This past spring, producers asked viewers to tell them which of the 400 Forensic Files episodes amused, haunted, enlightened, and otherwise seared themselves into their cerebrums.
The 25th anniversary special includes reminiscences from series creator Paul Dowling
The survey results determined which clips made it into a 45-minute program celebrating the show’s 25th anniversary. I was glad to see a lot of my own favorites turn up in the responses — and surprised at a few greats I’d almost forgotten.
Most Memorable Exoneration 1. Ray Krone (Once Bitten) 2. Patricia Stallings (Deadly Formula) 3. Clayton Johnson (Accident or Murder)
Most Groundbreaking Forensic Science 1. DNA Profiling 2. Polymerase chain reaction 3. AFIS
Best Reenactment 1. Murder of the List Family (The List Murders) 2. Drowning of Joan Rogers and her two daughters (Water Logged) 3. Drugs sneaked into pregnant fiancée’s drinks by Maynard Muntzing, M.D. (Bitter Pill to Swallow)
Creepiest Crime Scene 1. B.J. Sifrit in bathtub with victims’ heads (Dirty Little Secret) 2. Entire family shot to death by John List (The List Murders) 3. Christopher Porco’s ax attack on his parents (Family Ties)
Favorite Forensic Tool or Technique 1. Luminol 2. Forensic genealogy 3. Mass spectrometry
Favorite Phrase or Quote 1. “Is it common for a bomber to blow himself up?” “Not common enough.” (Postal Mortem) 2. “It’s from the book of Who Cares” (Slippery Motives) 3. “Those goddamn black shoes!” (Hell’s Kitchen)
Most Surprising Clue 1. Blood vial implanted in arm of John Schneeberger, M.D. (Bad Blood) 2. Hamburger bun with killer’s print (Purebread Murder) 3. Cat hair (Purr-Fect Match)
Most Creative Alibi 1. Kevin Dowling’s fishing video (Shadow of a Doubt) 2. Dana Ewell’s being with FBI agent John Zent at the time of the Ewell family murders (Two in a Million) 3. Thomas Jabin Berry’s claim that he frequently had consensual sex with strangers he just met at the beach (A Cinderella Story)
Best Takeaway from Series 1. Technology and investigative techniques are constantly improving. 2. The odds of getting away with crimes are slim. 3. Criminals are dumb.
One-Off Favorite Forensic Files Quotes • “We will NOT reveal the name of the poison on this program.” • “He stopped at an ice cream store and got a dessert known as a ‘blizzard.’” • “Let’s go after that bitch.”
Maynard Muntzing and Michelle Baker
Random Comments From Survey Takers • “This was such a hard survey to answer! It was like asking me who my favorite child is — and I only have 4 kids, not 400.” • “Antifree made Stacey Castor Anti-free.” • “Never trust anyone with trilobal carpet fibers” • “I only wish that Peter Thomas can see this event or episode.” • “Best time to watch Forensic Files: midnight after the meds kick in.”
In addition to YouTube, you can watch Forensic Files: A Special Tribute on Pluto or Tubi as well as on Discover+ and Fox Nation.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
With Friends Like Virginia McGinnis… (‘Financial Downfall,’ Forensic Files)
Before jumping into this week’s recap, I want to address something that readers brought to my attention: Forensic Files has exited Netflix. I usually watch the show on HLN or YouTube and thus was asleep at the switch when the news broke.
Gary Lico, Forensic Files global marketing executive, officially confirmed the change.
“Forensic Files is indeed off Netflix, much to the dismay of many,” Gary said in a statement to ForensicFilesNow.com. “Viewers were concerned they’d lose their favorite show. This will be a boon to our other streaming partners: FilmRise, Pluto, Discovery +, and HBO MAX, in particular. We’ve all seen the power of one program, in this case, Forensic Files, increasing a platform’s audience.”
In other words, we won’t need GPS or sniffing dogs to find places to watch Forensic Files in 2022. So let’s enjoy the new year and turn our attention toward “Financial Downfall”:
Forensic Files evildoers who plan ahead often rely on feigned sentiment, staged death scenes, and insurance fraud to win their fortunes.
In 1987, Virginia Agnes McGinnis did just that. Fifty-year-old Virginia and her husband bamboozled a trusting 20-year-old woman whose real name was Deana Jalynn Hubbard Wild but whom Forensic Files calls Donna Hartman.
After manipulating Deana into taking out a $35,000 insurance policy, Virginia and Billie Joe “B.J.” McGinnis killed her and made it look like an accident.
Deana Wild at a Seal Beach overlook
Virginia, we discover, didn’t limit her betrayal to friends. She allegedly killed one of her husbands and two of her own blood relatives as well.
So what made Virginia into a scheming killer who felt loyalty to no one but herself? And why was Deana Wild spending her time with a middle-aged couple instead of making friends her own age?
For this week, I looked for answers. So let’s get going on the recap along with extra information from internet research:
Deana Hubbard was born in Kentucky in 1967, and her parents divorced three years later. Her mother, Bobbie Jo Roberts, who worked as a school teacher, then married a law student whose last name was Marshall, according to the True Crime Brewery podcast. That union also ended in divorce.
Bobbie’s high hopes for her little daughter’s future fell when a school test revealed Deana’s IQ as 85, right on the marker between normalcy and mild intellectual impairment —if one trusts those kinds of metrics to gauge a person’s potential (I don’t).
A couple of Deana’s best girlfriends from high school who appeared on the Oxygen show Accident, Suicide or Murder described Deana as fun to be with and part of a lively social circle.
One of the few existing photos of Virginia McGinnis
At 17, she fell in love with a Navy man named Jay Wild. Two years later, they married and moved to San Diego, where he was stationed, but his absences while at sea strained the marriage and they separated in 1987.
Deana stayed in California and met Virginia and B.J. McGinnis.
Virginia was born in 1937 in Ithaca, New York, to a dairy farmer named Christie Hoffman and his wife, Mary. The family lived in poverty, and Virginia suffered sexual abuse, according to research from Radford University. In childhood, she exhibited the three conditions of the MacDonald triad theorized to presage violent behavior in adults.
Virginia had a son named James Coates, and media accounts vary widely on his relationship status with Deana. They were anywhere from headed to the altar to mere strangers
Like Deana, Virginia and B.J. had lived in Kentucky, which made her feel comfortable with them. Deana moved in with them in their Chula Vista, California house in December 1986 while she looked for a job and an apartment, according to the Oxygen Network.
Deana’s mother tried to check up on her, but Virginia reportedly interfered. After Bobbie sent her a plane ticket, Deana visited her in Kentucky, but the two clashed and she returned to the McGinnises.
On April 1, 1987, Virginia brought Deana to an insurance agency and they took out a $35,000 policy on Deana. Virginia claimed Deana was traveling to Mexico and thought life insurance made sense.
In reality, the McGinnises were taking Deana on a sightseeing trip to the Big Sur region of California, where the Pacific Ocean’s dramatic coastline lies at the foot of the Santa Lucia Range of mountains. The three tourists arrived at Seal Beach on April 2, 1987.
Deana reportedly had a fear of heights, but she probably couldn’t resist looking around for Seal Beach residents like these
Deana enjoyed gazing down at the waves crashing into rocks so much that she stayed behind after her friends headed back to the car, the couple later explained.
Suddenly, Virginia and B.J. realized that Deana had disappeared, they said. One of her blue high-heeled shoes lay at the site.
Virginia ran to a nearby art gallery to call for help. A Monterey County rescue team arrived at the scene.
