Forensic Files Archives - Page 16 of 22

Eric Copple: Unfiltered Rage

Adriane Insogna and Leslie Mazzara Are Murdered in Napa
(“Good as Gold,” Forensic Files)

Eric Copple surrendered to a blind fit of anger and ended up killing two women and ruining his own life. The murders of Adriane Insogna and Leslie Mazzara were the subject of a 2008 episode of Forensic Files.

Eric Copple in court with his lawyer Amy Morton

“Good as Gold” trumpets the way investigators identified the murderer with the help of an advance in DNA analysis.

Bad romance. The testing not only revealed that the killer was a white male but also provided other specific clues about his appearance and what part of the globe his ancestors came from.

While the DNA drama was suspenseful, it didn’t tell viewers anything about Copple’s emotional underpinnings.

Something made him fear being alone so much that he killed his girlfriend’s bff as well as one of her roommates, and the reason had nothing to do with his eye color or ethnic heritage.

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Lily Prudhomme, a contract supervisor from Napa County, had ended her engagement to Copple, age 25, at some point before the murders happened, and he was caught up in anguish over the breakup.

Home invasion. For this week’s post, I dug around for any hints from Copple’s childhood that might explain his psychology, and also looked into where he is today.

But first, here’s a recap of “Good as Gold,” along with additional information from internet research:

After midnight on November 1, 2004, a volleyball coach named Lauren Meanza awoke to the sound of her dog growling. She heard the screams of her roommates, Adriane Insogna and Leslie Mazzara, both age 26.

The three women shared a house on Dorset Street in the city of Napa, California.

Massive investigation. Meanza found Mazzara, a tour guide at the Niebaum-Coppola Winery, and Insogna, a civil engineer for the Napa Sanitation District, bleeding from multiple stab wounds.

She saw a male fleeing but couldn’t give a description because it was dark.

No motive was evident. The assailant didn’t sexually assault the women or steal anything from the house.

Detectives followed all sorts of false leads, like the fact that the father of Mazzara’s former boyfriend had become infatuated with the onetime Miss South Carolina pageant contestant.

The police gathered 218 DNA samples and conducted approximately 1,000 interviews, with no payoff.

Revealing genes. In the meantime, Copple and Prudhomme reconciled and got married in February 2005. She had no idea her new husband was a murderer.

At some point during the 11-month-long investigation, detectives turned their attention toward the DNA on some Camel Turkish Gold cigarette butts found outside the house.

Since none of the roommates smoked, perhaps they came from the attacker.

Asked if the roommates knew any smokers, Meanza casually named Copple, although she apparently didn’t suspect him at that time. (He had helped the women move into their apartment. He also attended Mazzara’s and Insogna’s funerals.)

As mentioned, the latest breakthroughs in forensic science allowed investigators to obtain specific details from the DNA on the cigarettes. The smoker probably had blue or green eyes, light-colored hair, and a northwestern European ethnicity, according to the test results.

Remorse and woe. Once that information became public, Copple turned himself in to the police and confessed.

Copple’s appearance matched the physical specs the test had indicated, so that part of the investigation was a success.

But he wouldn’t give a motive for the homicides or reveal what he did with the knife.

Later, at his sentencing, he said he suffered from depression and had been suicidal throughout his life.

In men, depression often manifests itself in anger, and Prudhomme’s cancellation of their initial plans to get married in Hawaii probably didn’t help.

Jealousy and anger. With the wedding off, Prudhomme and Insogna had been planning a trip to Australia together.

Insogna, who had a degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, was interested in structural engineering and wanted to climb Sydney’s Harbor Bridge.

Although Copple didn’t exactly say so, some sources told investigators that he suspected Prudhomme’s friendship with Insogna had contributed to the broken engagement. The women worked together at the Napa Sanitation District and were close.

Bloodbath upstairs. Copple and Prudomme had argued about their broken engagement at a party they both attended (separately) on Halloween 2004, the night of the murders.

Seething with resentment, Copple later went to the house that Mazzara, Insogna, and Meanza shared. He reportedly killed Mazzara first, then Insogna.

Meanza, who occupied a bedroom downstairs, didn’t cross paths with Copple, so she escaped the attack. Her dog, Chloe, who was in the bedroom with the door closed, also was unharmed.

Contrition spoken. In court, Copple seemed like the rare defendant who regretted his actions, not just getting caught. He described himself as “broken man” and expressed remorse, as reported in the Napa Valley Register by writer Marsha Dorgan:

“I cannot fathom an explanation for my sinful deeds … the terrible agony inflicted upon a great number of people…My relationship with Lily was (in jeopardy) and crashing. It was all like it fertilized the seed of anger in my heart… There was rage inside me. If I had only listened to those who pleaded with me to get the help I needed.”

He also admitted to trying to cope by abusing alcohol.

At the sentencing hearing on January 12, 2007, Arlene Allen, the mother of Adriane Insogna, told the court:

“My baby never wore a turtleneck sweater in her life, and yet she had to be buried in one — and still — it could not hide the extent of her wounds.”

Prudhomme seemed unwilling to completely condemn the man who killed her friends. She spoke of him at the sentencing hearing as someone who had a “gentler side.”

Copple received life without parole.

Insecurity and worry. As far as what made Copple, a surveyor for a civil engineering company who had no prior criminal record, so obsessive about his relationship with Prudhomme, the only clue that turned up was pretty minor.

A book about the case, Nightmare in Napa: The Wine Country Murders by Paul LaRosa, mentions that Copple’s family moved around a lot because of his father’s career in the military. So maybe he felt desperate for a sense of stability.

Leslie Mazzara was Miss Williamston, S. Carolina

The book also discusses an alternate theory that Leslie Mazzara was the real threat to his relationship, that he had made a pass at Mazzara and he was afraid she’d tell Prudhomme about it.

That’s all the information that turned up about Copple’s motive and emotional constitution.

Friendship preserved. As far as epilogues for the cast of characters, Copple resides in Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California. His status is LWOP, life without parole. End of story.

Leslie Mazzara’s mother, Reverend Cathy Harrington, and her two sons built a cottage in Mazzara’s memory at the Calvary Home for Children in Anderson, South Carolina.

Adriane Insogna’s mother, Arlene Allen, who appeared on Forensic Files, remained close to Lily Prudhomme after the murders. Allen has discussed her grief in the media.

No match for FF. Today, Prudhomme, who holds a master of science degree from the University of Edinborough, lists her job as an administrative assistant at the Napa County Office of Education on her LinkedIn profile.

NBC’s Dateline Mystery produced an episode about the double homicide, “Nightmare in Napa.” It’s drawn-out and a bit tiresome. But hey, not every true-crime show can rise to Forensic Files’ level.

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

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Amy Bosley: A Killing in Kentucky

She Followed a Pattern of Failure
‘Dirty Laundry, Forensic Files

Updated on May 13, 2022

Amy Bosley backed herself into a corner financially, then tried to finesse her way out with a homicide.

It’s a scenario Forensic Files watchers have seen many times.

This week’s post will explore elements of the “murder to get me out of a jam and keep me in brioche french toast” plan that usually lands the culprit in a life of mystery-meat sandwiches on dry bread.

But first, here’s a recap of “Dirty Laundry,” the 2009 Forensic Files episode about the Bosley case, with additional information from internet research:

Married to a roofing contractor who built a multimillion-dollar operation, Amy Bosley, 37, handled the books for the business.

