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Helle Crafts: Winter of the Woodchipper

Richard Crafts Is Still Alive
(“The Disappearance of Helle Crafts,” Forensic Files)

Note: This post has been updated with information from 2020

Before launching into this week’s recap, I’d like to let readers know that the name of this blog is changing from True Crime Truant to Forensic Files Now. A redesign is coming in a few months, too, but the true-crime content will remain the same.

But enough about the future — let’s fly back to 1996, the year Forensic Files broadcast the premier episode of its first season, when the show used literal titles instead of puns (“A Case of the Flue,” “Naughty or Nyce,” etc).

“The Disappearance of Helle Crafts” tells of a crime 30 years old, but you can bet that the killer will always be part of popular culture.

Mystery inmate. Richard Crafts was an airline pilot, a part-time police officer, a former Marine pilot, and a father of three. But ever since 1986, he’s pretty much been “the guy in Connecticut who put his wife in the woodchipper.”

Let’s get two pieces of bad news out of the way up front.

First, the Connecticut Bureau of Prisons doesn’t provide recent photos of inmates, so we have to use our imagination regarding his age progression.

Second, and far worse, Crafts has already become eligible for release.

Danish transplant. I’ll get to the specifics about his escaping razor wire on two feet, but first here’s a recap of the episode along with additional information drawn from internet research:

Helle Lorck Nielson originally came from Denmark and met her future husband in Miami, in 1969, when she was training as a flight attendant for Pan Am and he was training as a pilot for Eastern Airlines.

They married in 1975 in and eventually moved to a $250,000 house on a two-acre lot in Danbury, Connecticut.

Beating the odds. In 1984, doctors discovered that Richard had colon cancer and gave him only a 2 percent chance of survival, according to a Newtown Bee story, although the Hartford Courant described it as stomach cancer.

Either way, he survived.

But Richard, who associates described as nice although a bit introverted, didn’t appreciate that Helle had cared for him during his surgery and chemotherapy.

The ingratitude turned out to be the least of his shortcomings as a husband and father.

And although he reportedly made $120,000 a year — a nice bundle in 1986 — he didn’t like the idea of paying alimony and child support and dividing up the family possessions. He allegedly tried to thwart a breakup by telling Helle his cancer had returned, but she discovered he was lying.

Flight attendant palooza. A divorce became imminent in the fall of 1986, after a private investigator named Keith Mayo confirmed what Helle, age 39, had been suspecting, that her husband was having an affair.

The other woman was an Eastern Airlines flight attendant from Middletown, New Jersey, named Nancy Dodd.

The Crafts’ marriage had been in bad shape for a while, with Richard disappearing for long stretches. Helle found receipts from Christmas gifts her husband had bought for another woman.

The house sat on a generous acreage, making it easier for Crafts to commit the murder without attracting neighbors’ attention

Richard would later nonchalantly admit to state police that he actually had a second girlfriend, yet another Eastern flight attendant, and that his job as a pilot presented a lot of nice opportunities to cheat.

Plaintive request? According to Helle’s divorce lawyer, Dianne Andersen, who appeared on the Forensic Files episode, Richard physically abused Helle at times.

When Helle filed for divorce, she told Andersen that if she disappeared, Richard did it.

Andersen remarked that it was “an unusual comment” (but not if you watch Forensic Files often enough).

Richard Crafts had at one time done some piloting for a secret CIA mission, and Helle feared he could track her down anywhere if she tried to flee, the Hartford Courant reported on September 14, 1989.

Missing maiden. But Helle’s life ended right in the Crafts’ home. Her friend Gertrude Horvath dropped her off there on November 18, 1986, after a trip to Frankfurt, Germany, for her job.

The family’s live-in nanny, Dawn Marie Thomas, 19, was out of the house.

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

When Helle didn’t show up for work the next day, her friends turned to Keith Mayo, who started an investigation on his own.

Call in Henry Lee. The nanny told Mayo that Richard had ripped up some bedroom carpet that had a mysterious dark stain on it.

A large freezer was missing from the house. And then there was the $279 receipt for the rental of a diesel-powered woodchipper.

A snowplow driver named Joe Hine reported seeing a man with a woodchipper on a bridge over the Housatonic River shortly after Helle went missing.

That sighting jumpstarted police interest in the case — to such an extent that investigators called in forensics expert Dr. Henry Lee.

Waterside lab. The investigative team found a pile of wood chips with a letter addressed to Helle Crafts on the river bank. They discovered blond hair, bone fragments, and a woman’s painted fingernail. In the water, they found parts of a chainsaw with the serial number scratched off.

Police set up a tent near the murder scene to collect and study the evidence, and motorists started heading to the site to slow down and take a look, according to the Newtown Bee.

“The horrifying accounts of the murder stunned and shocked the community, known more for its quality of life than for gruesome deaths,” the Newtown Bee recounted. (Tragically, Newtown would go on to make headlines after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.)

“She ran off.” Meanwhile, Richard Crafts insisted he didn’t know where his wife was. He had previously said that she went to Copenhagen to stay with her mother, Elsebeth Nielsen, because she was ill. He told other parties that Helle had jetted off to the Canary Islands with a friend.

Police set up a lab in a tent near the river where they found tiny bits of Helle Crafts’ remains

Richard’s defense lawyer would later contend that, because Helle was a world traveler who spoke four languages, she could have happily gallivanted off anywhere, the Hartford Courant reported on September 14, 1989.

Remnants of a woman. But investigators weren’t buying it. They deciphered the obscured serial number on the chainsaw, and it matched the number Richard Crafts had filled out on a warranty form.

They eventually found a total of 2,660 light-colored hairs on the chainsaw and in the chip pile. Dental records confirmed that a tooth at the scene came from Helle.

The authorities concluded that Richard Crafts bludgeoned the slender 5-foot-6-inch-tall Helle to death with a police flashlight in their bedroom, froze her body, then disposed of it with the chainsaw and rented woodchipper.

Heavy instruments. On January 13, 1987, Richard was arrested for homicide and held on $750,000 bond at the Bridgeport Community Correctional Center.

Upon hearing the news of the murder, Helle’s mother was so shocked she required a doctor’s care.

Meanwhile, more damning evidence against Richard poured in. A few days before Helle disappeared, Richard had used cash to buy a deep freezer and refused to give his name to the appliance dealer, according to People magazine.

Investigators believed he used a U-Haul truck to transport the large Brush Bandit woodchipper to the river bank. After the murder, he scratched the serial number off the chainsaw, dismantled it, and threw it into the river, they concluded.

Dianne Andersen in her Forensic Files interview

Copenhagen ploy. Richard’s lack of concern over his wife’s absence didn’t exactly help his case. Helle’s friend Jette Olesen Rompe testified that when she expressed alarm because Helle hadn’t shown up for work, Richard told her, “You’ve been watching too many movies,” the Hartford Courant reported on April 12, 1988.

Elsebeth Nielsen refuted Richard’s claim that Helle went to Copenhagen to nurse her back to health in November. Helle wasn’t scheduled to visit until April 1997, and Nielsen felt fine until she found out about the murder of her only child.

J. Daniel Sagarin, Richard’s lawyer, countered her friends’ assertions that Helle would never willingly leave her children. “People do things in divorces,” he said, the Hartford Courant reported.

Sympathetic juror. Richard Crafts’ sister and brother-in-law, Suzanne and Malcolm Bird, supported his innocence.

At the 1987 trial, Richard found one more sympathetic onlooker.

Eleven jurors voted for conviction, but a lone holdout named Warren Maskell, 47, defied the judge and walked out of deliberations. According to People magazine coverage:

Maskell had visited a nearby church every day at lunchtime, seeking divine guidance, and his belief in Crafts’s innocence was unshaken to the end. “A woman who was sick of trying to change a guy could just take off and say the hell with it,” he explained. “I think Helle Crafts might still be alive.”

At least Helle’s friends and family had the comfort of knowing that Richard was tucked away in jail the whole time; he couldn’t come up with the bail money.

One of many tabloid headlines the Crafts murder generated across the U.S.

Half a century. And incarcerated he would stay — a second jury found him guilty of murder on November 21, 1989.

It marked Connecticut’s first homicide conviction without a body and the first time the state had allowed cameras in a murder trial.

A judge gave Crafts 50 years.

In 1993, Crafts appealed, contending the circumstantial evidence was insufficient and the nationwide publicity about the crime prevented a fair trial. No luck on that; the state supreme court upheld his conviction.

That same year, a judge refused Richard’s bid to extract money from Helle Crafts’ estate.

Friends loyal to the end. As far as the three children, ages ranging from 5 to 10 at the time of their mother’s murder, they stayed with some of Helle’s friends and continued to attend school in Newtown, according to the New York Times.

Two of Helle’s flight attendant colleagues launched a campaign to raise money for the kids, which back in pre-Go Fund Me days involved posting signs in stores and on bulletin boards in airports.

Another of Richard Crafts’ sisters, Karen Rodgers, of Westport, Connecticut, eventually took custody of the kids.

