Forensic Files Archives - Page 7 of 21

Karen Pannell: Written off Too Soon

Tim Permenter Pins a Murder on Another Ex
(“Writing on the Wall,” Forensic Files)

Tim Permenter isn’t the first Forensic Files killer to cast suspicions on multiple dupes so if investigators cleared one, they could target another. But he did distinguish himself by doing so in a speedy manner.

Murderers Christopher Porco and Richard Lyon, for example, brewed up multifaceted plans — including blaming the Mafia and a victim’s own brother — well ahead of their crimes. Tim, on the other hand, made a spontaneous decision to kill, then brainstormed with himself on a cover-up while eating pizza at the crime scene.

Accused in print. Of course, Tim had a lot more experience in manipulation than the others: He was a former pimp.

Tim’s onetime girlfriend, popular airline professional Karen Pannell, 39, didn’t learn about that particular aspect of his past until a few months into the relationship. When she insisted on breaking up, he flew into a rage and stabbed her to death in her townhome in Oldsmar, Florida, in 2003. Then, he scrawled the name of her ex-boyfriend on the wall in hopes that he would take the fall.

For this week, I looked into how investigators picked off that and other false leads one by one. I also searched for more information on murder victim Karen Pannell and on Tim Permenter’s whereabouts today — as well as some details on his early career as an escort-service owner.

Kid sister. So let’s get going on the recap of “Writing on the Wall” along with extra information from internet research:

Karen Pannell was born the last of a family of six kids and the only girl on February 10, 1964, in Germany, where her father was serving in the Air Force.

She had a vivacious personality, symmetrical features, and a beautiful smile — the kind of individual any business would want as the face of its brand. She worked as a model and then got a job as an American Airlines gate agent at the Tampa International Airport, where she acquired a reputation for being able to pacify irate travelers. She worked her way up to customer service supervisor.

Drama king. In her spare time, she liked diving and other outdoor activities and also became her family’s informal event-planner. She encouraged togetherness as her brothers grew into adults.

“Karen, being the only girl and the youngest, she was always very special to her brothers,” Randy Pannell told the North Pinellas Times.

In October 2003, Timothy Permenter dialed police, telling them that he dropped by Karen’s house at 2030 Montego Court and found her dead on the kitchen floor. He used a teary, pitiful voice on the phone. He was so upset that he threw up in the front yard after law officers arrived.

Furniture fight. The word “Roc” was written in blood on the wall — it looked as though Karen used her right index finger to spell out the name of her attacker as her last act before dying.

Someone had stabbed Karen 16 to 17 times in her back, neck, and heart and left her face-up in a pool of blood.

She had a previous boyfriend named Roc Herpich, an insurance adjuster known to have struggled with drug problems and minor legal troubles. The couple had lived together for about a year and were still in a custody battle over a $900 roll-top desk.

Nice try, buddy. Karen and the Harley-Davidson-riding Roc had a stormy relationship in general and she had filed a domestic battery complaint against him. He admitted to kicking in the door after they had a fight.

If all was as it appeared on the surface, police had an open and shut case against Roc.

Or so the real killer thought.

The forensics indicated someone wrote “Roc” over spots of blood splatter that had dried earlier than the letters, suggesting that it had happened after Karen died. And Karen’s right hand had formed the letters, despite that she was left-handed.

MS diagnosis. After suffering minor indignities like having police photograph the bottoms of his feet and take nail clippings, Roc was cleared.

At the time of the murder, he was home with his current girlfriend and her son, who was having a backyard sleepover with a bunch of his little buddies.

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

The ever-helpful Tim advised investigators to check out Karen’s dark and handsome former husband, Jeff Paine. The two had been married for five years and were now having an alimony dispute. Karen needed more money because she had recently found out she had multiple sclerosis.

Ransacking ruse. But Jeff proved he was in South Florida on a diving trip at the time of the homicide. And a British Airways pilot who Karen had once dated was out of the country.

By this time, officers had also ruled out a theft as the cause of the murder, although they found some disarray — an overturned birdbath, a purse with its contents emptied — at Karen’s place. Random home invaders don’t generally overkill their victims or know the names and spellings of the homeowner’s former boyfriends.

Meanwhile, Tim was cooperating with police. He answered questions and allowed a search of his home.

Ready for his closeup. And Tim had one more trick up his sleeve: an alibi. He had been with his friend and former co-worker George Solomon in New Port Richey, he said.

Soon enough, however, police discovered that a cell phone call to George that Tim had made around the time of the murder bounced off a cell tower near Karen’s home.

Having cleared all of Tim Permenter’s intended patsies — Roc, the ex-husband, and the fictitious surprised burglar — investigators could at last turn all eyes toward Tim and only Tim.

Engine trouble. So who was this guy and how did a nice woman like Karen end up with him?

Tim Permenter was born on May 10, 1967, to a teenage mother, Donna Finch, and had little contact with his father, according to a Tampa Bay Times account. Donna’s parents helped bring up Tim. His grandfather, Alex Finch, a lawyer and onetime mayor of Clearwater, was murdered by a client in 1989.

Karen met Tim, who drove a blue BMW convertible, when he was working as a VW salesman. She was shopping for a new vehicle.

Passed intelligence test. They began dating. He took a page from the classic sleazy-criminal playbook (Richard Crafts, John Meehan ), using fake war stories to gratify his ego. Tim falsely claimed that he served as a Navy Seal and participated in a mission.

But the Pannells had no reason to suspect that he was lying. Tim seemed bright, according to Michael Pannell, brother of the victim. The Ph.D.-holding Michael noted during his Forensic Files appearance that Tim impressed the family by beating him at Trivial Pursuit.

But there was some knowledge about Tim that the Pannells had yet to discover — and it wasn’t trivial.

Interesting ‘hook.’ Tim had at one time operated a small chain of prostitution outfits in Gainesville and Tallahassee, Florida. After the law caught up with his criminal enterprise, he explained that he started by placing newspaper ads for escorts. He discussed his best practices with the Associated Press:

“You could tell over the phone if a woman knew what she was getting into or not. For example, if a woman called up and said, ‘What exactly is this escort service?’ they wouldn’t be hired.“

Tim’s service, called Esquire Escorts, charged $100 per hour; the woman would get $65 and Esquire got $35. (One source noted that new hires had to go out on a practice date for free with a member of Esquire Escort’s management team.)

Pimp vs. pimp. He grossed $6,000 to $7,000 a day by the time he turned 20, he told Dateline during an episode titled “Written in Blood.”

But Tim was hungry for more. In 1990, at Tallahassee’s Capital Ridge Apartments, Tim had a shoot-out with a pimp who owned an escort service called Exclusively Yours. According to the Solved episode “Written in Blood,” Tim was the aggressor, and he shot the rival pimp twice.

Tim’s name had also popped up in the media amid allegations that a University of Florida supporter had paid for prostitutes supplied by Esquire Escorts to have sex with basketball player Dwayne Schintzius.

(The mullet-wearing Schintzius survived the scandal and went on to play professionally before dying of leukemia at 43 in 2012.)

Cash frittered away. Esquire Escorts also figured into the downfall of University of Central Florida president Steve Altman, who claimed he used the service for nonsexual massages only.

Although Tim said he started his empire to finance his University of Florida tuition, he also admitted to the AP that he blew all the money on “cars, a motorcycle, Jacuzzis, that sort of thing.”

He spent 12 years in prison for attempted murder, racketeering, and other related crimes.

Bad marks. Toward the end of his three-month relationship with Karen, he had given her a watered-down version of his criminal record. (Not sure how he explained the “Escort King” tattoo on his arm, however.)

