Rebecca Reisner, Author at Forensic Files Now

Bruce Moilanen: Killer and Jackass

A Husband Tries Murder, Insurance Fraud, and a Little Forgery
(‘Hunter or Hunted?’ Forensic Files)

Forensic Files has introduced us to many a dimwitted killer.

There was Ron Gillette, who sent out invitations to his second wedding while still married to his first wife.

Judy Blake and Bruce Moilanen in their youths. Bruce belonged to the track and field team at Ontonagon Area High School

Creative effort. And let’s not forget Ronnie Joe Neal, who told police he just happened to find his victim’s Cadillac with all her valuables inside and the keys in the ignition.

Well, Bruce Moilanen was none-too-bright either, but he went even bigger than stupid: He was a buffoon.

Maybe he deserved a little credit because his ploy to win the affections of his late wife’s friend was original, but it was laughable just the same and investigators saw through it immediately.

That one, really? Bruce also did some more-typical dumb criminal stuff, like trying to make a premeditated murder look like a hunting accident (Janice Dodson).

And like Forensic Files killers Brenda Andrew and George Hansen, Bruce never imagined investigators would look into previous near-deadly “accidents” that befell the victim.

For this week, I searched for some background on Judy and Bruce Moilanen and checked on where he is today.

So let’s get going on the recap of Forensic Files episode “Hunter or Hunted?” along with extra intelligence from internet research:

Minutiae machine. Judy Diane Blake was born to a conservative, outdoorsy family in Hancock, Michigan, on Oct. 16, 1957. She had two brothers, Jerry and David. The Blakes belonged to the Redeemer Free Lutheran Church, and Judy’s parents, Mary Ann and Dale, operated a business called Dale’s Service, according to FindaGrave.

In 1976, Judy met Bruce Moilanen, who came into the world on March 29, 1954, the son of Mr. and Mrs. William Moilanen.

Thanks to the Iron Daily Globe, a newspaper that pretty much documented every time a local changed his or her vacuum-cleaner bag, some anecdotal intelligence about Bruce popped up.

Finn folk. He received an appendectomy in 1959, his confirmation in the Apostolic Lutheran Church in 1969, and a number of traffic citations, including two for speeding and one for improper overtaking, in the early 1970s. He sustained minor injuries both as a passenger in an accident in 1974 and as a driver when he lost control of his own vehicle in 1976.

Like many residents of Michigan’s rugged Upper Peninsula, the 6-foot-tall Bruce had Finnish ancestry. At some point, he worked as a support staff person at General Hospital in Marquette, Michigan. Forensic Files gives his job title as insurance adjustor.

The murder shook up the Upper Peninsula including Ontonagon, Michigan

As for Judy’s occupation, a Battle Creek Enquirer item identified her as a nurse at the same hospital.

The couple married in 1978. According to American Justice, Judy’s parents didn’t entirely approve of the union. Perhaps the loudmouthed Bruce seemed too different from their quiet daughter. Or maybe they read about the speeding tickets in the IDG.

Chasing big bucks. Judy and Bruce stayed in the Upper Peninsula. In 1989, they had a daughter named Elise. By this time, the Blakes had taken more of a liking to their son-in-law.

Everything seemed fine until November 29, 1992, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, when Judy, Bruce, and Elise were visiting the Blakes.

It was the last day of hunting season and a large party, including Bruce and some of the Blakes, went out looking for deer.

Separately, Judy Moilanen took a group of her own Springer spaniels plus her parents’ dog, Streak, for a walk in the woods behind the property the Blakes owned on Highway 38 in Ontonagon.

Worst case scenario. Although Forensic Files says that all the dogs returned home without Judy, the book The Sweater Letter by Dave and Lynn Distel maintains that only Streak came home alone.

Judy Moilanen was a dog trainer as well as a medical professional

When two and half hours passed with no sign of Judy, family members got worried that she was on a fool’s errand searching for Streak.

Mary Ann and a family friend found the dogs by themselves in the woods. Farther out, they saw Judy lying motionless on her side.

When they turned her on her back, they saw a bloody chest wound, and Mary Ann screamed, according to the The Sweater Letter.

Part of a trend? The bullet had traveled through Judy’s heart, exited her body, and landed somewhere in the woods. Investigators couldn’t find it at first.

In the meantime, the authorities took the scene at face value as an accident, believing that an unknown hunter’s errant bullet killed Judy.

In fact, an Associated Press article titled “Carelessness, hunters equal a deadly season” pointed to Judy’s death as one of many accidental deer season tragedies around the country in 1992:

“Judy Moilanen, 35, was walking her dogs last weekend in a wooded area frequented by hunters when she was struck by a bullet. She was the fourth hunting-related fatality in Michigan this season.“

Local color. But detective Bob Ball didn’t buy it. He felt uneasy about the way Bruce Moilanen behaved, according to both Forensic Files and American Justice.

Bruce seemed to blame Judy for her own death because she didn’t wear an orange jacket.

And Bruce didn’t observe much of a mourning period. Within a couple of weeks of Judy’s death, he was gallivanting around on ski trips, and he tried to pick up Judy’s longtime friend Lee Anne Wysocki Jessop, according to her Forensic Files interview.

But Bruce seemed to have even more interest in another woman, the happily married Gayle Lampinen, 35. He had started hitting on her before Judy died. According to American Justice, Gayle considered him irritating and “kept ignoring him” and “hoped he’d go away.”

Odd present. After his wife’s death, Bruce reportedly bragged to Gayle that he’d soon have a financial windfall thanks to Judy’s life insurance policies, which would total $330,000 because of double indemnity clauses.

Gayle and Judy had met each other, but they weren’t close friends. So it seemed strange when Bruce presented her with boxes of Judy’s old clothes as a keepsake gift.

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Mixed in with some second-hand sweaters, Gayle found a letter — supposedly written to her by Judy — that said her marriage to Bruce wasn’t working.

“After 14 years, we don’t see things the same anymore,” the note explained. “You are the only woman he trusts.”

Ya’ gotta be kidding. It also said that Bruce needed a new girlfriend.

And in an attempt to entice Gayle that redefined the word “buffoon,” the writer ended the letter by noting that Bruce “is incredible in the sack.”

Oh, for goodness sake.

Handwriting analysis showed that the writing was slow and deliberate like that of a forger, and ultimately determined that Bruce, not Judy, had written the letter.

Detectives found a ‘practice’ letter in addition to the one Bruce made for Gayle Lampinen to discover

Meanwhile, investigators found out that in 1991, an 85-pound chimney block “accidentally” slid off a roof where Bruce was working and hit Judy’s head. She got medical treatment and survived.

Hunting buddies. After the brick incident, the Moilanens’ house caught on fire. Judy escaped unharmed.

As for the completed murder of Judy in the woods, Bruce immediately named more than two dozen people as alibi witnesses. But they couldn’t say exactly where he was during a window of time around Judy’s death.

Police found one witness who saw Bruce hunting alone near the scene of the shooting.

Investigators believed that Bruce hid in the woods and shot Judy.

When a diligent investigator finally located the fatal bullet on the forest floor, Bruce said he didn’t own a .30 caliber rifle that could fire it, but detectives found some of Bruce’s paperwork listing such a gun as collateral on a bank loan.

Suspect cracks wide open. By this time, detectives had ascertained that Gayle Lampinen had no romantic interest in Bruce whatsoever regardless of how great his sexual prowess was or wasn’t.

When the police broke the news to Bruce that his silly device had failed and Gayle considered him little more than a nuisance, it crushed his ego and he confessed.

Judy was a tyrant at work and at home and a bad cook, Bruce claimed.

He said that on the fatal day in the woods, the first two times he spotted Judy through the trees, he aimed his gun but couldn’t bring himself to shoot. The third time, he closed his eyes and pulled the trigger, delivering the deadly wound.

Police pressure. Bruce also said Judy had threatened to divorce him and he didn’t want to split everything.

“That was Bruce’s downfall — he was cheap,” Bob Ball said.

Bruce was arrested and charged with premeditated murder. He pleaded not guilty and said cops coerced the confession from him. He tried to hide his face behind some papers on his way into the Ontonagon courthouse.

To prepare for the trial, investigators had re-created the chimney block incident. Bruce had said that he accidentally moved it with his foot, but they determined it was too heavy and needed a deliberate push in order to fall off the roof.

Weepy woe. Fortunately, prosecutor Beth Paczesny, just 26 years old and new to criminal trials, had plenty of other witnesses to help sway the jury, too.

During Gayle Lampinen’s testimony, Bruce reportedly began crying.

The defense didn’t have a single person to put on the stand. Bruce’s lawyer, the seasoned Thomas Casselman, claimed that all of his witnesses canceled because of fear. He portrayed the investigation as a witch hunt.

Casselman pressed the false-confession claim. “Those of you who are combat veterans or prisoners of war might understand,” he offered.

Foreman not fooled. When the jury came back with a guilty verdict on Dec. 15, 1993, Judy’s parents — who initially supported Bruce — hugged. Some in attendance cried.

Forensic Files chose police officer Linda Culp (above in a newspaper clipping) from an open casting call to play Judy Moilanen. Producers used a plastic chimney block so she wouldn’t get hurt during the ‘accident’ re-creation.

Jury foreman Jeff Vlahos, who later appeared on American Justice, seemed just as amused as everyone else by the “incredible in the sack” aside. He said he couldn’t imagine a grown woman writing something like that.

On Jan. 21, 1994, Bruce received a sentence of life without parole.

Judy’s brother and sister-in-law, David and Yvonne Blake, adopted 5-year-old Elise.

Too many roomies. Bruce went off to prison, but has made some attempts to get out on two feet, including an unsuccessful 1996 appeal claiming police shouldn’t have interrogated him without counsel.

Some disagreeable experiences have allegedly befallen Bruce while behind razor wire.

During his time at E.C. Brooks Correctional Facility, he claimed an employee retaliated against him for filing a grievance by moving him from a two-prisoner cell to a seven-man open dorm area, which caused mental stress and sleep deprivation. He also implied that staff members damaged his word processor and cassette player.

If I understand the court papers correctly, Bruce actually got some of these employees dismissed in 2011.

But he didn’t win freedom for himself.

‘Volumes’ of info. Today, Bruce is better known as inmate #235252 in Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, Michigan, at security level II. He has no chance at parole.

Gayle Lampinen, the woman he found so captivating, appears to still live in the Upper Peninsula and participate in equestrian events.

If you’d like to know more about the case, you can find the book The Sweater Letter, later retitled Hunt to Kill, on Amazon.

It’ll cost you. “The Deer Hunting Murder,” the American Justice episode about the homicide, is available online but tricky to access. I ended up having to pay $4.99 for an A&E Crime Central subscription to watch it on Amazon, even though I have Prime.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

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Marlene Major: A Life in Minor Key

A Mechanic Preys on His Kids and Makes His Wife Disappear
(‘A Daughter’s Journey,’ Forensic Files)

The Marlene Major case is a study in both the grimly expected and the pleasantly surprising.