The state saw to it that the children received Richard’s pension fund, according to a Connecticut News-Times story.

No country club. As far as Richard’s whereabouts, he spent some of his sentence at the MacDougall Walker Correctional Institute, but later moved to the Osborn CI in Somer, Connecticut.

Life there sounded pretty stressful, so Richard, who turned 81 in December, probably hasn’t grown old like a fine Merlot.

When officials closed parts of the medium-security prison in 2016, rumors spread that they were contaminated with cancer-causing PCBs.

I originally reported that Richard Crafts would become eligible for parole in 2022. But reader Horrified wrote in with the news that Richard is actually scheduled for release in the second half of 2020.

How did this happen?

Well, it’s safe to assume his sister Karen Rodgers didn’t write any letters to the parole board to support him. She sided with the prosecution during the trial and encouraged the judge to give him the maximum sentence. She contended that the Crafts’ son Andrew was afraid of his father.

Unfortunately, Helle’s lawyer wasn’t around to fight Richard’s release. Dianne Andersen died in 2012. A News-Times piece remembered her fondly as the first woman to practice law in town and a “barracuda” in the courtroom.

And Keith Mayo died in a car accident in 1999, according to reader Horrified.

It’s a good bet that many of Helle’s same friends who aided Richard Crafts’ conviction made a case to keep this wife-killer removed from fresh air and unable to access heavily bladed machinery for the maximum amount of time.

Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but Richard had an odd obsession with working in law enforcement — despite that the part-time gigs he snagged paid a fraction of what he made as a pilot — and “even when he was off duty [he] sometimes responded to police calls without authorization,” according to the Pan Am World DocuProject. I hoped that such biographical details would give pause to the judicial system.

But ultimately, none of that seemed to matter. According to a Jan. 31, 2020, story from the Newtown Bee, at the time of Richard Crafts’ sentencing, the laws in effect enabled a convict to serve “significantly less time” if he “exhibited good behavior while incarcerated.”

Richard Crafts was released from prison into a Bridgeport halfway house named Isaiah House, then to a shelter for homeless veterans, also in Bridgeport — and in summer 2020, he should be completely free, Fox61 reported. (Thanks much to Horrified for providing the links.)

Celluloid infamy. As for the 800-pound popular-culture gorilla in the room — whether filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen got the idea for the woodchipper in Fargo from the Crafts murder — there’s not really evidence to confirm or refute, according to Snopes.

Oh, and one more piece of bad news, but it’s really pretty small. Forensic Files hadn’t started using its theme music with the guitar chords yet when Medstar produced the episode in 1996.

But Peter Thomas’ storytelling still makes it feel like home and lends compassion to the story of Helle Crafts, a nice woman who married a heartless guy.

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

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Jonathan Nyce: Manslaughter in a McMansion

A May-December Marriage Implodes
(“Naughty or Nyce,” Forensic Files)

This post was updated in January 2023.

The story of Michelle Nyce’s murder offers plenty of high drama, including an international romance, an alleged extortion plot, a millionaire doctor, and a lascivious gardener.

But the overall theme is pretty much a simple case of “there’s no fool like an old fool.”

Once Jonathan Nyce, 53, ran low on money, he thought that Michelle Rivera Nyce, 34, would stick by him.

Truncated sentence. It’s not clear whether Michelle wanted out of the marriage because of her fear of returning to poverty or because of the allure of her younger boyfriend, but her husband killed her before she had a chance to exit on two feet.

It happened on January 16, 2004, in Hopewell Township, New Jersey.

The state has already released Jonathan Nyce from prison, and some intelligence about his post-incarceration years turned up, but first here’s a recap of the Forensic Files episode “Naughty or Nyce,” along with additional information drawn from internet research:

Jonathan Nyce, a medical researcher with a PhD in molecular biology, had established a pharmaceutical company that at one time was capitalized with tens of millions of dollars. EpiGenesis started off in North Carolina, then moved to Cranbury, New Jersey.

He came from a Catholic family and his first marriage, to a woman from outside the faith, fizzled in part because of the religious difference, according to Never Leave Me by John Glatt, a 2006 mass-market paperback about the Nyce case.

Described as “socially awkward” or “ungainly” — by the time he was 12, he was six feet tall, the book recounts — he met Michelle through a classified ad. The two exchanged letters before meeting.

(Jonathan later revised the story about how they met, saying he first glimpsed Michelle on a beach, according to a People magazine article.)

Fairy tale start. She came from a family of seven children near the town of Orion in the Philippines. Jonathan would later describe the Rivera home as a squatters’ settlement with shacks “perched unsteadily on bamboo stilts above fetid Manila Bay” with no electricity and “no bathrooms except for trap doors.”

Michelle and Jonathan got married in the Philippines, then moved to the U.S., where they eventually settled into a huge $800,000 house and had a daughter and two sons.

Who knows, maybe the young woman trying to escape the disadvantages of a developing-world nation really did fall in love with the intelligent, generous American. He paid for new homes for Michelle’s relatives back in the Philippines.

Some old-growth trees in the yard would be nice, but the crib still looks none-too-shabby

Jonathan was also hospitable. Michelle’s father, Teodoro Rivera, visited the family frequently, sometimes staying for months and cooking Filipino dishes for the couple, according to a newspaper account.

Disturbing call. But Michelle was lacking something in her life and, by 2002, she had acquired a man on the side. Miguel DeJesus worked for a landscaping company the Nyces used. He and Michelle first met and exchanged phone numbers when he came to the house to ask about a bill, according to court papers, although the People story says they met at a plant nursery.

DeJesus was a real loser, according to Lisa Coryell, a crime reporter who appeared on the Forensic Files episode. Also known as Alexander Castaneda, DeJesus had several Social Security numbers and was a deadbeat dad and a cheater, Coryell said.

Jonathan Nyce claimed that DeJesus demanded $500,000 from him — or he would release a videotape of one of his trysts with Michelle.

Confronted by her husband, Michelle admitted to an affair with the Guatemalan (one news source describes him as Puerto Rican) in his early 30s.

She promised to end the affair with DeJesus, and Jonathan filed a restraining order against him.

Just five months later, however, Michelle was found dead in her forest-green SUV off Jacobs Creek Road. It looked as though the 1997 Toyota Land Cruiser had swerved in the snow and landed in an embankment.

But why were there footprints leading away from the passenger side of the car?

Fashion sense tip-off. And Michelle’s head injury and defensive wounds didn’t look as though they came from an auto accident. The blood patterns in and outside the car didn’t add up either.

Although whoever set up the accident scene wanted it to look as though Michelle was driving, she wasn’t wearing shoes. On the passenger side of the car, investigators found a brown pair that Forensic Files noted “didn’t match her dark blue outfit” (okay, but brown’s a neutral). Perhaps the doctor had thrown the shoes into the car as part of the staging.

Investigators discovered that Michelle had strong motives to abandon her marriage that probably didn’t have anything to do with her sometimes-boyfriend DeJesus.

From rich to retail. EpiGenesis had forced Jonathan out of the company, which faltered financially because an asthma drug it was developing didn’t pan out. The Nyces put their gigantic house up for sale for $1.6 million.

Michelle took a job selling Chanel cosmetics at Macy’s in the Quaker Bridge Mall. Jonathan would later claim that she only went to work to gain experience so she could start her own perfume company someday.

Around this same time, she found out that Jonathan had lied to her about his age — he had subtracted 10 years — and she was reportedly upset it.

Media opportunity. And one more liability on Jonathan’s side: He was “plagued by a fondness for drink,” according to a Philadelphia Daily News story from January 22, 2004.

Michelle’s brother Sonny Ragenil said Jonathan’s jealous rages, drinking, and budget-cutting motivated her to leave, according to the Philadelphia Daily News article.

And Jonathan could be controlling. When a casting director friend offered Michelle an on-camera role in an ad campaign, Jonathan strenuously objected; it’s not clear whether or not she eventually appeared in the ad.

Whatever the case, Michelle wanted to get away, 8,400 miles away to be exact, to the Philippines.

Rooms by the hour. Meanwhile, Jonathan despaired of losing his wife to divorce. On the night of January 16, 2004, Michelle returned home from a rendezvous with DeJesus at Mount’s Motel in Lawrenceville.

Accounts vary as to whether Michelle and Jonathan argued before it got violent or whether Jonathan pulled her out of her car and immediately started attacking her.

Either way, he killed Michelle in a jealous rage.

Cache of evidence. When police raided the McMansion, they found a baseball bat with traces of blood, Jonathan Nyce’s clothes soaking in pinkish water in the washing machine, and pieces of cut-up shoe treads hidden throughout the house.

They were from men’s size 12 moccasins and matched the footprints left in the snow near the death car, although Nyce would later claim that the impressions were really from a size 9.5 shoe, DeJesus’ size.

Jonathan probably wore the moccasins on the night of the murder, then removed the treads and sliced them up — not realizing that they’re just the kind of Columbo evidence investigators love to reconstruct.