The couple told Police Officer Jess Mason that they didn’t hear Deana yell or scream; she silently vanished.
Mason would later describe the McGinnises as calm — but it didn’t seem suspicious because the missing woman wasn’t a blood relative.
By the time first responders found Deana’s body, she had dried blood covering her face. They could also see severe wounds on the backs of her hands and fingers. She had fallen anywhere from 390 t0 500 feet and died of head trauma.
Once the McGinnises learned about the discovery, they seemed appropriately distraught.
Authorities at first believed the couple’s story about an accidental fall. Sadly, things like that happened a lot on the cliffs of Big Sur.
Virginia immediately filed a claim for the insurance payout on Deana.
Deana Wild, left, was the real woman portrayed as ‘Donna Hartman,’ right
Meanwhile back in Kentucky, after Deana’s funeral, her mother was having trouble collecting on a $2,500 burial insurance policy that her employer provided, according to the book Death Benefit by David Heilbroner. The insurance company was holding up the claim pending some fact-finding. At church, Bobbie approached a fellow parishioner, a tax attorney named Steve Keeney, and asked for help.
Independently, Keeney started checking out Virginia’s background and discovered her history as an insurance payout queen. She pursued small amounts of money because — as Forensic Files watchers know well — it’s not cost-effective for the companies to investigate modest claims. Virginia went for quantity, with each policy amounting to around $35,000.
In one fishy case, second husband Sylvestor “Bud” Rearden, a cancer patient in the hospital, was released to Virginia after she falsely identified herself as a nurse qualified to care for him. He promptly died on Virginia’s watch.
The same thing happened to Virginia’s mother.
In both cases, Virginia benefitted from their life insurance policies.
And horror of horrors, it turned out that more than two decades before Deana’s death, Virginia’s 3-year-old daughter, Cynthia Elaine Coates, had been found dead in a barn. The little girl was riding a pony and somehow got tangled up in cords, accidentally hanging herself from the ceiling, Virginia said. Again, she collected an insurance payout.
She had also profited from a number of suspicious fires earlier in her “career.”
Virginia McGinnis in court
With Virginia’s track record exposed, police investigated Deana’s death as a possible homicide. A sequence of photos that the McGinnises took at Seal Beach suggested that Deana had grown sleepy as the day passed. In the last images, B.J. appeared poised to push Deana off the cliff.
A lab found that Deana’s blood contained Elavil, an early treatment for depression. The drug, usually taken just before bedtime, causes drowsiness.
And one more thing: James Coates — Virginia’s son and insurance co-beneficiary — was in prison for a parole violation and married to someone else.
Still, the McGinnises maintained that Deana and James were engaged and it was only natural for them to have an insurance policy on their future daughter-in-law.
Investigators would ultimately conclude that the McGinnises took the naive Deana out for a bite and sneaked the Elavil into her beverage before heading off to Seal Beach. Once they thought she was too drowsy to fight back, B.J. pushed her off the cliff.
Deana’s medical records showed that Deana never had a prescription for Elavil.
But B.J. did.
The wounds to the back of Deana’s hands and her fingers suggested someone had stomped on them, perhaps as she tried desperately to hold onto a ledge or brush.
Virginia and B.J. McGinnis were arrested and charged with murder on Sept. 15, 1989, under a no-bail warrant. (One source says that the judge did set bail, for $5 million. Either way, the authorities were not letting this killing machine and her spouse out of their sight.)
The trial kicked off on Jan. 6, 1992. The court transported jury members to Seal Beach so they could study the drop-off where Deana died in horror.
During the open-air part of the trial, the jurors could hear sea lions barking on the coast below, an AP account noted.
Virginia’s lawyer, Albert Tamayo, blamed Deana’s death on her high-heeled shoes.
In typical smear-the-victim fashion, Virginia claimed that Deana was a pill popper who would help herself to any drug, hence the presence of her husband’s Elavil in her blood.
It took the jury three days to convict Virginia of forgery, insurance fraud, and first-degree murder.
Deana Wild with B.J. McGinnis
“I don’t for a moment entertain the thought of Deana wanting life insurance for herself,” said Superior Court Judge Bernard Revak. “I don’t think this 20-year-old girl thought about her death.”
He also noted, “There are too many coincidences for this to be a coincidental death.”
Virginia went off to prison.
B.J. McGinnis had already died from complications due to AIDS while in jail awaiting trial.
On an interesting tangent to the legal drama, some controversy arose over Steve Keeney’s portrayal as the crusading lawyer who cracked the case wide open.
In an April 10, 1993 review of the book Death Benefit, Louisville’s Courier-Journal newspaper suggested that the tome overglorified Keeney, depicting him as “a cross between Perry Mason and Mother Teresa, a character whose only sin is working too hard and caring too much.”
Keeney supposedly sank $250,000’s worth of time and expenses into the investigation, all pro bono. But he reportedly had a deal for a portion of the proceeds from David Heilbroner’s book (which got great views on Amazon), and both men allegedly got money for a Lifetime Channel movie based on the case.
Although the scene of the crime at Seal Beach lies in Monterey County, the insurance was purchased in San Diego County, hence Virginia’s trial there
Forensic Files interviewed Keeney on camera, but the episode also focuses on the work done by homicide detective Scott Lawrence and prosecutor Luis Aragon.
As for the Lifetime production, Justice for Annie: A Moment of Truth Movie first aired in 1996 and starred Peggy Lipton and Danica McKellar.
No word on whether Virginia got to watch actress Susan Ruttan play the character based on her in Justice for Annie, but she definitely missed her portrayal on the Oxygen show in 2021 — Virginia died in prison at the age of 74 on June 25, 2011.
John and Noreen Boyle’s Son Reveals More of His Story (‘Foundation of Lies,’ Forensic Files)
When Noreen Boyle suddenly disappeared from her home in Mansfield, Ohio, her husband, John “Jack” Boyle, told friends and family that she simply had gone off on a jaunt. No big deal.
Collier Landry
But their 11-year-old son, Collier Boyle, immediately went into overdrive.
He sensed something terrible had happened. Collier pushed for an investigation that ultimately led to the discovery of Noreen’s body buried beneath the concrete floor of a new home in Erie, Pennsylvania that Jack hoped to share with his pregnant mistress.
In 1990, Collier served as the star witness for the prosecution at the sensational murder trial. A jury convicted Jack Boyle, M.D., a popular doctor with a huge practice, and he’s lived behind razor wire ever since.
His son, now known as Collier Landry, grew up to become a freelance cinematographer out of Los Angeles and pitched the idea for the documentary A Murder in Mansfield, which first aired on the ID Network in 2018.
In 2021, Collier started a podcast series. He aims to make Moving Past Murder not just a vehicle for storytelling but also therapy and outreach for listeners.
Collier recently answered some of my questions about his work and life. Edited excerpts of our conversation appear below:
Forensic Files and the ID documentary told the story of your mother’s homicide. Where does the podcast fit in?It’s a true-crime podcast from someone who knows about murder. My message is that you can come through extraordinary things and be a functional person. I’ve stared at the nadir and survived. My mother gave me resiliency. I don’t want her death to be in vain.
What was your mother like? My mom was a kind, giving, wonderful person who often put the needs of others before her own. Every year for Christmas, I would have to donate half my toys to other children because I was fortunate and I should share with others who need it.
She disappeared on New Year’s Eve 1990. How did your father explain that to you?He said she took a little vacation. I knew my mother would never leave my sister and me.