Her husband, Robert Bosley, 42, was no miser. The couple, who lived in Alexandria, Kentucky, had expensive cars and a vacation cabin and spent large sums of money on houseboat parties on Lake Cumberland.

But Amy wanted more of something — no one ever quite figured out what — so she began hiding away (or maybe spending) money that should have been used to pay taxes on Robert J. Bosley Roofing and Chimney Sweep Service Inc.

The company owed $1.7 million dollars by 2005, and the IRS made an appointment with Amy to look over records and get some answers. Meanwhile, her husband knew nothing about the financial misdoings.

On the night of May 17, 2005, hours before the meeting was to take place, Amy shot Robert six times, staged a break-in, and then used her best hysterical-spouse voice to tell 911 that an intruder had materialized in the couple’s bedroom and murdered her husband.

Apparently, she thought that with her husband dead, the IRS would forget about the tax bill.

But she soon acquired even bigger problems than the feds.

Local police saw through the phony home-invasion evidence and recovered the murder weapon, which Amy had hidden in her purse.

She got 20 years in exchange for pleading guilty to first-degree murder.

“There is really nothing else I can say that can express the shock and outrage of the community and the agony and hurt left behind,” Jimmy Bosley, the victim’s brother, said at the sentencing, as reported by the Cincinnati Enquirer on November 3, 2006. Upon exiting the courthouse, Amy faced a “jeering” crowd.

The murder of the roofing king and the aftermath were colossal news in the area but, as previously mentioned, Amy’s situation seems rather typical for folks who watch Forensic Files regularly.

The plot she devised wasn’t as elaborate as that of the Just Sweats gang or as diabolical as the one Craig Rabinowitz tried or as brutal as the method Christopher Porco employed, but it shared fundamental aspects with all of them:

1. Self-motivated financial straits. Like all the rest, Amy lacked a sob story. She didn’t need the money to save her mother’s house from foreclosure or finance a brother’s experimental cancer treatment in Germany. She got into trouble all by herself —just like Christopher Porco.

Christopher, a college student, started defrauding his way into cash because he wanted a new SUV and other possessions he thought would impress his friends. He ultimately attacked his parents with an ax in the hopes of inheriting their assets. It didn’t work.

2. Unwillingness to fess up and declare bankruptcy. The IRS and the courts are often lenient if the guilty parties admit what they’ve done and commit to working out some kind of resolution financially.

Amy apparently thought it easier to put Robert Bosley in a grave than to come clean and let him help decide what they should do about the tax problem.

Similarly, entrepreneurs John Hawkins and Gene Hanson desperately tried to hide the financial disaster engulfing their retail fiefdom. Instead of opting for Chapter 11, they tried out murder and insurance fraud. It did not end well for them.

3. No prior criminal record. When Forensic Files starts out with the search for killers from outside the family, you can almost hear the real murderer’s interior monologue: “I’m a respected member of the community with no record except for parking tickets. My in-laws love me, and my fake hysterics are fooling everyone.”

Amy Bosley was a bookkeeper married to a successful, well-known entrepreneur. They had two children, 7, and 10, and looked happy in photographs. Who would suspect her of a violent crime?

Likewise, Craig Rabinowitz, who was running a Ponzi scheme on the verge of collapse, had fooled everybody about his character. His friends poured money into his seemingly existent latex glove business. His in-laws mortgaged their house to help finance his venture.

Fortunately, forensic evidence doesn’t care how respectable the culprit seems.

In the Rabinowitz case, an autopsy of his wife’s body contradicted his accidental-drowning narrative and an audit revealed his “business” funds were lining the pockets of an exotic dancer named Summer.

Rabinowitz is in prison for life without parole.

As for Amy Bosley’s epilogue, the children she shared with her husband were placed in the care of relatives. Incidentally, the kids helped the investigation by volunteering that the gunshots took place before the glass-breaking Bosley did to fake the intruder scenario.

Amy was sent to the venerable Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women — but she won freedom after serving 85 percent of her sentence. As of this writing, she is scheduled for release on May 18, 2022.

By the way, no one has figured out what she did with the $1.7 million.

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

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Frankie Pullian: Deceived and Killed

E. Lee White Preys on an Innocent
“Undertaken,” Forensic Files

Frankie Pullian’s murder is one of those stories that simultaneously affirm and deny faith in humanity.

A band of fraudsters put into motion a plan to kill Pullian, a 29-year-old errand runner at a funeral parlor, and pocket $980,000 from life insurance policies.

Justice exists. The culprits thought no one would pay much attention to Pullian’s death because he lived in relative obscurity with no family near him in Passaic County, New Jersey.

But society cared. The criminal justice system worked. It took them a few years, but authorities determined how Pullian really ended up lifeless underneath a stolen Ford Maverick — and put three of the conspirators in prison.

The crime happened in 1980 and the Forensic Files episode about the case dates back to 2006, so for this week, I hunted around to find out whether the perpetrators are still alive and what happened to them.

Guy Friday. But first, here’s a recap of “Undertaken,” along with other information from internet research.

Frankie Pullian joined the army after high school but received an early discharge because of what Forensic Files called a neurological impairment. An Asbury Park Press story from 1982 described him as retarded.

Whatever the case, he functioned highly enough to take a job with the E. Lee White Funeral Home in Paterson, New Jersey.

White hired Pullian to wash funeral limousines and perform assorted other tasks. Pullian earned $7,500 to $10,000 a year.

Forgotten scandal. Pullian (as well as Forensic Files) apparently overlooked a bit of trouble the business experienced back in 1975.

The state of New Jersey stripped E. Lee White of certification to conduct funerals because of unethical business practices including the “unconscionable” practice of marking up caskets to “four times their wholesale cost,” according to an Asbury Park Press account from July 15, 1975.

The New York Times reported that the revocation was permanent, but somehow, E. Lee White resurrected his reputation and operations within a few years.

Newspaper accounts published after 1980 describe him as a “respected civic leader,” and E. Lee White Funeral Home was open for business.

Cruel quartet. But White had secretly progressed from crooked to homicidal. He hoped to parlay his investment in the innocent Pullian into a six-figure payoff.

In the eight months preceding the murder on April 8, 1980, White and his wife, Erna, and associates Lawrence Scott and William Brown started taking out insurance policies on Pullian, forging his signature, and naming themselves as the beneficiaries.

Newspaper accounts give Scott’s profession as truck driver or construction worker and Brown’s as Prudential Insurance employee, but the two apparently did some kind of work for White’s funeral parlor as well.

Large indemnity. Erna White, a public school teacher, obtained one of the insurance policies on Pullian by claiming she was his sister. She signed the policy “Erna Boone,” her maiden name.

Pullian didn’t have a sister.

One of the policies offered an extra $350,000 if the insured party died in an accident.

Ready to pounce. Investigators believed that E. Lee White was the mastermind behind the crime and had started planning it several years ahead of time — and possibly hired Pullian with the intention of killing him.

Meanwhile, Pullian “idealized White and considered White a father figure,” according to N.J. Superior Court documents.

With all the insurance policies in place, White arranged for someone — the police never determined who — to kill Pullian, run over his body with the Maverick, and abandon the vehicle in an alley so it looked like an accidental hit and run.

Everything worked as planned at first. Emergency services took Pullian directly to E. Lee White’s funeral parlor, where White started the autopsy himself.