Police also found blood in the garage and bloody towels hidden in the chimney.

Five-foot-tall tigress? Investigators believe Jonathan made up the entire story about the extortion attempt by DeJesus. He probably hoped to save his marriage by warding off the other man.

They think the murder happened in the garage, where Jonathan hit Michelle with a baseball bat and threw her to the floor. Then he put her body in the car and staged the accident.

The 6-foot-3-inch 200-pound former executive eventually confessed to police that he had caused Michelle’s injuries but claimed she tried to stab him in the neck with a dagger.

Then, making what is apparently a go-to excuse for wife killers (John Boyle and Richard Nyhuis), he said she landed on the floor during the scuffle but it wasn’t his fault. A Courier News account explained, “He claimed that she continued to flail at him from the ground, he said, so he knelt on her back and shoved her face into the floor.”

No knife like the stiletto Jonathan described ever turned up.

Crime of passion. Nyce’s two brothers and father attended the bail hearing where Mercer County Superior Court Judge Charles A. Delehey cut the amount from $2 million to $1 million in January 2004. A newspaper account at that time described Jonathan as “a research scientist world-renowned for his efforts to cure asthma.”

At the trial in July 2005, DeJesus testified about the affair, which helped the defense’s argument that Michelle’s killing was “passion/provocation manslaughter” rather than murder.

DeJesus also said that Jonathan had threatened him with death.

The court proceedings had no shortage of histrionics. According to a New York Times story from September 23, 2005, assistant prosecutor Doris Galuchie took issue with Nyce’s portrayal as a benevolent medical professional:

“He wasn’t saving lives,” Ms. Galuchie said. “He was an unemployed father who was, quite frankly, taking an interest in his children for the first time.” Mr. Nyce erupted. “That’s too much!” he shouted. He glared at Ms. Galuchie and moved forward in his seat … A few moments later Ms. Galuchie said, “This man didn’t even pay for his own wife’s funeral.” Mr. Nyce again shouted from the defense table: “I was in jail! Jesus!”

Kids relocated. Judge Wilbur H. Mathesius looked favorably on the defendant, saying that he’d done a lot of good in his life, and gave him eight years.

In post-sentencing comments, Nyce declared he still loved Michelle.

Jonathan Nyce’s relatives took care of the children, Samantha, Alex, and Trevor, whose ages ranged from 5 to 12 at the time of the murder. Michelle’s father traveled to New Jersey to request custody of the kids, but it’s not clear whether he had any success.

Jonathan (Sr.) and Emma Nyce leave the Mercer County Courthouse after their son’s conviction

Jonathan served his time at New Jersey’s newest and largest detention facility, South Woods State Prison.

In May 2009, an appeals court upheld Nyce’s conviction.

Electronic autobiography. It didn’t matter much, however, because he was released from jail after just five years, on December 5, 2010. He received credit for good behavior and for the time he spent incarcerated before sentencing.

Nyce moved in with his parents and reunited with his three children.

He wrote an e-book, Under Color of Law: The Deliberate Conviction of an Innocent Man and the Destruction of a Family, to vindicate himself.

In his literary effort, he changed his story about the way Michelle died and the nature of her relationship with DeJesus. Jonathan alleged that DeJesus initially got Michelle into bed by drugging her, then took to stalking her. Jonathan blamed Michelle’s death on DeJesus, saying she died clutching Dejesus’ black hair in her hands and her fatal injuries probably came from falling off the Mount’s Motel balcony.

Oh, and she went to the motel only because she was duped into thinking there was a baby shower there, Jonathan claims in the 2012 e-book.

Amazon reviewers gave the e-tome 1.5 stars out of 5.

Going academic. As for Nyce’s former business, it’s not clear whether EpiGenesis Pharmaceuticals still exists or in what form. The business has LinkedIn and Facebook pages, but they look empty and untended. I couldn’t locate a website for the company.

After prison, Jonathan Nyce became editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cancer Science and Cell Biology, an online publisher of academic research. He was the only member of the editorial board without a biography accompanying his photo.

When originally writing about the case in 2018, I asserted that “not that it wipes away his horrible crime, but if you have to pick a post-manslaughter second act, it might as well be trying to cure cancer.” Now, however, it looks as though Nyce never really had humanitarian intentions.

On Feb. 5, 2020, the PhillyVoice reported that federal authorities charged Jonathan Nyce with selling fake drugs to owners of dogs with terminal cancer. He allegedly falsely claimed that one such medicine “will almost always restore a cancer-stricken dog’s appetite, spirit and energy!”

He gave the bogus treatments realistic-sounding names, Tumexal and Naturasone, and claimed the Food and Drug Administration helped fund his research. In reality, the drugs consisted of random ingredients mixed together, and the FDA had nothing to do with them.

The fraud raked in almost $1 million in sales to approximately 900 victims, according to the Department of Justice.

In December 2022, a federal jury convicted Jonathan Nyce of wire fraud and the interstate shipment of misbranded animal drugs.

The cancer journal Nyce worked for appears to have changed its name to BMC Biology, and it no longer lists him as a member of its editorial staff.

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

P.S. I stumbled upon an interesting travel blog, unrelated to the case, but it has pictures of living conditions similar to what Michelle’s family would have had. Also, Jonathan Nyce’s e-book has thumbnail photos of the Riveras taken in the Philippines that you can scroll through for free on Amazon.

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Richard Nyhuis: A Boy Scout Leader Goes Astray

Bunchee Nyhuis Is Murdered In America
(“The Talking Skull,” Forensic Files)

Last week’s post recapped a Forensic Files episode that was rich in biographical details, about an elegant social climber named Noreen Boyle and the arrogant mid-life crisis victim of a husband who murdered her.

This week is dedicated to “The Talking Skull,” a Forensic Files story whose heart lies in the evidence-gathering process.

As a YouTube commenter summarized the authorities’ work:

Anupam Sircar 2 “From just a skull in the ground to a convicted killer in prison!!! Wow!!! Well done!!!”

The story offers up everything viewers ever wanted to know about ID’ing a skull.

Cartographer’s catch. But the episode gives relatively little in the way of personal details about Bunchee Nyhuis or her husband, Richard, who turned homicidal one night in 1983. By the time the closing Forensic Files theme music plays, viewers haven’t really gotten to know the couple.

So, for this week, I looked around for intelligence about their personal histories (only a few tidbits about Bunchee available, but a fair amount on Richard) and also checked into the whereabouts of Richard today. So, let’s get started on the recap:

In November 1987, a freelance mapmaker named Raimo Pitkanen was on a job for an orienteering club when he spotted a skull at the S Bar F Scout Ranch near Farmington, Missouri.

Frightened by what he’d seen, Pitkanen left the skull in the woods and didn’t report until he was safely back in his home in Finland.

Written in bone. At the scene, the Missouri Highway Patrol found some other bones, strands of hair, and a button that said “Texwood.” Some of the remains had been gnawed by animals who probably dug them up from a shallow grave.

Bunchee Nyhuis and Richard Nyhuis — In happier times

The victim’s pelvic bone had the type of markings that indicate it belonged to a woman who had given birth to two or more children. (That would have been a nice fun fact in a case that wasn’t quite as grim as this one).

Investigators discovered that Texwood was a Hong Kong manufacturer that made jeans specifically for “Asian builds,” according to The Bone Detectives, a children’s book of all things, published by Little Brown in 1996.

Facing the challenge. Forensic Files asserted that the button proved the victim was either from Asia or had visited Asia.

It turned out that was correct, but it bothers me when the show leaps to conclusions — the jeans could have been worn by an Armenian-American woman who bought them in a thrift store in Vermont.

Anyhow, after a forensic artist used the skull to re-create the face of the victim, a woman named Wilaiporn Cox saw it on TV and identified it as belonging to her missing friend Bunchee Nyhuis. No one had seen Bunchee since December 1983. At the time, Richard claimed that she had returned to Thailand. He said he had dropped her off at the St. Louis airport and never heard from her again.

Thai love story. It seemed plausible at the time. Her friends recalled her saying that she wanted to go back and visit her relatives in Thailand.

Bunchee (also “Bun Chee” or “Buncheerapon,” depending on the source) was born in the city of Chonburi in Thailand circa 1950 and left her homeland after meeting the dark-haired, blue-eyed Richard Nyhuis. He was serving in the Air Force in Thailand in the early 1970s.

Seemed perfectly respectable. Richard Nyhuis came from a normal family background (on paper, anyway). He was born on February 18, 1946, to Harold Clayton Nyhuis and Virginia Buckler Nyhuis, who lived in Kankakee, Illinois. Harold spent 30 years working for an office supply business called Amberg File and Index, and Virgina was a secretary who worked on a newsletter published by the family’s church, Asbury United Methodist.

When Virginia died at the age of 94 in 2016, an obituary mentioned Richard had two sisters, Kathryn Siegel and Ann Johnson.

Richard became an electrician for McDonnell Douglas. Neighbors described him as an ideal husband and father and a well-respected Boy Scout leader, according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story from July 20, 1989.