What did you do first? I stored notes with her phone numbers in a Garfield. I was secretly calling her friends to find out where she was. That’s how everyone knew she was gone. People were devastated. She was the light of people’s lives and they were shocked this could happen to her.
Noreen Boyle was sweet but ‘didn’t suffer fools,’ according to her son
How did the disappearance transition from a missing-person case to a murder investigation?A Mansfield police officer named Dave Messmore saw the case cross his desk over a holiday when there wasn’t a lot going on. I told him, “She’s dead.” Dave didn’t care if my dad was a doctor — he was going to investigate him like any suspect.
It turned out that my father had been accused of molesting my uncle’s daughters and the Maryland police were about to arrest him for that crime, but the girls couldn’t go through the trauma again. The police in Maryland believed he killed my mom.
What happened to you after they finally arrested your dad? My entire family abandoned me. My father’s side didn’t want anything to do with me. And my mother’s side didn’t either because I look like my father. I went into foster care before I was finally adopted.
Your sister, Elizabeth, was just a toddler when this happened. Where did she go?When my sister and I were playing together in a foster home, they would take her away and say we weren’t bonded so they could adopt her out. I haven’t been able to find her.
Can your listeners relate to your history with your father?The manipulations by my father are incredible. He’s written around 500 letters to me from prison. I read the letters on the podcast and people say, “This is just like my abusive father and husband.”
You’ve said you can relate to the emotional side of sheltering in place during the Covid-19 crisis. How so?When I was 12 years old, for six months, I was basically not allowed to talk to anyone because I was preparing to testify.
So I get it with the pandemic. There are kids in abusive homes for whom school is their only relief. Now they’re stuck at home.
Have you ever found yourself attracted to someone who shares your dad’s traits?I got involved with a woman and then realized she was narcissistic and a horrible person. And when I broke up with her, she wanted to destroy me. I’m glad we ended it before the pandemic because if I’d been stuck with her in the same place, I think I would have offed myself. True narcissism is so insidious.♠
He Got Away With It — But Only for 46 Years (“Marked for Life,” Forensic Files)
“Marked for Life” is one of just a handful of Forensic Files episodes involving a respected retiree harboring a horrible secret from his own ancient history.
Gerald Mason as a young man
Howard Elkins, for example, a long-married former factory owner, committed suicide a day after police showed up at his house in 1999 bearing evidence that he killed his pregnant girlfriend in 1967.
The Blowback. Gerald Mason, the subject of this week’s post, caused an even greater tragedy and eluded the law for longer. During one night in 1957, he terrorized and robbed four teenagers, sexually assaulted one of them, and shot two police officers to death. Investigators didn’t identify and track him down until 2003.
But instead of taking his own life, he admitted to his crimes and went to prison.
In cases like Mason’s — in which most of those involved have either died or stopped talking to the media — I like to look into the reactions that friends and neighbors had upon first learning about the past of the once upright-seeming man who lived peacefully among them.
Happy days. I also searched for more information about what Mason did between the time he vanished into a prosaic life and the day the law exposed him as a rapist and double murderer.
So let’s get going on the recap of “Marked for Life” along with extra information from internet research:
The episode starts out with black & white footage of Eisenhower-era police cars, beachgoers in swimsuits that didn’t require Brazilian waxing, and several scenes from Leave It to Beaver. It sets the stage for what Forensic Files calls a simpler, more innocent time (although it was probably pretty much like today except the ugly things stayed beneath the surface).
El Segundo lies in Los Angeles County just 10 minutes from the dimly lit murder scene
Fateful foursome. As if the producers weren’t already going above and beyond with the great retro clips, they found and interviewed one of the teenage robbery victims, Robert E. Dewar, a man well into his AARP years by the time the episode first aired in 2005.
On July 22, 1957, Robert and his buddy and their dates were parked at a lover’s lane on Van Ness Avenue in Hawthorne, near El Segundo, California. When Robert rolled down a window, a man pointing a firearm at him suddenly appeared. The gunman took their money and jewelry and made all of them undress, bound them, raped one of the girls inside the car, and then stole their 1949 Ford sedan.
Parting shot. About an hour and half later, two police officers — who had no idea that Mason had committed violent felonies earlier that night — stopped him for going through a red light on Rosecrans Avenue and Sepulveda Boulevard, and prepared to give him a ticket. Mason should have just taken the summons and gone on his way. Instead, he pulled out his gun and shot the officers three times each. Richard Phillips, 28, radioed for an ambulance, but he died before it got there, as did partner Milton Curtis, 25.
Rookie police officer Milton Curtis with the family he left behind
Ballistic evidence at the scene suggested that Phillips, known for his marksmanship, had shot the attacker once before he fled.
But the mystery man had vanished after ditching the stolen vehicle.
Police found skirts belonging to the female victims inside the car.
Random finds. Robert Dewar described the assailant as soft spoken and uneducated with a Southern accent. Charlie Porter, a police officer who had driven past the scene where Phillips and Curtis had just stopped Gerald Mason, described him as about 6 feet tall, having short hair, and appearing arrogant (apparently a law officer can spot that from a distance), according to the 48 Hours episode “The Ghosts of El Segundo.”
Investigators lifted a thumbprint from the stolen car’s steering wheel but found no matches in their files.
Progress on the case stalled.
A newspaper clipping showing Richard Phillips’ survivors
Three years later, Manhattan Beach homeowner Doug Tuley turned over two watches and a .22 caliber handgun he found while digging up weeds on his property. The timepieces belonged to the robbed teenagers. The attacker had apparently dropped the items while fleeing after abandoning the stolen car on that night in 1957.
Lots of legwork. Police traced the gun’s serial number to a Sears in Shreveport, Louisiana, which recorded the buyer’s name as “G.D. Wilson.” The gun, the least expensive one the store carried, cost $29.95.
Investigators discovered that a “George D. Wilson” had rented a room in a YMCA near the Sears store, but he’d given a fake address in Florida.
Police spent years checking up on every George D. Wilson they could find, but none panned out.
The case even made a 1958 issue of True Detective magazine, which appealed to the public for help catching the so-called Lover’s Lane Bandit (although “bandit” sounds like a rather light suggestion of his crimes). But that and other media efforts never yielded a viable suspect.
Confronted by his past. Then, in 2002, a woman told El Segundo police that her late uncle had bragged about killing two police officers. It turned out to be a dead end, but it kick-started interest in the case again. Investigators used the newly available Automated Fingerprint Identification System, also known as AFIS, to run the fingerprint from the teenagers’ stolen car. Up popped the name of Gerald Fiten Mason, a prosperous retiree who lived in South Carolina.
His handwriting matched the signatures on the YMCA and Sears records.
Police, who surveilled him for weeks and observed him playing golf with friends and enjoying other innocent diversions, finally knocked on his door on Jan. 26, 2003. Depending on which media account you read, his response was utter disbelief, denial, annoyance, or cockiness.
“His jaw dropped to his knees,” officer Dan McElderry told the The Times of Shreveport Louisiana.
Successful entrepreneur. Yet a different publication said Mason’s attitude was basically, “Why are ya’ bugging me for that now?” Another article described Mason as acting as though he didn’t understand why they suspected him. But he immediately spoke of getting a lawyer once the lawmen materialized at his house, one source said.
Robert E. Dewar around the time Gerald Mason attacked him and his friends
Gerald Fiten Mason had made a small fortune by buying, selling, and operating gas stations and convenience stores, according to The Times of Shreveport. He was living quietly in Columbia, the same South Carolina city where he was born on Jan. 31, 1934. He had served a year in jail for burglary in 1956 but had no other criminal record whatsoever.