After Marlene, a 25-year-old mother of two, went missing, Bill Major gave the classic Forensic Files “my wife just got in her car and drove away forever” explanation (Jack Boyle, Richard Nyhuis).

And sadly, a revelation toward the middle of the story isn’t out of the ordinary either: Bill was sexually abusing the couple’s kids (John Schneeberger, Fred Grabbe).

But two other aspects of the case were unusual and uplifting.

First of all, the stepmother whom LaLana and Donald Major acquired after Marlene disappeared was not only kind to them but also placed them ahead of her husband in importance.

Second, two decades after her mother vanished, LaLana began investigating the cold case herself and helped to solve it.

For this week, I looked into whatever happened to Bill Major.

So let’s get started on the recap of “A Daughter’s Journey,” along with extra information from online research:

Marlene and Bill Major lived in a trailer in the tiny Kentucky town of Verona and made a cute couple on the surface. She had shoulder-length blond hair and pert features. He had darkish hair and Marlboro Man eyes.

Bill, born on Jan. 6, 1944, worked as an auto repairer. His father, Jim Major, would later describe his son as a “charmer” who could “talk the pants off anybody” — but “you couldn’t believe a word he said,” according to South Coast Today.

Only a few bits of intelligence on Marlene surfaced. She came into the world in Lincoln County, Kentucky, on Dec. 7, 1955, the daughter of Willie “Billy” Craig Oakes and Lorraine Mildred McQueary, according to Find a Grave.

By 1980, whatever luster the Majors’ marriage once had was gone. Marlene became romantically involved with Glenn St. Hilaire, a former welder who lived in his camper on the Majors’ property and did some work for Bill’s business.

Glenn, who had French Canadian roots, told Cold Case Files that Bill actually encouraged the affair.

Apparently, it gave Bill more time alone with the children, yikes. Or perhaps Bill was planning to kill Marlene all along and wanted to set up Glenn as a suspect.

On October 15, 1980, Glenn overheard Marlene and Bill arguing. Glenn stepped out for coffee, and never saw Marlene again.

Like many other deadly Forensic Files spouses, Bill didn’t keep his story straight. He told Glenn that Marlene took the children and left — but told a neighbor that she had gallivanted away with Glenn, according to court papers.

Bill informed LaLana, 4, and Donald, 8, that their mother was a prostitute who ran off and didn’t care about them.

Motorists who broke down on I-75 provided a lot of business for Bill Major’s garage

Glenn went to the Florence police department to report that he suspected foul play in Marlene’s sudden absence.

A newspaper article about her disappearance noted that Marlene had hazel eyes, wore glasses while driving, and was last seen in jeans and a blue-and-green plaid flannel shirt.

But there was no sign of her.

Meanwhile, Bill quickly got rid of his guns and sold his tractor, then scooped up his kids — but abandoned the family dog — and headed to Rhode Island to be closer to his parents, who lived in East Providence. Bill bought a trailer and settled with the kids in Pawtucket, a city known for having a high crime rate by Rhode Island standards.

One year after Marlene’s disappearance, Bill remarried.

The kids confided in their stepmother, identified only as Pauline in a media account, that their father had been beating and sexually abusing both of them. He also would coerce them into obedience by threatening one sibling that he would kill the other, they said.

Fortunately, Pauline was no evil stepmother. According to Cold Case Files, she confronted Glenn and he promised to stop. When that didn’t work, she notified the authorities.

In 1985, LaLana and Donald got to witness law officers pull up in cars with flashing lights, handcuff Bill, and haul him away.

A court sentenced him to up to 15 years in a Rhode Island state prison for his sex crimes against his children. He served about 12 years before winning release.

Somewhere amid all this mess, Bill married at least once more. Claire Bailey, a bus monitor, reportedly believed Bill’s time in prison resulted from an armed robbery conviction, according to South Coast Today.

In the meantime, Donald and LaLana had moved in with their maternal grandmother, Lorraine Oakes, in Kentucky.

Marlene was still missing.

Glenn St. Hilaire met the Majors when he had car trouble on his way to Texas to search for work as a welder

Lorraine told LaLana that Marlene was dead, that Bill did it. She had no proof, though, so LaLana, at 20 years old, decided to investigate.

She got her hands on the cold case file, including Marlene’s diary — Marlene had told her sister as well as Glenn to look at it in case anything happened to her.

LaLana found a passage Marlene wrote about the sexual abuse suffered by Donald.

“He tried to hide what they were doing, but I know what I saw,” Marlene wrote. “I guess I died inside.”

(Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but at some point during her marriage, Marlene learned that Bill had a 1975 conviction for molesting two boys, according to Cold Case Files.)

Marlene also noted in her journal that Donald said Bill had been molesting him for four to five years. She wrote that she planned to use the allegations to gain custody of the kids in a divorce.

A number of YouTube commenters criticized Marlene for not going to the police immediately. But if Forensic Files got its numbers right, Marlene married at age 16. She hadn’t lived much and, back in 1980, the societal framework for discussing and reporting sexual abuse of children hadn’t developed as it has today.

Glenn St. Hilaire told investigators Bill said that if Marlene ever tried to leave and take the kids, he would kill her — and that he knew how to commit the perfect crime.

LaLana Bramble during her appearance on Cold Case Files

Bill had even told people of how he would dismember Marlene’s body, remove her jaw, and destroy her teeth to prevent identification, Detective Tim Carnahan said during his Forensic Files interview.

LaLana learned that, on a farm in Boone County, Kentucky, about a mile from the Majors’ old homestead, a hunter had found a human skull with a bullet hole and missing jaw in November 1981.

After digging in the ground near the skull site, LaLana found nothing more. Nevertheless, she persisted.

Forensic scientists had developed mitochondrial DNA testing, so LaLana spearheaded a fundraising drive for the $20,000 lab fee. Her aunt offered to donate her retirement fund to the cause, but fortunately, the state of Kentucky decided to pay.

The DNA from the skull matched LaLana’s DNA, proving it came from Marlene.

LaLana said she wanted the whole world to know that her mother didn’t abandon her kids. Someone murdered her.

And in another action to restore some faith in humanity, Bill’s father, a retired trucker, began working with investigators.

They set up a secret recording on which Bill confided in dad Jim Major that he murdered Marlene, buried her body in a sinkhole, pushed her 1972 Ford Pinto into the Ohio River, and threw away the gun. Bill also said the homicide didn’t bother him one bit.

Marlene, right, with her children and her sister

Investigators used an airplane to search for the blue car, but it never turned up, and Bill had only laughed at LaLana when she asked him what he did with the rest of Marlene’s body.

But Bill started talking soon enough.

After his arrest on June 25, 2001, he switched to blame-the-victim mode and told police that Marlene had threatened him with a gun, and he lost his temper and shot her twice in the face and four times in the torso.

By the time the case went to trial in Boone Circuit Court in July 2003, Bill, 59, was barely recognizable. He aged prematurely. He used a wheelchair because of a 1995 stroke.

Judge Jay Bamberger declined a request from Bill, who authorities extradited from his home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, to skip the trial because of ill health.

The children testified about their abuse, with LaLana describing how Bill pointed a gun at her and said he would kill her if she didn’t keep it a secret. Donald told the court that Bill’s sexual assaults on him took place “in the trailer, in the truck, in the warehouse, at work, wherever.”

A newspaper clipping shows Bill Major in court

As for Marlene’s death, defense attorney Edward Drennen argued that Bill’s earlier confession wasn’t entirely valid because the stroke scrambled his memory. Drennen suggested that Bill acted out of “extreme emotional distress” because of jealousy over Marlene.

The Cincinnati Enquirer described the courtroom scene in the trial’s final hours:

“After Drennen’s closing arguments, Major leaned to his attorney and complimented him on a job well done. Major then wheeled around in his wheelchair and smiled at his two children, who were in the gallery. As the guilty verdict was read a short time later, [Donald] Oakes leaned to his sister and said, ‘It’s finally over.'”

LaLana “pumped her brother’s hands, a satisfied smile on her face,” the Cincinnati Post reported.

“Good-bye, Dad. I hope you spend the rest of your life behind bars,” Lalana, 27, said. “You deserve it.”

Bill got a life sentence and went off to Kentucky State Reformatory in LaGrange in August 2003.

Meanwhile, although the balance of her body was never found, Marlene, whose full maiden name was Helen Marlene Oakes, got the burial she deserved. “You just couldn’t believe how hard it was for us to know our daughter’s skull was sitting in a forensic lab somewhere for all those years,” Lorraine Oakes told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

So where is Bill Major today? The Kentucky Department of Corrections no longer lists him as an inmate, and according to a reader comment — possibly written by Donald — on the Raving Queen blog, Bill died in prison on October 15, 2017.

Donald and LaLana have kept a low profile over the years. They both long ago jettisoned the “Major” from their personal identification. LaLana was last known as LaLana Bramble and her brother began using his mother’s maiden name, calling himself Donald Oakes.

A 2003 article mentions Donald was living in Washington state. A 2004 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer notes LaLana’s occupation as beauty shop manager.

It’s sad that their mother never got a chance to experience life on her own and away from Bill, but the diary she left behind helped make it possible for her children to escape him forever.

The Cold Case Files episode about the homicide, “Daddy Knows Best,” is no longer on YouTube, Daily Motion, or Amazon Prime. If anyone knows of another way to view it, please write in with a clue.

P.S. Thanks to reader Sean in Tampa who emailed with a tip that you can watch “Daddy Knows Best” on the Cold Case Files Presented by A&E channel on Pluto TV.

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

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Jack Lynch’s Killers: An Update

Prescription Drug Addicts Annihilate a Community Asset
(‘Partners in Crime,’ Forensic Files)

All murder victims make for sympathetic characters (well, Michael Prozumenshikov is marginal), but Charles “Jack” Lynch seemed especially deserving of a much better fate.

The Forensic Files episode about the case kicks off with an interview with Kim Arwin, who sounds as though she’s had a hard-knock life. Kim lived in Jack’s neighborhood in Danville, Illinois, and tells Forensic Files about his kindnesses to her family, such as the time she was having financial problems and Jack bought her daughter a dress for eighth-grade graduation.

Jack Lynch made his neighbors his family

Code 911. For this week, I looked into where Jack’s killers are today, so let’s get going on the recap of “Partners in Crime” plus extra information from internet research.

Jack Lynch, who was unmarried and lived alone, acted as a benevolent father and grandfather figure to neighbors for decades.

Those relationships ended on July 16, 1992, the day a passerby reported a fire at Jack’s house. His car was missing from the driveway, so neighbors assumed he wasn’t home.

Death by bloodbath. Then, responders pulled a charred body from the blaze.

Dental records confirmed the victim’s identity as Jack Lynch. An autopsy revealed no smoke in lungs. He died from 24 stab wounds, one of which cut his jugular vein, before the fire started.

