 years old, Sandy 10, and Randy 13.

The trio gave separate on-camera interviews on “While the Children Slept,” the American Justice episode about the case. They said they supported their father’s innocence. “Whether he’s guilty or innocent, I’m still going to love him,” said Todd.

That same year, the kids also spoke out in court during the sentencing phase of the Maryann Boczkowski homicide trial. They asked the court to spare their dad’s life, but he got a death sentence anyway. (Judge Donna Jo McDaniel later reduced it to life.)

Todd Boczkowski, Sandy Boczkowski, and Randy Boczkowski — Todd, Sandy, and Randy Boczkowski circa 1992

Musical homes. As of 2003, when Forensic Files originally aired “All Wet,” about the deaths of Elaine Pegher Boczkowski and Maryann Fullerton Boczkowski, the kids were saying they still loved their father and believed that both of their moms died accidentally.

So, what has happened to them since Tim Boczkowski traded his Dockers for prison scrubs?

Although they were shuffled around a lot, the Boczkowskis managed to stay together. They first lived with their aunt and then their grandparents, but for whatever reason, they couldn’t care for them permanently.

Odyssey concludes. The kids landed in a happy foster home, but it was overcrowded and its location made it impossible for all of them to continue school in the North Hills District of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.

In 1996, the AP reported that the Boczkowski kids were searching for a new foster home where they could stay together and in the same school district.

Here’s the best part of the story: 100 people applied to adopt them.

Brothers Randy and Todd Boczkowski circa 2003 — Randy and Todd Boczkowski circa 2003

Faithful offspring. County authorities narrowed down the list to 20. The kids, who were ages 12 to 15 by then, decided on a couple whose own children who had grown up and moved out, according to an AP story from January 17, 1997.

But they hadn’t forgotten about their original dad. According to another AP account: “They write him and are allowed one phone call a year. They’ve mailed him photos and sent him tins of cookies for Christmas.”

In the meantime, the new foster family must have done a good job.

Impressive résumés. The kids participated in sports in school, finished college, and went on to have LinkedIn profiles brimming with keywords like “sales funnels,” “competitive compensation structure,” and “social interaction through a behavioral system.”

(Not exactly sure what all those terms mean, but they sound like the stuff hiring managers like to see.)

Sandy Boczkowski in 2003 — Sandy Boczkowski 2003

Randy, the eldest child, grew up to work with at-risk young men at George Junior Republic and later joined a Philadelphia-area crowd-management company as an intern and rose to branch manager.

Baby a hero. His sister, Sandy, graduated from North Carolina State and has had a decade-long career as an employment recruiter and expert on talent development for private industry.

And the youngest Boczkowski, Todd, trained with the Civil Air Patrol when he was 16. He joined the U.S. Air Force and became a military police officer. In 2006, a Virginia Daily Press story mentioned Todd after he came to the aid of a child at the scene of a shooting in Hampton.

After his military service, Todd worked in online marketing for several years before he and a business partner established their own digital consulting firm in Pittsburgh.

No hell-raiser. Meanwhile, their father, Tim Boczkowski, lives in medium security at the Nash Correctional Institution. His last legal action of note came in 2007, when his bid for a new trial for Maryann Boczkowski’s death was rejected.

Boczkowski’s prison record reflects good behavior — no infractions or escape attempts.

There aren’t any recent media accounts about the kids’ relationship with their father, but I suspect they still believe in his innocence, especially considering that Sandy Boczkowski has chosen to live in Raleigh — just 47 miles from where her dad occupies a cell in Nashville, North Carolina.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

Update on Lawrence Murrell and Justin Glover

A Scam Begets a Murder
(“Dollars and Sense,” Forensic Files)

When people kill for a small amount of cash, it’s only natural to think: Couldn’t they just make money via fraud instead so no one gets hurt physically?

In what sounds like a Sopranos subplot, a trio of young pals in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, started out to do just that.

Fraudster friends. Wesley Person, Justin Glover Jr., and Lawrence Murrell Jr. would persuade a fourth party to apply for an auto loan, divide up the money, and never buy the car.

The Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union couldn’t recoup the funds by seizing the vehicle because there was no vehicle. The conspirators carried out more than a dozen of these scams, defrauding lenders out of a total of $115,000 to $120,000.

Unfortunately, the men’s shenanigans took a horrible turn, which Forensic Files recounted in “Dollars and Sense.”

Shifty move. In 2005, Wesley Person’s partners in crime discovered that he’d quietly completed a scam worth $15,000 to $20,000 and neglected to share the proceeds.

Person, age 26, barely had a chance to enjoy the new shoes he bought himself at the Sneaker Villa in Harrisburg: Murrell and Glover killed him on the day before Christmas.

They defeated the purpose of their business model. Instead of easy money, the two men received life sentences.

Horrible sight. For this week, I looked for epilogues on Murrell and Glover. They were in their early 20s at the time of the murder, so I was curious to find out whether they got any breaks.