The E. Lee White Funeral Home at 628 Market St.

Cops not fooled. The medical examiner arrived and unwittingly declared a car accident the cause of death and cleared the path for the conspirators to begin collecting the funds.

But the position of the body, lack of skid marks, and unlikelihood of a car traveling fast enough on a short alleyway made police suspicious.

One of the life insurance companies requested an investigation.

Three years after Pullian’s death, authorities dug up and reexamined his body. They discovered his skull carried a fatal “moon crater” injury — the mark of a blunt instrument, like a hammer — inconsistent with a death by auto.

Assumed identity. Investigators had noted that the vehicle contained high-velocity blood splatter in the interior. But someone had taken care to wipe fingerprints away.

They theorized that a White associate lured Pullian inside the car and killed him there with a heavy implement.

Once detectives spoke to doctors who administered the exams required by the insurance companies, it became clear that the plan involved impostors.

The men claiming to be Frankie Pullian had to refer to notes to answer the doctors’ questions.

No sweat. As the case pressed on, White tried to appear calm, even after his indictment for first-degree murder and fraud.

The funeral director said that he was not worried about the charges and that business increased after his indictment, according to a Morristown Daily Record story from 1984.

Lawrence Scott somehow managed to snag William Kunstler, a lawyer world-famous for taking on social outcasts as clients, to defend him.

Nonetheless, a jury convicted Scott, Brown, and E. Lee White on January 18, 1985 after a 47-day trial.

Condemned at last. The following month, Judge Amos Saunders, citing “pure, evil greed,” sentenced White, age 45, to life with eligibility for parole after 25 years.

Lawrence Scott, 38, also got life but with parole eligibility after 15 years.

William Brown was scheduled to receive sentencing the day after Scott and E. Lee White did, but newspaper accounts were unavailable.

Erna White was tried separately and convicted of fraud and theft by deception. She got off with probation.

So, where are these four cold-hearted people today?

1. E. Lee White got into trouble while incarcerated in Trenton State Prison.

In 1990, a judge tacked an extra five years to White’s sentence after a jury convicted him of soliciting a fellow inmate to take responsibility for the Pullian murder.

White had offered Robert Earl Moore cash and a sports car in exchange for making a false confession.

That disappointment didn’t deter White’s optimism and, over the years, he vied aggressively for release on the basis of various claims, including the seemingly universal “ineffective counsel.”

In 2016, two superior court judges affirmed a New Jersey State Parole Board’s decision to deny parole to White.

The court noted a lack of “rehabilitative progress” and that “instead of confronting the facts as proven at trial, petitioner adhered to a version of events that downplayed his culpable actions.”

An undated Mugshots.com profile of E. Lee White Sr. indicated he was moved to East Jersey State Prison (formerly Rahway State Prison) at some point.

E. Lee White died in May 2019. He was living in Washington, D.C., at the time of his demise at age 79, according to an obituary in the Star-Ledger. (Thanks to reader Angela who wrote in with the scoop.)

2. Erna Boone White still lives in Paterson. She is around 77 today.

Her name turned up in the news on February 21, 1991, when The Record reported that the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office had begun a probe of the funeral home for allegedly billing impoverished relatives of the deceased for burial expenses already paid for with public aid funds.

The Record cited Erna White as the owner of the business — still named after her husband — and said she claimed to know nothing about the investigation.

In what may be one more example of White family woe, mugshots.com lists an “E. Lee White Jr.,” born in 1971, as jailed in Florida in 2014 for an offense related to cocaine possession. There’s no confirmation, however, on whether or not he’s Erna and E. Lee White Sr.’s son.

3. Lawrence Scott won release in 2001 but ended up back in prison later that same year. The N.J. Department of Corrections lists his current status as “paroled.”

4. William Brown is not listed with the N.J. Department of Corrections. Newspaper accounts of the crime carry little identifying information about him, and the commonness of his name makes it hard to research him. A story from 1985 lists his age as 50, so if he’s alive, he’s around 82.

Judge Amos Saunders, who viewers may remember from his appearance on Forensic Files, retired in 2000 and became a counsel to the law firm Carlet, Garrison, Klein and Zaretsky. He died in 2015 at age 81.

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

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Tim McEnany: An Epilogue

Inside His Innocence Website
(“A Case of the Flue,” Forensic Files)

Last week’s post detailed chimney sweep Tim McEnany’s conviction for the murder and robbery of Kathryn Bishop, an 82-year-old who kept a lot of cash in her house.

A young Tim McEnany, in a Pennsylvania Justice Project photo

He received life in jail without parole and is serving his sentence at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution in Somerset.

But there are two sides to every post-conviction story, and McEnany offers up his via the Pennsylvania Justice Project, which is the subject of this week’s post.

Site to see. I really didn’t want to find anything that seemed worthy of consideration on McEnany’s website. Forensic Files laid out the case so neatly in “A Case of the Flue,” and who can resist a little righteous disdain for anyone who would hurt an elderly widow?

While I still suspect that justice was already served in this case, McEnany and his supporters do offer some intriguing counterpoints, including one rather explosive theory, via the Pennsylvania Justice Project.

A review of McEnany’s website follows, but first here’s a superquick recap of the crime as portrayed in Forensic Files:

Tim McEnany and his cousin Andrew Reischman cleaned the chimney in Kathryn Bishop’s house in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, on March 3, 1993.

Saltwater and slots. Over a beer at Shane’s Flight Deck that evening, the duo allegedly decided to return to Bishop’s house, quickly burglarize it, then establish an alibi by going back to the watering hole before anyone noticed they had left.

The part that didn’t go as planned was finding Bishop at home and awake. She was beaten to death, and her $6,000 in cash was stolen.

Afterward, McEnany — a married 26-year-old with two small children — and Reischman returned to the bar and then headed to Atlantic City for some recreation, according to prosecutors.

McEnany doesn’t have a lot of supporters on YouTube, judging from reader comments posted to “A Case of the Flue”:

Zeather Ababa
“He should have been given a sign to march in the street which says ‘I kill a old lady.'”

Joseph T.
“Murder just to take the money and piss it away, and give it to the Casino. Hope it was worth it, dumbass.”

With the Pennsylvania Justice Project, Father Francis-Maria Salvato — a priest who has taken up McEnany’s cause — hopes to disabuse the public of such unkind sentiments.

The innocence website includes nine long-form blog posts, a couple of them written by McEnany himself and the rest by Salvato. It also features audio interviews with McEnany’s mother.

Janet Callahan McEnany and Father Salvato’s most provocative contention is that the police should have investigated Kathryn Bishop’s grandson, Greg Seitz, in connection with the murder-robbery.

Treated like soot. According to the Pennsylvania Justice Project, Janet Seitz — who is Bishop’s daughter and Greg Seitz’s mother —and her husband visited Bishop while the chimney sweeps were at work. McEnany recalled the husband as pleasant and trusting, but he got some dubious vibes from Janet Seitz.

In her Forensic Files interview, Janet Seitz said she felt McEnany’s bill, between $300 and $400, seemed high.

I have to disagree. Even by 1993 standards, that sounds like a reasonable fee to have two people do work of that nature. (In addition to the cleaning, they did at least one repair to the chimney.)

Burned by media. It’s possible that some bias on Janet Seitz’s part influenced the investigation.