Jack’s injuries came from two different knives, which police believed meant two killers.

Van abandoned. Rope left at the scene suggested someone had tied him up.

Kim Arwin in a family picture — Kim Arwin, left, had known Jack Lynch since her childhood

Although they found no sign of forced entry, investigators could see that one or more people had ransacked the house, taking a TV, VCR, microwave, gaming unit, .357 magnum, and small amount of cash. The fire that ravaged Jack’s home originated from three separate places in the structure, a clear sign of arson.

Jack’s car, with his TV inside, turned up in a housing project’s parking lot.

Bandits on the loose. As far as suspects, a neighbor named Ed Kramer put himself front and center early on. Ed had a career-criminal mullet and was a bit of a drama king — talking to reporters and demanding to be let into the house. He was also the last person to see Jack alive, and had just borrowed money from him.

But police soon had reason to look in a different direction. They suspected a tie between the fire and a string of thefts in the area.

Just days before the murder, a gunman had robbed two area drugstores and stolen large quantities of prescription medicines. And a number of neighborhood houses had recently been burglarized.

Dregs of society. Hours after the murder, police stopped motorist Robert Moore and found in his van a .357 magnum like the one stolen from Jack as well as a sack of cash from a local Comfort Inn that had just reported a robbery.

A photo from Danville’s website belies the hardscrabble lives of some of the city’s residents

Robert and his wife, Jamie L. Moore, both 30 years old, were drug dealers addicted to prescription pills and well-known among locals. The Moores didn’t have legitimate jobs, and they collected welfare.

In the Moores’ bedroom, investigators found two knives covered with Jack’s blood. (As YouTube commenter Jay Brown wrote: “Quick! Hide the knives behind the bed! No one will EVER think to look there…”)

Worse than expected. The weapons came from a wooden holder in Jack’s kitchen.

Still, the Moores’ neighbors “probably were surprised by this,” State’s Attorney Craig DeArmond said, according to an AP account. “I don’t think that anybody saw them as being that violent.”

But at the very least, no one could deny the two were highly unstable. When the authorities arrested Jamie, she swallowed pills in a suicide attempt or maybe a bid for sympathy. She also deliberately cut herself with broken glass while waiting for police to take her fingerprints.

Spouse spills it. Meanwhile, her husband immediately started blabbing.

He told police that he got the .357 magnum when he “killed that guy.”

A circa-1993 newspaper clipping shows Jamie and Robert Moore in custody

Robert admitted that he went to Jack’s house, tied him up, and began gathering his possessions. He said that Jack freed himself, they fought, and he stabbed the older man to death and set the house on fire to cover up the crime.

Jamie’s talkin’. In an instance of rarely seen semi-honor among thieves, Robert insisted that “Jamie didn’t have no part of it” and that she was asleep on the couch during the crime.

(He probably wanted the children the couple shared — a daughter, 9, and son, 6 — to have a mother.)

But Jamie implicated herself. She told police she knocked on Jack’s door to gain entry and allowed her husband to come in behind her.

Hotel hit. She maintained, however, that Jack was still tied up and alive when she exited his house.

Prosecutors made a case that both Moores stabbed Jack.

Vintage photo of Jack Lynch and friends at a birthday party — A vintage photo shows Jack Lynch seated at right

They used Jack’s car to haul the stolen goods, then abandoned it and robbed the Comfort Inn because they didn’t get enough cash from Jack’s house, the prosecution contended.

Robert continued to insist that he alone killed Jack.

Setting low expectations. Jamie pleaded guilty to armed robbery and agreed to testify against her husband.

She attempted suicide yet again. Prosecutors decided not to put her on the witness stand.

Robert’s testimony at his own trial didn’t help his case much. He admitted that he went to Jack Lynch’s house to get money to buy drugs and said he didn’t know why he stabbed him to death or set the place on fire. He also declined to fight off his affinity for drugs — he said if he had any, he’d take them.

Kim Arwin testified for the prosecution, telling the court about Jack’s dedication to his neighbors.

Odd man in. In February 1993, a Vermilion County jury found Robert Moore guilty of murder, home invasion, armed robbery, and arson.

An undated prison photo of Jamie Moore from Mugshots.com

One of the 12 jurors felt Jack deserved a shot at rehabilitation. He voted against the death penalty, so Robert got life in prison instead of a lethal injection.

After a separate trial, Jamie Moore received a sentence of 39 years.

She’s free. The children stayed with relatives, and Robert’s father pursued custody.

Jamie spent time in the Decatur Correctional Center, where she availed herself of the prison’s social media platform to seek an “honest, serious and dependable man” for friendship.

In 2011, Jamie Moore won release with three years of parole, which she successfully completed, according to the Forensic Files Facebook page.

She has maintained a low profile since then.

Behind razor wire. Robert Moore, 59, resides in Menard Correctional Center in Illinois.

The facility was once home to two other Forensic Files killers, Mark Winger and Gene A. Brown Jr. (Both of them have since moved to Western Illinois Correctional Center.)

In Robert’s mugshots, it looks as though someone propped him upright to take a last picture, much like the ones sheriffs in the Old West took of dead outlaws after a gunfight.

Robert’s inmate profile notes that he is ineligible for release and has “Jamie” tattooed on his upper left arm.

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

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What Happened to Kem Wenger’s Son?

Logan Was Just a Baby When His Father Killed His Mother
(“Wired for Disaster,” Forensic Files)

Before tragedy struck, Kem Wenger was heading toward a more stable life. The Illinois hairdresser had become engaged to a student-minister who wanted to adopt her baby son, Logan, so she could distance herself from his unreliable father.

But the biological dad didn’t like that idea, so he planted a bomb in Kem’s house in Bloomington. Her fiancé, Kurt Simon, survived the blast, but it killed Kem, age 29.

Assorted siblings. For this week, I looked into how Logan — who was a toddler when his mother died and his father went to prison — survived this whole mess and what he’s doing today. I also searched for updates on Kem’s daughter as well as Kurt Simon.

So let’s get going on the recap of the 2006 Forensic Files episode “Wired for Disaster,” along with extra information from internet research.

Kemberly Sue Dohman came into the world on Sept. 25, 1963, in Bloomington, Illinois, the daughter of Wilma and Richard Dohman. She had three sisters and a brother, although it’s not clear how many of them arose from Wilma and Richard’s union — they split up.

Equipment maker. Only a couple bits of information about Kem’s early life turned up online. According to a 1976 Daily Leader story, Kem was a cheerleader in junior high and got to attend cheerleading camp. Her obituary mentions that she worked as an extra on Grandview, U.S.A., a movie shot in Pontiac, Illinois, circa 1983.

In 1985, Kem married a man whom Forensic Files calls Paul but other media accounts identify as Todd Wenger. They had a daughter, Kelsey, before divorcing.

Kem then started dating Dale Fosdick, a dark-haired furry-browed machinist who appropriately worked at Caterpillar. Dale would later admit that he backed away from Kem when she told him they were expecting a child.

New flame. Feeling alienated and worried, Kem considered terminating the pregnancy on two occasions but changed her mind both times, her friend Terry Hoffman said.

Once Logan was born, Dale contributed some of his income to support him, but it was insufficient and often late. In addition to her work as a hair stylist, the glamorous-looking Kem did housecleaning and babysitting to make extra money. Still, she needed to use food stamps.

While Logan was still a baby, Kem met Kurt Simon, a counselor studying to be a Presbyterian minister.

Goodwill tour. “Both of us were poor as church mice, but we were two of the happiest people,” Simon would later tell the Bloomington newspaper The Pantagraph.

As Forensic Files viewers will remember, Kurt sounded like good father material. Logan had already started calling him Daddy.

At around 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 22, 1993, Kem and Kurt returned to Kem’s house from a trip to Iowa, where Kurt lived and attended the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. Friends had thrown the couple a surprise engagement shower at the Golden Congregational Church on the day before they headed back to Illinois.

Huge shakeup. The couple planned to attend Kelsey’s piano recital the next day.

Kurt entered the house first, taking in some luggage and then returning to the car to unload more items. “It’s a lot warmer here than it was in Iowa,” were the last words he heard Kem say before she went inside the residence.

Then, an explosion rocked the house and woke the neighbors. It was so powerful that shrapnel hit nearby houses.

Kurt found Kem lying on the floor dead. The blast had destroyed the right side of her skull.

Smoking guns. Investigators determined that in the hallway, Kem had used her left hand to pick up some type of package hiding a bomb, which detonated via a motion-activated switch.

Police found bomb-making components such as wires and fuses in the basement and battery wrappers and rubber gloves in a wastebasket upstairs.

Death and indignity. The evildoer apparently finished making the bomb on-site so it wouldn’t accidentally go off in transit (Mark Hofmann) and thought the explosion would destroy the entire house and leave no evidence.

Because the blast happened close to Kurt but left him unharmed, police at first considered him the chief suspect.

The three-bedroom house at 1301 North Roosevelt Avenue where the crime happened

In front of the neighbors, officers placed Kurt in handcuffs, ordered him to sit on the ground, and hauled him in for questioning. They released him after a few hours, and he didn’t hold a grudge — they were just doing their jobs.

Insect activity? Kurt later spoke to The Pantagraph about his grief:

“It goes from uncontrollable sobbing to numbness to bouts of denial, bouts of anger. … It sounds cliché, but she was just a gem. She was one of the most soft-spoken, sensitive people. And she was gorgeous, but that was almost secondary.”

As far as a suspect, Kurt looked toward Kem’s mother, who by then was known by the name Cricket Lewis.

“If you take every kind of evil, roll it up into a ball, there you have Cricket Lewis,” Kurt said in one of Forensic Files‘ Top 10 best quotes.

Convenient passing. He deemed Cricket “terribly depraved” and capable of such a horrible act.

Kem’s friend Terry Hoffman seconded that motion.

“Cricket made her money on her back,” she said during her Forensic Files interview. “I mean, yes, she had a bar, but I think that the bar that she had was bought from the inheritance of an old lady that she took care of and that, of course, died under her care.”

Tax woes. Kurt noted that at Kem’s funeral, Cricket primarily mourned not her daughter but rather the loss of any insurance payout because Kem let her policy lapse.

(My research didn’t uncover any concrete evidence of wickedness attributable to Cricket, although apparently she was a bit of a tax cheat. In 1988, the Pantagraph noted that Illinois revoked her license because she failed to pay $1,545.95 in taxes and neglected to file returns for Cricket’s Tap, the bar she owned in Forrest, Illinois.)

Investigators considered Cricket a suspect in the homicide as well but ultimately concluded that neither she nor Kurt Simon had the mechanical wherewithal to create the pipe bomb that killed Kem.

Todd’s all right. Another suspect, Kem’s ex-husband, Todd, had reportedly had some custody disagreements over Kelsey. He worked at Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing and lived just two miles away.

But Kurt Simon said that he and Kem got along with Todd, and Todd had a solid alibi anyway.