The Harrisburg neighborhood where police believe Wesley Person's murder took place in 2005 — The Harrisburg neighborhood where the murder took place

But first here’s a quick recap of the episode along with information drawn from internet research:

On Christmas Eve of December 2005, motorists spotted flames alongside Route 83 near Baltimore, Maryland. They came from a body that had been set on fire.

That’s my BF. Although the corpse had been badly burned, the skull along with a patch of the victim’s braided hair gave a reconstructionist just enough to work with.

A woman named Keisha Walker recognized the police artist’s drawing as her boyfriend, Wesley Person. (Note: He appears to be no relation to either of the NBA players of the same name).

Person was born on August 31, 1979, and attended Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School, whose alumni included science fiction author Isaac Asimov and Shirley Chisolm, the first black woman elected to Congress.

Justin Glover Jr. murderer of Wesley Person — Justin Glover Jr.

Hardest-working scammer. Although Person wasn’t exactly chasing greatness, he didn’t make a whole lot of trouble either. He moved to Pennsylvania and started keeping company with Lawrence Murrell Jr., 21, and Justin Glover Jr., 24.

If anything, Murrell sounded like he should have been a good influence. He was married, worked full time as a janitor for the Harrisburg school district, and was taking college courses. In his spare time, he bought and renovated houses.

Murrell and Glover, the third member of the trio, “were partners in several rental properties in Harrisburg,” according to a Pennlive.com article, which also notes that Glover was a father.

That’ll be cash. But for whatever reason, honest entrepreneurship wasn’t enough, and Murrell, Glover, and Person started the auto loan scams.

The last day anyone saw Person alive was shortly before Christmas. He had gone shopping with a big wad of 50s and 100s.

His buddies Abdul McCauley and Stephen Aikens witnessed him having a heated discussion with Murrell and Glover in the parking lot afterward.

Police theorized that Murrell and Glover took Person to the basement of one of the properties Murrell owned and shot him three times in the head.

Lawrence Murrell Jr. murderer of Wesley Person — Lawrence Murrell Jr.

Detritus divulges. At the site where the duo left Person’s burning body, investigators found some plaster and other detritus that matched the debris in Murrell’s house at 441 South 13th Street in Harrisburg.

On February 19, 2008, Murrell and Glover were found guilty of first-degree murder, criminal conspiracy, and abuse of a corpse.

Glover got a life sentence for the homicide and 11 to 22 years for other charges. Murrell received life without the possibility of parole plus additional time.

They are both still fighting to get out.

Legal maneuvers. In 2014, a superior court upheld Glover’s conviction. He then filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus based on contentions including ineffective counsel for failing to object to the use of “unverified cell phone records,” failure to impeach Abdul McCauley, and the possibility that Keisha Walker “had motive to commit the crime.”

Justin Glover Jr. in a recent mugshot — Justin Glover Jr. in a 2018 mugshot

Glover contends that Aiken should have testified for the defense that he heard Keisha Walker — Person’s girlfriend — say that Person “got what he deserved” because of some bad blood between the two lovebirds.

License to work. Glover also contended that his own girlfriend Christina Hughes should have been allowed to testify that they were watching a movie together during the time of the murder.

In August 2017, U.S. District Judge Richard Conaboy denied Glover’s petition.

For now, Glover resides along with 2,183 inmates in the maximum-security Fayette State Correctional Institution in Labelle, Pennsylvania. It’s the only prison in the state where license plates are made.

At 6-feet-5-inches, Glover probably doesn’t have to worry about being bullied out of his commissary items.

Chance of freedom. Murrell, who is serving his sentence in the medium-security Dauphin County Prison, has had better post-conviction luck.

Although the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania denied his 2010 petition for allowance of appeal, he won the right to an evidentiary hearing in 2018.

Murrell’s court papers contend that he had ineffective counsel who failed to call character witnesses and that the plaster found on Wesley Person’s body could have come from a different property. Murrrell also alleges that Abdul McCauley’s testimony for the prosecution was tainted because Dauphin County had given him favorable treatment for an unrelated drug offense.

Rehab your life and house. No word on how the evidentiary hearing turned out or whether it has even been scheduled yet. As of this writing, Murrell remains behind razor wire.

Murrell and Glover are still young — 34 and 37 — and have plenty of time to explore legal avenues to freedom.

They also have skills that would enable them to start legitimate real estate careers, although the two should probably forget about their partnership and go their separate ways if they get out of prison on two feet.

Incidentally, the 5-bedroom 1-bath row house where Wesley Person met his end is up for sale for $69,100.

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

Watch the episode on YouTube and Tubi

What Happened to Dr. John Schneeberger?

Epilogue for a Canadian Rapist and His Victim
(“Bad Blood,” Forensic Files)

Listen to this post as a podcast

When Dr. John Schneeberger drugged and raped a patient in his exam room, he probably figured that she a) wouldn’t know what happened or b) wouldn’t be believed even if she did.

Schneeberger was a family physician beloved by residents of Kipling, a farming town of 1,100 people in Saskatchewan. Many of them had been treated by the 30ish blond doctor at one time or another and found him kind and caring.

King of the North. The Forensic Files episode “Bad Blood” told the story of his 23-year-old victim, usually identified only as Candy or Candice in the media.