In one of the radio interviews, Tim’s mother said that concern about a bias toward her son spurred the McEnany family to decline media requests — including one from Peter Shellem, an investigative journalist known for helping wrongly convicted people win exoneration.

Without the benefit of having talked to the McEnany family, Shellem, who worked as a reporter for Harrisburg’s Patriot News, got the facts wrong when he appeared on Forensic Files, Janet McEnany alleges.

Charting it out. A couple of other theories the website brings up are less scintillating: that the police botched the crime scene investigation and that various law-enforcement parties used the case to win themselves promotions.

Not that those allegations are any less worthwhile to explore — it’s just that they’re pretty much standard among convicted people.

The following table boils down major points of contention detailed on the website:

AUTHORITIES SAY THAT McENANY...	McENANY SUPPORTERS SAY	McENANY'S REASONING
Called victim's house twice to ensure coast was clear	Police seized his cell phone and fabricated call evidence	Authorities were anxious to solve case
Left bar for long enough to commit crime and return	He and Reischman never left the bar (Shane's Flight Deck)	Bar employees were guilty of serving a minor (Reischman), so they told police what they wanted to hear
Failed polygraph	Results can be manipulated	Mother worked for prison system, has seen corruption
Admitted guilt by saying beer gets him in trouble	He only meant he should have gone home instead of to a bar	Wife would be an honest alibi, unlike bar employees
Had paint chip in jacket, from basement window	Paint chip planted by police	Window never opened until police opened it
Was guilty because of forensic evidence	Police did "Forensic Files" to bolster their credibility	Police desperate to cover up injustice to McEnany
Got a fair trial	Trooper Jack Lotwick drove jurors to and from court, thus had a chance to influence them	Lotwick used case to win the job of sheriff
Kicked Bishop to death, causing Reischman to flee her house in horror	Witness says fleeing man had long hair	He & cousin have short hair. Victim's grandson's is long
Beat Bishop severely in a rage killing	Rage killings are personal; he had no rage toward Bishop	More likely that someone close to victim (like a relative) did it
Left fiber evidence from his T-shirt on victim's body	Lab scientist had doubts about fiber evidence	Even if fibers are from T-shirt, doesn't prove murder
Went to Atlantic City to spend stolen cash	Nothing — no mention of an Atlantic City trip on site
Got a fair portrayal on "Forensic Files"	"FF" hyped up evidence to win viewers	Shows like "FF" are tools of system

Because this post includes negative reader comments about McEnany, it only seems fair to offer a couple from his supporters:

Timothy Callahan
“Timothy McEnany is my cousin. … My cousin is innocent, a good man, and a good father. A travesty of justice has been committed by our broken legal system and as a result an innocent man is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He is a victim, not a murderer.”

Darya Eudora Mace-Tasker
“I can remember this years ago and it didn’t make sense then! When reading the facts now, it TRULY is injustice!!! … There are so many wrongly put into the system because the system does not work!”

What about Reischman? While McEnany continues to serve his sentence in medium-security at SCI, Andrew Reischman has never faced charges related to Kathryn Bishop’s robbery or murder.

He did, however, run into a little trouble in North Carolina. From 1995 to 2000, an Andrew Vincent Reischman collected charges of DWI, marijuana possession, resisting arrest, and “assaults or threats against the government.”

The last offense is probably less severe than it sounds, because North Carolina records indicate he received probation for that misdeed as well as the others.

A web search for Pennsylvania and the surrounding states turned up no other brushes with the law for Reischman, who was born in 1972.

In other words, it sounds as though he got his act together before hitting 30.

Hero to the railroaded. On a sad note, Peter Shellem took his own life at the age of 49 in 2009.

Former O.J. Simpson lawyer Barry Scheck called Shellem “a rare, one-man journalism innocence project,” according to a New York Times story.

That’s all for this post. True Crime Truant will be off for New Year’s vacation — back on January 18.

Until then, cheers and good tidings for 2018. — RR

Tim McEnany’s Murder of Kathryn Bishop

A Chimney Sweep Plays Dirty
(“A Case of the Flue,” Forensic Files)

It seems odd that someone with a strong enough work ethic to wriggle down a 20-foot-tall tunnel and clean away soot would later that same day kill a homeowner and steal her cash for an easy payday.

Or maybe it’s because chimney sweep Tim McEnany and his cousin Andrew Reischman had labored so hard for the $300 fee Kathryn Bishop paid them that he decided burglary looked like a better pursuit.

As a YouTube viewer named lonehorseman09 put it so eloquently:

“i owned a chimney sweeping business in western canada for 24 years and this is the type of lowlife you have working for you-fortunately for me nothing physical ever happened to any of my clients.”

Unlike the occasional Forensic Files episode that leaves viewers skeptical about the guilt of the convicted (Jim Barton), “A Case of the Flue” presents a straight trajectory from the incriminating evidence to Tim McEnany.

Bundles of joy. That doesn’t mean McEnany has accepted his fate, however. The inmate has an unusually extensive innocence website. I’ll report on that later. First, here’s a recap of “A Case of the Flue,” along with other information from internet research.

Kathryn I. Bishop, an 82-year-old widow, lived alone in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, near the state capital of Harrisburg.

She liked to use cash to pay for groceries and had about $6,000 neatly wrapped in circular bundles in a basket on her dining room table. But McEnany was paid by check after he and Reischman cleaned Bishop’s chimney on March 3, 1993.

The next day, Bishop’s daughter, Janet Seitz, stopped by to visit, only to find an ambulance in her mother’s driveway.

Puzzle left behind. Bishop had been beaten to death — kicked more than 60 times by an intruder the night before. Wounds on her arms suggested that the retiree had fought back.

“There was a lot of trauma,” Graham Hetrick, Dauphin County coroner, was quoted as saying in a March 7, 1993 account in the News Record, a North Hills newspaper. “It’s a real pathetic case.”

Police found a word puzzle and a broken pen near the body. They also discovered a receipt from Ace American Chimney Experts, Tim McEnany’s business.

Clean oilman. A neighbor recalled seeing a man running from Bishop’s house the night before, but it was too dark to see his face.

Police started their investigation by questioning an oil company driver who had made a delivery to Bishop’s house on the day of her homicide. He had a solid alibi.

Investigators turned their attentions to the duo from the chimney sweep outfit.

Tim McEnany and Andrew Reischman’s story about their whereabouts the night of Bishop’s death seemed shaky from the outset.

‘Wagers’ of sin. The two claimed they were drinking at Shane’s Flight Deck in Middletown all night, but bartenders recalled that they left and came back at one point.

Cellular One records from McEnany’s massive 1990s-era cell phone showed he made two calls to Bishop’s house that night, both of them unanswered.

Police believed he was checking to make sure she was either asleep or out.

But the burglary turned into a robbery-murder when he (and probably Reischman) discovered Bishop home and wide awake. She was hard of hearing and often didn’t notice the phone ringing, her daughter said.

Loyal cousin. Investigators theorized that McEnany spontaneously decided to kill her, and when Reischman saw the violence, he fled in horror out the side door, in view of the neighbor who reported the sighting.

But apparently, Reischman still returned to the bar with McEnany.

An informant told Patriot-News reporter Peter Shellem that McEnany, then a 26-year-old married father of two, and Reischman, 20, drove to Atlantic City after they left the bar for the night.