A Pantagraph clipping from *April 17, 199*6, shows Michael Costello and Cricket Lewis. Dale Fosdick’s people came up with $72,000 to pay Costello for the first trial, but taxpayers footed his $18,000 bill for the next go-around

Next up on the suspect list came a former co-worker Kem had filed a sexual harassment complaint against. But he supplied proof that he hadn’t been anywhere near Bloomington in months.

Tinkerer. That left Logan’s father, Dale Fosdick, 31, who lived in an apartment on the east side of Bloomington.

Dale didn’t lack for technical skills. In addition to his work at Caterpillar, he constructed model airplanes and played with motors.

In Dale’s basement, law officers discovered a huge inventory of components used in explosives. Wire cutters from Dale’s residence made distinctive marks similar to those found on bomb fragments at Kem’s house. He had Walmart receipts for .25-caliber BBs like those used in the deadly device.

Jury divided. Officers arrested Dale Fosdick and charged him with first-degree murder.

Over the course of two trials — the first ended in a mistrial with one juror a holdout and another too ill to continue — the defense portrayed Dale as a devoted father incapable of violence.

Dale’s supporters asserted that he was too “wimpy” to murder anyone.

Hopping up. And he defended his performance as a parent. Dale admitted that he shrank back after he learned of Kem’s pregnancy but claimed he did a 180 later and embraced fatherhood.

Terry Hoffman acknowledged that Dale eventually decided he wanted to marry Kem.

And Dale had the homicide victim’s own mother on his side. Cricket portrayed Kurt Simon as the villain. She said that she and Kem had a good relationship until Kurt ruined it and robbed Kem of her joie de vivre.

Hit record. Cricket told the court about Dale’s impressive feats, like picking up Kem from the hospital after she gave birth and sticking around to watch her feed the infant.

(Cricket’s daughter Joni Bailey also supported Dale, but it’s not clear whether or not she testified.)

Defense lawyer Michael Costello tried to shame Kurt Simon, asking, “Why did you think you could take away someone else’s children? Think that was Christian?”

But the prosecution had plenty of ammunition on its side, too. McLean County State’s Attorney Charles Reynard pointed to Dale as a bitter malcontent who caused Kem’s life to be “vaporized in a violent, bloody explosion.”

Stingy dad. Reynard played a tape recording between Dale and Kem. She sarcastically said Dale wasn’t really dedicated to their son “until about the time I started dating Kurt — then the love started pouring out.”

Todd Wenger testified that Dale once told him he would rather quit his job than give Kem “a dime” in child support.

Dale’s former colleague Todd Grafelman said Dale worried that Kem would take their son and move to Iowa. (Actually, Kurt was reportedly planning to move into Kem’s house in Bloomington.)

Prosecutor pounces. It came out that Dale allegedly told associates that he was documenting Kem’s appointment books as evidence of fraud against the Department of Public Aid — and he was plotting to gain custody of Logan.

Reynard also remolded the testimony about Dale’s alleged meekness.

“How would a wimp kill someone?” Reynard asked. “Would he confront the person and do it face to face or would he do it coldly, sinister and secretive?”

Near the scene. Caterpillar colleague Harvey P “Sunny” Sturdevant — who had served in Vietnam — testified that Dale had asked him to kill Kem, although he didn’t take it seriously at the time. The two discussed bomb-making and the fact that BBs are hard to trace, according to Sturdevant.

Evidence showed that Dale mail-ordered hollow grenade material and waterproof fuses, although he claimed the fuses were for a Fourth of July celebration.

Neighbors testified to seeing Dale near Kem’s house within 12 hours of the explosion. Kem kept a spare key under the front steps and the backdoor screen had a hole in it, so Dale had easy points of access.

And Bloomington detective Dan Katz testified that Dale wasn’t always as responsible as Cricket alleged — Cricket had once admitted that she sometimes had to call Dale and yell in order to extract the child support he owed Kem.

Much contemplation. In the second trial, McLean County Circuit Judge William Caisley forbid the defense to use innuendo to cast suspicion upon Kurt Simon or Todd Wenger unless it had solid evidence.

The Horseshoe Saloon takes up the space at 201 E. Krack Street that once housed Cricket’s Tap in Forrest, Illinois. She put the bar up for sale in 1988, noting it had an upstairs apartment

After deliberating for 43 hours, a jury convicted Dale Fosdick of first-degree murder on February 26, 1996.

At the sentencing hearing, Cricket said that Dale, who had 25 supporters with him in court, could come live with her anytime. She held Dale’s hand and “tearfully kissed his cheek,” according to an AP account.

Epilogues. A single juror had voted against the death penalty, so Dale received 55 years.

“The rest of us have been sentenced to life without Kem,” Kurt Simon told The Pantagraph.

So, what happened to the principals in this drama?

Grandson is motivation. Cricket Lewis continued to advocate for Dale Fosdick. In May of 1996, she wrote a letter to the editor restating that Dale helped Kem financially. She complained that she had been “treated like a criminal because of my belief in Dale” and that Kurt Simon’s father — also a minister — “called me evil in front of the world on television.”

The grieving mother said that her “heart aches for Kem every day” and that the real killer was still out there.

Whether she really believed in Dale’s innocence is unclear — but she undoubtedly thought she’d have greater access to Logan with Dale, rather than Kurt, as his custodian.

Man of the cloth. Cricket died at the age of 65 on Dec. 19, 2003. Her obituary noted that she ran Cricket’s Tap from 1983 to 1988.

The would-be son-in-law Cricket so despised has done well for himself. Today, Kurt Simon who, except for some gray hair, looks pretty much the same as he did on Forensic Files, is a minister at First Presbyterian Church in Vandalia, Illinois. He has two “incredible daughters, Sadie Joe and Greta,” according to his bio for an article he wrote about meditation.

The children who Kem Wenger left behind have taken up careers in public service. After her mother’s death, Kelsey went to live with Todd Wenger and later became a case manager supervisor for the Salvation Army and has also worked in shelters for homeless people, according to her LinkedIn profile. (Todd died at the age of 52 on Nov. 27, 2003.)

Early exit. Kelsey’s brother goes by the name Logan Fosdick and appears to have a relationship with his sister despite that they grew up in separate households.

Beverly and Sylvester Fosdick, Dale’s parents, brought up Logan — Kurt Simon never had custody of him.

Meanwhile, Logan’s imprisoned father died of natural causes at the age of 48 in 2010. Dale Fosdick’s obituary noted he was a muscle car and aviation enthusiast, and asked that donations be made for Logan’s education.

Survivors club. Now 29, Logan graduated from Eureka College in 2014 and joined the Bloomington police force in 2016. A 2017 video shows him and another officer having fun singing a Christmas carol.

Logan is married and has a baby.

Incidentally, Logan Fosdick is in good company in the Forensic Files “family” — there are other episodes featuring children who attained stable lives despite having fathers convicted of killing their mothers.

You might enjoy reading about Noreen and Jack Boyle’s son, Collier Landry, or Tim Boczkowski’s three children (one of whom later changed his mind about his father’s innocence).

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

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Dr. Debora Green: An Update

An M.D. Goes Medea on Her Kids, Breaking Bad on Her Husband
(‘Ultimate Betrayal,’ Forensic Files)

Updated with news from August 31, 2023*

The world loves to hate mothers who kill their children, and Debora Green makes an especially incendiary target.

Just begun: Michael Farrar and Debora Jones Green

She not only plotted her kids’ demise but also chose the most horrific possible murder weapon, a fire.

Like Medea, the Euripides antihero 2,400 years before her, Debora carried out her awful deed to punish a husband who wasn’t exactly evil but betrayed her just the same.

Cinematic story. And like Walter White 19 years after her, she used ricin poisoning as part of her bid for revenge.

No wonder Debora’s crimes, which took place back in 1995, merited an Ann Rule book in 1997, a Forensic Files episode in 1999, and a Lifetime movie in 2021.

So, amid all the drama, are there any mitigating factors? Is sympathy possible for Debora Green, a medical doctor who violated her “do no harm” oath in a way that devastated her own family?

Normal childhood. For this week, I searched for answers to those questions and also looked for more background information on Debora’s life as well as updates on her status today, the life of ex-husband Michael Farrar, and the loyalties of the family’s surviving daughter.

So let’s get going on the recap for “Ultimate Betrayal” along with extra information from internet research:

Debora Jones came into the world on Feb. 28, 1951, in Havana, Illinois, as the second of three children born to Joan and Bob Jones. The couple had married as teenagers but apparently figured out how to parent competently. Debora described her childhood as happy, according to Bitter Harvest: A Woman’s Rage, A Mother’s Sacrifice by Ann Rule.

One of the cool kids. It became apparent early on that Debora was exceptionally intelligent. The Lifetime movie, A House on Fire, pegged her IQ as above 160.

But she wasn’t a nerd. At Peoria High School, she found time for cheerleading in addition to her schoolwork.

The Green-Farrar house at 2517 Canterbury Court has been replaced by a grass-covered vacant lot

Debora, who also played the violin and piano, got a perfect grade-point average and ended up as co-valedictorian of her class.

Next up, the attractive girl with symmetrical features completed an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois.

Two specialists. Debora married a fellow engineer named Duane M.J. Green in 1974, but the union lasted only a few years and he would later complain to police that Debora jilted him after he helped pay her tuition, according to the Kansas City Star.

While studying at the University of Kansas Medical School, she met Michael Farrar and they married in 1979. The former Eagle Scout was four years younger than his new wife but also a high achiever on the path to earning a medical degree.

Michael went into cardiology, and Debora specialized in oncology and hematology.

Nice spread. They had their first child, Tim, in 1982. Although A House on Fire portrays Tim as having only one sister, he actually had two, the younger girl named Kelly and a middle child whom Forensic Files identifies as Jennifer and Bitter Harvest calls Lissa — but her real name is Kate Farrar.

Debora and Michael had no shortage of room for their kids: By 1995, the family had settled into a six-bedroom Tudor-style house in Prairie Village, an affluent section of Kansas City, Kansas.

At some point, Debora put her career on pause to stay home with the kids, although she still did some freelance medical peer-review work out of her house.

In the spirits. She became a soccer coach so she could spend more time with her children, who attended the private Pembroke Hill School.

Although by all accounts, Debora was dedicated to her job as a full-time parent, her marriage grew strained as she grappled with depression. She reportedly leaned on alcohol as a crutch despite that her doctor had advised her not to drink while taking antidepressants and antianxiety medications.

Still, she enjoyed playing sports and having fun. In a May 1996 Redbook article, her onetime tennis clinic friend Ann Slegman recalled:

“In this sea of affluent house-wives with their smartly cropped hairdos, tennis skirts, and Steffi Graf wanna-be attitudes, Debora was refreshingly different. Heavyset with short, razor-cut hair, thick glasses that were popular among the disco set in the 1970s, faded T-shirts, and sweat shorts, she joked and laughed her way through the tennis drills.“

International affair. In an effort to prop up their deteriorating union, Michael and Debora, along with son Tim, went on a hiking and boating trip to Peru sponsored by Pembroke Hill School.