She was a single mother with a high school diploma, a job at a gas station, and a reputation as a partyer.

On the local totem pole, Candy was basically the part buried in the ground.

Who was she to disparage an asset to the community like Dr. Schneeberger? The charming medical professional helped raise funds so the town could install a public swimming pool. He was happily married with four kids — two of them step-children he took in from his wife’s previous marriage.

What a great guy. In fact, he was so agreeable that he willingly took multiple DNA tests after Candy reported the Halloween-night sexual assault to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1992.

Defamation of character. Just as Schneeberger’s admiring public expected, his DNA didn’t match the semen from the alleged rape.

The test results seemed to confirm townspeople’s suspicions that Candy was lying, that she had a crush on Schneeberger and was retaliating because he rejected her, according to Autopsy, an HBO docuseries that produced a segment about the case.

Some residents suspected Candy was hoping to profit from a nuisance suit, according to Forensic Files.

‘Nothing to see here.’ The doctor maintained that he gave Candy the injection of Versed to calm her nerves and that the drug sometimes caused hallucinations of sexual activity as a side effect.

The police halted the investigation in 1994.

What Mrs. Schneeberger and the rest of her husband’s fan club didn’t know was that the doctor had foiled the DNA tests by implanting in his arm a tube containing another man’s blood.

Self-funding. Meanwhile, Candy persisted. Although the Versed had incapacitated her and made her memory hazy that evening on Dr. Schneeberger’s exam table, she felt sure he had raped her.

It took seven years, but her efforts finally landed Schneeberger behind razor wire.

A private detective she hired got hold of Schneeberger’s ChapStick. Candy paid for a DNA test at a private lab and got a match.

John Schneeberger, here with wife Lisa, had a squeaky-clean image hard to assail

Tables turn. But Schneeberger pulled his fake-blood routine once more during the hospital’s lab test and evaded justice again.

Then, in 1997, there was a colossal break in the case: Lisa Schneeberger switched sides.

She found out her husband had been drugging and sexually assaulting her 13-year-old daughter.

The court ordered more DNA tests, which this time included a sample of Schneeberger’s hair and blood drawn from his finger.

They matched the semen from Candy’s attack.

Nice try, Doc. Schneeberger went on trial in November 1999 in Saskatchewan for raping both Candy and his step-daughter.

He admitted to the blood switcheroo; it came from one of his patients. But, he said, it was a matter of self-defense. Candy had broken into his house, he contended, and stolen a used condom so she could frame him.

The jury didn’t buy it and convicted him of enough crimes to put him away forever.

But he got a sentence of only six years.

After the show. The Forensic Files episode, first aired in 2001, ends with Candy’s jubilation when she learned the doctor had been denied parole.

So, what happened to Dr. John Schneeberger after Forensic Files’ closing guitar chords?

Well, it’s a mixture of justice and injustice.

Paperwork problem. After four years in the minimum security annex of Ferndale Institution (now known as Mission Minimum Institution) in British Columbia, Schneeberger won parole.

The ex-convict — who was also sometimes known by his given first name, Steven — promptly moved to Regina, the same town where Candy lived. He’d been stripped of his medical license, so he got work on a demolition crew and also did carpentry.

Fortunately, Candy didn’t have to worry about bumping into Schneeberger at the supermarket for long.

Candy in an appearance on Canada’s ’72 Hours’

Records showed that Schneeberger — who originally came from Zambia and later lived in South Africa — had neglected to disclose on his Canadian citizenship application in 1993 that he was being investigated for rape, according to the Calgary Herald.

They still love him? Canada moved to deport him to South Africa — but not before his victims had to witness the residual goodwill Schneeberger had built up in the Great White North.

His friends began a letter-writing campaign urging the immigration minister to reverse the deportation order so Schneeberger would have a chance to say goodbye to his biological daughters.

Schneeberger’s camp won.

His wife, who was identified as Lisa Dillman after her divorce, was ordered to allow the girls, ages 5 and 6, to see him.

Ex-wife’s dilemma. She had paid $2,000 for contempt of court for previously refusing to take them to see their father in jail, but she ultimately obeyed the visitation order, according to a Globe and Mail story. As writer Margaret Wente quoted the former Mrs. Schneeberger:

“At least I can say to my girls when they’re older: ‘I tried.’ They will know that Mummy at least tried to keep us away from him…. I still blame myself. Maybe if I had believed [Candy], none of this would have happened to my daughter.”

The story also reported that Schneeberger’s pals threw him a going-away party.

He had a garage sale to get rid of his things prior to deportation.

Unwelcome. If this is sounding more like a kid going away to college than a sex criminal being chased out of North America, don’t worry — he faced adversity when he finally landed back in Africa in July of 2004.

The man once affectionately known as “Dr. John” in Canada became “Dr. Rape” in South Africa.

Candy wearing a pink turtleneck and holding her dog in an older shot — One more reason to like Candy (recently and in an older shot): She’s a dog lover

He tried to join the Health Professions Council of South Africa so that he could work in some field of medicine again, but he soon withdrew his application.