When Karen told Tim it was over, he reportedly tried to choke her. Her airline colleague Catherine Mallet said that Karen had worn a turtleneck to work on a hot day and pulled it down to show her the strangulation marks.

Authorities investigating Karen’s murder slowly put together a case against Tim. At the crime scene, they found his prints on a pizza box with three missing slices (Karen’s autopsy found no pizza in her stomach). The delivery time of the pizza contradicted his contention that he left Karen’s place at 7:30 p.m.

The Pizza Hut deliveryman, who chatted with Karen in the doorway for around 10 minutes, told investigators that Tim had scowled at him.

Tim’s skin was found under Karen’s nails.

Poor placement. Investigators believe Tim went to her house in hopes of rekindling the romance. They ordered a pizza at some point, but when Karen made it clear she wanted to discontinue the relationship, he got angry and strangled her. While figuring out how to foist the blame on someone else, Tim ate three slices of pizza.

Next, he used Karen’s lifeless right index finger to write “Roc” in order to frame Roc Herpich. But the letters were too high up on the wall for a partially disabled victim to write.

Lab tests showed Tim’s DNA mixed in with Karen’s blood at the scene.

Horrible death. Tim was indicted in 2004. The trial wouldn’t take place for three more years, but the law took him into custody right away for violating his parole for crimes related to his pimping; he had traveled to Pasco County to see a friend without permission from his parole officer.

Karen Pannell with husband Jeff Paine — Ex-husband Jeff
Paine called Karen
‘amazingly bright’

Prosecutors maintained that Tim started the attack by surprise, putting a knife in Karen’s back, which paralyzed her. Blood splatter placement suggested he then got on top of her and continued to stab her. “She was looking up into the eyes of her murderer,” according to Assistant State Attorney Bill Loughery.

In court, the prosecution decimated Tim’s already-compromised alibi about visiting George Solomon. George, his ex-colleague from the car dealership on Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard, testified that on the night of the murder, Tim met him at a gas station, where he asked him to provide an alibi. Later, over drinks, he confessed to killing Karen. “She’s gone. I killed her. I killed Karen,” Tim said, according to George’s testimony.

Loose lips. Tim said the two had argued after he told Karen that he had just quit his job at the car dealership, according to George Solomon.

Also to Tim’s detriment, after finding the body, he had called Catherine Mallet to let her know Karen had been stabbed — before investigators made the determination of cause of death.

Tim’s defense team came out swinging.

They labeled George Solomon a “big fat liar” and pointed out that Tim had no blood on his clothing the night of the gory murder.

Missing wardrobe. Tim, who testified calmly at the trial, said that his statements about the logistics regarding the cell phone and his arrival at Karen’s house were simple errors. During an appearance on the On the Case with Paula Zahn episode “Message in Blood,” he maintained that he didn’t wear a wristwatch and often didn’t keep track of the time.

“I’ve been off on times,” Permenter told prosecutor Bill Loughery. “Does that make me a murderer? No, sir.”

Police never found the murder weapon, believed to be a knife taken from Karen’s kitchen, or any of Tim’s bloody clothes.

Kind souls. Aside from his mother, known as Donna Finch or Donna Markham, Timothy had no supporters in court, according to the Tampa Bay Herald. Donna had cancer and sometimes came directly to court after chemotherapy treatments, the St. Petersburg Times reported.

After deliberating for four hours, on October 24, 2007, a jury found Tim guilty of first-degree murder.

While pleased with the verdict, Karen’s camp showed sympathy for Tim’s mother. “My heart goes out to her,” said Karen’s stepmother, Yvonne Pannell. “I know his mother is in pain. And we’ve been in pain for four years.”

Eye kept on guy. In November 2007, the jury voted 7-to-5 for the death penalty, but the judge sentenced Tim to life without the possibility of parole, which disappointed Karen Pannell’s family, according to her brother Randy.

Tim’s various efforts for a new trial have failed. In 2013, a U.S. district court denied a petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

Today, Timothy Permenter is inmate #570672 at Liberty Correctional Institution in Bristol, Florida. The state lists him as in close custody, meaning he requires armed supervision at all times.

Wait, there’s more. Sadly, Roc Herpich, whose animated personality livened up the Forensic Files episode, died in 2018 at the age of 60. (Thanks to reader Joe for writing in with the tip).

If you’d like to check out other true-crime programs about the case, you can choose from a few. You can see the Dateline episode, divided into six segments with different URLs, on the NBC News website. It costs $1.99 to view the On the Case with Paula Zahn episode on Amazon.

The shows aren’t as compact and easy to watch as Forensic Files, but nothing is.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Tubi

Margaret Rudin: A Gold Digger Craps Out

The Fifth Time’s Not the Charm for Las Vegas Millionaire Ron Rudin
(“For Love or Money,” Forensic Files)

If you’re looking for a sympathetic Forensic Files murder victim, you might prefer to read about Daniel McConnell or Charlotte Grabbe instead of Ron Rudin.

The Las Vegas residential real estate developer wore garish jewelry, cheated on his wives, foreclosed on homes, and evicted tenants. He accrued so many enemies, whether avowed or suspected, that he maintained an arsenal of firearms and a pack of hunting dogs inside his house and a concrete wall and barbed wire fence outside.

Bid for bucks. Of course, that doesn’t mean he deserved to be shot four times in his sleep and then thrown in the desert so that spouse No. 5 Margaret Rudin could claim her share of his $10 million to $12 million estate.

On “For Love or Money,” the Forensic Files episode about Ron Rudin’s murder, one of his ex-wives mentioned he’d done good things for people during his life — but she didn’t specify what.

For this week, I checked around and found redeeming information about the human being behind the bling. I also did background research on the elegant and proper-looking Margaret — one of many Forensic Files villains (Craig Rabinowitz, Janice Dodson) whose plans to become independently wealthy by eliminating a spouse backfired.

Illinois boy. So let’s get going on the recap of “For Love or Money” along with information from internet research:

Ron Rudin was born an only child on Nov. 14, 1930, and grew up in Joliet, Illinois. His mother, Stella, stayed at home and enjoyed a close relationship with him, according to the book If I Die by Michael Fleeman. His father, Roy, had a high-paying job as a chemical company executive.

A look behind the barricades: Ron’s house was nice, not grand

Still, Ron didn’t live a charmed life.

At the age of 10, he saw Roy die of a heart attack.

Veteran returns. As a student, Ron tried to avoid the Korean War draft by joining the ROTC and later serving in the Illinois National Guard — but the government nabbed him anyway.

He survived overseas duty and moved to Las Vegas to make his mark on the world.

After gaining experience as a construction worker, Ron started his own real estate business, building houses and also buying and flipping existing ones. He became a gun dealer and amassed a collection valued at $3 million.

Affinity for alcohol. Ron shared his success with his mother, moving her to Nevada so they could spend more time together. He liked taking her out to dinner at the Las Vegas Country Club.

In his off hours, he enjoyed hunting and flying airplanes.

But Ron had another favorite pastime that wasn’t so wonderful: alcohol consumption. Loyal ex-wife Caralynne Rudin — who gave interviews to multiple true-crime shows — defended him, saying drunkenness didn’t make him abusive. But Margaret would claim otherwise.

Shiny, shiny. On the bright side, Ron had no interest in gambling. He stayed out of Sin City’s casinos.

Still, he did delight in flashing his wealth. He wore a six-carat diamond ring and drove a perpetually spotless black Cadillac with vanity plates reading “RRR-1.”

Another of the handsome, olive-skinned entrepreneur’s favorite accessories was a wife — five of them in all.