Sadly, the excursion to South America did more harm than good for the marriage. Michael met a good-looking blond registered nurse named Margaret Hacker (called Celeste Walker in the Lifetime movie) and they starting seeing each other back in the U.S.A.

Debora “saw all the telltale signs” of an affair including “a new wardrobe, new exercise equipment, and a new, distant attitude toward her and the children,” according to the Redbook account.

Toxic person. She moved into a separate bedroom and started drinking more.

Soon, it was Michael’s turn to struggle with his health. On Aug. 7, he became violently ill with bacterial endocarditis, which causes severe diarrhea. His weight dropped to 125 pounds.

He eventually needed three hospitalizations, each time after he’d eaten food Debora prepared for him (Maynard Muntzing), but at first doctors couldn’t figure out what triggered his episodes. It was 1995, long before the AMC series Breaking Bad made ricin a household name.

Confides in kids. Once his health rallied, Michael vacated the family’s mansion on Canterbury Court and rented his own place in the Georgetown apartment complex across town.

Debora turned suicidal and ended up in a psychiatric hospital after Michael called police to intervene during an argument on Sept. 25. In the emergency room, she spat on Michael, called him an obscene name, and said he’d get the kids over her dead body.

Bitter and angry, Debora had also “used the crudest language to tell the couple’s children that Michael was having sex with other women,” the Kansas City Star reported.

Woman on the side. At some point amid the melodrama, Michael discovered in Debora’s purse packets of castor beans, which contain ricin.

At first, ricin didn’t show up in Michael’s lab tests. The chemical is hard to detect because it breaks down quickly. But eventually, a large number of ricin antibodies turned up in his blood.

Michael confronted Debora on the phone about poisoning him. She denied it and they had an angry discussion. On Oct. 23, he spent time visiting girlfriend Margaret Hacker at her house.

Great escape. On Oct. 24, 1995, Debora and Michael had another argument on the phone. An hour later, the Prairie Village mansion, where she and the kids were still living, caught on fire.

Debora, 43, got out through a bedroom door to the outside.

All sources agree that 10-year-old Kate escaped by climbing onto the roof through her second-floor bedroom window and jumping to the ground without injury. But accounts vary as to whether Debora caught her as she fell or tried to catch her and failed or just watched her descend.

The dog, too. Kate and her mother stood together as emergency workers arrived on the scene. The flames were so intense the firefighters couldn’t go inside.

Golden-haired Kelly, who at age 6 already showed signs of being a gifted student, died of smoke inhalation in bed.

Tim, 13 years old and a popular soccer and hockey player, died of burns.

The family dog, a black Lab named Boomer, died of carbon monoxide poisoning, according to Medium’s True Crime Edition.

Suspicious blaze. Reports about Debora’s behavior at the fire scene differ. Some describe her as without emotion as she watched the blaze that killed two of her children. Another account said she was yelling at emergency workers, accusing them of not doing enough to save Kelly and Tim.

Authorities suspected arson and, at first, believed either parent could have done it.

Debora explained to police that on the night of the fire, she woke up to the smoke alarm, opened the bedroom door, saw flames, and ran outside.

On the intercom, she told Tim to stay in his bedroom until firefighters arrived and then she ran next door to ask for help from neighbors, Debora said. They noticed that her hair looked wet. A lab would later find singeing to her hair.

The robe. At the house, police found what looked like an empty accelerant bottle. The stairway that the children needed as an escape route had flammable liquid poured on it. The path of the fire led to Debora’s door.

Because the doorjamb to Debora’s bedroom was covered with soot, investigators believed the door was open when the fire started.

Her bathrobe, found in a ball at home, had burn marks.

Actress Stephanie March plays Debora Green in A House on Fire

Investigators ultimately concluded that Debora both set the fire and poisoned Michael with the castor beans.

Girlfriend shows up. Detectives discovered records indicating Debora had made two purchases of castor beans at Earl May Garden Centers around the time of the couple’s woes. She claimed that son Tim needed them for a science project and that Tim — who wasn’t around to defend himself — might have poisoned his dad.

By this time, Michael had asked for divorce; he filed the papers the day after the fire. Debora was not happy that gal pal Margaret Hacker attended the memorial service for the kids.

“Michael was in her bed while our house was burning down,” she complained to Slegman.

But in between the fire and the time of her arrest, Debora and daughter Kate continued to live as normal a life as possible after such a tragedy.

Neighbors unnerved. Kate got a role in a State Ballet of Missouri production of The Nutcracker.

On November 22, 1995, after Debora dropped off Kate for ballet practice at the Midland Theater in Kansas City, police arrested her and charged her with two counts of murder, attempted murder, and aggravated arson. A judge set bail at the unheard-of amount of $3 million.

The developments shocked residents of Prairie Village, who weren’t accustomed to having drama and police activity in their corner of the world.

Dedicated parent. According to an AP account, neighbors had to contend with the smell of smoke that lingered for weeks after the fire and the sight of cars slowing down to look at the charred $400,000 house at 7517 Canterbury Court.

The Kansas City Star reported that most neighbors refused to discuss the tragedy with the media. The few who did said that Debora loved her children and, while clearly the couple’s marriage had seen better days, no one imagined it would end in a burning hell.

Locals didn’t have to look at the wreckage of the once-palatial home for long. By November 1995, the city was making plans to demolish it.

Getting fluid. In preparation for the trial, the prosecution noted evidence that Debora had been reading a book about arson and literature about people murdered by family members.

The Prairie Village Shopping Center is typically upscale for the area

Authorities believed that after the couple fought on the phone, Debora poured accelerant on Michael’s belongings and also used the fluid to cut off the children’s escape routes from the house. Her hair and bathrobe sustained burns because she used too much accelerant near her own bedroom door. Then she told Tim to stay in the house with little sister Kelly until the fire trucks arrived.

And one more thing: This was not the first time a blaze had broken out in a Green-Farrar household. On May 21, 1994, when the family lived in Missouri and was considering a relocation to Prairie Village, a fire damaged the Missouri house — reportedly right after Michael had nixed the idea of the move over concerns about the future of the marriage, according to court papers available on Murderpedia.

No legal action resulted from the Missouri fire.

Daughter faithful. But there was no escaping the consequences of the Kansas inferno. The state kept Debora in custody during court proceedings. “She’s very surprised that she would be charged with these kinds of crimes,” Ellen Ryan, one of Debora’s three lawyers, told the AP. “She lost everything in this fire including her children, everything, and she’s astounded.”

Debora’s defense lawyers floated the possibility that Tim had set the fire.

Meanwhile, Kate Farrar remained loyal to her mother. She left a vase full of roses at the courthouse for Debora, and the two talked on the phone.

Curiosity high. Michael, who had to make $5,400 monthly payments to Debora as a run-up to their divorce, showed up in court with a partially shaved head because he’d needed brain surgery to drain an abscess probably caused by the ricin poisoning. He would also need a heart operation to counteract the damage.

The murder case was such big news that true crime author Ann Rule, who wrote The Stranger Beside Me and Small Sacrifices, attended the preliminary hearing and brought an assistant to help take notes.

Prosecutors had assembled a roster of 300 prospective witnesses and planned to start out by calling 20 of them to the stand. Olathe courthouse employees outfitted a backup room for media outlets; there were only 60 seats in the courtroom

But the trial never happened.

Not her intention. On April 17, 1996, Debora Green pleaded no contest in a deal to take the death penalty off the table. The AP reported that, “in a fast monotone,” Debora read a statement maintaining that she wasn’t in her right mind on the night of the fire — her psychiatric and alcohol problems set the stage for the tragedy — and she didn’t want to compound the suffering of her family with a trial.

“She’s accepting responsibility for [the fire],” said Debora’s lawyer Michael Moore. “I don’t think she ever intended to kill her children. She’s a caring, living, breathing human being.”

On May 30, 1996, she received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years for attempted murder, premeditated killing, and aggravated arson.

Hair we go. Once Debora had spent a few years behind razor wire, she began recasting her story.

According to Bitter Harvest, Debora made claims that Michael and his girlfriend might have hired someone to start the fire. She also told Ann Rule that the homewrecking Margaret drove Margaret’s former husband to suicide.

Debora also noted that she cut off her singed hair not to obscure it as evidence but rather to look her best for Kelly and Tim’s funeral.

About-face. In 2000, Debora briefly tried a new tack. She requested new sentencing based on a claim that her no-contest plea to arson resulted from her own confusion caused by prescription psychiatric drugs.

She would also need to defend herself over the ricin allegations. “No one in an alcoholic fog would have been capable of the intricate planning it took to locate, purchase, and grind up the deadly castor beans,” Ann Rule wrote in Bitter Harvest.

Once Debora realized the motion might put capital punishment back in play, she withdrew it.

Too late. Four years later, she made a bid to have her plea thrown out because new advances into arson investigations refuted the pour pattern evidence against her, she contended. The fire might have come from a vanity in her bedroom that ignited on its own, Debora said.

Kate Farrar, then 19, attended a hearing on that matter — and sat with Debora’s supporters, according to the Kansas City Star. Michael Farrar showed up as well but sat away from his daughter. In 2005, District Judge Peter Ruddick ruled against Debora.

In 2015, a judge scuttled Debora’s request for resentencing because she based it on recent state and federal rulings on “Hard 40” prison terms that didn’t apply retroactively. Johnson County District Judge Brenda Cameron also noted that Debora understood the terms of her plea deal when she agreed to it.

Author touched. Today, Debora Green resides in Topeka Correctional Facility in medium-high security, with the first prospective release date in 2035. According to the Kansas Department of Corrections, she has a job in prison. At 5-foot-4 and 188 pounds, she’s not staging any hunger strikes.

So does Debora Farrar deserve any sympathy? To this writer, it sounds like a long-sustained period of temporary insanity resulting from her husband’s infidelity, her clinical depression, and the loss of a career that brought her respect, personal fulfillment, and a high salary.

“Even though I could not believe she was innocent,” wrote Anne Rule, “I thought her tears [for her children] were genuine.”

New wife. As for the husband she tried to eliminate, Michael Farrar survived and worked as a cardiologist at North Kansas City Hospital for 29 years. He recently served as medical staff president and enjoyed traveling, bird hunting, dining out, and learning more about history, according to a recent interview on the hospital’s website.

And what of the extramarital relationship that helped fuel the modern-day Greek tragedy? According to Medium writer Lori Johnston, Michael Farrar and Margaret Hacker broke up. He ended up marrying a lawyer, and daughter Kate Farrar eventually went to live with them — but at the same time, Kate, now 36, still believes in her mother’s innocence, according to Medium.

*Michael Farrar died on August 23, 2023, at the age of 68. Media outlets have yet to disclose his cause of death.