His brother, William “Bill” Schneeberger, a cardiothoracic surgeon, tried to help him get back on his feet professionally.

He maintained the charges against his brother were false. “I don’t believe my brother is a saint,” Bill Schneeberger said in a statement to the Calgary Herald, “but I know he is not a fool and rape in a consulting room when you have asked two nurses to join you is ridiculous.”

Bill Schneeberger’s efforts on his brother’s behalf appear to have gone nowhere. Bill himself returned to the U.S. and works with the humanitarian organization Emergency NGO in Ohio, according to his LinkedIn profile.

My old room available? John Schneeberger went to live with his mother, Ina, in Durban, South Africa, and reportedly took up work in the catering industry; he had picked up some skills on kitchen duty in prison. He pretty much dropped off the radar screen after that.

As for Candy, she filed civil suits against the doctor and the Kipling hospital where he treated her. No word on how she fared with the legal actions, but she got to see herself played by supermodel Estella Warren in I Accuse, a movie version of her story made for Canadian TV.

Candy herself appeared on the Canadian news magazine show 72 Hours, which produced an episode about the case called “Good Doctor.”

As of this writing in 2018, she’s known as Candice Fonagy and works as a continuing care assistant for an addiction-services facility in Saskatchewan. Professionals with her job title are known as “the eyes and ears of the frail and vulnerable” — a good fit for someone who has survived a saga like Candy’s.

By the way, Forensic Files executive producer Paul Dowling has said he is a fan of hers and that “Bad Blood” is his favorite of all 400 episodes of the series he created.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime.

See the Autopsy episode “Dead Men Talking” (the segment about Candy comes on at 18:50 minutes).

Listen to this post as a podcast

Sherri Dally’s Murder

An Affair Starts in Vons and Ends in Homicide
(“Sign Here,” Forensic Files)

This week’s recap takes a look at two awful people who killed one nice person.

“Sign Here” tells the story of Sherri Dally’s murder at the hands of her husband and the woman he was having an affair with.

Famous trial. In addition to sharing the standard forbidden-fruit attraction, Diana Haun and Michael Dally had a common interest in macabre things, like wounding people with knives.

Yikes.

Because gory details aren’t my favorite part of murder narratives, for this post I’ll concentrate on the courtroom drama. (One account from the time of the trials said that anyone who wasn’t following the story must live under a rock, but I don’t think it got much coverage beyond the West Coast.)

I also checked into the murderers’ whereabouts today.

But first here’s a recap of the Forensic Files episode along with additional information drawn from internet research:

Diana Haun, 36, was a former model who enjoyed using makeup, wigs, and costumes to change her appearance drastically.

Backgrounds in common. For whatever reason, she ended up as a deli clerk at Vons supermarket in Oxnard, California, near her hometown of Port Hueneme.

Michael, also 36, worked as a manager at the same store. Coincidentally, Diana and Michael both had mothers originally from Japan and fathers who were U.S. servicemen.

The two probably had a lot of stories to share and, somewhere amid dispensing quarter pounds of thick-sliced provolone and spreading cream cheese on everything bagels, they worked up a passion for each other.

They carried on a conspicuous affair despite that Michael was married with two small sons, Devon, 8, and Max, 6.

He and his wife, born Sherri Renee Guess, 35, had met in high school.

Sherri’s mother, Karlyne Guess, who appeared on both Forensic Files and a Fatal Vows episode about the case, described Sherri as a typical California girl active in 4-H, Brownies, and Pioneer Girls.

Mr. Popular. School friends remembered Michael — whose nickname was Hawaiian Mike although he didn’t come from Hawaii — as charming. He had thick black hair and a smooth, tan complexion.

Sherri was crazy about the guy.

He won over her family, too. The two married in 1982.

But by the 1990s, the bloom was off the rose for Michael. “The marriage was marked by her fidelity and Michael Dally’s infidelity,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

In addition to having affairs, Michael patronized prostitutes and used cocaine.

Thankless spouse. It’s painful to read about the kind, generous things Sherri did in hopes of saving her marriage to this loser — like the time she washed and waxed Michael’s car while he was at Diana Haun’s house.

Sherri Guess and Michael Dally on their wedding day — Sherri and Michael Dally married in 1982. The photo gray lenses were the least of his crimes

Although news outlets often described Sherri as a homemaker, she also operated a day care business with her friend Debbie English.

Despite Sherri’s virtue and devotion, by 1996, Michael wanted out of the marriage.

Cruel blueprint. He and Diana came up with a plan. She would disguise herself as a law officer and fool Sherri into thinking she was under arrest so she’d allow Diana to handcuff her and put her in a rental vehicle.

It worked.

The kidnapping happened in a Target parking lot in Ventura on May 6, 1996.

After the abduction, Diana beat and stabbed Sherri to death, possibly even decapitating her. Then, Michael reported his wife missing and presented himself as a distraught husband to the media.

That worked, too, for a while.

But then he began doing things like trying to get rid of Sherri’s possessions while she was still missing.