The army veteran was ensconced in a “comfortable suburban tract” with his wife, Betty Claire Blackmon Mason, the New York Times reported. The couple had two daughters and three grandchildren.
Loyal to Dad. A neighbor told the NY Times that the law must have the wrong man — why would a fugitive live out in the open as he had done for years in South Carolina?
A friend told CBS that the revelations were “flabbergasting.”
Jerri Mason Whittaker, daughter of the accused killer and rapist, would later tell People magazine that she “could not have had a better father.”
Richard Phillips
According to an LA Times account, Mason “was a genial fellow who checked up on neighboring widows and was always willing to lend them a hand with a man’s traditional chores: painting a mailbox or fixing an electrical glitch.”
Reunion of sorts. Dayton Sisson, who had lived next-door to Mason for 30 years, told the media that the two of them helped each other out when one needed to cut down invasive trees or renovate his garage. “If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have no garage like this,” Sisson told the Associated Press.
Mason went bowling regularly and was an “above average player.”
After his arrest, he was detained at a Columbia facility but ultimately returned to Los Angeles County to face a judge.
“Officers that hadn’t been around for 20 years came in walking on canes,” Assistant District Attorney Darren Levine told CBS.
Back bears evidence. Also in attendance was Howard Speaks, the investigator who had lifted the fingerprint off the steering wheel of the stolen car back in 1957.
In March 2003, Gerald Mason, who had a bullet-shaped wound in his back thanks to the dying Richard Phillip’s accuracy, pleaded guilty to two counts of murder. It’s not clear why he didn’t face any charges for rape.
Gerald Mason in court
He teared up while apologizing for his actions, saying they didn’t “fit in his life” and he didn’t know why he did it. Mason would later characterize the crime spree as a baffling anomaly. (But he certainly prepared for it like a pro, with surgical tape, a flashlight, and a gun. And a handy pseudonym.)
Deprived youngster? Mason said he had the gun only for safety while hitchhiking and that he ended up in the lover’s lane while drifting.
He said he didn’t remember why he raped the girl.
He also tried playing the unhappy childhood card, alleging that he had never had a normal family life (although he had two brothers who attended his hearing in South Carolina, according to the LA Times).
Sorry, fella. The families of his victims didn’t feel a whole lot of sympathy for the guy.
“Your cowardly act shattered our lives forever,” said Carolyn Phillips, the daughter of Richard Phillips. “You caused our mother to become a widow with three babies to raise alone.”
The court honored Mason’s request to serve his sentence in South Carolina so he could be closer to his wife and children.
Mason lost a 2009 bid for parole.
On Jan 22, 2017, he died of natural causes in prison, never having quite explained how he rehabbed himself into a law-abiding neighbor and family man in the 46 years since he’d left trauma and tragedy in his wake.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
A Reporter Recalls Mansfield’s Trial of the Century (‘Foundation of Lies,’ Forensic Files)
John “Jack” Boyle clearly saw too many Vincent Price movies. Or maybe he didn’t need to watch any horror films because he already had macabre impulses inside him.
After the wealthy doctor from Mansfield, Ohio impregnated his girlfriend, he hoped to marry her without the financial inconveniences of a split from Noreen Boyle, the mother of his son, Collier, 11, and daughter, Elizabeth, 3.
Collier and Noreen Boyle
Jack avoided a divorce by killing Noreen just before New Year’s day of 1990. And here’s the unusually ghastly part of the murder: He buried her beneath a fresh layer of concrete in the basement of the new house that he intended to occupy with Sherri Campbell in Erie, Pennsylvania.
But instead of winning himself a second chance at marriage, he earned a prison sentence of 20 years to life.
I feel a personal connection with the case because I grew up 40 miles from Erie — it was the big city we went to if we couldn’t find something in Meadville — and I had relatives in Mansfield, Ohio.
This time, I looked into the homicide’s effect on the community of Mansfield — population 46,000 — courtesy of a phone interview with journalist John Futty, a native who wrote about the case for the Mansfield News Journal.
“I’ve covered courts and cops for four decades now,” says John, “but I’ve never covered anything that had that level of public interest or was reported so comprehensively.”
Below are excerpts from my phone conversation with John, who now works for the Columbus Dispatch:
According to Forensic Files, Jack Boyle had a hugely successful medical practice. Had you heard of him before the murder?No, I don’t believe I had. My recollection was that Noreen and John weren’t too involved in the community. But we heard from a lot of patients who were surprised because they really liked him as a physician.
How did locals react to the case?The community was obsessed with it all the way throughout the trial. It’s not your typical murder case. We’re talking about someone from Woodland, one of the most prestigious areas in town, who transported a body to a new home he hoped to share with his pregnant girlfriend.
Was there a lot of sympathy for Collier, who was 12 years old when he testified? Yes. Collier’s testimony was seen by pretty much everyone and it was fascinating. Obviously, a pretty bright kid.
What about Noreen — was there sympathy for her?Yes, especially because her husband had a pregnant girlfriend.
What did people think of the character assassination Jack and his brother waged against Noreen? They claimed she was a gold smuggler and baby seller. That came after he went to prison, when he was trying to get a new trial. The people who knew Noreen didn’t buy it.
Jack Boyle’s most recent prison mug shot. He has a chance of parole in 2025.
Back to the trial —I assume the courtroom was packed every day. The public had to get there early if they wanted to get a seat inside. There was a video monitor outside for those who couldn’t fit. The judge didn’t want people going in and out of the courtroom.
What was it like to cover the trial as a reporter for a small-town newspaper? There were two of us. We would have a tape recorder running during the trial. We had to transcribe the testimony ourselves. The two of us would stay late into the night to type big sections of key testimony so we could fill a couple of inside pages in the paper the next day.
Did you appear on any of the true crime shows about the Jack and Noreen Boyle case?More often or not, I turn down requests to be on shows. They take your time. You have to go somewhere where they’re doing the filming. You might sit there in the interview for an hour or more and end up with a couple snippets on TV.♠
That’s all for the post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
A Teenager Barely Gets a Chance to Live (‘Headquarters,’ Forensic Files)
Belynda Tillery was the only daughter in the family for eight years
Those who saw the photo of 8-year-old Belynda Tillery on rollerskates in the Lubbock Evening Journal in 1983 probably imagined the carefree-looking child would go on to live a charmed life.
But the golden-haired girl’s circumstances changed drastically sometime between then and 1992, when she disappeared.
For this week, I looked into why her trajectory took a dangerous turn and what happened to the boyfriend who ended her life. And because a number of YouTube viewers expressed shock that a strip club hired Belynda as a dancer when she was a minor, I looked around for an explanation.
So let’s get going on the recap of “Headquarters” along with extra information from internet research and online correspondence with Belynda’s younger sister.
Brothers aplenty. Belynda Kay Tillery came into the world in Hobbs, New Mexico, on Dec. 27, 1974, the daughter of Beverly Lutz Tillery and Robert Earl Tillery.
A clipping from the Lubbock Evening Journal on August 4, 1983.
Just a small amount of background information about Belynda’s parents came up online. Their 1969 wedding announcement in the Lubbock Avalanche noted that Beverly worked at Litton Industries (an electronics manufacturer) and attended Azusa Pacific College.
The newspaper item described Robert Tillery as a Poco Taco employee attending South Plains College. It’s not clear how long Belynda’s father stayed in her life or what type of work he did at the time of her birth.