McEnany never implicated Reischman, however, and investigators didn’t find strong enough evidence to tie him to the crime. McEnany alone was charged with robbery, second degree murder, and conspiracy.

Investigators had found a paint chip in McEnany’s clothing and discovered it came from the area around Bishop’s basement window, suggesting McEnany entered the house that way.

Little switcheroo. The defense team hired forensic scientist Skip Palenik to refute fiber evidence that investigators said tied McEnany’s black T-shirt to the murder scene.

But Palenik ended up agreeing with the prosecution’s theory — that the fiber evidence pointed to McEnany.

McEnany, who gave a semi-incriminating statement (“Every time I drink I get in trouble”) to the police upon his arrest, maintained his innocence throughout the trial.

On October 20, 1993, after deliberating for five hours, the jury found him guilty of robbery, conspiracy, and second-degree murder.

Chaos and histrionics. When the judge polled each jury member on every charge, McEnany had to hear the word “guilty” 48 times, which sent him over the edge, literally.

He screamed of injustice and tried to escape via a courtroom window.

Adept at scurrying through tight spaces, the 5-foot-8-inch-tall McEnany got halfway out before deputies dragged him back by the ankles, according to an account that appeared in the News-Press of Fort Myers, Florida (yes, the dramatics made news all the way from Pennsylvania to the Sunshine State).

He got life in jail without the possibility of parole.

Andrew Reischman never faced charges related to the case

Supporters persist. McEnany, who is now 51 years old, resides in Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution in Somerset along with 2,393 other inmates.

As mentioned, he does maintain a strong presence on the internet and clearly has some people convinced of his innocence. I’ll give his website a good read and also look for an epilogue on Reischman and discuss it in the next post.

Until then, cheers. — RR

Update: Read Part 2

Denise Davidson: A Jamaican Queen Falls

The Murder of Louis Davidson, M.D.
(“House Call,” Forensic Files)

The presence of a beauty queen, even if it’s Miss Southern Delaware Bartlett Pear, gives a true-crime story the allure of a fairy tale gone awry.

The Forensic Files episode “House Call” is especially hard to resist because it centers on a genuine heavy hitter — a former Miss Jamaica pageant finalist.

Pretty face, awful crime. Denise Davidson probably thought police would never implicate someone like her when her estranged husband turned up dead.

But her poise and fluffy hair didn’t help when it really counted, and she ended up in prison. So for this week, I poked around to find out whether she’s still incarcerated — and if so, whether she’s enjoying madcap Orange Is the New Black-like adventures or it’s just plain dismal living behind razor wire.

But first, here’s a recap of “House Call” with additional information from internet research:

In 1982, Louis Davidson, M.D., married onetime swimsuit model Denise Davis, and they moved into a large house in Carrollwood, Florida, a few years later. Both of them originally came from Jamaica.

Messy divorce. The doctor was described as kind and generous and “so smart he was almost scary” by Kathy Molino, R.N., a former colleague who appeared on Forensic Files.

But it turned out that the Bayfront Medical Center’s head of emergency pediatric medicine hadn’t made a wise choice for a wife.

The marriage soured, and Denise filed for divorce in 1989. The doctor reportedly believed she was cheating on him. She alleged there was violence in the relationship, according to a Jamaican Gleaner story.

The couple reconciled, but at some point Denise acquired Miami night club owner Leo Cisneros as a boyfriend. He had suspected ties to Jamaican drug trafficking.

By 1994, Denise and Louis Davidson were headed for divorce court again and a custody fight over their 8-year-old daughter, Natalie. Denise reportedly wanted to take her back to Jamaica to live.

The doctor had found a girlfriend, a paramedic named Patricia Deninno, and the two were engaged. Denise, 34, and Cisneros, 32, were expecting a baby together and also planned to get married.

Outsourced killers. But Denise and her new man wanted to avoid a dispute over Natalie and collect a life insurance payout of more than $400,000 by taking the doctor out of the picture permanently.

Denise Davidson at the time of her arrest

The first hitman they engaged was himself gunned down in Jamaica in 1993, before he could carry out the murder, according to what Denise’s sister, Ava Davis, told police, the St. Petersburg Times reported in a story by Craig Pittman.

The couple then arranged for two more hitmen, Robert Gordon, 32, and Meryl Stanley “Tony” McDonald, 47, to kill the pediatrician.

Pretending to be prospective tenants, the contract killers visited the rental office of Thunderbay Apartments, where the doctor lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, and obtained layouts of the entire complex and a two-bedroom unit.

On January 25, 1994, the doctor, 38, answered his door to find at least one of the killers on the other side. Court papers allege that one of the men had somehow chatted up the doctor in the parking lot, and they walked into the apartment together.

Whatever the case, once inside his home, the men roughed up Louis Davidson and drowned him in his bathtub, then left town pronto.

‘The Wire.’ Dennino found the doctor in the tub with his knees tied with a vacuum cleaner cord and a gag over his mouth.

The victim’s watch, camera, and money clip were missing, according to court papers. But thousands of dollars in cash and other valuables were left undisturbed, leading police to believe that murder was the real motivation.

By this time, Cisneros had fled to Jamaica.

Denise Davidson stayed in Florida, and authorities put her under surveillance.

She made the investigation easy.

Detectives followed her into a Western Union office, where they witnessed her wiring $1,200 to Robert Gordon and noticed that she signed the paperwork with an alias, Pauline White.

They eventually gathered enough evidence to prove that she had given Gordon and McDonald a total of $14,000 to $15,000 via a series of transfers.

Phone records revealed that she made numerous calls to Gordon the day of the murder.

Idle threat. Detectives found the local Days Inn room where Gordon had stayed and discovered a pair of Voit sneakers and a man’s sweatshirt that had Louis’s blood on them. One of the sneaker treads matched a footprint at the crime scene.

Meanwhile, once Denise realized the police considered her a serious suspect, she disguised her voice and left a threatening message (“You’ll be sorry, Denise…”) on her own answering machine in hopes of throwing off investigators.

No luck with that ploy, because detectives found evidence that Denise had made the call herself from Dooley Groves, the citrus fruit store where she worked as a manager. (A Snapped episode about the case says that she made the call from a payphone.) They also discovered evidence that Denise had bought a gray sweatshirt and Size 9 Voit sneakers – like those left behind at the Days Inn — at a Tampa Walmart, according to the Snapped episode that debuted in 2021.

The ultimate penalty. Police arrested Denise at Tampa International Airport as she was waiting to board a flight to Kingston, Jamaica. She was held without bail.

Florida investigators tracked down the assassins and put them as well as Denise on trial in 1995.

Daughters Natalie and Selena (foreground) ended up in Jamaica with Denise Davidson’s father, Peter Davis (right), and one of her sisters

By this time, she had given birth in jail to Selena, her daughter with Cisneros. According to a St. Petersburg Times account, Denise’s face lit up when the baby made an appearance in court, which prosecutors complained was an attempt to win the jury’s favor.

At the trial, Davidson testified that Cisneros had masterminded the murder plot without her cooperation.

Nonetheless, the jury convicted her of solicitation for murder, and she got a life sentence.

At the hitmen’s trial, Susan Carole Shore, an accomplice who served as a driver for the hired killers, testified for the prosecution. She met Gordon and McDonald at a Hialeah race track and accepted their offer to take them to St. Petersburg for $100. But she said she knew nothing about a murder plot, and received probation and deportation back to England.