Don’t let the no-frills sign fool you. The S Bar F Ranch looks like a rustic Club Med

“She’s a tigress.” But investigators didn’t believe Richard was entirely wonderful. They confronted him while he was camping with his sons, Steven and Michael, at the same Boy Scout ranch where Bunchee’s remains had been discovered. He gave a videotaped confession, albeit a shifting one, and went on trial for murder in 1992.

The proceedings took place in St. Charles County Court with a jury of seven men and five women.

The prosecution contended that, during an argument in November 1983, Richard struck the 33-year-old Bunchee with a sharp object, then suffocated her as she lay on the floor pleading for medical help.

The defense countered that Richard Nyhuis was a peaceful man who fell prey to his wife’s volatile nature. His lawyer alleged that he pushed his 5-foot-tall wife in self-defense after she demanded that they build a bigger house, which they couldn’t afford, threatened to leave him and take their two little sons to Thailand — and then came at him “with hands and fingernails raised,” The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported on November 24, 1992. He also alleged she bit him.

Fifty long years. She hit her head when she fell, then began screaming and Richard accidentally suffocated her, the defense contended during the trial.

But St. Charles County medical examiner Mary Case testified she believed the skull injury came from an implement such as a clawhammer or tackhammer. According to court papers, “Dr. Case further stated that if the wound was left untreated, it could only have caused the wife’s death if medical attention was not properly sought.”

A jury convicted Richard of first-degree murder, and he got life in jail without the possibility of parole for 50 years.

Appeal fizzles. On appeal, Richard complained that the “state flaunted his wife’s remains in front of the jury throughout the trial.” He also contended that the court had precluded him from presenting evidence of “his wife’s specific acts of violence against defendant’s and wife’s children,” according to court papers.

In October 1995, a Missouri Court of Appeals upheld his conviction. The judges noted that “people normally become unconscious after being deprived of oxygen for one minute. This gave defendant sufficient time to coolly reflect on what he was doing after his wife was unconscious.”

Today, Richard Nyhuis resides in Potosi Correctional Center in Mineral Point. The prison houses death-row inmates and has accommodations ranging from minimum to maximum security.

The Missouri Department of Corrections website describes Nyhuis as 5-feet-8-inches tall and 180 pounds.

He’ll be 96 when he comes up for parole.

What about the children?

Offspring Okay. Again, not a whole lot of information, but it sounds as though Richard did a decent job of raising them alone in the years between Bunchee’s death and his arrest for murder.

The name Steve Nyhuis popped up on the St. Charles High honor roll in 1990. Steve appears to have followed his father into the military and had a successful career. It looks as though his brother, Michael, became a woodworker and is married.

In 1991, 48 Hours produced an episode about the case, but I wasn’t able to find it on CBS.com, Youtube, Amazon Prime, or Netflix. If anyone has a clue, about where to see it, please write in.

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

Noreen Boyle: A Death Encrypted

John “Jack” Boyle Creates a Bistate Horror Show
(“Foundation of Lies,” Forensic Files)

Note: Updated with a new parole eligibility date

Noreen Boyle’s murder sounds more like a page from an Edgar Allan Poe short story than an episode of Forensic Files.

After killing Noreen, her husband decided on a macabre way to conceal her body. Dr. John “Jack” Boyle created a grave beneath the concrete basement floor of their new house in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Amateur job. The story surrounding the homicide, however, is pretty typical as true-crime tales go: A spouse finds a new love and murders the old one to avoid a battle over the kids and money.

But Jack Boyle, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who was a tremendous success as a physician, failed miserably as a hitman, and landed himself in a crypt of his own — a cell at the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio.

The murder took place in the hours before New Year’s 1990 struck, but people from the Boyles’ old hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, have never stopped talking about the case. The Investigation Discovery channel produced a documentary about it in 2018.

Imperfect union. Jack Boyle is still alive, so for this week, I looked for an epilogue for him as well as his and Noreen’s children. But first here’s a recap of “Foundation of Lies” along with extra information drawn from internet research:

Noreen Schmid Boyle, an elegant mother of two, managed to cope with her husband’s various affairs over the years. Maybe she cared more about maintaining a stable home for Collier, 11, and Elizabeth 3, than she did about her own hurt feelings.

Or perhaps she soothed her pride with shopping trips and her Range Rover and BMW. Her husband’s medical practice, which specialized in Medicaid and Medicare cases, was a money machine. One in every 13 residents of Richland County, Ohio, was a patient there, according to Forensic Files.

Surely, Noreen enjoyed Jack Boyle’s status in the community.

Gatsby gal. According to the Akron Beacon Journal, Noreen was something of a Holly Golightly. She came from a working-class background, the daughter of a secretary and a machinist.

But she liked people to think otherwise.

Noreen told friends that she grew up in a mansion and had an M.B.A. from the Wharton School.

She did, however, graduate from the University of Pennsylvania School of Dentistry as a dental hygienist (and supported Jack Boyle while he went to medical school).

At some point before New Year’s Eve 1989 rolled around, Noreen had decided that being the wife of a rich doctor wasn’t worth the pain. She found out that Collier had witnessed his father kissing another woman.

Noreen with Elizabeth and her birth mother

Secret agenda. Citing mental cruelty and neglect, Noreen, 44, filed for divorce. But Jack, then 46, persuaded her to make a fresh start with him in Erie, Pennsylvania. He bought a house there and arranged for the sellers to vacate it right away.

All along, however, Jack planned to make Noreen disappear, then marry his girlfriend, Sherri Campbell, and live with her and the kids in Erie, where he intended to establish a new medical practice.

On December 31, 1989, Jack struck Noreen and suffocated her to death after an argument at their residence in Mansfield, Ohio.

Heavy equipment. Over the course of the next few days, the doctor began driving the three hours from Mansfield to Erie, saying he was preparing the new house for their big move. He didn’t mention that he was renovating the basement into a cemetery.

He used a rented jackhammer to make a hole in the concrete floor. Then he secreted Noreen’s body inside, filled in the opening, repainted the floor, and covered it with indoor-outdoor carpeting.

In what must have been a strenuous job, Jack gathered up the pieces of broken concrete and dumped them on property owned by Mark Davis, a business associate who was also Sherri Campbell’s uncle.

Sherri Campbell, in a still from Forensic Files and a News Journal photo, during the time of the trial. She had already given birth to Jack’s daughter

Deluded. Now Jack was free to move in with Sherri Campbell, who was 26 years old and very pregnant with his child. He told Collier that Noreen had gone on a little jaunt out of town. Jack would later contend that he saw his wife leave the house and that she was picked up by someone in a car.

Why did Jack Boyle think that his wife’s disappearance would quickly fall off the radar screen?

Maybe he figured the new friends and associates he planned to acquire in Erie would know nothing of Noreen and have no reason to inquire about her.

Jane Imbody, a local Mansfield news anchor who appeared on the Forensic Files episode, said that the doctor considered his deceptions good enough for not only the public and his family but also for himself. “He was such a good liar he believed his own lies,” Imbody said.

But 11-year-old Collier wasn’t having any of it.

Semi-forgery. Collier told investigators everything: Jack’s affair with Sherri Campbell, the thumps he heard while his parents were arguing New Year’s Eve, the trips to Erie, and how his father complained of being sore when he returned. His 3-year-old sister reportedly told police she saw her father strike Noreen.

The authorities found the patch of newly paved basement flooring in the Erie house and discovered Noreen’s decomposing body beneath it. She had a plastic bag over her head.

The real estate agent who handled the $300,000 house deal told investigators about the woman who accompanied Jack to his office. She signed her name “N. Sherri Boyle,” in an apparent effort to impersonate Noreen. (When asked about it in court later, Sherri Campbell pleaded the Fifth Amendment.)

Ice overkill. The prosecution ordered forensic tests to make sure the discarded concrete fragments dumped in Mark Davis’ yard came from the concrete in the Erie basement.

Dr. Jack Boyle intended the new house in Erie to double as a love nest and a burial ground

They matched, but the real smoking gun was the rental receipt from the jackhammer.

Jack said he used it to break up ice on his property. I grew up near Erie, with the lake effect and six-month-long winters, but never saw a homeowner use a jackhammer to get rid of ice. People either left the ice alone, put rock salt on it, or ruined their shovel blades hacking away at it.

Prosecutor takes aim. By the end of the month, authorities had arrested Jack and were holding him on $5 million bond. The trial kicked off just a few months after the murder in 1990, and the doctor testified on his own behalf — for nine hours.

It came out during questioning that Jack had arranged for Sherri Campbell to cook a pork roast and bring it over on New Year’s day — evidence he knew there was no chance Noreen would show up at home, according to Richland County prosecutor James Mayer Jr.

Stories published in the Mansfield News Journal on June 26, 1990, gave extensive coverage of Jack Boyle’s various evasions under oath.

Witness for the prosecution. In addition to the lies he told to cover up the murder plot — for example, he denied purchasing concrete mix at a local Busy Beaver store — there were self-aggrandizing claims regarding his military service.