If you can’t find the movie “A House on Fire” on TV, you can watch it on Amazon for $2.99. I was able to see it on the Lifetime website free of charge, but the link no longer works.

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

P.S. Read Part II, ‘Dr. Debora Green: Tennis and Madness’
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Mark Hofmann’s Deep Dive into Deviousness

A Dealer of Bogus Mormon Documents Just Might Be the Devil
(‘Murder Among the Mormons,’ Netflix, and ‘Postal Mortem,’ Forensic Files)

When Mark Hofmann delivered the bombs that killed two people and rattled all of Salt Lake City, he didn’t bother to disguise himself.

Instead, he wore his own green varsity jacket and rode the elevator with two strangers — who remembered him — in the Judge Building, where he placed a box outside of Steve Christensen’s office. Although Hofmann used darkness as a cover when he left a similar parcel at the home of the Sheets family, he drove his tan minivan, which a neighbor recalled seeing there.

Full-time faker. The oversights were a departure from the deviousness Hofmann had been honing since adolescence, according to the 2021 Netflix miniseries Murder Among the Mormons. (Forensic Files covered the case in 1997.)

At 14, he began altering collectible coins to make them more valuable. By his 20s, he was earning five-figure sums for documents he attributed to Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Jack London. And Hofmann, who grew up in a strict Mormon family, acquired a reputation as the “Indiana Jones” of discovering antique writings important to his church, which has its headquarters in Salt Lake City.

But nearly everything that Hoffman sold was forged or faked. He used ancient ink recipes and oxidation-hastening methods to fool authenticators. He concocted imaginative stories to surprise and alarm those faithful to the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.

Foundation shaker. According to the three-part Netflix offering, Hofmann resented the restrictions of his upbringing and delighted in challenging his religion’s most sacred narrative — that in 1823, an angel named Moroni led Joseph Smith to buried golden plates that would form the basis of the Book of Mormon.

Perhaps in an effort to catch and kill, Mormon collector Steve Christensen paid $40,000 for an instrument that Hofmann called the White Salamander Letter, which said that a talking amphibian, not a winged messenger from God, led Smith to the plates.

For the church, the story was as devastating as “Moses saying, ‘I got the 10 Commandments from the ghost of Elvis Presley,’” according to Murder Among the Mormons, which was co-produced by Joe Berlinger (Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich).

Bid to throw off cops. Hofmann went even bigger with his next phony offering, a set of diaries and papers titled the McLellin Collection. They included a claim that Smith’s brother was actually the one who discovered the gold plates.

A reenactment shows the same model Toyota Mark Hofmann drove Courtesy of Netflix © 2021

Worried that Christensen was catching on to his deceptions, Hofmann murdered him with the exploding package. To throw off investigators, he planted the bomb that killed schoolteacher Kathy Sheets. Her husband, Gary, and Christensen operated a troubled financial company, and Hofmann hoped investigators would suspect a disgruntled investor as the culprit for both homicides.

Hofmann’s plan was working out nicely until he accidentally set off a bomb in his own sports car and police scrutiny uncovered evidence of his scams.

Youthful laddie. With interviews of Mormon historians from the 1980s interspersed with interviews of the same people today — minus their aviator frames and fluffy hair — Murder Among the Mormons portrays the shattered innocence Hofmann inflicted with his duplicity.

The series also includes audio from the boyish-voiced earnest-sounding killer‘s full confession to police in 1987. But even then, Hofmann wasn’t done with his scheming.

Here’s that story preceded by three other examples of his deviousness:

1. He made his wife into an inadvertent accomplice.
Hofmann planted a phony version of the Anthon Document — which contained characters that Joseph Smith transcribed from the gold plates — in a bible he gave to his wife, so she would “discover” it, thus adding heart-warming allure to the backstory he gave investors. He also turned the family home into a crime scene by keeping a locked laboratory with all the tools of his forgery trade. “He fooled me every day,” said Doralee “Dorie” Hofmann, a former teacher who gave up her career to raise her kids. Although Dorie considered her husband a good provider, it’s not clear whether she knew Hofmann spent a bundle on fancy dinners with associates and enjoyed a binge-drinking session during a business trip. — or whether or not he let Dorie drive the blue Toyota MR2 he enjoyed showboating around town.

2. He fooled the FBI and the Library of Congress
Hofmann summoned all his tricks to create a forged copy of a real document bearing the Oath of the Freeman, a pledge taken by new members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 1600s. To imitate ink seepage that takes place over centuries, he used a vacuum cleaner to suck the pigment to the back side of the paper. Because of the Oath of the Freeman’s significance as the first printed document in the Colonies, the FBI and Library of Congress examined Hofmann’s copy. They declared it genuine. He planned to sell it for $1.5 million but never got a chance.

3. By the time the police gave him his first lie detector test, he was a pro
Apparently, even as a child Hofmann had an inkling he’d face off with a polygraph someday. In his teens, he began practicing methods for beating the machine. When the Salt Lake City police gave him a lie detector test in the wake of the bombings, Hofmann scored +13. (A negative score suggests deception and anything greater than zero indicates truthfulness.)

4. Just because Hofmann ultimately confessed and said he deserved incarceration didn’t mean he felt remorse
He admitted to investigators that not only did he enjoy the power trip of fooling collectors and Mormon officials but also that he felt zero sympathy for his homicide victims because dead people don’t suffer. And once in prison, Hofmann began secretly plotting the homicides of members of the pardons boards as well as George Throckmorton, the forensic document expert who figured out Hofmann’s Oath of a Freeman was a fake. Fortunately, Hofmann never carried out those murders, and the mild-mannered but unrelenting Throckmorton is alive and included in the Netflix series. (The 67-year-old Hofmann, better known today as No. 41235 at the Central Utah Correctional Facility, declined to appear.)

Along with his deviousness, Hoffman did display some humility, albeit in a back-handed way. He told an interviewer that his forgeries seemed ingenious only because document experts inflated his talents to save face for failing to put him out of business sooner.

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

See Murder Among the Mormons on Netflix

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

P.S. If you watch the Forensic Files version of Mark Hofmann’s story on YouTube (link above), you’ll bump up against an “inappropriate or offensive to some audiences” warning — probably because the episode includes a graphic black & white photo of the murder scene.

MaryAnn Clibbery and George Hansen: Unsalvageable

A Murder Wrecks a Remodeling Business
(‘Frozen Assets,’ Forensic Files)

Local TV commercials starring small-business owners have an innate charm in spite of, or maybe because of, their low production values.

George Hansen and MaryAnn Clibbery urged, ‘Don’t move, improve’

The folksy ads become part of a community’s sense of place and security, particularly in the case of Al Zullo Remodeling Specialists, who for decades told homeowners that “one call does it all.”

MaryAnn Clibbery and George Hansen were partners in the Loves Park, Illinois, company, named after the original owner, Anthony “Al” Zullo.

Retiring type. Before he died in 2000, he decided to leave the business to MaryAnn and George to reward their loyalty. She had started there as a secretary in 1959, and he got on board at some point in the 1960s, according to reporting from the Randolph County Herald Tribune.

By 2004, MaryAnn, 69, was thinking about retiring from the business.

But she never got the chance. Her business partner bludgeoned her to death in a back hallway of Al Zullo first.

Caring boss. For this week, I checked on George’s whereabouts today (he’s still alive) and looked for more information about the victim’s life and also what happened to the business after one owner died and the other traded his white button-down for an unfitted light-blue prison-issue shirt.

*By the time of MaryAnn’s murder*, Loves Park’s reputation for tranquility had already been marred by another 2004 crime — a deceased newborn left on the side of a road

So let’s get going on the recap of the 2008 episode “Frozen Assets” along with extra information from internet research:

At Al Zullo Remodeling Specialists, George Hansen handled sales and MaryAnn Clibbery did the finances. MaryAnn was known for her kindness to workers and sometimes fronted them their wages with her own money if they got in a jam, according to Forensic Files.

Quintets of kids. Born MaryAnn Romain, she had grown up in a family of five children who lived in the projects in Chicago, then moved to a house with no hot water in Rockford, Illinois, according to the Beloit Daily News. An obituary for MaryAnn’s father notes he owned a Gulf station for 15 years, so perhaps things improved financially for the family.

MaryAnn went on to have five children of her own and two marriages. At least one of her husbands left her widowed and it’s not clear whether she divorced the other or he passed away. By 2004, she was single, but had a long-term serious boyfriend.

Background information on George Hansen is skimpy except for the fact that he was married with children. An employee named Raymond Beardsley told the Beloit Daily News that he had a temper and could become “unhinged.”

Bereft boyfriend. Still, on the surface, everything looked great at the local institution until the early morning of Dec. 22, 2004. George and co-worker Randy Baxter discovered MaryAnn’s body when they showed up for work. Randy called 911 and reported MaryAnn wasn’t breathing and rigor mortis had set in.

Investigators determined she sustained three blows to the back of the head plus other blunt force trauma inflicted during two separate attacks.

Harold “Gene” Sundeen, her boyfriend of 12 years, was heartbroken. “I remember the dress she wore for our first date,” he told the ID network’s Murder in the Heartland. “It was blue with white polka dots.”

The business occupied a strip mall on North Second Street

Convenient suspect. MaryAnn’s son Robert Cleere, who also appeared on Murder in the Heartland, recalled that he was working on his mail route when his supervisor told him about his mother’s murder.

Her well-attended funeral mass took place at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church.

Police at first focused on Kevin Doyle, an employee MaryAnn had recently let go after he messed up on a job. He had kept a set of keys to the business.

Drank and drove. But there was also the matter of MaryAnn’s relationship with George. In everyday business life, they didn’t get along quite as well as they seemed to in the commercials. According to Forensic Files, George felt MaryAnn didn’t deserve the partnership Al Zullo left her.

When questioned by police, George denied any conflict and gave an extensive alibi: The night of the homicide, he enjoyed several vodka-and-Squirts at the Backyard Bar and Grill with his wife, followed by some Brandy Old Fashioneds at Singapore Bar and Grill, where he bought a $50 gift card for MaryAnn. Then, he took his granddaughter to Safety First Driving School and visited a tanning salon before heading home.

Witnesses confirmed George’s alibis.

Canary jumper. But things fell apart for George after a citizen notified police about a black garbage bag sitting on top of some ice on Rock River.

It contained a hammer, gloves, MaryAnn’s tan suede purse, and a yellow sweater.

The sweater, which had originally belonged to founder Al Zullo — and was kept around the office for whoever caught a chill — had MaryAnn’s blood on the outside.

Evidence cornucopia. Skin cells found inside the collar of the sweater matched George’s DNA profile.

MaryAnn Clibbery shows off a remodeled kitchen in her early years with Al Zullo

Likewise, the gloves contained MaryAnn’s blood on the outside, George’s DNA inside.

Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but MaryAnn had already had at least two suspicious brushes with death before the murder.