Wife commits suicide. He met the first two, secretary Donna L. Brinkmeyer and insurance agent Caralynne Holland, through his work. His union with Donna, whom he married in 1962, barely lasted a year. He had better luck with the glamorous-looking Caralynne. They made it work from 1971 to 1975 and stayed friends despite that Ron had cheated on her.

Next up came a horrible tragedy. Ron’s third wife, hairdresser Peggy June Rudin, shot herself in the master bedroom inside Ron’s fortress-like house at 5113 Alpine Place. She reportedly suffered from depression.

A couple of sources referred to Peggy as Ron’s one true love. (Of course, it’s possible that she died before he had a chance to get tired of her.) After Peggy’s death, which happened around Christmastime, Ron would always feel distressed when December rolled around, according to “Vegas Black Widow,” an episode of the TV series Sex, Lies & Murder

Ron Rudin circa 1974 (in a photo from the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project libraries) and
shortly before his death

New squeeze. Media accounts didn’t mention the identity of Ron’s fourth wife, but she was inconsequential compared to his fifth, Margaret.

The pair met at the First Church of Religious Science. “She was outgoing. She was vivacious, very sociable and dressed nicely,” Michael Fleeman told KTNV-TV.

Margaret was slender and had blue eyes and a fine-boned face. Some YouTube viewers commented that she looked like Meryl Streep. Newspapers described her as a socialite.

Modest abode. The couple married in 1987, when Ron was in his late 50s; Margaret was 12 years younger and had two adult children.

Like all of Ron’s wives, Margaret lived with him in the two-bedroom two-bath abode behind the seven-foot barrier. The house lacked curb appeal but — location, location, location — it sat right behind Ron Rudin Realty’s office in a strip mall, so Ron could walk to work.

Margaret and Ron had their ups and downs.

The guy had charm. “They loved each other passionately, but they had these very, very volatile fights,” Fleeman told ABC-KTNV. “At one point [in 1988] there was gunfire, literally. A gun went off. Nobody got shot, but that’s how this relationship was.”

A gun with a legal silencer ended Ron Rudin's life — The gun that ended Ron Rudin’s life

The couple split up and then reconciled.

Margaret would later tell 48 Hours that Ron was charismatic and mysterious and she wanted to make their relationship work in spite of his imbibing and his affair with a woman named Sue Lyles.

Kept at a distance. Ron cared enough about Margaret to bankroll her when she decided to open her own antiques shop. He bought her a Lincoln Continental.

But that didn’t mean he trusted her. One of his guns outfitted with a federally registered silencer went missing during the first year of their marriage and at some point, he suspected Margaret of taking it. Ron reported the theft to the police — his gun business was lawful and legitimate.

Ron didn’t let Margaret too close to his finances. She received an allowance.

Insidious plot. After discovering that Margaret was eavesdropping on his conversations at work, Ron removed the phone line between the house and the real estate office. She and her younger sister, Dona Cantrell, later secretly installed hidden recording devices there.

Just weeks before Christmas in 1994, Ron made a disturbing discovery, according to his best buddy John Reuther.

“He says he’s found a piece of paper in the house, ‘Margaret is diagramming out how she’s going to split up all my money, the estate with her relatives and her friends,'” Reuther told ABC-KTLV.

Nomadic upbringing. Yikes, so who exactly was the woman who Ron had taken to the altar?

Margaret Frost was born in Memphis circa 1942, and by the time she got her high school diploma, her family had moved to 15 states and she’d had to change schools 22 times, according to an interview from jail she gave to the TV series Mugshots for the episode “Margaret Rudin: Death in the Desert.”

She described her father as stern and fanatically religious.

Eager to leave home, at the age of 18, Margaret married a 20-year-old carpenter. They settled in Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, and had a son and a daughter. That union lasted 10 years and Margaret went on to acquire and divorce two more husbands before she took her act to Vegas.

Margaret Rudin with her first husband and two children — She wasn’t always glam: Margaret with her first husband and their children

No jackpot. There, she married a boat dealer, but that relationship sank quickly.

Although Margaret had snagged progressively wealthier men, she didn’t score lucrative settlements in any of her divorces, according to American Justice. (Her daughter, Kristina Mason, who appeared on Mugshots, denied that Margaret was a gold digger.)

Ron’s extramarital girlfriend, Sue Lyles, said her children had received threatening anonymous letters about the affair. Sue suspected Margaret sent them in hopes she would end the relationship.

Lateness unusual. But Margaret didn’t need to worry about Ron cheating on her for much longer. He disappeared on Dec. 18, 1994.

His employees at the real estate office got worried immediately when he didn’t show up for work — Ron always got there on time — and notified authorities.

Margaret also reported him missing but not until two days after he vanished.

Names of the disgruntled. A week later, police located his Cadillac in the parking lot of the Crazy Horse Too, a local gentlemen’s club. The car’s exterior was covered with mud, a worrisome sign because Ron liked to keep his autos glistening. Inside the vehicle, they found some small blood spots too degraded for DNA testing.

Ron Rudin owned the strip mall that housed his real estate office. Margaret’s antiques store was just down the way

Investigators got a list of all Ron’s evicted tenants in case one of them had gone homicidal. (His buddy Jerry Stump, however, would later tell the Las Vegas Sun that Ron was a kind landlord who gave tenants extra time to come up with their rent money.)

No solid leads came until three weeks later, when hikers reported finding a skull near Lake Mojave. The discoverers knew right away it didn’t come from an animal. They could see fillings in the teeth. Lying near the scene, they found a white-gold bracelet with diamonds that spelled “Ron.” Caralynne had bought it for Ron during their marriage.

Cleanliness compromised. Someone had incinerated the remains of the corpse from the neck down.

Dental records proved the skull belonged to Ron Rudin, dead at 64.

The skull had four bullet wounds from a .22-caliber Ruger. Knife marks suggested that whoever killed Ron Rudin decapitated him.

Cosa Nostra? Investigators came to believe that someone other than Ron had left his car at the strip club (he never patronized the establishment) to throw them off course. A manager there allegedly had ties to organized crime.

Margaret’s daughter,
Kristina Mason,
stayed loyal to her

Ron reportedly brushed up against the mafia in a conflict with Tony Spilotro — later portrayed by Joe Pesci in Casino — over a real estate auction, according to “Vanished in Vegas,” an episode of The Perfect Murder.

But the bedroom Margaret and Ron shared told a much more relevant story than the Crazy Horse Too.

Sounds like Scott Peterson. Margaret had recently had the room recarpeted (flaming-red flag). Her contractor, Augustine Lovato, contacted police later and said that he found sticky bloodlike residue on the old rug. The walls and ceiling lit up when detectives sprayed luminal.

She suggested the blood came from Ron’s sneezing during his frequent nosebleeds or that it was left over from Peggy’s long-ago suicide.

Police noticed Margaret referred to Ron in the past tense and started renovating the master bedroom into an office before anyone knew he was dead.

Special conditions. But she wouldn’t get much time to enjoy the remodeling job. As the investigation continued to crawl along in 1995, trustees of Ron’s estate booted Margaret out of the house and seized cars and other assets in Ron’s name. They cut off her checking account.

A fake ID with Margaret in a brown wig while she claimed to be a nurse — Margaret, pictured on a fake nurse ID, had books about disguising identities

In Ron’s will, he stipulated that if he died by violent means, there should be an investigation into any person with financial reasons for wanting him gone —and he instructed the trustees to disinherit such an individual.

Margaret, however, didn’t know about those directives in the will. As far as she knew, Ron’s demise would mean she’d inherit millions.

Discovery in the water. That never happened, but after haggling with the trustees, Margaret received a $500,000 to $600,000 settlement in 1996.

The murder investigation continued.