But the couple had plenty of children to support. Belynda was the fourth of the Tillerys’ five children and the first girl. The family lived in Lubbock, where they attended the First Church of the Nazarene.
Veering off course. Growing up, Belynda was “best friends” with her brother Danny and “a bit of a tomboy,” according to her sister, Robyn Tillery. But Belynda “enjoyed her Easy-Bake Oven” and “playing in her makeup — and was quite good with end results.”
In school, Belynda showed little interest in extracurricular activities, Robyn said. “In her early teenage years, she became quite the rebel and found herself drawn to the bad kids. She loved the party life but still made time for her family.”
Angela Allenduring her appearance on Forensic Files
At 13, Belynda was removed from the Tillery household and placed in some type of children’s home. About four years later, she was returned to her mother and got a job dancing at the gentleman’s club.
Tasmanian devils? Although no media source gives the name of the establishment, Forensic Files mentioned that the Bandidos owned it.
The Bandidos were a multistate motorcycle group “so fearsome that when a rumor spread through a town that they were coming, people literally headed inside their homes and locked their doors,” according to a Texas Monthly story by Chris Hollandsworth.
That probably explains how the Bandidos got away with employing dancers younger than 18. (By the way, Texas has since raised the required age to 21 for all types of strip club workers as well as customers.)
But the real danger that stalked Belynda came not from a 220-pound tough on a Harley with no muffler but rather a skinny unaffiliated loser named Troy Armstrong.
Baneful boyfriend. Troy, who Forensic Files describes as a petty thief and drug user in his late 20s, began dating Belynda while she was working at the club.
As if he weren’t already bad news, Troy was two-timing Belynda with girlfriend Angela Allen, who viewers will remember from her appearance on Forensic Files.
Lubbock police once had to use an armored vehicle to breech a fenced-in compound owned by the Bandidos — who also ran the strip club — according to Texas Monthly.
Belynda ended up pregnant, which riled Troy, although media accounts give varying reasons: Troy didn’t want to pay child support. Or he was mad that the baby belonged to another man. Or it was Troy’s and he was angry that Angela broke up with him because of it.
Regardless of any turmoil, Belynda wanted to continue the pregnancy. “She loved children and showered her nieces and nephews with plenty of love and attention,” Robyn said. “She was over-the-top excited when she learned that she would be having a child of her own.”
Remains of the day. In 1992, Troy took Belynda camping, ostensibly so they could discuss the pregnancy.
She vanished afterward.
Two years later, in 1994, a couple of hunters stumbled upon an unidentified skull, some bones, and a white high-heeled shoe in a field in Yellow House Canyon. Forensic evidence suggested that the remains belonged to a woman who died of a stabbing attack and was no older than 24.
To her older brothers,Belynda‘was their princess’
Forensic artist Karen T. Taylor created a portrait of the anonymous female.
Passing likeness. After police released the drawing to the public, they got tips from the usual mix of people genuinely trying to help and a few oddballs — some who thought she was a woman missing since the 1950s, according to lead investigator Tom Watson. He also noted that one caller told him that her “knife freak” husband committed the murder and added, “By the way we’re having a custody battle tomorrow — can you give me a copy of the report for my lawyer?”
Fortunately, Beverly Tillery recognized the portrait as looking like her own missing daughter, and dental records confirmed it.
Angela, Troy’s other girlfriend, surrendered any loyalty to him and told investigators that Troy had shown up at her door with blood on his hands after the camping trip with Belynda. She turned over a jagged-edged knife he owned to police.
Then it was Troy’s turn to disappear.
Evidence in storage. The authorities finally apprehended him in January 1996, when they used GPS to track down a trucker friend of Troy’s on Interstate 80 in Nebraska. They dragged Troy out of his hiding place in the back of the tractor-trailer.
Police discovered he had a key to a New Mexico storage locker with Belynda’s driver’s license and other possessions. All together, they had enough evidence to charge him.
For the court proceedings, Troy cut his longish brown hair and put on a suit. He looked more like a nervous CVS clerk who shoplifted Marlboro Lights than a knife-wielding killer.
At the trial, prosecutors contended that Troy and Belynda argued during the camping trip and he stabbed her numerous times in the back, then deserted her body on or about July 24, 1992.
Troy Armstrong, seen here during the time of his court proceedings, was a “little man with a big ego,” according to investigator Tom Watson.
More loss. Angela testified that Troy admitted to committing the murder and threatened he’d kill her children and her father if she told anyone.
The jury took two hours to find him guilty on Dec. 5, 1996. He got a life sentence.
Today, Troy Armstrong resides in the Alfred Hughes facility in Gatesville, Texas. The board declined to grant him parole in January 2021 based on the crime’s brutality, the likelihood he would reoffend, and his “drug abuse involvement.”
Although the Tillerys won justice for Belynda, tragedy would strike their mother again. Beverly’s obituary — she died at age 62 in in 2010 — notes that she had a 12-year-old son, Michael Canales, as well as a granddaughter whose lives ended before hers did.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
An Ex-Bartender Spills About Having a Con Manas a Boss (‘Past Lives,’ Forensic Files)
Everyone has a story about a crazy boss, but few have worked for a grave robber who faked his own death — and became the subject of a Forensic Files episode.
Bey’s, located on Harden Street, reportedly stayed open until the clock struck 2 a.m. or the police showed up
After serving his time for fraud convictions related to his failed scheme to collect $7 million in insurance funds, Connecticut financial adviser Madison Rutherford started using “Bey” as his first name and opened Bey’s Sports Bar in Columbia, South Carolina.
To him, maybe the place seemed like paradise compared with the federal lockup, but even the beer-swilling college kids who helped keep Bey’s in business bristled at the unsanitary conditions there.
Bey’s shuttered in 2013, but a former bartender named Lex — who asked that only her first name appear in print — recently talked to ForensicFilesNow.com about her wild ride at the sports bar:
Were most of the customers students?A group of guys between 21 and 35 who were called the wolfpack started going to Bey’s. Some underage people drank there. I had just turned 22 when I started working there.
Madison Rutherford conned a lot of people over his lifetime. Was he charming?No, he was mission-bound. Every time he came in, he did what he had to do and left. He was standoffish with girls. He was an alpha toward guys.
Did he seem legit?He seemed like what a crime boss was, for a lack of a better phrase. I heard that everything was under his dad’s name.
Did you know about his past?We all knew about his Forensic Files episode, but I didn’t watch it until later. We knew he wasn’t a good person, but there was something almost attractive about how he would just do what he wanted. The bar was wild west.
Is it true that he stole his employees’ tips?On St. Patrick’s Day, I worked early morning until 1 a.m. the next day. I made about $200 in tips. We pooled all tips and agreed we would split them evenly. He took them into the dishwashing room and took out whatever he wanted for himself. He took about half our tips.
What did you think when you finally watched the Forensic Files episode?Just very justified in thinking he was a crappy person.
What was the bar like toward the end? By 2013, we started seeing Bey a lot less. Business dropped. We had a manager who really tried to keep the bar afloat but we almost never saw Bey. Business just dropped and dropped and no one wanted to work there or go there.
Do you have any fond memories of Bey’s? Even though it was working for this crazy bar for a crazy person, it was truly one of the most fun times. There was music. I met lots of people there. The experience I had atthatbar was a diamond in the rough.♠
That’s all for this post. Until next time cheers. — RR
A Storm-Tossed Marriage Ends at a Lakeside Vacation Spot (‘Drowning Sorrows,’ Forensic Files)
Florence ‘Flo’ Unger
For a long time, the Ungers looked like an enviably high-functioning family.