He said that he was a former Navy man (true), he flew an F-14 during the Vietnam War and logged more flight time than any other pilot (false), a sniper shot him during the Iranian hostage crisis (false), and that he was a flight surgeon (false).

The trial’s real sensation was Collier Boyle, age 12 by then, who impressed the courtroom with his articulate testimony about his parents. Collier revealed that he and Noreen feared Jack’s nastiness and temper.

Cruel tactic. Jack received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for 20 years for aggravated murder and a consecutive 18 months for abuse of a corpse.

As if losing his mother once didn’t hurt enough, Collier had to go through it again in 1994, when Jack Boyle claimed the body found underneath his basement didn’t belong to Noreen and that she might still be alive.

Some of the autopsy details, including her eye color, were wrong, and the doctor’s brother claimed he’d received a phone call from Noreen after the night she officially disappeared.

Trash talk. Around the same time that Jack was pushing for a new trial, his aforementioned brother, Charles “C.J.” Boyle, began a smear campaign against Noreen.

A lengthy account appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal on July 25, 1994.

Charles Boyle claimed that Noreen’s adoption of Elizabeth from Taiwan was illegitimate.

He also alleged the adoption was “the ‘first operation test’ of a baby-selling organization for which Noreen Boyle became an agent” and that she and an associate had nabbed “several hundred thousand dollars in clear profits” from the illegal enterprise.

A job for DNA. What’s more, Noreen was an international gold jewelry smuggler, according to Charles. And she had planned to burn down the new house in Erie out of jealousy — and she had multiple affairs of her own with men, including a contractor and a police officer, Charles claimed.

He also suggested that Noreen staged her own death and then disappeared on her own volition.

Noreen wasn’t around to defend herself from the character assassination, but at least the authorities were able to refute the story that she had fled on her own accord.

They exhumed Noreen’s body, and a mitochondrial DNA tested reconfirmed its identity.

The misinformation on the coroner’s report was simple human error.

Stay inside, pal. On June 2, 1994, Jack Boyle lost his appeal of the case, when a panel of circuit judges ruled that evidence of his guilt was “overwhelming.”

In 2000, the Mansfield News Journal reported that Boyle was making noise about his attorneys’ not representing him competently. He said they failed to advise him against testifying on his own behalf. That effort went nowhere, and he remained behind razor wire.

In 2010, he failed in his first bid to win parole. As of this writing, he’s still in Marion, with his next parole hearing scheduled for Oct. 01, 2025.

He has reportedly changed his story about Noreen’s death. He acknowledges that he killed her, but says it happened by accident: After she tried to attack him with a knife, he pushed her to defend himself and then he blacked out, he said. When he woke up, he claimed, Noreen was dead.

Okay, whatever you say, Jack.

More about him in a minute. What about Elizabeth and Collier?

‘Colliver’ Twist. Elizabeth was adopted by the family of a local school principal. No other information about her came up in internet searches. She may prefer to remain uncontacted.

Collier found himself alone after the murder. As a Daily Mail story from November 10, 2017, quoted the A Murder in Mansfield filmmaker:

“He … had a lot of rejection from both sides of his family,” documentary director Barbara Kopple tells DailyMail.com. “His father’s family probably felt that he betrayed them, and they didn’t want to adopt him or have him live with them, and the mother’s family probably had some trouble embracing a murderer’s son — in a way, a sense of further rejection.”

Fortunately, a local couple named Susan and George Zeigler eventually adopted Collier. He credits them with helping him recover from the traumatic events of his childhood.

Today, he goes by the name Collier Landry and works as a cinematographer out of Los Angeles.

Return to Mansfield. As of 2016, Collier was seeking to reconnect with his sister Elizabeth, whom he lost track of after the trial.

He conceived of the idea for A Murder in Mansfield, which was produced by Cabin Creek Films.

It shows Collier’s homecoming to Mansfield and his reunion with his mother’s best friend as well as with lead detective Dave Messmore, who also appeared on the Forensic Files episode. Messmore and his wife actually wanted to adopt Collier but legal problems prevented it, according to a positive review of the movie on the filmint.nu website.

Back to Jack: The movie also promised to show a reunion between him and his son. Somehow, Collier has managed not to hate him.

Collier Landry

Photo motherlode. The Hollywood Reporter gave A Murder in Mansfield a good review as well. The movie has appeared at a number of film festivals and had “explosive ticket sales” for its showing in Mansfield. But the broadcast on November 19 on the ID network will be its TV debut.

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

Update: Read about Collier’s life today.

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime.

P.S. Read a Q&A with the Mansfield native who reported on the case for the Mansfield News Journal

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Indie Bound

Updates on James Kidwell and Eddie Makdessi

Folks, It Doesn’t Get Much More Sordid Than This
(“Fate Date” and “Double Cross,” Forensic Files)

The Forensic Files episodes about James Kidwell and Eddie Makdessi — unconnected except that they both committed especially lurid homicides — might tempt you to fast-forward past the TMI and get right to the parts about how the authorities caught them. Here are quick summaries, plus updates that you can skip ahead to if you like:

JAMES KIDWELL
Episode: Fate Date
DOB: 12/10/71
Appearance: 6-foot 7, 209 pounds, hazel eyes.
Facility: Mack Alford Correction Center, Stringtown, Okla. Medium security.
Outlook: Life without parole, three counts. Virtually no chance of getting out on two feet.
CRIME: After Rebecca Barney declined Kidwell’s advances, he raped and killed her, shot her husband, Fred, set their house on fire, and murdered a good Samaritan named Kenneth Maxwell who stopped to report the blaze on Feb. 22, 2003. The salacious part of the case, which was tried in 2004, revolved around Kidwell’s pride in his alleged natural assets. It’s not clear whether he gave himself this nickname or others dubbed him so, but here it is: Ten-Inch Cowboy.
UPDATE: Life in prison has not been kind to this buckaroo. By 2006, he had lost all his teeth — he only had 14 to start with — and has been fighting to get dentures. In 2014, the state rejected his request because he’s managed to eat enough to maintain a weight between 209 and 252 pounds. To be sure, Kidwell doesn’t deserve a Hollywood-quality smile at taxpayers’ expense, but everybody needs at least some teeth, so maybe Oklahoma will consider footing the bill for a strictly utilitarian set.
TAKEAWAY: Avoid prison unless you have plenty of Ben & Jerry’s commissary cash.

EDDIE MAKDESSI
Episode: Double Cross
DOB: 9/3/63
Appearance: 5-foot-4, dark eyes.
Facility: Red Onion State Prison, Pound, Va. Supermax.
Outlook: Two consecutive life terms for two first-degree murders and a $202,500 fine. Victim Information and Notification Everyday, aka vinelink.com, makes no mention of his being eligible for parole.
CRIME: Virginia Navy man Adibeddie “Eddie” Makdessi collected a $700,000 life insurance payout on his wife, Elise Martin Crosby Makdessi, before authorities figured out he killed her and an innocent colleague named Quincy Brown in Virginia Beach on May 14, 1996, as part of a ridiculously complicated scheme to sue the Navy on (false) sexual assault charges. Both victims worked at Oceana Naval Air Station. It took authorities 10 years, during which time a news reporter tracked Makdessi down in Russia and lured him back to the U.S., but he finally paid for his horrible deeds.
UPDATE: Makdessi’s efforts to break free include an unsuccessful 2014 lawsuit alleging authorities discriminated against him because of his Lebanese ethnicity. In 2016, a U.S. Magistrate Judge ruled against him in a suit claiming Wallens Ridge State Prison staff failed to protect him from assaults from a cellmate. On Oct. 31, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court denied his habeas corpus petition, noting that Makdessi “has repeatedly abused this Court’s process” and it would deny any subsequent such attempts. (Thanks to reader Patrick Wood, who tipped me off on this new development.) Meanwhile, although the name of Makdessi’s current home sounds whimsical, it’s actually quite grim. Virginia’s “worst-behaving” prisoners end up there, according to HBO’s Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison. Makdessi isn’t in the documentary, but it offers a glimpse of the daily life faced by him and other inmates housed in the prison’s 8×10 cells.

TAKEAWAY: If you have teenage sons you’d like to scare straight, stream the HBO documentary today.

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

To order the book:
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Book cover

Greg Davis: Darlie Routier’s No. 1 Antagonist

A Texas Prosecutor Dedicated to Death Row
(“Invisible Intruder,” Forensic Files, and “Darlie Routier,” The Last Defense)

After the past two posts about the unfair treatment Darlie Routier has received at the hands of the criminal justice system, it seems only natural to provide some intelligence on Greg Davis.

Greg Davis in a Forensic Files appearance

I was hoping to find something scandalous or incriminating about the Texas prosecutor, who still clearly takes pride in having landed Routier on death row in connection with the 1996 stabbing deaths of two of her little sons — a crime she has always blamed on an unidentified assailant.

Davis discussed the case on camera in the Forensic Files episode “Invisible Intruder” in 1999 and in the series The Last Defense in 2018.