A scuba diver had found Ron’s missing gun with its silencer in Lake Mead. Police determined the old-timey firearm (“That gun looks like you have to walk 10 paces before you shoot it,” wrote YouTube commenter Katelyn Young) was the murder weapon.

Dona Cantrell testified against her sister

Gone girl. Margaret didn’t seem too worried yet. According to Las Vegas Metro Detective Phil Ramos’ interview with American Justice, she had once remarked that a “Clark County grand jury couldn’t indict a ham sandwich.”

Law officers generally don’t appreciate that kind of talk, and Margaret was indicted on charges of first-degree murder, accessory to murder, and unlawful use of a listening device.

Detectives moved to arrest her on April 18, 1997, but she had disappeared.

Border crossing. Despite that America’s Most Wanted aired segments asking for help finding her, Margaret remained on the run for years and had quite a fantastic voyage, thanks to her adeptness at changing her appearance and making fake ID cards. She used the names Anne Boatwright, Susan Simmons, and Leigh Brown.

She lived among a community of U.S. retirees in Mexico, stayed in a YMCA while working in a gift shop in Phoenix, and ended up about as far away from Las Vegas in miles and culture as one can get in the U.S. — Revere, Massachusetts.

Whatever post-Ron life Margaret hoped to attain, it probably didn’t look like the drab apartment complex where police found her after tracing packages sent between her and her family members. She was living with a retired firefighter she met in Guadalajara.

Self-protection. He and the rest of the buddies she acquired while on the lam couldn’t believe the grandmotherly lady in the black wig was a felon. “She’s just too sweet,” friend Carol Reagor told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “It’s not in her nature.”

Joseph Lundergan, another friend Margaret met in Mexico, let her stay with him briefly in Massachusetts and accepted her collect calls after she went to prison.

Margaret said that she concealed her identity because she feared her late husband’s business associates. “When you’re helpless and you’re totally alone, you do tend to, maybe, panic,” she told 48 Hours in 2001.

Israeli connection. Prosecutors made a case that while Ron Rudin lay sleeping, Margaret shot him three times on one side of the head and once on the other, put his 6-foot-tall body into the missing trunk and burned it, then left his bracelet nearby for identification.

Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but before Ron Rudin’s disappearance, Margaret had been spending a lot of time with a 40-year-old Middle Easterner named Yehuda Sharon. Police suspected the two were having an affair and that he had helped her carry Ron — how else could the featherweight Margaret haul Ron’s 220-pound body?

Yehuda, a former Israeli intelligence officer, denied everything.

Cue the violin music. The trial of the so-called Black Widow of Las Vegas kicked off in March 2001. Although the dramatic, self-indulgent storytelling used by defense team Michael Amador and Tom Pitaro annoyed the judge so much that he appointed additional defense lawyers to dilute their irritating effect — and they ultimately lost the case — they did put up a valiant fight for Margaret.

Apartment where Margaret hid in Massachusetts — The apartment where Margaret
hid in Revere, Massachusetts

“The entire state’s case is nothing but a house of cards waiting for just a slightest breeze to knock it down,” Amador told 48 Hours.

Amador (pictured with Margaret in the image at the top of the page) portrayed his client as a “poor widow left out in the cold.” He suggested that Ron’s trustees Sharron Cooper and Harold Boscutti had reason to kill Ron. Harold alone gained $1.5 million from the estate, Amador said.

Sister vs. sister. And women rarely mutilate victims, Amador argued.

Margaret trotted out the inevitable victim-smearing, claiming Ron trafficked drugs and evaded taxes and might have fallen victim to a business associate he double-crossed.

Unfortunately for Margaret, she herself ended up double-crossed when her lookalike sister served as a witness for the prosecution.

The verdict. Dona Cantrell confirmed that the two of them had planted the listening devices and testified that Margaret was romantically involved with Yehuda Sharon and was crazy about the guy.

Yehuda admitted in court that he had rented a van around the time of Ron Rudin’s disappearance, but said it had nothing to do with the murder and he and Margaret were just friends; he helped her with her taxes.

A jury convicted Margaret of first degree murder. She showed no emotion upon hearing the decision.

Margaret exits prison, where staff members called her a model inmate

High proof. Juror Coreen Kovacs mouthed the words “I’m sorry” to Margaret after the verdict. She later said the other jurors pressured her to vote guilty.

A different juror, however, told American Justice that the evidence against Margaret was so great that no lawyer could have won an acquittal.

Amador later admitted that the reason Margaret looked scared, feeble, and weak during the trial had more to do with staging than any real circumstances. “That was no accident,” Amador told American Justice. “That was a $450-an-hour makeup artist I hired from a modeling agency”

Sprung! On August 31, 2001, Judge Joseph Bonaventure gave Margaret a life sentence.

She served some of her time at Southern Nevada Women’s Correctional Facility, later renamed Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center.

An old classified ad from Ron Rudin 's real estate business — As this old classified ad shows, Ron Rudin created jobs — or at least gigs — thanks to his success in real estate development

In 2020, the Nevada Department of Corrections agreed to release Margaret early to settle her lawsuit over alleged civil rights violations stemming from the way she was treated in prison.

Enterprises no more. She told the media that she planned to move in with her daughter in Chicago and write books about her time in captivity. Margaret again proclaimed her innocence, blaming the Las Vegas police for her “wrongful” conviction. They “testi-lyed,” she said.

Yehuda Sharon made the news again in 2020 after he accused police of neglecting to investigate a burglary in his residence. The Las Vegas resident remains a fuzzy character who has said he supports himself as a software developer or as a seller of holy oils for church use. Some speculated his main occupation was gigolo, according to true-crime author Suzy Spencer, who appeared on Sex, Lies & Murder.

As far as an epilogue for the Rudins’ businesses, they appear to be no more. A check-cashing business moved into Ron’s old real estate office and Margaret’s nearby antiques shop was replaced by an X-rated video store.

Wait, there’s more. The house on Alpine Place, which was fortified outside but couldn’t protect Ron Rudin inside, was torn down. A commercial building now occupies the space.

You can watch the Mugshots episode on Ron Rudin on YouTube. You can see the Sex, Lies & Murder for free if you sign up for a trial subscription to Reelz.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

Joe and Shannon Agofsky: Cruel Intentions

Thieving Brothers Force a Banker to Die in Terror
(“Stick ’em Up,” Forensic Files)

Joseph and Shannon Agofsky probably didn’t need to commit homicide in order to rob a bank, and they definitely didn’t need to do it in such a sadistic way.

Like villains from a James Bond movie, the brothers bound Dan Short to a chair, tormented him with a cruel claim, and threw him into a lake while he was still alive.

Unlike 007, Short had no chance of escape. The father of two drowned.

Missouri misery. Clearly the perpetrators were heartless, but didn’t they realize that adding murder to their thievery all but guaranteed they’d never exit prison on two feet? (Alvin Bellamy was convicted of multiple armed bank robberies but got out after just eight years because no one died.)

For this week, I looked for any information about the Agofsky brothers’ motives and upbringing that might explain their inhumanity and recklessness. I also searched for some background on Dan Short, whose death stunned Noel, a town of 1,000 people on the Elk River in southwestern Missouri.

A lot has happened since the Forensic Files episode “Stick ’em Up” first aired in 2006, so let’s get going on the recap along with additional information culled from internet research and recent interviews:

Tend to the lens. On Oct. 6, 1989, cashier Pauline Coonrod arrived at the State Bank of Noel to find the door unlocked and the vault open.

Local police and an FBI agent from Joplin found that $71,000 in paper money and 320 pounds of wrapped coins worth $4,000 were missing. On the floor lay two spent 45-caliber shell casings. The robbers had shot out the security camera lens, covered it with spray paint, and tipped it away from the lobby. They left no fingerprints and set off no alarms.