Sneaked-in sedation. According to Fraud Magazine, on one occasion, the brakes in her car failed right after George had borrowed it. Another time, someone set fire to a sofa MaryAnn was sleeping on.

But if MaryAnn was snoozing at the office, it didn’t necessarily mean she was lazy. Police found the remains of the prescription sleep medication Zolpidem in her mug at the office. George used to deliver coffee to MaryAnn in the cup, and employees had seen her asleep at her desk.

He had good reason to keep MaryAnn a little woozy. She was investigating him.

Risky rendezvous. That year, some of the Christmas cards received from vendors and subcontractors included notes saying that they hadn’t been paid. MaryAnn discovered George was pocketing the money owed to them. He falsified the books to hide his theft, which totaled around $100,000.

MaryAnn had told police and her doctor about her suspicions, according to Fraud Magazine.

The day she died, MaryAnn stayed late at the office to confront George about the embezzlement. It’s not clear why she chose to meet alone with him after the frightening incidents. (Her friend Linda Cleveland recalled that over breakfast at Johnny Pamcakes in early December 2004, MaryAnn said that she feared something bad was on the horizon.)

Hard landing. Police believe George was wearing the yellow sweater while beating MaryAnn with a hammer during an argument over the missing money. After the initial attack, George opened some drawers to make the place look ransacked, then realized MaryAnn was still alive and beat her again, the authorities theorized.

He stuffed the evidence into the garbage bag and included her purse so the attack would look like a burglary that turned into a homicide. But police would find that nothing else was missing from the office.

As attested to by this Rockford Register Star clipping, MaryAnn participated in numerous community activities

George threw the murder bag off the Roscoe Road bridge into the Rock River. But it landed on the ice (John Lotter and Thomas Nissen). A witness saw George’s white truck with its “Zullo 51” vanity license plate driving back and forth on the bridge. Police believe he was trying to figure out how to retrieve the bag but gave up.

Tablet tattler. In addition to the desire to cover up his financial misdeeds, George harbored another motive to kill MaryAnn: The business had a $150,000 life insurance policy on her, which would have come in handy to pay off the venders and subcontractors he cheated.

On Dec. 27, 2004, Loves Park police interrupted George’s game of video poker at Croc’s Pub to arrest him. He reportedly didn’t ask for a reason or make any comment. His pants pocket contained a single pink pill, which was identified as the same sleeping aid found in MaryAnn’s mug. (George’s sister would later admit to investigators that she had been illegally selling the prescription drug to him.)

The evolution of the quaint hometown business into a hub for murder and betrayal shook up the community. “These were people who had been in their homes, and it just gave everyone a horrible feeling,” Jessica Olstad, a former Wptz-TV Newschannel 5 reporter who covered the case, told ForensicFilsNow.com.

Some other dude did it. With so much forensic evidence pointing his way, George changed his story.

He now said he stopped by the office to look for his gloves around 7 p.m. on Dec. 21, and saw MaryAnn lying dead. Because the yellow sweater, hammer, and gloves that some anonymous evildoer used in the attack were associated with George, he was afraid he’d be blamed, so he panicked and covered it up (Brad Jackson) by disposing of the evidence, he said. Then he retrieved his granddaughter from driving school and stopped off for a sandwich.

A vintage ad from when Al Zullo was alive

At the trial in 2005, prosecutor Margie O’Conner asked George why he didn’t come to MaryAnn’s aid when he saw her lying on the floor the evening before Randy Baxter notified authorities.

“It was the dumbest and worst thing I ever did,” Hansen told the court.

Courtroom cool. George also claimed MaryAnn was in on the financial crimes and that he had no motive to kill her because they needed each other to keep the scam going.

“All I remember is wanting to go over the rail and strangle that guy,” MaryAnn’s brother Robert Romain — who was sitting just a few feet away from George at the trial — told Murder in the Heartland.

In a dramatic moment, after testifying about finding MaryAnn “in a big scab” of dried blood, Randy Baxter became so rattled that he needed to take a break before looking at the crime scene photos, the Beloit Daily News reported.

Wily guy. Despite emotions running high, “it was the most civil trial I’d ever covered, eerily quiet,” Jessica Olstad recalled. “MaryAnn’s boyfriend sat there every day. He was incredibly friendly, but not boisterous and certainly didn’t seek the limelight.”

In her closing statement, Margie O’Connor warned the jury about George’s guile: “He made his living as a salesman” and “is trying to make the sale of his life.”

Assistant Public Defender Frank Perri maintained that George was guilty only of “stupidity” and “selfishness” and that the contents of the garbage bag added up to nothing more than circumstantial evidence — there was no blood in his car.

Somber but satisfied. A jury didn’t buy it and convicted him of first-degree murder.

According to the Rockford Register Star, after the verdict:Hansen’s family and friends filed out of the third-floor courtroom tight-lipped and headed straight for the elevators, trying to avoid TV cameras and other media. Clibbery’s family and friends walked out looking somewhat haggard but relieved.

and headed straight for the elevators, trying to avoid TV caHansen’s family and Lengthy sentence. Outside the courthouse, George Hansen’s 35-year-old daughter sobbed and told the media that her father had been convicted without evidence.

During the sentencing proceedings on October 13, 2005, MaryAnn’s boyfriend as well as her brother Louis Romain and her daughter Charmaine Shelf addressed the court about their painful loss.

Winnebago County Judge Daniel Doyle gave George a 60-year sentence.

Major disconnect. Meanwhile, what about the fate of Al Zullo Remodeling Specialists – a staple service whose friendly low-budget commercials became part of Loves Park’s identity?

Well, George’s crime rendered it unsalvageable, leaving creditor Amcore Bank and vendors unpaid.

The bank sued in an effort to get the $92,000 Al Zullo owed for a loan, according to the Rockford Register Star, which also noted that just one month after the murder, phone calls to the business were greeted by an answering machine with no room for messages and no forwarding number.

Still slim. The newspaper also reported that one homeowner who paid Al Zullo in full for renovation services was “hounded” for money that the business owed to a lumber provider. Homeowners with half-finished construction work were out of luck. With MaryAnn gone and George about to begin a life of strip searches and Nutraloaf, the business ceased to exist.

George Hansen in a recent prison mug shot

Today, the man who brought about its demise is better known as inmate #R47647 at the Pontiac Correctional Center. The Illinois Department of Corrections notes that George has a projected parole date of Dec. 23, 2064 — when he’s 123 years old.

Unrequited love. In the meantime, he has kept his 5-foot-7-inch body tattoo-free and trim at 139 pounds, according to the state’s DOC website.

As for MaryAnn’s boyfriend Gene Sundeen, who Forensic Files watchers will recall for his grief during his on-camera interview, he never remarried. He died a single man in 2019 at the age of 89.

You can watch the Murder in the Heartland episode “Bad for Business” on Hulu. It’s also on YouTube, but there’s a $1.99 fee to watch it in standard definition.

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

Watch the Forensic Files on YouTube or Hulu

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Mark Hofmann: 7 Fast Facts

Netflix Solemnly Dishes on the Con Man and Bomber
(Murder Among the Mormons, Netflix)

Mark Hofmann looking uncharacteristically scruffy in an early mugshot

Mark Hofmann had both a Jekyll and a Hyde inside him, but outwardly he had only one persona: polite young man.

He sounded just as boyishly earnest when lying to the media about discovering valuable historic Mormon documents as he did when confessing to the police that he committed fraud and double murder in the 1980s.

Catch the stream. In 1997, the Forensic Files episode “Postal Mortem” told the story of how Mark used ancient ink recipes and other trickery to create forgeries like the White Salamander Letter — which retold Mormon history in a way that rattled the church — and then killed two people so he could evade suspicion and continue to bilk collectors.

Two years ago, ForensicFilesNow.com published a recap and update on the episode.

Now, Netflix is getting in on the act. On March 3, the streaming giant debuted Murder Among the Mormons, a three-part series offering new interviews with victims and their families and more insight into how Mark Hofmann accommodated within his own soul a thieving terrorist and a respected husband and father of four.

Flimflam nonfiction. Here are seven facts from the series, which was co-produced by Joe Berlinger (Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich):

1. There was at least one polygamist in the family — Mark’s grandfather.

2. Mark’s parents, Lucille Sears Hofmann and William Hofmann, were horrified that his kids had a storybook with dinosaurs, which they considered too evolution-friendly

3. A trip to Manchester, England, first got Mark interested in Mormon documents. Joseph Smith, who founded the religion in 1823, discovered the gold plates translated into the Book of Mormon in Manchester, New York.

4. Mark made photocopies of the fake documents he created to prevent the church from doing catch-and-kills.

5. He violated his religion’s ban on alcohol at least once — drinking hard liquor with a pal and promptly throwing up.

6. One of his forgeries involved a vacuum cleaner used to suck paint to the back side of a document to mimic what happens naturally over time.

7. Although Mark was secretly agnostic and betrayed his church, he was wearing a Mormon temple garment when he accidentally bombed his own car. (He survived and is still in prison).

You can watch Murder Among the Mormons on Netflix now. Although it’s stopped offering free trial subscriptions, the service has a deal for $8.99 a month with no contract or cancellation fee. (And while you’re on Netflix, you can also stream American Murder: The Family Next Door. I’ve only watched it three times, so far.)

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

Jane Dorotik: Trotting in and out of Prison

A Horse Farm Lies at the Center of Bob Dorotik’s Murder
(“Marathon Man,” Forensic Files)

The Forensic Files episode about Bob Dorotik’s murder stands out because the case was so easy to solve.

Police arrested Jane Dorotik just four days after she reported her husband missing.

The couple were warring over their horse farm, and Jane was so impatient to get Bob out of her way that she rushed into a foolish, poorly executed homicide plan.

Good year for someone. A number of YouTube commentators decried Forensic Files for even taking up its bandwidth with such an obvious whodunit.

But 2020 brought a surprise for true-crime viewers and Jane herself: Innocence advocates managed to get her guilty verdict overturned because of advances in DNA technology.

For this week’s post, I looked into the new evidence and ended up finding other intriguing intel about the Dorotiks that Forensic Files didn’t mention. I also checked on the status of her relationship with her daughter — whom Jane’s defense lawyer tried to blame for Bob’s death.

So let’s get going on the recap of “Marathon Man”:

Bucolic bliss. On February 13, 2000, Jane Dorotik notified the sheriff that her husband never returned home after going for a jog on a rainy afternoon.

Scene of a crime: the Dorotiks’ master bedroom. Pretrial, prosecutors suggested the motive was a $250,000 life insurance policy

Jane and Bob lived on a huge horse farm on Bear Valley Heights Road in Valley Center, a rustic area an hour from San Diego.

The couple, who married in 1970 and briefly separated and reunited circa 1999, had three grown children.

Respected RN. Nick worked in construction and was a semi-professional snowboarder. Alex was attending law school. Middle child Claire, 24, still lived at home on Charisma Farms while she was finishing a graduate degree in psychology at San Diego State University and working as a personal trainer.