Disguise-shopping. And while Michael was supposed to be anxiously awaiting word about Sherri, police found him holed up in Diana’s apartment. He was shirtless and she had lingerie on.

Investigators turned their attention toward the two, and evidence began streaming in.

Witnesses remembered that Diana bought a blond wig, fake police badge, and handcuffs prior to the murder, and she was seen near the ravine where searchers discovered Sherri’s remains on June 1, 1996.

Diana Haun on trial for Sherri Dally's murder — Diana Haun in court

Sherri’s blood was found in the teal vehicle Diana rented. A local dry cleaner told investigators about receiving an anonymous phone call around the time of the murder from someone asking how to remove blood from a car seat.

“It’s all him.” And colleagues from Vons had plenty of stories to dish up about the adulterer and his girlfriend.

Diana Haun’s trial took place first.

Lawyers for the skinny, startled-looking defendant, who faced capital punishment, said that Michael took advantage of her love and tricked her into killing Sherri.

Witness after witness. But the forensic evidence pretty much added up to a flashing arrow of guilt pointing at Diana.

About 30 Ventura law officers had worked on the investigation, and 125 witnesses testified.

In addition to the evidence in the car, the police found Diana in possession of a pen with green ink, the same color she used to sign the car rental contract.

The jury also learned that, while Diana was a genius of disguise, she was a dim bulb as a hitwoman.

Diana Haun allegedly wanted to raise Max and Devon Dally herself. Sherri Dally stood in her way

She used a check to pay for her wig and other do-it-yourself murder items. And she wrote it in green ink.

On September 26, 1997, a jury found Diana Haun guilty of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder.

LA Times writer Mack Reed described the jubilation after the verdict:

“The detectives laughed and hugged and laughed some more. The victim’s mother cried, then smiled. [Diana Haun’s] family sat still in the courtroom, ashen-faced.”

Spectators watching a feed of the decision outside the courthouse broke into cheers, the LA Times reported.

Diana Haun got life without parole.

Ms. Moneybags. Tried separately, Michael faced the death penalty, even though no forensic evidence tied him directly to the crime scene. Prosecutors brought him up on special charges of lying in wait and committing the crime for financial gain.

Sherry Dally's mother Karlyne Guess — LA Times clipping shows Karlyne Guess (center) leaving the courtroom

Michael’s defense lawyer Robert Schwartz denied that Michael wanted to avoid a costly divorce and benefit from Sherri’s $50,000 life insurance policy. He already had a wealthy girlfriend, Schwartz contended.

Diana Haun had an annuity worth $1 million thanks to a settlement over an injury sustained in high school. A basketball backboard fell onto her head and put her in a coma for three months. She was receiving $1,077 a month and it was to continue until she turned 65.

“It was all her.” Schwartz blamed Haun for the killing. “This plan was designed, conceived, and carried out by this psycho, crazed whacked-out witch, Diana Haun,” he said.

(She definitely had an interest in witchcraft, but it’s worrisome to see it used as evidence of blood lust — witchcraft is part of the recognized religion of Wicca, which forbids harming others.)

The defense contended that Sherri and Michael Dally were in the process of reconciling and Haun went rogue to stop it.

But witnesses said Michael had spoken of wanting to get out of the marriage.

Father interferes. Debbie English testified that Michael inadvertently made a remark indicating he had prior knowledge of where the body was buried.

She also told the court that Michael’s father, Lawrence Dally, had tried to discourage her from talking to investigators about Michael.

Teenaged Sherri Dally — Sherri Dally as a teenager

Sallie Lowe, one of Michael’s ex-girlfriends, had even more damning information to share. She said Michael had choked her on two occasions and tried to coerce her into giving him money.

“He just wanted [Sherri] to disappear,” Lowe told the court. “There were times he talked about stabbing her with a knife, but not only stabbing her — twisting the knife to cause pain.”

Tainted jury? Lawrence Dally’s testimony that Michael was actually with him when prosecutors contended he was planning the crime with Diana Haun didn’t make much of a dent in the prosecution’s case.

Michael’s trial ended with a murder conviction in April 1998.

The defense pressed for a different jury to determine Michael’s sentence — his trial verdict elicited a lot of cheering from spectators, just as Diana’s had, and there was concern it tainted the jury.

But the same jury was used during the penalty phase two months later.

Sherri’s mother, Karlyne Guess, read a statement in court about how the graphic visions of the murder haunted her.

Throw away the key. There was talk in the defense camp of putting the Dallys’ older son on the stand to dissuade the judge from giving the death penalty. To their credit, they decided against it.

A judge gave Michael Dally life without parole and ordered him to pay the Guess family $15,000.

As far as post-sentencing activity, Diana made some effort early on.

Not loving prison. In October of 2000, she appealed on the grounds that the court had been allowed to hear prejudicial evidence, like that fact that she had a prior affair with another married man and practiced witchcraft.

That train went to Nowhereville, and Haun is still serving her time in Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.

Michael made news as recently as September 2018, when he requested clemency from the state of California. The governor reportedly assigned an investigator to look into the matter, according to the VC Star.

In the meantime, his status is LWOP at California State Prison in Lancaster.