In the aftermath of the heist, no one could find the bank’s president, Dan Short. He had the keys to the front door and access to the vault, which made him a suspect.

Hounds released. After a split with his wife, Dan was having problems adjusting and at times had turned to alcohol, his daughter, Melanie, later told investigators, according to the Swamp Murders episode “Run for the Money.”

Shannon, left, was supposedly the brains, rather than brother Joe — Shannon, left, was supposedly the brains, rather than big brother Joe

Maybe Dan Short was looking for a new, cash-infused start.

County sheriffs coordinated a search effort using tracker dogs and helicopters that flew so low that Noel residents had to raise their voices to talk, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Secret treasure. And talk they did. The crime was pretty much the only topic of local conversation, according to Gerald E. Elkins, a newspaper reporter who appeared on the Forensic Files episode.

Soon, investigators discovered that the bank had a second, secret vault that only Dan Short had the key for, and it contained $100,000. If he wanted to steal from the bank, why would he leave the extra cash there?

And disarray at his house suggested something bad had happened to him. Someone had rifled through drawers and upended his wastebasket. His glasses, which he always wore, lay on a dresser. The spot where he normally parked his vehicle was empty except for debris— neckties, newspapers, and letters emptied out of the back.

Spouse scrutiny. Police found Dan’s red four-wheel-drive Dodge pickup abandoned at a parking lot for Sibley Industries on Toga Hill Road outside of town. The vehicle had no prints other than Short’s.

At first, the victim’s estranged wife of 23 years, Joyce Short, drew suspicion. Although she’d been a popular and well-respected gym teacher and coach for the Noel public school system, she was also the beneficiary of $200,000 in payouts from Dan’s life insurance policies.

Noel was known for Christmas, cabin rentals, and canoe paddling, not kidnapping and murder

But police found no solid evidence pointing in her direction.

Security upgrades. Joyce, who lived in St. Louis with son Scott while he attended a private high school and Melanie was away at college, defended Dan’s reputation. “He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t associate with rough tough people,” she told an AP reporter.

Despite $75,000 in rewards funded by area banking organizations, “the consensus of people coming in and out of my post office is [the case] will never be solved,” Postmaster Bill Poage told the AP, which also reported that some worried residents installed floodlights around their houses for extra protection.

“After the first day, we had hope,” Dan’s brother Bob Short later told the AP. “Even the second day, we thought that maybe they had just tied him up somewhere.”

Bound for death. On Oct. 11, 1989, five days after the robbery, a couple fishing for bass reported seeing a body floating on Grand Lake in Oklahoma, 21 miles from Noel.

Someone had duct-taped a man to an antique wooden chair, weighted it with a concrete block, attached a 30-pound hoist chain, and dropped it off Cowskin Bridge on Highway 10.

Joyce Short was protective of her husband despite their rift

The victim’s wallet ID’ed him as Dan Short, born July 19, 1938.

Good citizen. His murder took a toll on not only his family — Dan remained close to his kids despite the marital woe — but also the community.

Dan started the president job at the State Bank of Noel in 1983, and he also did radio commentary on local sports and served as grand master of Noel’s annual Christmas parade.

When Noel school principal Rocky Macy and friends established a local newspaper, the Elk River Courant, Dan penned sports columns free of charge.

Nice guy remembered. “Dan Short was a great writer,” Macy told ForensicFilesNow.com during a phone interview on Oct. 31, 2020. “He was a very nice guy, and he’d been a guest in my house.”

At Dan’s funeral, some of his columns were read aloud, Macy recalled in his blog.

A TV series titled Lost Cause suggested that Dan might have caused ill feeling in the community because economic problems spurred the bank to repossess some customers’ belongings and decline to provide credit to others.

But a different media account said that Dan was compassionate and would actually bend the rules a bit to help out people in financial need.

Tape-up job. With the victim identified, investigators busied themselves with the forensics.

Authorities released a photo of the spindle-backed death chair in hopes that someone would recognize it.

A lab rejoined the cut-up duct tape.

Well-traveled. Around the same time, concerned citizen Rowdy Foreman picked up a stray piece of tape near Grand Lake and turned it over to police. It fit perfectly with the rest. And remnants of the wooden chair used to bind Dan Short clung to the adhesive.

Police got tips that locals Joe Agofsky, 23, and Shannon Agofsky, 18, had been talking about coming into money.

The brothers had grown up in Noel, and Joe had at one time wanted to become a sheriff’s deputy. Shannon, who stood 6-foot-3-inches tall and liked to keep himself fit, was thinking about a career as a bodyguard, according to Rocky Macy’s blog.

Women to the rescue. At first, the duo seemed to have alibis. Joe’s fiancée, Shayna, and her brother, Lloyd Tuttle, said that Joe was with her at her house in Carterville, Missouri, the night of the robbery.

Likewise, the Agofskys’ mother, Sheila Agofsky Billbe, claimed Shannon was at her house after coming home from teaching a karate class. He wasn’t feeling well and she saw him asleep in his bed around the time of the crime, Sheila said.

The investigation continued for two years. Although discouraged by the wait, local businesses and houses kept yellow ribbons, along with the usual Christmas decorations, on their doors to signify their desire for justice for Dan Short.

Loose lips. Unsolved Mysteries produced a segment about the case and asked for tips. Syndicated series Hard Copy reenacted the crime and solicited help as well.

The Agofskys’ names surfaced again amid more reports that they were throwing a lot of money around. After the bank robbery, both brothers, who were unemployed, purchased cars with cash, according to the FBI Files episode “Blood Brothers.” Shannon reportedly bragged that he was the richest teenager in the country, according to Lost Cause.

Joe had taken Shayna to Disneyland (yes, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride incentivized a horrific crime) and bought her a ring, Swamp Murders reported.

Unlikely trust-funders. And it turned out that Sheila Agofsky owned a brown-and-tan van like the one a passerby reported seeing on the bridge around the time of Dan Short’s murder. Other witnesses saw the brothers wipe off fingerprints from their bullets before loading their guns and recognized the chain used in the murder as those once seen in Sheila Agofsky’s residence.

Still, at first, there was one big factor that cast doubt on the Agofsky brothers’ involvement: Years earlier, they came into a lot of money honestly.

Every December, thousands route cards via Noel’s post office to snag its Christmas stamp

In 1980, the boys’ father, Joe Agofsky Sr., who worked for Pressure Control Inc., an Oklahoma company that did trouble-shooting for oil rigs, died in a plane crash while returning from a business trip in Mexico. The twin-engine Piper Navajo ran out of fuel, hit the ground, and burned in Soto La Marina, killing all seven people on board, according to newspaper accounts from 1980.

Just out of reach. The boys, ages 9 and 14 at the time of the tragedy, were entitled to trust funds as a result of their father’s death. Joseph Jr. reportedly nabbed $75,000 from his trust.

But Shannon couldn’t get at his payout until he turned 21.

After receiving subpoenas, Joe and Shannon said they had nothing to do with the robbery-murder.

Buddy squeals. Meanwhile, the FBI started leaning on an Agofsky associate named Gant Wesley Sanders, reminding him he had no alibi and threatening him with prison time if he withheld information about the murder-robbery.

Gant, who had gone to high school with Joe and briefly roomed with Shannon, finally cracked in 1990. He said Joe Agofsky had talked about the possibility of kidnapping a bank president and forcing him to open the vault. (Authorities ultimately concluded Gant had nothing to do with the robbery-murder, and he got immunity on a gun charge.)