The jury found McDonald and Gordon guilty and voted in favor of the electric chair.

“Your honor,” McDonald read from a prepared statement, “God Most High told me to tell you that you should override the jury’s 9 to 3 recommendation.”

Circuit Court Judge Susan F. Schaeffer, known as “Ms. Death” for her harsh sentencing, was unimpressed and gave Gordon and McDonald the death penalty for first degree murder.

Slippery boyfriend. Pittman, who appeared on Forensic Files, remarked that Leo Cisneros was too cowardly to kill the doctor himself. That seemed a little strange. Reluctance to slaughter an innocent man with one’s own hands sounds more like evidence of a bit of humanity.

Regardless, no one ever got to hear Cisneros’ side of the story at the trials.

He had vanished and was still missing when Forensic Files first aired “House Call” in 2002. In 2008, America’s Most Wanted sought help in finding him, without success.

Cisneros remains at large.

Filing away. It should be mentioned that “Leo Cisneros” is a relatively common name, and the internet has stories about at least two felons by that name, but neither of them is Denise Davidson’s former boyfriend, whose full name is Leonardo Anselmo Cisneros.

The two hitmen clearly had no idea where Cisneros was hiding out. Otherwise, they would have used the information to win themselves plea deals.

They both made efforts to get new trials, however.

Gordon filed an unsuccessful 1997 appeal claiming that having an all-white jury didn’t count as a jury of his peers and that the court had neglected to hold Denise Davidson accountable to the same standards that had factored into his punishment.

He didn’t get anywhere with a writ of habeas corpus with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in 2004, either.

Meryl McDonald filed a motion for rehearing, which was denied in 2007. (The Murderpedia page for each of the men provides links to the court papers.)

As of today, neither man has been executed. They’re prisoners in the maximum-security section of Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida.

No deprivation camp. Regarding Denise Davidson, she is inmate #153691 at the Homestead Correctional Institution in Dade County, Florida.

It’s a prison with a minimum-security area that sounds a lot like the fictional Litchfield Penitentiary of Orange Is the New Black fame.

Davidson’s current custody status is “close,” which means limitations on off-premises activities. In other words, for OITNB fans, no van-driving gig like the one Lorna Morello and Tiffany Doggett scored.

Denise Davidson in her most recent prison photo — Denise Davidson’s most recent prison photo

But Homestead offers plenty of other diversions, including four softball teams and classes in art, creative writing, music, aerobics, yoga, and anger management.

Inmates also have the opportunity to study PC support services and automotive service technology.

On the down side, Davidson looks somber in recent photographs.

She probably regrets ending her marriage by soliciting two hitmen instead of one divorce lawyer.

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

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Forensic Files Via Netflix

Hike Over to the Stream

UPDATE: NETFLIX DISCONTINUED FORENSIC FILES IN 2022.

Just a quick post this week with a link to a side project of mine that involves Forensic Files.

True Crime Truant posts always provide links to the related Forensic Files episodes on YouTube so you can watch them for free.

If you’re already paying for Netflix streaming, however, you might want to switch.

Netflix has 360 episodes 100 percent free of ads. But its library of Forensic Files is time-consuming to navigate.

The Decider.com article “10 Great ‘Forensic Files’ Episodes and How to Find Them on Netflix” tries to make the job easier.

Decider is a website devoted to entertainment available via streaming.

But getting back to Netflix, you’ll find one disadvantage to watching Forensic Files there: The only reader comments are reviews that pertain to the series as a whole, not specific episodes.

You might miss the “I hope the mother’s supervisor rots in hell” and “I knew he was a lying weasel from the 911 call” comments. I rather enjoy them. You can always go back and forth from Netflix to YouTube.

Next week, True Crime Truant will resume recaps of Forensic Files episodes, with “House Call,” which tells the story of how pediatrician Louis Davidson met his end at the hands of his wife and some hired assassins.

Until then, cheers. — RR

Richard Alexander: Wrongly Convicted of Rape

Making a Sex Criminal
(“Within a Hair,” Forensic Files)

Note: This story was updated with news from September 2020

Richard Alexander’s story on Forensic Files is something of a precursor to Making a Murderer, the Netflix docuseries about Steven Avery.

Avery, an undereducated auto-salvage dealer, spent 18 years in prison because a rape victim mistakenly identified him. DNA evidence exonerated him, but he landed back in prison.

Compact story-telling. Whereas Steven Avery’s saga snagged a 10-hour bingefest on Netflix, Richard Alexander’s got one 30-minute Forensic Files episode.

But “Within a Hair” gets the job done. It’s absorbing and ends on a happier note, with Alexander’s exoneration for rapes he didn’t commit.

Cagey assailant. For this week, I looked around to see whether Richard Alexander won a financial award and whether he rebuilt his life successfully — or ended up behind razor wire again, like Steven Avery.

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

A series of rapes and robberies were taking place in the River Park section of South Bend, Indiana, in 1996.

The attacker took pains to leave the crime scenes free of evidence. He wore gloves and wiped off surfaces. In at least one instance, he covered a victim’s eyes so she couldn’t identify him later.

Bicyclist implicated. In one attack, he came across a young engaged couple who were arguing by the side of the road. He struck the man and raped the woman.

A police dog traced the rapist’s scent from the scene of that crime to some bicycle track marks in the grass. Investigators theorized the attacker got away on a bike.

Not long after, police spotted a young black man riding a mountain bike in the area and took him into custody.

It was Richard Alexander, age 29, and his bad luck was only just beginning.

Lone juror holds out. He denied having anything to do with the River Park rapes and thefts, but three victims picked him or his photograph out of lineups.

Richard Alexander in court after his arrest

A semen sample from one of the rapes in which he was implicated didn’t match Alexander’s DNA. Police dropped charges stemming from that assault, but persisted with other ones.

At his first trial, a racially mixed jury couldn’t reach a decision because one member, a social worker named Barbara Griffin, held out for Alexander’s innocence.

In 1998, after a second trial, an all-white jury convicted him on two of three assaults, and he got 70 years in prison.

Anguish and sadness. Sex criminals tend to get the roughest treatment from other inmates in the prison population, and Alexander’s experience was no different.

In an on-camera interview, Alexander’s pain comes through the TV screen. He witnessed inmates raped in the shower.

Inconvenient truth. Still, as heartbreaking as it is to see someone like him wrongly imprisoned, it’s worth mentioning that, like Avery, Alexander had some rough stuff on his record from the years preceding the rapes.

Alexander’s rap sheet, which Forensic Files showed on camera briefly, included burglary, robbery, receiving stolen property, car theft, and something called “crime deviate cond.”

Steven Avery’s past misdeeds included cruelty to animals.

It’s not outrageous for law enforcement to believe that either of those men could have committed a rape.

Hair does damage. But other parts of the Richard Alexander investigation seemed like a witch hunt. Police deemed it suspicious that his apartment contained “a knife, some hoods, and bandannas.”

Also, the prosecution used a pubic hair found at one of the rape scenes as evidence against Alexander simply because under a microscope, it looked similar to his hair. At the time, there was no mitochondrial DNA testing.

And with Alexander locked away, the rapes continued, this time in the nearby city of Mishawaka, Indiana. One woman identified Alexander as her attacker despite that he was in jail when the assault happened.