Florence stayed home with the kids and enjoyed photography and decorating. Mark was a banker who served as the base coach for their sons’ ball teams.
Every year, the family enjoyed a vacation at a charming resort town in Western Michigan.
Boiling point. But on the first night of their 2003 trip, something went horribly awry between dinner and bedtime, and Florence didn’t make it home alive.
According to Forensic Files, the tragedy was the culmination of Mark Unger’s downward spiral into gambling and substance abuse.
For this week, I looked for clues as to why Mark sank to such depths. I also searched for more background on Florence. So let’s get going on the recap of “Drowning Sorrows” along with extra information drawn from internet research:
Mark and Florence Unger in happier times
Style sense. Born in Detroit on March 16, 1966, little Florence Gabrielle was adopted by Claire Stern and her husband, Harold, a successful lawyer
Florence, known as “Flo” to friends, enjoyed hiking, horseback riding, and interior design, according to the Detroit Jewish News. She had an eye for beauty and “was the person you’d want to be with at a flea market,” her older cousin Elizabeth Stern told the DJN.
Mark Steven Unger came into the world on Nov. 29, 1960. He enjoyed an affluent upbringing in Huntington Woods, Michigan, thanks to his mother, Bette Rosenthal, who owned successful restaurants in the Florida Keys, according to the book Afraid of the Dark by Tom Henderson.
Radio days. As a student at the private Detroit Country Day School, Mark belonged to the swim and football teams and advanced to the state tennis championships in his junior and senior years, according to Afraid of the Dark.
In his young adulthood, Mark had gigs as an ad-copy writer, a restaurant manager, and a bartender before winning a spot as a WJZZ radio sportscaster, a job he loved.
Mark met Florence at the University of Michigan, where she majored in fine arts. After two years of dating, he proposed by hiding an engagement ring in her brownie sundae, according to Tom Henderson’s book. They married on Feb. 24, 1990.
Glamour gal. Once the couple started a family, Florence wanted to stay home, so Mark — who already had to supplement his income with a job at the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame — traded his sportscaster gig for a better-paying career as a mortgage banker.
Friends described the Ungers as a happy couple. With her delicate good looks, charm, and elegance, Flo was “like a movie star,” according to “Lady in the Lake,” an episode of Dark Waters: Murder in the Deep. And the athletic-looking 6-foot-tall Mark was crazy about her and their little sons, Max and Tyler.
Trouble in paradise reportedly began in 1998. Mark became dependent on Vicodin and Norco after back surgery for an old sports injury. A drinking problem soon followed. After an MGM Grand casino opened in Detroit, he took up gambling.
Emotional instability. The couple was already a bit house-poor. They had bought a 3,355-square-foot home in Huntington Woods, Michigan. The fact that Mark lost $7,000 at a betting parlor didn’t exactly help.
According to Dark Waters, he was letting his family down in other ways, too. On one occasion, he blew off their sons’ swim meet. Mark hated his job — which involved extending loans to low-income customers in a way that he felt exploited them — and it showed. He could be angry and hostile at home.
Real estate websites vary on the particulars, but the Ungers’ house at 26104 Huntington Road had at least four bedrooms and three bathrooms
To his credit, Mark recognized he needed help. His father was a heavy drinker who went off on benders, and Mark wanted to break the cycle, according to his older sister, Connie Wolberg, who appeared on Dark Waters.
Sudden hardship. He spent months at a residential rehab facility in late 2002, according to Dark Waters. But he didn’t go back to work when he completed treatment, according to 2008 court papers. Sources vary as to whether he was fired or just refused to return to the bank.
Florence struggled without Mark’s income.
“Her normal was pulled out right before her eyes,” a friend told Dark Waters. Florence took a job as a loan officer at Flagstar Bank to support the family
Show us the money. By this time, the marriage had nearly collapsed under the weight of Mark’s disgruntlement and weaknesses. The once-fit outdoorsman had acquired a double chin and a paunch.
Florence, 37, began an affair with family friend Glenn Stark.
She filed for divorce in August 2003. Mark, 42, wanted to stay together and refused to sign the papers. She and her lawyer reportedly roiled Mark by demanding a full accounting of his gambling losses and the amount spent on his long stretch in rehab.
A Detroit Jewish News clipping from Oct. 31, 2003
Where is she? Although angered, Mark still loved Florence desperately and insisted they take Max, 10, and Tyler, 7, on their annual family vacation to the Watervale Inn resort in the lakeside town of Arcadia, Michigan.
Mark would later tell police that on Oct. 24, 2003 – the first night of the trip – he and Florence spent some time together on a boathouse roofdeck.
The next morning, Mark told resort owners Maggie and Linn Duncan that he had awakened to find Florence gone.
Suspicious precision. When the Duncans went to the cottage to break the news to Mark that they found Florence’s lifeless body in Lower Herring Lake, Mark “went ballistic,” started “crying and screaming and hollering,” and “went diagonally down to the water and jumped right in, right next to [Florence],” according to 2008 court papers.
But Linn hadn’t told Mark where Florence’s body lay in the water, and it wasn’t visible from the cottage.
According to Mark, that night on the roofdeck, Florence asked him to check on the kids, so he went back to the cottage, read them a story, and put them to bed.
What a heel. When he didn’t find Florence back on the roofdeck, he figured she was visiting the Duncans or other friends. He watched a movie and went to bed, only to wake up alone in the morning.
The Watervale resort gives each of its cottages a name. The Ungers stayed at the Mary Ellen
The police found it interesting that, by the time they first arrived at the scene, Mark had already packed up the family’s 1999 Ford Expedition and was getting ready to head home with his sons.
Police saw some broken railing on the roofdeck and noted a large bloodstain on the cement 12 feet below. A search of Mark’s car yielded a pair of his shoes smeared with white paint similar to that on the deck railing.
Perfect storm. Mark hired a team of his own forensic investigators who made a case that the wooden slats cracked after Florence sat on them and she fell to the cement, then rolled into the water.
Investigators didn’t buy it. “Bodies don’t bounce,” the medical examiner said.
They believed Florence and Mark fought that night over her refusal to reconcile with him. Perhaps the rejection awoke his anger over having to sacrifice his sportscaster job as well as his self-loathing over his weight gain and his frustration that he could no longer use substances as a crutch.
Today, the Mary Ellen rents for $3,835 a week
Placement off. Mark’s emotions exploded and he threw his wife over the railing, then kicked in some wooden slats to make it look like an accident, the authorities theorized. After 90 minutes — long enough for the pool of blood to form on the concrete — Mike checked on Florence and discovered she was still breathing, so he pushed her body the three feet from its resting place into the water, the forensics suggest.
Testing revealed the fence would remain intact under Florence’s weight of 110 pounds. (I’m a little suspicious of experiments like that — it could be that the particular section she sat on was already damaged or otherwise weakened.)
More telling was the finding that she had no drugs or alcohol in her system that night, making it unlikely she’d carelessly sit atop a fence 12 feet in the air. Plus, the spot where she landed didn’t align with the broken slats.
Her policy. And numerous friends noted that Florence was profoundly afraid of the dark, and wouldn’t have stayed on the roofdeck alone at night. Fred Oeflein, a boater who stopped by the roofdeck that night and offered the couple a ride, said that Florence declined because she feared the dark.
There was also the matter of Mark’s having $750,000 in insurance payouts to gain from Florence’s demise.
In May 2004, seven months after Florence’s death, Mark was charged with murder. Max and Tyler went to live with their maternal grandparents.