Police obtained a complete set of fingerprints from Shannon and got a match on the errant piece of duct tape from the crime scene — despite having soaked in water, the tape bore a fingerprint.

Conspicuous consumption. A wiretap picked up Shannon asking Joe if he could face charges on the Short case. Still, authorities needed more evidence tying Joe Agofsky to the crime.

After studying Joe’s financial history, investigators found that he had made $19,000 in cash purchases from Oct. 6, 1989, to Jan. 31, 1991, while he was jobless.

Without fisherman Rowdy Foreman’s
help, Shannon Agofsky
would have gotten away
with murder

His total spending around the time included $800 in cash for a vacation car rental, $44,500 to buy a house and some adjoining land, and an unspecified amount for new furniture.

Bye, bye, alibi. Shannon, the prosecution argued, needed money because he was too old to continue receiving $600 to $800 a month from his late father’s Social Security — but too young to tap into the trust fund.

Meanwhile, Joe’s alibi disintegrated when FBI agent Ladell Farley discovered Joe made long distance phone calls to Shayna’s house during the time of the robbery when he said that he was home with her.

Investigators also discovered that Joe had rented a safe deposit box in the bank, probably to get its floor plan, and asked questions about who the president was and where he lived.

Gant, whose father had helped remodel the bank, said that Joe asked him for the blueprints, the Springfield News-Reader reported.

Anonymous participant. Investigators believed that, before dawn on Oct. 6, 1989, the brothers abducted Dan Short from his house in Sulphur Springs, Arkansas. Dan had two friends over earlier that night, and the Agofskys might have staked out the house and sprung into action as soon as Short’s pals left.

They had already loaded their mother’s brown-and-tan van with equipment needed for the crime.

An unidentified accomplice served as lookout and driver.

Utter inhumanity. The Agofskys made Dan open the outer vault, took the money, abandoned his truck, and carried out their plan to execute him.

Shannon took off one of his gloves while tying Dan Short to the chair, leaving the fingerprints on the duct tape.

John Douvris, a jailhouse informant, would later testify that Shannon claimed to have taunted Dan Short by lowering the chair, then lifting it up again as he begged for his life — and telling Dan that his wife, Joyce, was the one who wanted him dead.

Already caged. When they threw Dan over the side of the bridge, one of the chair legs broke, releasing the piece of tape.

An autopsy proved Dan was still breathing when they tossed him into the water.

Police arrested the Agofsky brothers in March 1992 and charged them with murder. (They didn’t have to look too hard for Shannon; he was incarcerated due to a 1991 conviction for transporting stolen guns.)

Mom on the case. Sheila Agofsky offered a reward to anyone who could help clear her sons of the robbery and murder, but she didn’t specify a dollar amount, according to The Oklahoman.

The trial for robbery kicked off in 1992.

“I’m scared. I’m mad. And I’m in disbelief that it’s gone as far as it has,” Sheila said during jury selection proceedings. Sheila also complained that the jail denied her sons telephone and TV privileges.

Sorry, guys. She claimed that the boys couldn’t have used her van the night of the murder because it had a flat tire and compromised battery.

Yet the prosecution would later produce evidence that Sheila had tried to sell the van in 1989 and said in a newspaper ad that it “runs good.”

After seven-weeks, the trial ended in convictions.

U.S. District Judge Russell Clark sentenced the brothers to life without the possibility of parole plus a concurrent 10 years for conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery and use of a firearm during a violent crime.

A mother’s love. “The system works,” Joyce Short said after the sentencing. “The sunshine feels good on my back.”

The judge also ordered Shannon to pay $71,562.25 in restitution all by himself since Joe Jr. needed what little money he had to support a baby son he shared with Shayna, the Springfield News-Leader reported. Joe used $40,000 from his trust fund to cover legal costs, according to one media account.

Shayna and Sheila Agofsky vowed they would fight on to prove Joe and Shannon’s innocence. In 1993, Sheila pledged to sell her house and a rental property to finance her sons’ defense for the upcoming murder trial.

Spoiling for a fight. Sheila tried a little victim-smearing as well, saying Dan Short’s murder was drug related and that he “knew too much, drank too much, and talked too much,” the Oklahoman.com reported.

Meanwhile, Dan Short’s family and friends had to wait until 1997 before authorities could put together a solid homicide case and pull the trigger on a trial.

But once they did, the prosecution, led by Ben Loring, presented a battalion of witnesses — 60 in all. One of them testified to having seen Joe’s blue pickup truck at Dan Short’s house on the night of the murder.

In denial. And the prosecutors trotted out some high-impact prose. Assistant D.A. Eddie Wyant dubbed the chair used in the murder an “execution contraption.” Assistant U.S. attorney Mike Jones called the fingerprints on the tape a “smoking cannon.”

Defense lawyer Waco Carter produced just three witnesses, including Sheila and the boys’ uncle.

Carter argued that the fingerprint evidence wasn’t wholly intact.

Mechanical dude. Joe’s lawyers, John Woodard and David Autry, put Joe on the witness stand, where he claimed, “I have never considered robbing a bank before, and I never will.”

Joe maintained that he had enough money left from his trust fund to live on. Furthermore, he could make money doing auto-body work from his home if need be.

″We are innocent and we should be allowed to go home to our family where we belong,″ Joe said in court. He accused the FBI and state of fabricating evidence and claimed the judge had it out for the Agofskys.

Blame the bank. Shannon declined to take the stand, but his jailhouse acquaintances were happy to talk.

Wayne Pennington said Shannon had laughed about the murder. John Douvris claimed Shannon planned to murder FBI Agent Ladell Farley and that Shannon even spoke of killing Joe and Shayna because they were both present during the crime. (Shayna was never charged or prosecuted.)

The defense lawyers called the snitches liars and the investigators Keystone Cops. The team also tried to trash the bank’s reputation, alleging it had sloppy procedures and problems with the FDIC. Short’s death was tied to an alleged money-laundering scheme involving his bank, the Agofsky lawyers claimed.

Devil-may-care. Autrey contended that the prosecution’s case didn’t make sense because Short’s body surfaced upstream — rather than downstream — of the bridge.

Defense lawyer Richard Anderson implored the jury not to “do damage to your souls” by ignoring any reasonable doubt.

Another defense lawyer, Debbie Maddox, instructed Shannon — who managed to look pleasant and unthreatening throughout the trial — to turn his chair toward the jury members. She asked them to gaze into his innocent-looking eyes, and implored, “I beg you, I invite you to stare him down.”

Aggrieved family speaks. She held onto Shannon’s arm when the jury returned with the guilty verdict against him.

According to Tulsa World, Shannon’s “ever-present friendly expression remained unchanged.” He turned to his family and assured them that everything would be all right.

But there was more adversity in store for Shannon before the sentencing.

During the victim impact statements, multiple members of Dan Short’s family spoke of experiencing the same nightmare in which they heard Dan begging for his life.

Run-on sentence. Dan’s daughter, Melanie, was particularly emotional. “For the rest of my life, I will always have bittersweet feelings about such things as cutting a Christmas tree or watching a Cardinals game,” she tearfully told the court.

Shannon said he had no regrets about the murder because he didn’t commit it and asked spectators to think of him if someday one of their loved ones was unjustly accused.

He received another life sentence for the murder.

Why the brutality? Without forensic evidence placing Joe at the murder scene, the jury couldn’t agree on a verdict. Prosecutors didn’t try Joe again because he already had life for the bank robbery.

No one ever indisputably ID’ed the third accomplice.

Despite all the media coverage before, during, and after the murder, one question remained: What turned two middle-class brothers into ritualistically savage killers?