Defense debts. As for Sherri Dally’s sons, Max and Devon, they lived with their paternal grandparents after the murder.

Devon Dally, son of Michael Dally and murder victim Sherri Dally — Devon Dally

In March of 1998, Superior Court Judge Barbara A. Lane awarded the kids $6.4 million in a judgment against Diana Haun, although it’s unclear whether they saw any of the money. Diana already owed $202,000 to her defense attorneys, according to the LA Times.

As an adult, Devon Dally appeared briefly on the ID Network’s The Murder of Sherri Dally, and said that he believes his father is innocent. Devon also said that Sherri was a great mother and he remembers life with his parents as happy.

Max Dally hasn’t done any media that could be located online. He appears to have a career in the security industry.

You can watch an an episode of the New Detectives that includes a segment on the Sherri Dally case for free on YouTube, but it costs $1.99 to view Fatal Vows: A Lonely Place. (Neither show is as good as Forensic Files, but is anything?)

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime.

Sharon Zachary: Impatient Heiress

Robert Rogers Dies at the Hands of a Friend
(“Prints Among Thieves,” Forensic Files)

Greed can take hold of just about anybody, whether it’s a teenager working a funnel cake concession with an overflowing cash box or a county treasurer eyeing the public coffers and thinking he really deserves to be paid for OT.

Sharon Zachary

Most people can shake off the temptation, even if they do create a few mental blueprints for absconding with the funds.

“Prints among Thieves” tells the story of a respectable-seeming woman who followed her greed the whole way. She killed the man who stood between her and a pile of money. And she didn’t go about the homicide passively.

Curiosity stoked. Instead of “accidentally” leaving a tennis ball on the staircase or trying the Forensic Files tribute switcheroo of anti-freeze in a Gatorade bottle, Sharon Kay Zachary got up close and personal.

On April 26, 1996, she beat 80-year-old Robert Rogers to death in a bid to gain full access to his personal fortune.

A short update to her story appeared on this blog last year, but Google has logged so many searches for her name lately that a longer treatment seems in order.

Cash king. For this post, I looked around for more intelligence on Zachary and also tried to find out whether Rogers’ estranged son ultimately ended up with his dad’s assets.

So let’s get started on the recap with additional information drawn from internet research:

Robert Rogers was a colorful old coot who made a small fortune in real estate and trucking in Battle Creek, Michigan. He enjoyed throwing cash around in public. Local thieves preyed upon him multiple times, but Rogers continued to store large sums of cash in his home and on his person.

He had grown up during the Great Depression and didn’t trust banks.

Rogers lived alone in a house on a huge plot of land in Emmett Township, Michigan. His wife had died a few years before he met Sharon Zachary.

Rogers and his only child, an adopted son named Donald, went for long stretches without communicating. When they were together, they argued a lot.

Like a daughter. But Robert Rogers found an agreeable surrogate child in Zachary, a 31-year-old neighbor he hired as a caregiver. He had trouble with his eyesight, so he put Zachary’s name on his checking account and gave her power of attorney to handle his financial transactions.

He also made her the sole beneficiary of his estate.

Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but newspaper accounts reported that Zachary, her husband, Mike, and teenage son, Josh, lived in a house they were in the process of buying from Rogers at the time of the murder.

After one of the robberies, Rogers moved in with the Zacharys for a while and the four became like family, according to “Love Thy Neighbor,” an episode of Mansions and Murders.

Robert Rogers’ house at 1015 Raymond Road has been described as a mansion

Seamy undercoat. Mike Zachary did some kind of work for a carpet retailer, but he tended to have periods of unemployment, according to Tom Headley, a retired Emmett Township police officer who appeared on Mansions and Murders.

Sharon worked as a used-car salesperson, which probably explains a lot.

She may have had persuasive charm, but she was lacking in the common sense department.

It was foolish enough of her to start helping herself to Robert Rogers’ money, but why did she call attention to the theft by buying a car, a truck, a boat, and furniture and taking her family to the Caribbean?

Diminutive killer. Those extravagances added up to about $65,000, according to Forensic Files, and she also transferred another $55,000 in funds to her bank accounts.

At some point, Rogers discovered the financial shenanigans and decided to revoke her power of attorney.

Before he had a chance, a 911 operator got a call from Sharon Zachary to report what looked like a burglary at Rogers’ house. (Her rather husky voice on the phone doesn’t really match the photos from that time; she looks bookish and petite.)

Trace Christenson covered the case for the Battle Creek Enquirer

Initial suspect. Police arrived on the scene to find a hole in a sliding glass door to Rogers’ house, disarray inside, and Robert Rogers lying dead on the floor, struck at least 25 times in the head with a heavy object. Someone had gone through his pockets.

Sharon Zachary probably figured the alienated son would take the fall for the old man’s death.

At first, investigators did focus on Donald Rogers.

Shared animosity. While his father never lacked for cash, Donald had to work two jobs, a shift at General Motors and a part-time gig selling real estate. Donald had once tried, unsuccessfully, to get his father to give him power of attorney — a suspect move.