The boathouse railing was too low to meet building-code requirements, which the defense contended contributed to Florence Unger’s ‘accidental’ fall
Toon time. In the run-up to the trial, Oakland County Circuit Judge Linda Hallmark declined Mark’s request to have the boys returned to him. Claire Stern declared the prosecution “my heroes” and “my daughter’s heroes.”
But Judge Hallmark also admonished both sides for trashing each other publicly.
At the 2006 trial in Benzie County Circuit Court, Mark’s defense trotted out a theory that Florence may have had a seizure that propelled her from the cement into the water. They also showed an animated rendering of how she could have fallen and then tumbled.
Boyfriend spills story. The prosecution accused the defense of trying to paint the dead woman as a “shopping-crazed adulteress” after Glenn Stark, who had moved to Montana by the time of the trial, testified.
Glenn acknowledged that he and Florence exchanged romantic emails for two years and had sex on four occasions — one of them a week before her death, the Detroit Free Press reported. (Still, he seemed to validate Mark’s claim that he didn’t know about the affair until after Florence died. Glenn called it the “best-kept secret in Huntington Woods.”)
Jurors deliberated for 26 hours over a period of four days before finding Mark guilty of first-degree murder.
Dueling matriarchs. Although defense lawyer Robert S. Harrison said the decision stunned him and his client, Mark Unger showed little emotion as he was handcuffed and taken away, according to a Detroit Free Press account.
“Thank you, God,” Claire Stern said after the verdict.
Mark’s mother expressed disbelief. “My son is innocent,” Bette Rosenthal said, according to an AP account. “He would never hurt anyone. I think the world knows that except those people.”
Mark Unger in a 2019 prison mugshot
None-too-‘appealing.‘ In 2006, Max and Tyler won a $10 million suit against their father for Florence’s “projected lifetime earnings as a bank loan officer and the personal loss to her survivors.” It’s not clear whether Mark had enough money to pay off on any part of the award, but the boys’ lawyers also pursued claims on property and insurance.
In 2019, their father lost a bid for a new trial on the basis of ineffective counsel. Mark complained that his lawyer didn’t object to “provocative comments in the courtroom,” according to Michigan Live.
Mark is presently offender No. 611081 in the Chippewa Correctional Facility in Kincheloe on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Children successful. Florence is buried at Clover Hill Park Cemetery, which according to the Detroit Jewish News, is known as the “final resting place of Metro Detroit’s most prominent Jewish figures.”
Although she never got to fulfill all of her own promise, it looks as though her sons are on track to realize their potential.
Max Unger earned an MBA from the University of Michigan and has a management job with Spurs Sports and Entertainment. Tyler Unger followed in his mother’s footsteps to a career in design.
You can watch the “Lady in the Lake” episode of Dark Waters: Murder in the Deep on Amazon, but it costs $1.99 even if you have Prime.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
An Intoxicated Boater Kills a Local Hero (‘Dark Waters,’ Forensic Files)
Harry Uhl raced his Chevy Malibu in stock car competitions, but he didn’t meet his end in a fiery crash on a track crowded with speeding autos.
Harry Uhl Jr.
It happened on a boat barely moving on Lake Cayuga on a quiet August night.
His death at age 27 involved no malice or other ill intent, but it turned into a criminal case because the boater who accidentally hit him fled the scene.
Forensic Files mentioned that Harry was a celebrity around Tompkins County in the Finger Lakes region of New York, so for this week, I looked for more background on his life as well as that of passenger Nasreen Raza, who suffered a mangled arm in the accident.
Suds and fins. So let’s get going on the recap of “Dark Waters” along with extra information drawn from coverage of the story in the Ithaca Journal and other internet research as well as a phone interview with retired prosecutor Gary Surdell.
Harry Allen Uhl Jr. came into the world on December 20, 1974, one of seven children born to Delores Leopolski Uhl and Harry Uhl Sr., in Ithaca, New York.
As a child, the outdoorsy Harry enjoyed fishing with his older sister and would sometimes wash her car to thank her for taking him, according to the Ithaca Journal.
The little guy also “grew up with a wrench in his hand” and loved automobiles.
No grudges. It was a family affair. His brother, brother-in-law, and father — who also raced — would “go over the car with a fine-tooth comb,” Harry Jr. told the Ithaca Journal. “Every week we’d find stuff. Sometimes they were silly things we didn’t ever think were broken, but we’d find it.”
Cayuga is the longest of New York’s Finger Lakes and a big draw for tourism.
Harry graduated from Lansing High School and worked as a machinist at Borg Warner Automotive. In the first years of the millennium, “Hurricane Harry” earned a championship at Skyline Raceway and placed at Thunder Mountain in Center Lisle.
“He was a fierce competitor,” rival Ward Harrison of Groton told the Post Standard/Herald-Journal. “He was hard charging and he’d get mad like the rest of us. We’d rub cars and banged them, but we’d still talk to each other — just maybe not that night.”
Like mother, like son. Harry was popular for his warm personality as well as his exploits on the track. He “couldn’t walk more than 50 feet without bumping into someone who knew and loved him,” according to the Ithaca Journal.
At some point during his racing career, he changed the name of his car to No. 55 as a tribute to his mother, who died of cancer at age 55.
Little did Harry know that he would die even more prematurely.
A photo from Harry Uhl’s Findagrave page.
Fateful foursome. On August 17, 2002, Harry attended the Groton Old Home Festival, played a little pool, and then took his just-purchased fishing boat out on Cayuga Lake for its maiden voyage.
His pals Kristy Williams, Troy Maybee, and Nasreen Raza joined him. Forensic Files watchers will remember Nasreen — and her regal-looking face — from her appearance on the show.
Around 2 a.m., Harry steered to shore so Kristy and Troy could use a bathroom or a phone (media accounts vary) at Myers Point.
Demolition on the lake. Harry and Nasreen waited on the boat, which drifted a short distance from shore.
Suddenly, another vessel came out of nowhere like a demented dolphin.
Harry stood up and took a direct hit from the hull. A propeller tore into Nasreen’s arm.
Early newspaper reports described Nasreen Raza’s injury only as “a cut”
“I heard a blood-curdling scream,” Jason Hutchings, a sailor on the lake that night, would later testify. “To be honest with you, [Harry’s boat] didn’t even look like a boat to me — it looked like a paper box in the water.”
Jason saw Nasreen with her right arm “ripped to shreds” and Harry “bent over in a fetal position.”
Jumped and ran. Another eyewitness, Joseph F. Knight, who was swimming in the lake that evening, recalled that the offending vessel “hopped up in the air a little bit” over Harry’s boat, then circled without stopping and zipped away.
Harry died of head trauma that night, and Nasreen was airlifted to University Hospital in Syracuse, where doctors saved her arm, although it would be disfigured.
The Uhls held Harry’s funeral at the Lansing United Methodist Church, with his coffin draped in a checkered flag.
Tragedy for many. In a letter to the Ithaca Journal printed on Oct. 30, 2002, Harry’s nephew Timothy Lane wrote:
Harry’s calling hours were a wakeup for me. How could a man who was still so very young…have an impact on so many people’s lives? Goodbye to my uncle, my role model, one of my best friends that would do anything to help me and vice versa.
Harry Uhl’s sister Yvonne Bartlett said that she had “seen grown men break down when describing the accident scene.”
A memorial stock car race was held in honor of Harry, and the Uhls created a $500 scholarship in his name for local vocational program graduates.