Finally, in 2001, Alexander caught a break when police nabbed Michael Murphy fleeing from a residential robbery scene. They found a trove of stolen items in his apartment, including things taken during rapes that were pinned on Alexander.

Yet another attacker. Murphy ended up confessing to rape and 250 thefts. By this time, scientists had developed mitochondrial DNA testing and concluded the pubic hair came from Murphy, not Alexander.

The semen matched DNA from a third man, Mark Williams.

Sergeant Cynthia Eastman noted during her Forensic Files interview that all three of the men looked alike in stature and musculature and were around the same age.

Free at last. They also had completely different facial features, but the crimes happened in the dark and the victims were traumatized.

Murphy got 30 years in jail. Williams, who was already incarcerated for other crimes, received 40 years for one count of rape.

Richard Alexander was liberated on December 12, 2001 after five and a half years behind bars.

He was 35 years old.

“Richard has proclaimed his innocence from day one to anyone who would listen to him. He is extremely happy to be vindicated. He is excited about rebuilding his life,” said deputy public defender Brian Eisenman, as reported in an AP story.

It’s not over. Eastman, who said she always had a feeling Alexander was innocent, described a jubilant hug shared between her and Alexander, and Forensic Files shows joyful scenes of his reunion with family members.

In his final on-camera interview, Alexander said he had received no apology for the wrongful conviction and that “it still hurts because really nothing’s been done since I’ve been out.” The episode ended there.

Sadly, Alexander’s life has improved very little since then, according to information available on the internet.

He found a sympathetic lawyer, Roseann P. Ivanovich, who filed a multimillion lawsuit against the city of South Bend and its police department in 2002.

New woe develops. The suit named Cynthia Eastman as one of the wrongdoers. “Even though she had doubts, she testified against him twice. I have a big problem with that,” Ivanovich said, as reported in a 2002 AP story.

A US district court dismissed Alexander’s lawsuit. A court of appeals upheld the dismissal in 2006.

Things got worse for Alexander.

He pleaded guilty to a count of battery for assaulting a former girlfriend with a lead pipe in 2007. He got six years.

In 2017, the Indiana Department of Corrections listed Richard L. Alexander as having been eligible for parole in 2008 and gave his status as “Returned to court authority on release.”

But things took a tragic turn in September 2020, when police charged Richard with murder and invasion of property after girlfriend Catherine Minix, 37, turned up dead on a residential lawn in South Bend. Although Richard denied committing the fatal stabbing to police, his ex-wife said he admitted to the murder, according to ABC57.

Cause célèbre flattened. As for the rest of the players, it’s unclear whether Michael Murphy — who in addition to the rapes and robberies, had an attempted sexual assault of a 9-year-old girl on his record — is still in jail. The Indiana offender database lists his earliest possible release date as December 15, 2015.

The database gives a 2016 earliest-possible release date for Mark Williams, but doesn’t state whether or not he won parole.

Steven Avery is definitely still in prison and will probably stay there. On November 29, 2017, a Wisconsin judge denied him a new trial.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

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Richard Lyon: An Epilogue

Update on Nancy Dillard Lyon’s Killer
(“Writer’s Block,” Forensic Files)

The last post told the story of the poisoning death of Richard Lyon’s wife, architect Nancy Dillard Lyon, at the age of 37, in a case covered by Forensic Files episode “Writers Block.”

Richard Lyon pleaded not guilty at his 1991 murder trial. But a Texas court rejected his blame-the-victim strategy, which included a contention that Nancy had brought about her own slow demise by intentionally consuming arsenic and barium carbonate over a long period of time.

A jury convicted him of first-degree murder, and Lyon began a life sentence at the W.F. Ramsey Unit prison farm at the tender age of 34.

Sorry, sir. He became eligible for parole 15 years later in 2006. That bid was rejected, although the Texas Department of Justice website gives no explanation.

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On his most recent review date, February 3, 2016, a parole board denied him again and specified the reasons as “elements of brutality, violence” and “conscious selection of victim’s vulnerability.”

He posed “a continued threat to public safety,” according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

His next chance will come in 2021, when he’s 64.

In the meantime, Richard Lyon denies that he murdered his wife.

Richard Lyon, right, in a photo from from a website that advocates for his innocence

No rescue. A website created by his supporters solicits pro bono legal help. He maintains that he had nothing to do with Nancy’s death:

“His supposed crime was that he poisoned his wife, Nancy, so he could inherit her money and status in the community and then, begin his new life with his mistress. This narrative has been spewed for decades and portrayed in film in addition to being plastered all over the Internet.”

Lyon has applied to the Innocence Project of Texas and New York, the Thurgood Marshall School of Law Innocence Project, and the House of Renewed Hope.

So far, those organizations have declined to take on his case.

Dillard parents. If he ever does get out, he won’t find Tami Ayn Gaisford — the co-worker with whom he began an affair while married to Nancy — waiting for him. She still lives in Texas but married someone else.

As for updates on family members of the Lyons, I wasn’t able to find out who took custody of the couple’s little daughters after Richard went to prison. But Allison and Anna are adults now.

Nancy’s father, William “Big Daddy” Dillard, died in 2006 after a 59-year marriage to Sue Stubbs Dillard that produced four children. She passed away in 2009.

(They are not the same Dillards who founded the Dillard’s department store chain. Nancy’s family made its fortune in commercial real estate.)

Nancy and Richard Lyon during their marriage

Another tragedy. Incidentally, William and Sue Dillard had already lost one of their adult children, Thomas, in 1986. He died of a brain tumor.

In murdering Nancy five years later, Richard Lyon took away yet another child from the Dillard family.

Let’s hope someone brings that up at the 2021 parole hearing.

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

Update on July 11, 2018: Two corrections were made to the post — the website asks for legal help, not monetary donations, and the site itself was created by supporters, according to a representative for Friends of Richard Lyon.

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

Nancy Dillard Lyon’s Murder

A Husband Tries to Mess with Texas
“Writer’s Block,” (Forensic Files)

When Richard Lyon first began sneaking poison into his wife’s beverages, he probably hoped she would die quickly and doctors would attribute the tragedy to natural causes, end of story.

Nancy Dillard Lyon

But he was ready for a criminal investigation into Nancy Dillard Lyon’s death just the same.

Dallas drama. He prepared documents designed to make it look as though a) Nancy committed suicide, b) her brother murdered her to hide family secrets, or c) an ex-colleague had her killed to stop her from testifying in an embezzlement case.

The architect thought he had all the angles covered.

Fortunately, the state of Texas and Nancy’s family weren’t so easily fooled. They succeeded in getting Richard Lyon removed from the Dallas Country Club and deposited into the W. F. Ramsey Unit on a prison farm in Rosharon.

Here’s a recap of “Writer’s Block,” the Forensic Files episode about the case, plus additional information from internet research.

Richard Lyon was born on April 22, 1957 to a middle class family of five children in Connecticut. His father sold insurance. He attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, then headed to the Harvard School of Design for a graduate degree in landscaping and architecture.

Ivy League sweethearts. There, he met Nancy Dillard, whose parents were wealthy and influential enough for her father’s nickname to be Big Daddy. He had made a fortune in commercial real estate in Texas. But the money hadn’t spoiled Nancy. She was hard-working and practical.

In a Texas Monthly story, Gayle Golden wrote about Nancy and Richard’s early years:

“At Harvard, they had teamed up on all their projects, working through the night until collapsing together in the single bed they shared. According to friends, Nancy had the ideas, Richard the speedy execution.”