And the two men were short-tempered. One of their disputes allegedly got physical. All things considered, Donald must have seemed like the perfect patsy for Sharon Zachary.

But Donald had a solid alibi and passed a polygraph test.

“We argued, but it was just the way we got along,” Donald would later testify in court, according to the Battle Creek Enquirer.

Hidden mint. Meanwhile, detectives found a partial shoe print on a glass shard in the house that matched one of Sharon Zachary’s size 6½ sneakers. And next to a pond on Robert Rogers’ property, there was a set of house keys. A diver recovered a metal pipe that had been submerged in the pond but still carried a trace of Rogers’ blood.

After investigators uncovered Zachary’s financial misdoings, they theorized that she had bludgeoned Rogers to death, staged the scene to look like a burglary, and accidentally dropped her set of Rogers’ house keys while throwing the murder weapon into the pond.

Oddly, there was still more than $133,000 of cash stashed inside Rogers’ house. Zachary either missed it or didn’t want the risk of having to hide it somewhere. With Rogers dead, she’d inherit a great deal more from the will anyway. Newspaper accounts pegged the total at $500,000 to $750,000.

Out of the ordinary. Although the trial, which began in 1997, was no O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony sensation, it did cause a stir in Battle Creek.

“In the 1990s, we had a boatload of homicides, but most of them were drug-related,” recalled Battle Creek Enquirer crime reporter Trace Christenson during a phone interview with ForensicFilesNow. “This one [the Robert Rogers case] was different so it was a bigger deal. And forensics was starting to be a new big thing at the time.”

At the trial, defense attorney John Hofman described Zachary as a caring human being. “She is afraid of blood, she is a small person, and she would not do this,” he said, according to the Battle Creek Enquirer.

Jailhouse rat. But Calhoun County prosecutor David Wallace portrayed her as a woman in the throes of greed, “like a kid in a candy store.”

Zachary’s cell mate, an embezzler named Michelle McCormick, told the court that Zachary had confessed that she and Rogers argued about money and she killed him.

It came out that Zachary had once been accused of misappropriating funds from a car dealership, according to court papers.

Feeling flush. Nicholas Batch, a lawyer who had done work for Robert Rogers, testified that he advised Rogers against selling a house to the Zacharys because they weren’t “credit worthy” — more evidence that her plans exceeded her means.

Donald Rogers in his Forensic Files interview

A witness named David Garity testified that Zachary and her husband told him they could contribute $80,000 to a business the three wanted to start, according to the Battle Creek Enquirer.

But Zachary would never get a chance to follow through on the venture.

She received a guilty verdict for first-degree murder and armed robbery.

On September 15, 1997, Circuit Court Judge Stephen Miller gave her life without parole plus 15 to 30 years.

Goodbye to you. Her son, Josh, 18, cried in the courtroom when he heard the sentence, according to a newspaper account. (By the way, Sharon Zachary was 32 years old at that time. So did she — yikes — give birth to Josh at 14?)

Sharon Zachary proclaimed her innocence after the verdict. According to the Battle Creek Enquirer:

“This will not end until the day I go home,” she said. “I think she’s home now,” Donald Rogers said a few minutes later.

In 1998, Judge Miller denied Zachary’s motion for a new trial. In 2000, a Michigan court of appeals reaffirmed her conviction.

Low-to-medium risk. Today, she resides in Huron Valley Complex in Ypsilanti. She’s probably feeling a little cramped lately, as Michigan has consolidated all female prisoners into Huron Valley, making it the state’s only facility for women.

There’s no shortage of adversity at Huron Valley.

In 2016, corrections officer Lauralie Herkimer complained of dangerous conditions in the facility, including ceilings so leaky that they shorted out the lights and employees so drained from working overtime that they had trouble doing their jobs.

That same year, a prison guard was charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of 25-year-old inmate Janika Edmond.

On the bright side, the Department of Corrections has designated Zachary as Level II — on a scale of I to V — security-wise, suggesting that she has behaved herself well enough while behind razor wire.

Inflammatory situation. Incidentally, the house where she killed Robert Rogers continued to generate interest after the murder.

“There were rumors that there was more cash hidden in the house, and they had some issue with people going through the house,” Christenson said. “I don’t think they ever found anything.”

In March 2015, the property made news again.

It burned down in what newspapers described as a suspicious fire. No one was living in the house at the time.

The owner was listed as Donald Rogers.

So it looks as though Donald succeeded in supplanting Sharon Zachary as his father’s heir and received his rightful inheritance.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime.

Michael Fletcher and Susan Chrzanowski: Bad Judgment

Leann Fletcher Dies Amid a Love Triangle
(“Naked Justice,” Forensic Files)

“Naked Justice” is one of those Forensic Files episodes that make you equally perturbed about a) the murder itself and b) the way the killer insults our intelligence with his cover story.

The case also stands out for the specs on the other woman. Michael “Mick” Fletcher wanted to trade in his wife not for an exotic dancer or a fawning administrative assistant — but rather for a district court judge named Susan Chrzanowski. She made $104,000 a year, was respected for her work helping juvenile offenders, and even got a mention in Time magazine.