Harry’s brother-in-law Dick Stark changed his own racing car’s number to 455 (“for 55”) as another tribute to Harry.
Hauled not floated. Meanwhile, the community was demanding action on the hit and run.
“This was the biggest boating case we’d had in a long time and to come,” Gary Surdell told ForensicFilesNow.com. “We didn’t have forensic reconstruction experts on staff. We had to reach out to the state.”
Because Harry’s wounds had no marine life in them, investigators thought that the boat that hit him might have recently been transported via an automobile and not kept docked in the water.
Quick cover-up. They also considered the possibility that the guilty pilot sank the boat.
Fortunately, a passenger from the mystery boat came forward. Construction worker John Ottenschot told police that his coworker Floyd Wright, who had been driving the boat, might have hit something on that night of August 17, but they didn’t know what — it might have been a log.
Investigators examined the vessel in Floyd’s garage. They eventually determined that someone had made an effort to repair the damage, cleaning blood off the hull and spray-painting it white.
A tiny crack in the propeller held a bit of foam.
‘I had no sympathy for Floyd Wright,’ said former Assistant DA Gary Surdell. ‘No one did.’
Alcohol aplenty. They made a case that the foam came from upholstery on Harry’s boat and paint chips found in wounds to Harry’s back, chin, and leg originated from Floyd’s boat.
Floyd, 35, was charged with failure to stop and report the accident, a misdemeanor, plus tampering with evidence, a Class E felony, because he repaired his boat.
John Ottenschot testified that he and Floyd drank at lakeside bars the Haunt and the Tradewinds on the fateful night, but they had Pepsi in addition to beer on the boat and Floyd didn’t seem intoxicated.
Bulb possibility. Defense lawyers Thomas Cramer and Andrew Bonavia insisted Floyd didn’t know what he hit because the other boat had no light on and its engine was off.
One prosecution theory held that Harry actually did have some form of illumination, but it broke off in the collision. “If Harry had his light on, that would have counted more against Floyd,” said Gary Surdell, who appeared on Forensic Files. “But that lake is so deep you would have needed Jacques Cousteau to find it.”
A jury convicted Floyd on all charges in April 2003.
On the spot. In June 2003, Judge M. John Sherman gave Floyd Wright — who already had a suspended driver’s license for operating a car while intoxicated — 16 months to two years in prison.
An Ithaca Journal clipping shows Floyd Wright, far right, with his lawyers
John Ottenschot faced no charges. “He clearly had bad feelings about the incident — what was he going to do, get into a fist fight with his friend?” Gary Surdell told ForensicFilesNow.com. “But he did the right thing in the end, although he didn’t give the whole account until he was on Forensic Files.”
Floyd served his time and then dropped out of sight. (New York’s Department of Corrections website lists other men named Floyd Wright currently in prison, but their descriptions don’t match his.)
Earlier episode. As for Nasreen Raza, it turns out that the boating accident wasn’t the first time she had made local headlines.
In 1998, at the age of 14, Nasreen was reported missing by her mother, Nancy Raza, after skipping school. After an anonymous caller tipped off police, they found her in the Courtyard Apartments on James Street in Syracuse. Nasreen was with an 18-year-old man she met on a phone chat line (remember those?) Nancy said that her daughter told her of sleeping in places where people woke up with roaches in their hair.
The guy was charged with endangering a minor.
Low profile. Nasreen apparently got her life back on track. In 2000, the local paper listed her as on the high honor roll at T-S-T Community School. In 2010 and 2011, she made the dean’s list at SUNY Courtland, where she studied anthropology.
There’s no word on what she’s doing today. (“Nasreen Raza” is a fairly common name — a lot of them are on social media.) But she’s probably happy to steer clear of drama and media attention.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Todd Boczkowski Discusses His Break With His Father (“All Wet,” Forensic Files)
After entrepreneur Tim Boczkowski went to prison for killing both of his wives — one in a bathtub in 1990, the other in a hot tub in 1994 — the story of the children he left behind was one of unity.
Todd Boczkowski is the youngest of three
Randy, Sandy, and Todd sought out and found foster parents who took in all three of them so they could stay in the same school district.
Sandy became a corporate HR executive for a logistics company, Randy got a job in crowd control at a Philadelphia stadium and started a family, and Todd served in the military and co-founded an online marketing company.
They all publicly supported their father’s innocence in the “accidental” deaths of their mother, Elaine Pegher Boczkowski, and stepmother, Maryann Fullerton Boczkowski.
That is, until now. Todd Boczkowski has changed his mind about his father and is preparing to tell his story via the upcoming book My Two Angels.
Todd, a 36-year-old Pittsburgh resident who lives with his long-haired cat, Mr. Puffers, recently talked to ForensicFilesNow.com about his relationship with his imprisoned father and late mother and stepmother and why he broke ranks with his older sister and brother:
You were 5 when your biological mother died. What do you remember of her?I was the mama’s boy. My mother provided the care, the love, the nurturing. My siblings were in school and my father was at work.The majority of my life was being around her. I got away with a lot. I always wanted to go to the candy store and would throw an absolute tantrum and I wouldn’t stop until my mom took me to get candy. My siblings still tease me about it.
Did you like your stepmother, Maryann, from the beginning? I did. I had a déjà vu moment because of how strikingly similar she and my mother looked. As a kid, I didn’t have an understanding of death. I remember meeting Maryann and thinking, “Mom, is that you?”
A clipping from a story about the Boczkowskis’ search for a foster home
When did you first start to suspect that your mother’s and stepmother’s drownings weren’t really accidental? It was at the age of 19 or 20, when I joined the military and was on my own and thinking for myself. I went through some formal law enforcement training. That’s when things started to not add up. Just the unusual circumstances, with both happening around tubs. My stepmother’s autopsy showing signs of strangulation. That’s tough evidence to refute.
Any other signs that concerned you? I believe that Maryann started to discover things about my father, ugly things and she was about to blow the lid off them. The week of her death she had reached out to my aunt — my father’s sister — and her friend. She wanted to meet up with them separately because she had something she wanted to talk about. She died before she had those meetings.
Tim Boczkowski, seen here in a 2021 prison photo, is serving his time at SCI Greene in Pennsylvania
How did your brother and sister react when you began to doubt your father’s innocence? We all accept one another’s opinions, views. We all have different perspectives. They respect my speaking out and writing a book.
What did you think about your father winning parole in 2018 from North Carolina (where Elaine died)? I’m sure the parole board thought, there’s another conviction in another state, so why do we still have to pay for him? Now he’s serving time in Pennsylvania for Maryann’s death.
To win parole, some prisoners have to admit to the crime. Is that the case with your father? He actually came out and verbalized that back in 2007. He said, “I’m responsible for your mother’s death.” But it didn’t seem genuine — it was like when someone drives drunk and kills someone by accident. That made me see who he was.
So the implication is that he didn’t mean to kill your mother? Yes. Now he’s serving his sentence for my stepmom, but he hasn’t admitted to his guilt in that – so that he can try to get his conviction overturned in Pennsylvania.
Is there anything else that influenced your perspective on your father? I was a guard at a prison camp in Iraq— it was so bare. It was a game changer for me. I realized I’d served harder time then my father had.
What’s your relationship with your father like today? I stopped talking to him in 2007. He’s attempted to make contact with me via letters to other people. My relatives know I feel this way. I said, don’t give him my address. I have a pretty good understanding as far as who my father is and that’s not the kind of thing I need in my life. I think he’s like a cancer. And I do think if he got out, he would kill again.♠
That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. – RR