The two purposely tweaked their handwriting so it looked similar enough that he could get away with handing in papers she’d written for him.

They married in 1982 and moved into a duplex in University Park, an affluent section of Dallas.

Folks, it’s Camelot. Forensic Files portrayed Nancy as a sweet and generous soul, an assessment corroborated by Golden, a newspaper reporter who lived in the other half of the duplex owned by the Lyons.

Nancy worked her way up to a partnership at Trammell Crow, a real estate development firm. Richard did well for himself as a project manager at a landscape architectural firm.

By 1990, they had two small daughters and lots of friends, swam at the country club, and joined in vacations underwritten by Nancy’s parents, William W. Dillard Sr. and Sue Stubbs Dillard.

Nancy and Richard continued to enjoy working together, Gayle Golden recounted:

“On their own they transformed the once-scrawny back yard into a little paradise, planting trees and wisteria, driving bricks into sand to make a patio, hanging chimes and a hammock.”

They constructed a dollhouse “shingle by shingle” for their daughter Allison.

Neighbor Gayle Golden’s Texas Monthly story

Homewrecker. But, as every Forensic Files watcher knows, idyllic-looking existences tend to give way. Richard began an affair with a coworker named Tami Ayn Gaisford around 1989. Nancy found out, but instead of getting mad, she got depressed.

Then she got hopeful. She thought the affair might just blow over. Richard left her on at least one occasion but returned and put on the loving husband act, all the while intending to escape from the marriage.

But the mild-mannered 5-foot-7-inch Richard needed a way that wouldn’t mean losing custody of his kids or the affluence and prestige that Nancy Dillard Lyon’s family brought to his life.

And there was something to gain from Nancy’s death: a $500,000 life insurance payout.

Toxic husband. Richard first sprang into action by sprinkling a powdered poison into a soda he bought for Nancy at the movies. The drink tasted terrible and made her sick later that evening. She survived that attempt.

It wasn’t clear what type of poison he used on that occasion.

On a subsequent try, he gave her vitamin capsules laced with the poison barium carbonate. Still, she lived.

At some point, he switched to arsenic, which he probably put in her food and a bottle of wine left anonymously on their porch.

It worked.

Nice playacting. A grim-looking Richard showed up on Golden’s doorstep in January 1991 to ask if she and her husband would look after his daughters while he took Nancy to the emergency room. She had nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

“Do you think you can make it downstairs?” Gayle Golden overheard Richard say to Nancy in a sweet voice. “I’ll carry you.”

Nancy Dillard Lyon, seen here with First Lady Barbara Bush, came from an influential family

During her six-day stay at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, Nancy’s violent illness continued and she begged the medical staff to save her life.

Doctors frantically did tests to find the cause of her illness. She died before they had a chance, on January 14, 1991, at the age of 37.

Forensic tests. Nancy’s father was none-too-pleased that his son-in-law made the decision to terminate her life support without consulting him or his wife. It would come up in court later.

Meanwhile, a laboratory found lethal amounts of arsenic in Nancy’s hair, liver, and kidneys. The strands of hair served as a map of doses of arsenic that coincided with Richard’s interactions with his wife.

Aware that the No. 1 suspect is always the husband, Richard was armed and ready with the aforementioned forged documents designed to look as though Nancy wrote them.

He produced diary entries detailing childhood sexual abuse Nancy’s brother had allegedly perpetrated against her. Perhaps that would prove that either her brother killed her or that Nancy was so distraught over the bad memories she took her own life.

Find a Patsy. The grieving husband also showed authorities an anonymous letter Nancy had received; it threatened violence if she went ahead and testified against a former colleague named David Bagwell who allegedly embezzled $720,000 from Trammell Crow.

Nancy had told doctors about the mystery wine; maybe it was from Bagwell and contained arsenic.

Testifying on his own behalf at the trial, Richard Lyon tried to implicate Bagwell. Nancy had called him a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” he alleged.

And in case that didn’t work, Richard could rely on a receipt for arsenic trioxide, barium carbonate, and two other deadly substances — signed by Nancy — as evidence that she deliberately poisoned herself.

Jerri Sims led the prosecution for the state

Paper Lyon. At the trial, prosecutor Jerri Sims called on a handwriting expert who could see the small differences between Richard’s and Nancy’s handwriting. He determined the diary entries about Nancy’s brother were forgeries created by Richard.

Chemical Engineering Co., where Richard claimed the arsenic came from, said that the receipts it issued to customers looked nothing like the one Richard presented; it was fabricated evidence.

And the anonymous threatening letter on behalf of her former coworker was a big nothing. No one could trace it to anyone involved in the embezzlement case.

Tami Ayn Gaisford, Richard’s girlfriend, testified that Richard had told her that Nancy died from a rare fatal blood disease — more proof that he was a liar.

Facing reality. While Golden described Nancy as “infuriatingly optimistic” about saving her marriage when Richard first left her, it came out at the trial that her hopefulness had finally receded: At some point, she had quietly removed her husband as beneficiary of her life insurance policy.

She also shut him off from their joint bank accounts. She didn’t appreciate his using $5,900 of their money to buy a ring for Gaisford.

In 1990, Nancy had hired a divorce attorney, Mary Henrich, in whom she confided her suspicion that Richard was poisoning her — something she felt too embarrassed to tell police, according to court records from Richard Lyon’s unsuccessful 1994 appeal.

Nancy planned to move to Washington, D.C., with her daughters after the divorce, a 1991 AP story reported.

Ants implicated. At the trial, internist Dr. Ali Bagheri noted that Richard was “smiling, joking, and laughing” with hospital staff members during his wife’s emergency room visit.

A detective noted that upon being informed that Nancy had passed away from poisoning, Richard Lyon didn’t ask any questions.

Lyon later admitted to buying some poisons, for killing fire ants in his yard, he said.

But members of the jury brought their healthy sense of skepticism with them for the two-week trial.

Bar exam. They took three hours to find Richard Lyon guilty of first-degree murder.

Judge John Creuzot didn’t buy Lyon’s story

During sentencing, Judge John C. Creuzot said that Lyon used “various and sundry chemicals to kill Nancy. The first two didn’t work, and you finally finished her off with arsenic, a tried-and-true method of producing death.”

Creuzot gave him life in jail and a $10,000 fine. (By the way, in other applications, Creuzot is known for being merciful. He was part of a bipartisan effort to give alcoholic and drug-addicted offenders treatment instead of incarceration.)

Lyon’s sentence began on December 19, 1991 — less than a year after Nancy Dillard Lyon died. I guess Texas courts don’t mess around.

Today, Richard Alan Abood Lyon is prisoner No. 00612188 in the capable hands of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

An upcoming post will look into developments in his case since the conviction.

Until then, cheers. — RR

Update: Read Part 3

Category: Forensic Files

Eric Copple: Unfiltered Rage

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Amy Bosley: A Killing in Kentucky

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Frankie Pullian: Deceived and Killed

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Tim McEnany: An Epilogue

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Tim McEnany’s Murder of Kathryn Bishop

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Denise Davidson: A Jamaican Queen Falls

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Forensic Files Via Netflix

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Richard Alexander: Wrongly Convicted of Rape

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Richard Lyon: An Epilogue

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Nancy Dillard Lyon’s Murder

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