He and Routier’s other detractors have consistently used personal smears against her: She was “self-centered” and “materialistic,” she was grieving in an undignified manner, she gave the babysitter a wine cooler, she got DDD breast implants, and so on.

But what about Davis himself? Does this millennial-era Oliver Cromwell have any impurity in his past?

Well, much to my disappointment, nothing obvious.

The only official trouble that popped up was an action from 2010, when a grand jury indicted Davis, then a Collin County assistant district attorney, on charges of tampering with a government record.

The matter involved allegations that some DA’s office employees falsified information to indicate they were working on official business when they were actually campaigning for a district clerk.

But a judge granted a motion to quash the indictment against Davis in January 2011.

After new Attorney General Greg Willis took office that same year, Willis chose not to retain Davis. But Davis quickly got a new job, as deputy first assistant DA in McLennan County. He served under District Attorney Abel Reyna.

Davis exited that job in 2014. He left on his own accord, and no accusations of misbehavior turned up on internet searches. But the announcement merited a number of negative reader comments, including:

“Sherry Moses Greg Davis is more of an ass than an asset. I don’t know how he can live with himself for putting an innocent woman on death row. God will be his judge.”

“Barry Green Being part of the Henry Wade administration and obtaining almost two dozen death penalty verdicts is a resume I would not want.”

As of 2014, Davis had helped put 20 people on death row, and several have been executed. (The conviction of at least one of them, Albert Leslie Love Jr., was reversed, in 2016.)

TV station KWTX in Waco reported that “Davis is said to be the most successful capital murder prosecutor in the state of Texas.”

Davis has said he believes there’s a good chance Routier will be executed, which would leave her surviving son motherless.

The next big news about Davis hit in 2017, and it sounded positive (sorry).

The FBI was investigating ex-boss Abel Reyna because he allegedly “dismissed criminal cases for his friends and major campaign donors for political and personal gain,” according to the Waco Tribune-Herald on November 10, 2017.

In an affidavit, Davis indicated that Reyna’s corruption was the reason he chose to leave the job. (Reyna lost his reelection bid in 2018.)

A snippet of typical character assassination

So, it looks as though Greg Davis — who is now a retiree living in the Dallas area — is basically a narrow-minded individual but with some integrity.

And to his credit, in his TV appearances, he seems earnest and not particularly in love with the sound of his own voice.

Just the same, if anyone knows of any skeletons in this guy’s closet, I’m all ears.

That’s it for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode about Darlie Routier on YouTube or Amazon Prime

Drake Routier: 5 Things to Know

Darlie Routier’s Son Lives the Crucible
(“Invisible Intruder,” Forensic Files, and “Darlie Routier,” The Last Defense)

After last week’s post about the persecution of Darlie Routier, many readers searched for information about her youngest son, who was 7 months old when a knife attack left his brothers dead on June 6, 1996, in Rowlett, Texas.

Despite the upheaval of the murders of brothers Damon and Devon Routier and the imprisonment of his mother for homicide, Drake Routier grew into “the most adaptable kid I’ve ever seen,” his father, Darin, told reporter Liz Stevens, who wrote about the Routiers in a Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The article, published when Drake was 2 years old, described him as normal, lively, and resembling his mother with “startled blue eyes” and a “delicate mouth.”

Now in his early 20s, Drake has beaten the odds in a number of ways. In an on-camera CNN interview, he doesn’t act like a young man who’s consumed with bitterness or anger. And he apparently has stayed out of trouble with the law. (No small accomplishment in an age when the children of politicians and celebrities tend to pop up on mugshots.com.)

Drake has said he believes in his mother’s innocence, and he has visited Darlie, 48, regularly in the Mountain View Unit, where she’s one of six women on death row in a state with the most active execution chamber in the U.S.

Here are 5 realities, drawn from internet research, about his life:

Reality #1. Drake’s father, Darin Routier, didn’t take custody of him right away after the murders, because he wanted to get his finances in order, Liz Stevens reported. After putting Darlie in jail with bail set at $1 million, the state of Texas placed baby Drake in a foster home in 1996. A court later gave custody to his father’s parents, Sarilda and Leonard Routier. Meanwhile, Darin, once a successful computer hardware entrepreneur, lost the family’s huge Georgian-style house, cabin cruiser, and 1986 Jaguar. He started over in Lubbock and eventually had Drake move in with him.

Reality #2. Drake found out in 2013 he had acute lymphocytic leukemia, which is “the most common type of cancer in children, and treatments result in a good chance for a cure,” according to the Mayo Clinic. He allowed CNN to show photos of him during the time he was undergoing chemotherapy. On October 13, 2016, Drake finished his last cancer treatment at the Children’s Medical Hospital in Dallas, according to a message his maternal grandmother posted online. An AP story dated June 18, 2018, reported that Drake was in remission, according to Richard A. Smith, a defense lawyer for his mother.

Reality #3. Drake told CNN he’s had to accept his identity as the kid whose mother is on death row. Darlie and other family members have been denigrated in the media ever since her arrest 11 days after the murders. During the trial, “prosecuting attorneys labeled Routier’s relatives ‘trailer trash’ and portrayed the Rowlett couple as tacky nouveau riche with twisted priorities,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The public chimed in, too. A pawn shop clerk “noted that Darlie often came to her store braless and used foul language,” the newspaper reported.

Reality #4. Drake’s visits to his mother, who’s been on death row for 21 years, take place with a sheet of glass between them. In addition to denying friends and family members physical contact with death row inmates, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice limits visits to two hours in duration and encourages “conservative dressing.” For example, visitors past the age of adolescence cannot wear shorts or skirts shorter than three inches above the knee.

Family lost: The Routiers with Devon and Damon

Reality #5. Although deprived of his mother’s embrace, Drake has grown up with many other people who love him. For instance, Jerry Dale Jackson, the father of Darin Routier’s girlfriend, Cindy, considered Drake to be his own. Jackson’s obituary in the Weatherford Democrat in 2017 listed Drake as one of his grandchildren.

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

Read Part 3: Greg Davis: Darlie Routier’s No. 1 Antagonist

Watch the Forensic Files episode about Darlie Routier on YouTube or Amazon Prime

7 Reasons Darlie Routier Is a Witch-Hunt Victim

Enough with the Silicone-Shaming
(“Invisible Intruder,” Forensic Files, and “Darlie Routier,” The Last Defense)

An ABC series called The Last Defense is reviving interest in the 1996 murders of Devon and Damon Routier and the character assassination prosecutors used to put their mother on death row.

Viewers of The Last Defense, co-produced by actress Viola Davis, may not realize that Forensic Files was on the case nearly two decades earlier.

Whereas The Last Defense disposes itself to throwing Darlie Routier’s guilt into doubt, the 1999 Forensic Files episode about the homicides of the boys, ages 5 and 6, portrays her as deserving of the capital punishment sentence doled out by a Texas jury.

But “Invisible Intruder,” the Forensic Files retelling of the suburban Dallas Greek tragedy, unwittingly lays the groundwork for skepticism over the prosecution’s presumption that it’s only logical for a sex kitten living in a mansion to stab her own children to death to free up more cash for Neiman Marcus.

On Forensic Files, a prosecutor named Greg Davis makes a number of narrow-minded judgments about Darlie that should have triggered the witch-hunt alarm.

Davis continues the defamation of the former housewife from Rowlett, Texas, on The Last Defense as do a number of others connected with the case. Unrelated observers also enjoy casting stones at the mother of three with the audacity to enjoy looking alluring.

Drawn from both Forensic Files and The Last Defense, the following seven assumptions and contentions are so unfair that I want to help Darlie Routier escape from her prison cell in the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas — whether she’s guilty or not.

Attack #1: Greg Davis and fellow prosecutor Toby Shook said they were “sickened” and “disgusted,” respectively, by a tribute involving Silly String and laughter the Routiers had at a grave-side birthday celebration for one of their slain sons. “It struck me as more than curious,” Davis said.
Refutation: People mourn in varied ways and processes, and some try to celebrate their loved ones’ lives in between the fits of unbearable sorrow.

The Routiers’ former home in Rowlett, Texas

Attack #2: Investigators contend a single fiberglass fragment on a knife from the Routiers’ kitchen indicates Darlie used the knife to stage the scene by cutting a hole in a screen.
Rebuttal: One tiny fragment? Murder scenes aren’t hermetically sealed chambers — how could they be when EMTs and police have to walk onto them in the first hours after the crimes? That fiber could have easily been accidentally transferred to, or planted on, that knife.

Attack #3: Greg Davis points out with disgust that Darlie liked to wear 10 rings at a time.
Dissenting view: So what? Madonna used to put on 20 bracelets at once and she still occasionally drapes herself in rhinestone-laden low-cut outfits. All five of her kids are alive and intact.