Their mother brought home a six-figure salary as an executive of operations for area psychiatric hospitals. Earlier in her career as a registered nurse, she worked at UCLA Hospital and later helped found programs to assist teenagers struggling with mental health and substance problems in Tucson.

Bob worked as an engineer at Lockheed at one point, but his professional trajectory was a little uneven.

Mane conflict. Claire and Jane loved horses and kept more than a dozen on the farm, including an Oldenburg named Nimo who shared a special bond with Claire.

Bob resisted when Claire and Jane wanted to increase the amount of family funds spent on the ranch operation — they bought, trained, and resold horses there — but he liked the equine critters well enough.

Unfortunately, he wouldn’t get any more opportunities to ride one. The day after Jane called 911 to report Bob missing, sheriff’s deputy James Blackmon found him dead on Lake Wohlford Road, near his favorite jogging path, at 4:35 a.m.

Claire, Bob, Nick, Alex, and Jane Dorotik back when no one imagined their life would become the subject of 48 Hours, Snapped, and Forensic Files episodes

Sneaks too spiffy. Bob, who was physically fit and ran marathons, had on a T-shirt and dark-red jogging pants. Someone had wrapped a rope around his neck and beaten him about the head.

As mentioned, law officers had plenty to work with from the get-go. Bob’s sneakers lacked any mud, water, or dirt marks, which conflicted with Jane’s story that he had gone for a run. Someone had tied his shoes awkwardly, with the bows askew.

Next to Bob’s body, they saw tire tracks and drag marks.

Some nosebleed. Jane, who apparently considered herself above suspicion, allowed a search of the house right away.

The police found a damp stain tinged with red, which Jane’s sister-in-law said came from a dog who sustained a cut to its dewclaw.

Investigators also discovered blood splatter on the ceiling and the underside of the mattress, which they suspected someone had recently turned over. There was so much blood in the room that it had dripped to the lower floor. Jane would later explain that Bob got a lot of nosebleeds.

Incriminating mark. Also inside the house was some of the same type of rope found around Bob’s throat.

In the bathroom wastebasket, officers found used syringes, one of them with an animal tranquilizer known as acepromazine.

On the outside of the discarded syringe, a lab would find Jane’s fingerprint in Bob’s blood. And his blood was on the needle, too.

The blood in the bedroom belonged to Bob as well.

Auto problem. An exam revealed Bob had died from bruises, fractures, and lacerations to the skull. The lab found flecks of color in his wounds as though someone had hit Bob with a painted object, possibly a hammer. Strangulation had contributed to his death.

The vehicle tracks at the murder scene matched the tires on a white Ford F250 pickup parked in the Dorotiks’ garage. It belonged to Jane.

Inside the 1996 truck, investigators found evidence of the victim’s blood partially cleaned up, not exactly a hallmark of innocence (Bette Lucas, Michael Peterson).

Daughter off-premises. In addition to the lady of the house, police at first suspected ranch hand Leonel Morales and Claire, who were both on Team Jane as far as sinking more cash into the horse farm.

At first, Nick (left, next to older brother Alex) was supportive of his mother, but his feelings shifted

But Claire was visiting a relative when Bob disappeared, and Leonel had an alibi as well.

Jane, on the other hand, “did everything but sign her name to the crime,” narrator Peter Thomas said in one of the all-time greatest Forensic Files quotes.

‘All my sisters with me.’ Authorities arrested Jane on Feb. 17, charged her with murder, and held her on $2 million bail.

Her sisters Bonnie Long and Marilyn Ryan immediately came to her defense.

Jane had a bad back and was still suffering from a hip injury sustained after a drunk driver hit her in 1987, Bonnie pointed out.

“How could she have overpowered her marathon-running husband?” Bonnie told the North County Times. “And even more, sling him over her shoulder and carry him 50 feet across a deck and down a flight of stairs?”

Bail back-and-forth. Other family members, friends, and Jane’s boss also vouched for her good character, prompting a judge to knock her bail down to $1 million so she could go home. With the help of her sisters, Claire, and Nick, she moved herself and her horses off of the farm.

But Superior Court Judge Marguerite Wagner suddenly upped the bail to $3 million, which sent Jane into tears and back to the county jail.

Claire Dorotik said her emotional connection with horses helped her heal

The trial kicked off in May 2001, just a little more than a year after Bob Dorotik died.

Quite a chunk of cash. The prosecution made a case that Jane had injected Bob with acepromazine in his sleep, hit him on the head repeatedly, inadvertently tied his shoes awkwardly when she was dressing him, dragged or carried the body to her truck, and left it on the side of the road. She threw away her bloody clothes and the murder weapon in the trash at a shopping center where friends had seen her around the time of the homicide, the prosecution alleged.

Investigators found evidence Bob was looking for a new job, perhaps in anticipation of a divorce.

Jane earned more than Bob, so a split would mean paying him 40 percent of her income in alimony — which would have curtailed her budget for hay, horseshoes, pitchforks, and the like.

Not made of china. Bob’s buddy Jim Goudge, who Forensic Files viewers might remember as the interviewee with a ton of magnets on his refrigerator, told 48 Hours Monday Mystery that Bob said if anything happened to him, authorities should look at Jane.

And here’s the really devastating part of the case: Jane’s sons testified for the prosecution. Both said their mother was physically strong — Alex noted she’d helped lift a heavy drainage pipe on the farm. Nick said that when he asked Jane how his dad’s blood got on the syringe, she didn’t answer.

As for the tire marks at the murder scene, the prosecution said Jane’s car made them when she dumped the body. (She told 48 Hours that the tracks got there when she went out looking for Bob before notifying authorities he was missing.)

Disharmony in the family. Jane’s lawyer, Kerry Steigerwalt, hit back hard. He lobbied aggressively to get the evidence collected from the house thrown away because of lack of probable cause for a search. The judge said no.

*Jane and sister Marilyn Ryan (left) lost their mother just 10 days before Bob’s* death

But Steigerwalt had more ammo in store. He claimed Claire Dorotik and ranch hand Leonel Morales killed Bob.

Although Claire and her father shared a love of running marathons, they didn’t get along well overall. Steigerwalt read aloud from a letter Claire wrote to her father. “I must take all precautions to protect myself from you,” it said, also accusing her dad of being vicious and untrustworthy. It mentioned her father’s threat to sell the horses, to whom Claire was emotionally tied.

Shunning the stand. Steigerwalt contended that evidence pointed to Claire’s having purchased the acepromazine. (None was found in Bob’s blood, but it might have been there in an amount too small to test.) He suggested that Claire or someone else other than Jane “went crazy” and “blew up” in the bedroom.

Claire and Leonel invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to testify.

Steigerwalt also argued that police ignored a witness who could have helped exonerate Jane. A woman claimed she saw Bob slouched between two men on the night of the murder.

Gone into OT. After deliberating for four days, the jury found Jane guilty.

But before the sentencing, the judge allowed the defense to present a new witness, Sheri Newton, who said that not far from the murder scene, she saw two strange, scary men in a black truck driving on the wrong side of the road on the night Bob disappeared. She recognized one of them as Leonel Morales.

Prosecutor Bonnie Howard-Regan pointed out that Sheri Newton also said she saw Bob Dorotik that night and described him as 6-feet-tall and more than 200 pounds — when Bob, in fact, stood at 5-foot-9 and weighed 147 pounds.

Clink time. The guilty conviction remained in place. Judge Joan Weber, who noted the possibility that someone had helped Jane dispose of Bob, handed the fallen horsewoman 25 years to life.

Off Jane went to women’s prison, where she spent her time reading, praying, meditating, and working outdoors on a yard crew, according to a TV interview from 2002. She would later say that going behind razor wire was like visiting a new country where you can’t communicate and everyone hates you.

In the meantime, most of the Dorotiks’ horses were sold. Sources vary as to whether the family owned Charisma Farms or merely rented it. Either way, it changed hands and no one from the family lives there now.

Advocates win. But in April 2020, after 20 years of incarceration, something positive happened for Jane. Prison officials gave her temporary leave from the California Institution for Women in Corona because of Covid risks.

Despite a rocky relationship with her dad, Claire wrote to him that she wanted to let go of her anger and try therapy together

Even better, in July 2020, a judge wearing a newsprint-patterned PPE mask overturned Jane’s conviction after Loyola Law School’s Project for the Innocent made a case for new evidence that might exonerate Jane. Her advocates pointed out that the murder scene lacked any of Jane’s DNA and that test results of fluid found in the bedroom were inadequate and misleading.

“Spending almost two decades in prison falsely convicted of killing the man I loved has been incredibly painful,” Jane said upon her release. “I lost literally everything in my life that Bob and I had built together. Thanks to my great legal team at Loyola Law School, I feel like I can finally breathe and I’m able to start thinking about making plans for the future.”

‘They out here saying.‘ A spokeswoman for the innocence project said its team was ecstatic over the new ruling

San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan’s office said it would use the latest DNA technology to retest blood evidence from the case.

As far as why Jane allowed Steigerwalt to attempt to pin the murder on her own daughter, Jane said that she trusted her lawyer and that the accusation about Claire was “already out there.”

Partners in crime? After the trial, Claire stated that she planned to stand by her mother. Once released from prison, Jane lived with Claire.

For me, those factors put Jane’s innocence in doubt. If Claire had nothing to do with Bob’s murder, why would she forgive her mother for trying to shift the blame to her? It sounds as though they both conspired to the homicide, then took a chance Jane would be acquitted based on the Claire-did-it defense — but there wouldn’t be enough evidence to convict Claire in the aftermath.

Whatever the truth about Claire, she managed to make a lot of her life after seeing her family torn apart.

Horse sense. She became a marriage and family counselor and is now known as Claire Dorotik-Nana. “As a practicing therapist, I not only found myself facilitating growth through adversity, but became curious about it myself,” she said in an Oxygen interview.

She’s also a published author who’s written about the healing power of her horses. Nimo, the stallion she bonded with when he was just a few hours old, was able to sense Claire’s pain three years later when the murder happened, she wrote.

Claire’s Amazon bio notes that she “has run 39 marathons, three 50-mile races, and nine 100-mile races to honor her father.”

Jane Dorotik in a 2020 interview and exiting prison the same year for coronavirus safety

Flanking falsehoods. Her mother, who’s past 70 and appeared meek in an on-camera interview with a regional CBS affiliate, said her experience as a convict has inspired her to work for prison reform.

Jane also told the media outlet that it should be illegal for police to lie while questioning suspects.

She has a point — Forensic Files has covered cases in which police coercion resulted in false confessions — but something tells me Jane was the one doing most of the lying during her interrogation.

You can view the 48 Hours about the case online.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

Author: Rebecca Reisner

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MaryAnn Clibbery and George Hansen: Unsalvageable

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Mark Hofmann: 7 Fast Facts

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Jane Dorotik: Trotting in and out of Prison

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