Dark matriarch. A longtime Noel resident who knew the Agofskys — and asked to remain anonymous because of safety concerns — told ForensicFilesNow.com that Sheila Agofsky indulged her sons in a way that probably shaped a narcissistic criminality.

“I’m sure if anytime there was an issue of authority, Sheila would say to her sons, ‘you don’t have to listen to them,”’ the source said. “She was mean as a snake and very smart. Shannon was very bright, too. I think Shannon would have been the boss and Joe would have been the assistant” in the robbery-murder.

Apparently, the Agofsky brothers felt confident that they could get away with anything and saw Dan Short’s murder as cinematic fun.

Not a pen pal. Indeed, even behind bars, Shannon wasn’t done killing.

In 2001, at the U.S. Penitentiary at Beaumont, Texas, Shannon and another prisoner shared an exercise cage where the prison apparently allowed inmates to fight — but not to the death.

Shannon, who had training in martial arts, stomped down on Luther Plant’s head and neck.

It’s all on tape. A video camera recorded the attack, which showed Plant “as he died, with his arms and legs twitching, his face bloody and mangled,” according to an AP account.

Plant, who was serving 15 years for arson and gun charges, drowned in his own blood.

A photo from Shannon Agofsky’s
Facebook page

After three days of deliberation, a jury convicted Shannon in 2004, rejecting his claims of self-defense. Again, Shannon showed no emotion upon hearing a guilty finding.

He received a death sentence.

Social-media presence. Shannon has not been executed and resides in the U.S. Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, as of this writing.

He has a Facebook page, although it hasn’t been updated since 2013. An innocence website for him posted as recently as 2018.

Older brother Joe Agofsky died of natural causes in a North Carolina federal prison at the age of 46 on March 5, 2013.

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

Watch the episode on YouTube

Bart Corbin: Homicidal Dentist

Jennifer Corbin’s Murder Explains Dolly Hearn’s Death
(“Insignificant Others,” Forensic Files)

In 1995, Jennifer Monique Barber had recently finished college and was plotting out her career while bartending at a Barnacle’s seafood restaurant in Georgia. A bouncer named Bob Corbin introduced her to his older brother.

Bart Corbin picture here in his early 30s — Bart Corbin pictured here in
his early 30s

Bart Corbin, D.D.S., must have seemed like a great catch. He was working hard to build up his dental practice, loved kids, and looked almost as sculpted as a Calvin Klein model. He was even three whole inches taller than Jennifer, who stood at around six feet.

Hidden past. After they married, Jennifer got a job teaching preschool at the Sugar Hill Methodist Church. By 2004, Jennifer, 33, and Bart, 40, had two sons, a four-bedroom house, a houseboat, and wonderful friends. Jennifer was outgoing and friendly. Bart was witty.

But there was one medium-sized problem: Jennifer and Bart were having affairs.

And one large problem: Bart was a murderer.

He’d shot girlfriend Dorothy “Dolly” Hearn in 1990 after she broke up with him. He successfully staged the scene as a suicide.

Jennifer Barber Barton wearing sunglasses — Jennifer Barber Corbin

Not this time, buddy. Like a number of Forensic Files villains (Barbara Stager and David Copenhefer), Bart got away with murder once and just couldn’t resist trying it again.

In 2004, Bart killed Jennifer in the same way, except this time, authorities figured out what happened and reopened Dolly Hearn’s case as well.

For this week, I looked around for information on Bart’s early life that might explain why he adopted homicide as a remedy for relationship problems. I also checked on his whereabouts today.

Healthy bromance. So let’s get going on the recap of Forensic Files episode “Insignificant Others” along with extra information from internet research.

Barton Thomas Corbin was born on Dec. 22, 1963, in Jacksonville, Florida, and brought up in Snellville, Georgia, with his fraternal twin, Brad, and younger brother, Bob. Their mother, Connie, worked as a bank teller. Their father, Eugene, was a military police officer who later started a chemical company.

During childhood, Bart and Brad dressed in identical outfits and were best friends, according to the mass-market paperback The Doctor’s Wife by John Glatt.

Gridiron guy. After watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for the first time, Bart decided to become a dentist like Hermey the misfit elf, according to The Doctor’s Wife.

At one point in his youth, Bart was overweight, according to Glatt’s book. He began working out and acquired a chiseled look that women liked.

Bart played football in high school and then got his bachelor’s degree at the University of Georgia. Academically, he was competent but unexceptional.

He reportedly felt inadequate sometimes because Brad was more of a scholar.

Parent pleaser. Friends from dental school who spoke to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a story dated Jan. 16, 2005, recalled Bart as a good guy who sometimes displayed a bad temper. In fact, all three Corbin brothers were loud and excitable, a condition they facetiously called “pseudo Tourettes,” according to Glatt’s book.

Jennifer and Bart Corbin's 3,200-square-foot house in Buford, Georgia — The Corbins’ 3,200-square-foot house at 4515 Bogan Gates Drive in Buford, Georgia

Still, by all accounts, Bart was fun to be around most of the time. He was musical and enjoyed going to dance clubs.

Soon after Bart and Jennifer began dating, he hit it off with her parents, Narda and Max Barber. They respected him for his industriousness.

Dedicated dad. The Barbers had only one reservation about Bart. According to Ann Rule’s book Too Late to Say Goodbye, he used a lot profanity and didn’t bother to clean up his language when he was around the Barbers.

Nonetheless, they were thrilled when the couple announced they were expecting a baby and wanted a big wedding. They married on Sept. 1, 1996, and went on to have sons Dalton and Dillon.

Bart crafted himself into a model citizen. He spent one day a month providing free dental care to patients in need. He visited Dalton’s kindergarten class to talk about dentistry, and coached Dalton’s baseball team.

Sociable duo. Some acquaintances recalled Bart rebuking Dalton harshly when he underperformed in a game, but most described Bart overall as a nice father.

Jennifer acquired a reputation for kindness at her nursery school job. She had a “warm lap and sheltering arms” for her students, according to the Ann Rule book.

She was also a livewire who enjoyed a good mojito.

The couple had many friends in Buford, a town of 14,000 people 35 miles from Atlanta.

Child confronted by scene. Neighbors Kelly and Steve Comeau grew so close to Jennifer and Bart — whose son shared a birthday with their daughter — that they named the Corbins as guardians for Stephanie, their only child, in case of a tragedy.

Bart and Jennifer Corbin in a boat. — Bart and Jennifer Corbin were both friendly, fun-loving, and close to their families

The Comeaus never imagined that a tragedy would happen so soon or that it would involve Jennifer.

On Dec. 10, 2004, Dalton, 7, entered his parents’ room to ask for breakfast. He found his mother dead and bleeding with a revolver by her side. He ran to the Comeaus’ house for help.

Histrionic Husband. Police discovered Jennifer with a bullet to the head, divorce papers under her body, and a gun tucked into the coverlet of her dark-wood canopy bed.

Upon learning of Jennifer’s death, Bart broke down emotionally and threw up in the bathroom, his brother Bob Corbin told 48 Hours Mystery.

Bart at first seemed to have an alibi. He was with friends at the Wild Wing Cafe bar in Suwanee and had the receipt to prove it. Afterward, Bart said, he drove one of his friends home and spent the night at Bob’s house.

Game girl. Once Jennifer died, it didn’t take long for word to get out about the adultery on both sides of the marriage. The couple had separated at some point; Jennifer wanted a divorce, but Bart filed first and requested custody of the kids.

He was having an affair with a married dental hygienist named Dara Prentice (it’s unclear whether that’s a pseudonym), according to Ann Rule’s book.

Jennifer had fallen in love with someone she met online while playing the fantasy game EverQuest.