Attack #4: Again, Greg Davis is horrified (he sure thrives on repulsion), this time because the Routiers played Coolio hit “Gangsta’s Paradise” at their sons’ funeral. “I can’t imagine that you do that,” he said.
Wrong, wrong, wrong: Darlie’s husband, Darin, says it was the kids’ favorite song. The Last Defense shows video of the older boy dancing to it. People often enjoy songs because the melody and harmony speak to them — the lyrics are insignificant. My law-abiding mother taught me “La Cucaracha” when I was 5 years old. It’s about a cockroach who walks funny because he needs marijuana.

Attack #5: Davis notes one of Darlie’s diary entries asks God to “forgive her” for what she is “about to do.” He believes that means she intended to kill herself or her sons or both.
Oh, shut up, Greg: So now people have to censor themselves in their own journals because some modern-day Cotton Mather might read them one day? The woman had three kids by the time she was 26. Of course, she’s going to have down days. It doesn’t mean she was truly suicidal or remotely homicidal. Stay out of women’s diaries, Greg.

Attack #6: Juror Kerri Parris, who appeared on camera on The Last Defense, nonchalantly admits she used the fact that Darlie had breast implants as a strike against her. “That’s not something I would do,” Parris said.
Stop leaping: Who cares? Eating venison is something I wouldn’t do. That doesn’t mean I think deer hunters are inclined to turn their rifles on their own kids.

Attack #7: More from Kerri Parris: “I just knew that she killed her boys. I was angry about it, but also went in open-minded about it.”
Supreme Court, did you hear that? The presence of a juror who admits she was biased from the beginning sounds like a slam-dunk argument for a new trial. Actually, here’s a better idea: Spring Darlie Routier from her cell, and everybody else mind your own business.

By the way, Darin Routier, an IT entrepreneur who divorced Darlie in 2011, appears on The Last Defense and maintains that his former wife is entirely innocent. Does anyone really think that this Texas dad would defend a woman if there’s any chance she took away two of his man-children?

The Routiers’ surviving son, Drake, has leukemia. He lives near his father in Lubbock and has said he loves Darlie and always will.

Come on, Texas, let this nice young man and his mother console each other outside of razor wire. — RR

Read Part 2: Drake Routier: 5 Things to Know

Watch Forensic Files episode “Invisible Intruder” on YouTube or Amazon Prime

Ed Post’s Murder of Julie Post

A Spouse Scapegoats a Towel Ring
(“Slippery Motives,” Forensic Files)

The story of Julie Post’s death encompasses a favorite Forensic Files theme: As much as the show stresses science, many times the little things suspects do or say are more damning.

“Slippery Motive,” the episode about Julie Post’s murder by her husband, New Orleans salesman Ed Post, also contains one of the best quips ever from a prosecutor’s on-camera interview.

Salesman’s personality. I’ll get to that in a minute and also provide an epilogue for Ed, who is still alive three decades after he ended his wife’s life.

So let’s get started on the “Slippery Motive” episode recap, along with extra information from internet research:

Ed Post and Julie Thigpen met at the University of Southern Mississippi and married in 1967.

They moved to Louisiana, where Ed made a name for himself as a real estate agent, thanks in part to what Forensic Files calls his sophisticated manner.

Cajun success story. After Julie joined his firm, Wagner & Truax, she sold around $1 million in real estate a year, according to Forensic Files. But later, someone mentioned that she made only around $20,000 annually.

The Omni property where the murder took place in 1986 is now the St. Louis Union Station Hotel

That confused me a little because if the firm charges the standard 6 percent commission, why didn’t Julie get at least half of that, which would add up to $30,000?

On the other hand, she started working there in 1982, when $20,000 a year was pretty decent scratch.

Together, the couple were earning enough to afford a wine collection worth $30,000, according to St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Bill McClellan, who went on to write a mass-market paperback called Evidence of Murder (Onyx, 1993) about Julie Post’s homicide.

(Note: Forensic Files references Wagner & Truax as the real estate firm that Ed Post partly owned, but a reader recently wrote in that he wasn’t an owner and the firm where he worked was actually Gertrude Gardner Realtors.)

Worst convention ever. But all that affluence wasn’t enough for the chubby 5-foot-7-inch Ed. He became infatuated with a cute colleague. She already had a well-to-do husband, and it was theorized that Ed wanted to turn himself into an even better provider than her spouse.

A trip the Posts took to St. Louis for a real estate conference gave Ed an opportunity to put a homicide plan into action.

He drowned Julie in the bathtub early in the morning on June 3, 1986, then quickly jumped into a T-shirt and shorts.

Ed Post, right, and his brother in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch photo

On his way out of the Omni Hotel in Union Station, where they were staying, Ed stopped by the concierge desk to thank her for a recommendation. Next, he introduced himself to the doorman and mentioned he was going jogging.

Big payout. Upon his return, he “discovered” his wife unresponsive in the tub. Police found a broken-off towel ring in the water. It looked as though Julie had grabbed it for support, it came loose from the tile wall, and then she fell, hit her head, and drowned.

Ed Post might have gotten away with it, but his greed turned reckless. He immediately called his lawyer brother to the scene, where they photographed evidence of the allegedly homicidal towel ring, in preparation for a lawsuit against the hotel (see Mark Winger).

And one more gift for prosecutors: Ed had purchased a $300,000 life insurance policy on Julie less than a month before her death.

Gratuitous interaction. At first, however, it looked as though authorities were buying the accidental-drowning story, and Julie Post’s body was transported to New Orleans for burial in Metairie Cemetery.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported on the death at the Omni, and it caught the eye of a prosecutor from the Missouri attorney general’s office.

Dee Joyce-Hayes didn’t buy all the towel-ring shaming.

Dee Joyce-Hayes in a 2010 Post-Dispatch photo

Oh, come on. She also found it odd that Ed Post thought it necessary to introduce himself by first and last name to the Omni doorman and explain where he was going.

“It’s from the book of ‘Who Cares?’ ” she said. (Best quip of the season.)

Clearly, Ed Post was trying to establish an alibi.

Soon, more authorities took an interest in the case as a possible homicide.

Hardware inquisition. Next came the trial by combat of the towel ring. Investigators had a woman of about Julie Post’s weight and height test an attached, intact towel ring in another bathroom at the Omni Hotel.

After numerous trials, investigators determined that it would take a person weighing 480 pounds — or a person weighing 120 pounds who was descending from 64 feet — to pull the towel ring directly off the wall in the way they found it at the murder scene.

The lab concluded that someone standing outside the tub, with a foot against the side, violently and deliberately wrenched the towel wring from its mount on the tile wall.

Dead giveaway. After exhuming Julie Post’s body, the coroner found marks that suggested someone had held her head down in the water.

The authorities did a great job with the forensics, but the towel ring factor got undue attention, in my opinion. There was no way of determining the condition of the towel ring before it came off the wall in the Posts’ room. Maybe it had a loosened mounting plate or was defective.

As Dee Joyce-Hayes pointed out, Ed Post’s gratuitous explanation to the doorman was the real red flag.

Too much info. Even the friendliest of business travelers is not going to introduce himself to the doorman by first and last name. The guy had a hidden agenda.

Ed Post also made sure to have a long narrative about the sights he took in on his jog, including Busch Stadium, the Gateway Arch, and city hall.

U.S. Prosecutor Dean Hoag called Post “a detail man done in by details” as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 29, 1989:

“Hoag asked the jury to recall the testimony of New Orleans insurance inspector George Leggio, who said Post had kept offering him details of the ‘accident’ when all Leggio wanted was Julie Post’s health record before her death.”

Talking down to them. Ed Post’s trial for first degree murder started in 1989. In addition to the towel ring test and the accounting of the financial windfall Post would receive upon his wife’s death, the evidence included testimony that he joked around — at Julie Post’s funeral — about wanting to date his aforementioned cute colleague’s twin sister .

And there was also the matter of Ed Post’s business, Jackson & Truax, having fallen on hard times. In the mid-1980s, the New Orleans real estate market wasn’t exactly a zydeco dance party.

Ed Post in 2013, a year before his release

The jury found Ed guilty of first-degree murder after a day of deliberation. Forensic Files noted that his condescending tone on the witness stand had struck out with the jury.

A judge gave Post a sentence of life in jail without parole.

Family turns. Apparently, Post’s lawyers had offered him the chance to be considered for second-degree murder as well as first degree, but he declined, preferring “all or nothing,” according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on May 24, 2014.

But the murder conviction was overturned because of evidence that the sheriff’s deputies got a little too buddy-buddy with the jurors.

By the time of his second trial in 1992, Ed Post’s brother, older daughter, and best friend (Harby Kreeger) no longer believed in his innocence. They testified against him.

It’s not clear whether Ed Post’s former firm is still in business. It doesn’t have a website or any Yelp reviews

Daughter’s ordeal. As if Stephanie Post hadn’t suffered enough by virtue of losing her mother, during her three hours of testimony, defense lawyer Rick Sindel brought up the fact that she’d had an abortion after being raped.

Stephanie, who cried several times on the stand, also said that her father had abused, and had pointed a gun at, her mother.