Love at First Sight. But instead of starting a new life with his great catch of a girlfriend, the 29-year-old lawyer ended up beginning a life sentence in a Michigan state prison less than a year after he shot Leann Fletcher, also 29.

For this week, I searched to find out whether Fletcher’s legal training has won him any leniency.

So let’s get started on a recap of “Naked Justice” along with additional information drawn from internet research:

Wife the main wage earner. Leann Misener was working in sales and dreaming of finding her Mr. Wonderful when she fell in love with Michigan State University undergrad Michael “Mick” Fletcher at a Halloween party.

They married in 1993. She supported him financially through law school and looked forward to becoming a stay-at-home mom. They moved to Hazel Park, a suburb of Detroit, and had a daughter in 1996.

He went to work as a criminal defense attorney.

It’s not clear which came first, but Judge Susan Chrzanowski started steering a lot of valuable case work his way and the two began having a torrid affair. They worked at the same court complex building in Warren, Michigan, and Fletcher had been a research clerk for her.

Near divorce. Forensic Files maintains that Chrzanowski, then 33 and recently divorced, believed Mick’s classic cheating-husband line about having a platonic relationship with his wife.

At some point, he filed for divorce from Leann, but they reconciled, and he impregnated her again.

He spread some devoted-husband gloss over his infidelity by giving Leann a sweet card about his happiness over their upcoming second child.

It was one of a number of gestures he began making in the months leading up to the shooting, according to Leann’s father, Jack Misener.

*Scene of the crime in Hazel Park, Michigan*

“He was sucking up to her and making her all kinds or promises,” Misener said during an American Justice interview from 2004.

Oh, shoot. Surely, no one would suspect a sweet husband like him of plotting to kill his wife, Fletcher must have reasoned.

He even tried to make the murder part of a date night, albeit an unorthodox one. On August, 16, 1999, he left his daughter, Hannah, age 3, with his in-laws, then took Leann to the shooting range to teach her how to use a gun.

They returned home and had sex. He then capped off the evening by calling 911 and, in a performance that redefines sniveling fake spouse-hysterics, pleaded for help after his wife accidentally shot herself while he was out of the room. He claimed she was reloading a gun when it happened.

Odds against him. That part alone strained credibility. How often do you hear of a woman shooting herself by mistake?

According to a CDC study, 86 percent of the 582 people who die of unintentional self-inflicted gun wounds annually are men.

It gets more implausible.

Investigators determined the bullet originated at a distance of at least 12 inches from Leann’s head, entered through her ear, and traveled a straight horizontal line from there. A person would need monkey arms to create that kind of wound, the police maintained.

Cache prize. Oh, and instead of putting some clothes on his wife before the EMT’s got there that night, Mr. Husband of the Year left her half-undressed on the floor.

The police theorized that Fletcher planned the shooting range trip so there would be an explanation for any gunpowder residue on his skin or attire.

But he couldn’t explain away the high-velocity blood splatter on his clothing

Investigators subsequently discovered a trove of steamy notes exchanged between Mick Fletcher and Susan Chrzanowski via both e-mail and good old greeting cards. They even found at least one picture of the judge “disrobed,” if you will.

Small fall from grace. Although the salacious headlines about the case undoubtedly embarrassed the judge, she “tried to put on a brave face” and continued to work and show up at community functions, according to a Detroit Free Press account from October 22, 1999.

Nonetheless, by February 2001, Chrzanowski’s stumble had found its way into a Time story called “Dial M for Misconduct”:

“[She] journeyed from pillar of the community to key witness at her married lover’s murder trial and then to focal point of public rancor over the deceit and misconduct produced by the desires that lurk beneath black robes.

By this time, her former flame Fletcher had been convicted of second-degree murder and gotten a life sentence plus two years on a felony firearms charge on July 28, 2000.

Career continues. Chrzanowski received a six-month suspension in December 2001 for steering cases — which she presided over as a judge — to Fletcher and initially lying about her relationship with him. The authorities never implicated her in the murder, however.

*A Detroit Free Press clipping from Dec. 20, 2000*

She resumed her position as a judge and stayed in the job until 2003, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Her work history leaves a gap for the three-year period afterward. In 2006, she started her own practice specializing in criminal and family law in Mount Clemens, Michigan. Her LinkedIn profile lists her current job as president of Susan Chrzanowski PLLC.

Former boyfriend Mick Fletcher hasn’t caught any breaks. He lives behind 12-foot-high razor-ribbon fences at the Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer, Michigan. It’s a Level II prison, which in Michigan means low to medium security.

Food for thought. He has remained tattoo-free, according to his profile, but prison meals appear to have added around 40 pounds to his once-slender 5-foot-10-inch frame.

Michigan prisons recently ended their contract with food providers Aramark Correctional Services and Trinity Services Group, and Fletcher will have plenty of time to savor the new cuisine.

His request for another trial, based on the claim that reenactments of the crime unfairly influenced the jury, was rejected in 2004.

And the Michigan Department of Corrections lists his minimum sentence as “Life.”

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

Author: Rebecca Reisner

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