In 1985, Julie Post had told her daughters that she and Ed were getting a divorce and they would have to switch from private to public schools, Stephanie testified.

Blame the pills. At some point during one of the trials (it’s not clear which), Dan Post testified that Julie had told him about physical abuse she suffered at Ed’s hands. Oddly, that information was supposed to work in Ed’s favor: The fact that he had a temper was intended to suggest he killed Julie in a fit of anger, punishable as second-degree murder instead of first-degree.

By this time, prison life had worn away Ed Post’s cockiness and he just wanted a deal, according to McClellan. Circuit Judge Timothy J. Wilson accepted Post’s guilty plea to second-degree murder in return for a 30-year sentence with the chance of parole.

Post admitted to drowning his wife but blamed it partly on his being on diet pills at the time. He apologized to Julie Post’s survivors. Julie’s father later remarked that the contrition gave him a bit of solace.

So where is Ed Post today, and what does he have to say for himself?

Gone quiet. After turning down several of his requests for release over the years, the parole board allowed him to exit Missouri Eastern Correctional Center in Pacific in 2014 at the age of 69.

As far as what he has to say, apparently he doesn’t. Post started keeping a lo w profile before his prospective integration back into the free world and has continued to do so.

As for an epilogue for Julie Post’s older daughter, Stephanie married a doctor who does work for Doctors Without Borders. Her husband attended at least one of the parole hearings to ask that Ed Post be kept in prison.

Dee Joyce-Hayes went into private practice at Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal and now is general counsel at the Bi-State Development Agency, according to her LinkedIn profile. I hope she gets a TV show of her own some day.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

Betty Lee: Death of a Damsel in Distress

Robert Fry Murders a Mother of Five
(“Four on the Floor,” Forensic Files)

A combination of bad companions and bad luck led a woman named Betty Lee to a horrible end on a spring night near Farmington, New Mexico.

A divorced mother of five, Lee was taking a break and enjoying some drinks with a couple of girlfriends.

But her so-called friends ditched her, and she accepted a ride home with a stranger who seemed kind-hearted, but wasn’t.

With friends like these. For this week, I looked around for an explanation for why Betty’s girlfriends abandoned her that night and where the killer, Robert Fry, and his accomplice, Leslie Engh, are today.

But first, here’s a recap of “Four on the Floor,” the Forensic Files episode about the case, with additional information from internet research:

Robert Fry, 26, was cruising around in his Ford Aspire near a bar called The Turnaround on June 6, 2000.

A popular tour spot in Farmington, New Mexico

Forensic Files gives Fry’s occupation as construction worker, but a newspaper account describes him as a “marginally employed Navy veteran” who served in Guam, then worked on and off as a bouncer, security guard, and driver.

In his spare time, Fry enjoyed playing Dungeons and Dragons and collecting knives.

Abandoned and stranded. Neither Betty Lee nor the authorities knew it, but the hot-tempered, beer-swilling Fry was a serial killer. He had already committed three murders and allegedly liked to prey on Native American people.

Lee, a Diné College nursing student from Shiprock, belonged to the Navajo Nation. Her hobbies were gardening and herb-gathering.

She and two other women went to The Turnaround together, but her friends met two men there and they decided to go to a motel together, leaving Lee without a ride home.

She tried to call her brother from a pay phone but couldn’t reach him and broke down in tears.

Desert nightmare. Bobby Fry pulled up beside the 36-year-old Lee, said that he hated “to see a woman cry,” and offered a ride.

Fry, who had his young buddy Lester Engh in the car, drove her to a remote dirt road in Farmington, saying he had to stop to relieve himself.

The powerful 6-foot-1-inch Fry then dragged Betty out of the car and attempted to rape her. When she resisted, he stabbed her in the chest. She fled on foot, but Fry caught up and killed her with a sledgehammer.

Mass tow job. Engh helped Fry conceal her body in some bushes. They threw her clothes in a ravine.

But there was no quick getaway for those two. The Ford Aspire got stuck in some soft sand as they tried to reach the highway. Around 4 a.m., Fry called his parents for help, but their pickup truck was paralyzed in the sand, too, as was the first tow truck they summoned, according to Forensic Files.

Finally, Bloomfield Towing owner Charlie Bergin answered a call and pulled all three vehicles free. They went their separate ways.

The Albuquerque Journal, however, gives a slightly different version of events.

Leslie Engh in court

Mom and Dad abetting? Although the ending is consistent with the Forensic Files account — three vehicles were immobilized in the sand and Bergin freed them all — the newspaper reported that when Gloria and James Fry initially came on the scene, they didn’t get stuck.

Instead, they left their son’s sedan there and gave him a ride home, where he “changed clothes and cleaned up.” They also dropped Engh at his place. The Frys’ truck got stuck when they returned to the scene to tow the Ford Aspire, according to an Albuquerque Journal story from December 8, 2000.

Clothing unravels tale. Bergin probably had no idea a homicide had taken place near the scene, but one has to wonder about Robert Fry’s parents.

The next day, an electrical-line inspector found Betty Lee’s body after following a trail of blood (he suspected someone had poached a deer) off the road.

Police recovered a cell phone Charlie Bergin had discarded at the scene.

Bergin identified Fry and Engh as the men who summoned for help, according to Forensic Files.

Partner sings. Investigators tracked shoe prints at the murder scene to footwear found during searches of Fry’s and Engh’s homes. Both sets of shoes had Betty Lee’s blood on them. A blood stain on Fry’s T-shirt suggested that he was the one who hit Lee with the sledgehammer.

Fry stayed quiet after the authorities detained him.

Engh, who was only 22 years old and looked like a baby chicken, cracked and told detectives everything, then testified against Fry.

The trial took place in Albuquerque because there was too much publicity around Farmington.

In April 2002, a jury convicted Fry of kidnapping, attempted criminal sexual penetration, and second-degree murder.

Trail of tears. Fry apologized to the more than 20 of Betty Lee’s relatives present in the courtroom and asked the jury to spare his life for the sake of his parents, the The Albuquerque Journal reported.

Clipping from the *Albuquerque Journal* from Dec. 31, 2000.

But the jury delivered a death sentence — not a common decision in New Mexico.

Engh got 40 years.

Investigators later tried Robert Fry for the homicides of Joseph Fleming, 24, and Matthew Trecker, 18. The murders took place in a shop called The Eclectic in 1996. Fry had sneaked away with some expensive knives and swords from the store and was afraid the two men would identify him.

Thrill killer? Authorities also discovered that both Fry and Engh were responsible for the unsolved murder of a Navajo reservation resident named Donald Tsosie, 40, who had traveled to Farmington to sell plasma. The men offered him a ride home, then robbed and beat him and pushed him off a cliff in 1998, Engh admitted to police.

Fry received life sentences for those crimes.

“There’s no motive or past acrimony,” Assistant Attorney General Steve Suttle told local news site KRQE. “[Fry] just kills people, and apparently he enjoys killing people.”

In addition to seeing her son condemned to die, Fry’s mother suffered a career setback. A petition signed by 250 advocates for the murder victims called for Gloria Fry to be removed from her job as adult misdemeanor administrator for the San Juan County probation department.

Behind razor wire. An investigation revealed that Gloria Fry had driven onto the Betty Lee crime scene as police officers were studying it. The fact that she lent her son a county-owned cell phone, which he used on the night of Lee’s murder, didn’t help matters either. Gloria Fry was fired on June 7, 2002.

So what happened to the killer and his accomplice?

Engh is still inmate No. 419862 in the custody of the New Mexico Corrections Department.

Fry hasn’t been executed and lives in supermax at the Penitentiary of New Mexico near Santa Fe. His lawyers lost at least one appeal but have stayed busy with various other delay tactics over the last decade.

Justice delayed. As of April 2018, Fry was one of only two prisoners on death row in New Mexico and defense lawyers were arguing for both men’s sentences to be reduced to life without parole because the state repealed capital punishment in 2009.

While awaiting a decision, Fry began toting a Bible.

Apparently it worked, because in 2019, the New Mexico Supreme Court set aside the death penalty for Fry and the other inmate, Timothy Allen. They’ll serve life sentences instead.

BFF fail. Finally, courtesy of the mass-market paperback Monster Slayer by Robert Scott (Pinnacle, 2005), a few scraps of information came to light about the two female companions who abandoned Betty Lee.

As Forensic Files did, the book identifies one only as Tina. But it gives the other a full name, Gloria Charley. (Curiously, one of Betty’s children was named Roxann Charley.)

Gloria Charley said that Betty had turned into a fifth wheel on the night of the murder and she simply didn’t feel like giving Betty a ride back to the reservation.

Really worth it, ladies? Although Lee’s girlfriends apparently were chomping at the bit to check into that motel with those two men, it doesn’t sound as though it turned into a magical evening.

Charley got only the last name of one of them and the name the other one gave — Johnny Miller — was either fake or he didn’t get around to telling her where he lived. Police never found either of the one-night Romeos.

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

Watch Forensic Files episode “Four on the Floor” on YouTube or Amazon Prime.

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