Dolly Hearn helping a dental patient — Dolly Hearn was in her senior year of dental school when she died

Female trouble. She and her internet connection, Chris, emailed each other feverishly and talked about a future together.

Shortly before Jennifer died, however, she found out that Chris, who purported to be a man, was actually a woman named Anita Hearn (no relation to Dolly Hearn).

Here’s where the story gets a little hazy. On 48 Hours Mystery, Anita Hearn said that after some shock upon learning of the deception, Jennifer decided to accept her as a love interest regardless of gender.

Fuzzy facts: “Did you ever meet someone who could finish a sentence for you but that lived 800 miles away?” said Anita, who resided in a modest house in St. Joseph, Missouri.

Anita explained that she portrayed herself as a man at first because EverQuest involved role-playing. She also claimed that her new friend feared her husband would kill her.

Other media accounts suggest Jennifer was having an affair with a genuine man, but it’s unclear whether they were mixing up the facts about her relationship with Anita or the male love interest really existed. Records showed that Jennifer was on the internet and phone with Anita the day she died.

What a heel. Divorces are never fun, but there were some early hints this one would get particularly ugly.

On Dec. 1, 2004, Jennifer called police to complain that Bart stole her diary and flip phone, bolted out of the house wearing only a towel, and ran over her foot with his yellow Mustang, according to the Barbers.

Barbara Hearn during her appearance on Forensic Files — Barbara Hearn during her
appearance on Forensic
Files

Corporal Dan Huggins, the officer who responded to the call, would later say that, because Jennifer declined medical treatment, the police couldn’t take action against Bart for domestic violence.

Odd pathway. In an earlier incident, on the couple’s way back from Thanksgiving at the Barbers’ house, Bart looked in Jennifer’s purse and found a romantic email from Chris, who he assumed was a guy. (Bart shouldn’t have gone through Jennifer’s bag but, yikes, what was she thinking printing out a love email?)

Jennifer and Bart had a fight in the car, and he allegedly hit her.

On the day that Jennifer died, police discovered a rather fishy crime scene. The entry wound was toward the back of Jennifer’s head, behind the right ear, traveling toward the front — an awkward trajectory for a self-inflicted shooting.

Informers help cops. She had no gunpowder residue on her hands and the weapon was tucked into the bedding, not an easy feat for someone who took a fatal bullet to the brain.

Once the investigation got underway, Bart clammed up and hired a lawyer.

Against the Barbers’ wishes, Bart had Jennifer cremated.

The investigation really started to heat up when tipsters told police about Dolly Hearn’s death back in 1990.

Family tradition. Dolly, 28, may have been saddled with a nickname 200 years out of date, but she looked as though she stepped out of a 1980s Van Halen music video.

Yet Dolly’s ambitions were higher than her hair. She was following in her father’s footsteps to become a dentist.

A newspaper clip of Dolly Hearn playing softball next to a shot of her with her hair and makeup done on Christmas day — Dolly Hearn was athletic as well as glamorous-looking

Dolly met Bart when they were attending dental school at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.

Refusal to get lost. In his last year of school, Bart was “alternately despondent and furious” when Dolly broke up with him, according to his buddy Eric Rader, who spoke to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Friends would later say that Bart didn’t mind being the one to end a relationship, but he couldn’t handle the reverse.

Dolly took Bart back but soon regretted it and ended the relationship for good.

Bart wouldn’t let it go. The Hearns said that he put hairspray in Dolly’s contact lens case, sabotaged her coursework, let the air out of her tires, and removed the gas cap from her car. He kidnapped Dolly’s cat, Tabitha.

Case abandoned. The Hearns asked Bart to knock off the stalking, and they gave Dolly a .38-caliber gun for protection.

On June 6, 1990, Dolly’s roommate found her shot to death on the couch in their apartment at 3077C Parrish Road in Augusta.

Dolly’s mother, Barbara Hearn, told Forensic Files she always knew that her daughter didn’t commit suicide, but authorities never made a determination, and let the case turn cold. A private coroner the Hearns hired concluded that Dolly killed herself.

Timeline shapes up. When authorities reopened the Dolly Hearn case, they took note that Dolly lacked blood splatter or gunpowder residue on her right hand, even though the bullet hit her on the right side.

Prosecutors theorized that Bart stopped by Dolly’s apartment, then collected her gun on his way to the bathroom, shot her, and positioned her body and the gun.

As for Jennifer Corbin’s death, investigators discovered that Bart canceled a marriage counseling appointment beforehand, suggesting he knew she wouldn’t be around.

Jennifer Corbin's sisters, Rajel
Caldwell and Heather Tierney,
listen to court proceedings — Jennifer Corbin’s sisters, Rajel
Caldwell and Heather Tierney,
listen to court proceedings

Not cut out for the slammer. Prosecutors believe that in between the time Bart dropped off his buddy and went to his brother’s place, he stopped by the house in Buford at around 2 a.m. on December 10, 2004, shot Jennifer, and arranged her body so it looked like a suicide, and wedged the divorce papers under her.

In late December 2004, a grand jury indicted Bart on one count of felony murder and one of malice murder. Police pulled over an SUV Bart was riding in — his secretary was driving — and arrested him.

Richmond County Jail boss Charles Toole put Bart in a “special needs” unit along with 15 other inmates not quite up for mixing with the hardcore population of prisoners, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Witnesses materialize. Bart’s mother and one of his brothers visited him in jail.

Meanwhile, investigators got two great tips about Dolly’s death. A neighbor came forward to report she saw Bart’s silver Monte Carlo parked at Dolly’s apartment complex the day she died. And Bart’s former school buddy Eric Rader said that Bart begged him not to tell investigators that he knew Dolly kept a gun in her apartment.

A neighbor also reported seeing Bart park his Chevrolet pickup at his and Jennifer’s house for about 20 minutes on the night of her murder.

A newspaper clipping showing Jennifer Corbin and sons Dalton and Dillon

Ready to rumble. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, prosecutor Danny Porter, known for his love of duking it out in the courtroom, was stoked for the main event against defense lawyers David Wolfe and the braid-wearing Bruce Harvey.

The defense hired a jury selection consultant. There were plans to roll out R-rated emails between Jennifer and Anita in court.

Jennifer, the defense alleged, turned to suicide over the failure of her marriage and possibility Bart would win custody of their sons.

Victims’ families unified. “We will take the high road,” Bart’s supporters wrote on the now-abandoned innocence website friendsofbartcorbin.org, “and appeal to you to support Bart and wait for the truth to come out at trial and for the falsehoods to be exposed and swept away as what they are.” They also solicited donations for his legal fund.

At the same time, the Hearn and Barber families supported each other emotionally and sometimes held hands during the early court proceedings.

Dozens of witnesses were lined up to testify. Ann Rule had tickets to fly in to Georgia for the trial.

‘Gotta cancel.’ But the showdown never happened.

Brad Corbin and his wedding party — Bart and Jennifer, left, at Brad Corbin’s wedding. Bob is far right

Bart and his legal team saw their defense evaporate when Bart’s buddy Richard J. Wilson admitted he gave Bart the gun that killed Jennifer.

The revelation spurred a bombshell: On September 19, 2006, Bart admitted to both murders in a plea deal to avoid the death penalty.

Fry, guy. Defense lawyer David Wolfe said that Bart made the decision in an effort to spare the Hearn and Barber families from the emotional strain of a trial.

Max Barber, Jennifer’s father, told the court that Bart was doing the right thing by admitting his crimes — but that he hoped he burned in hell anyway.

Stonefaced defendant. “To hear him say out loud that he killed the two girls, that’s huge,” said Jennifer’s friend Bridge Kamarad, the Gwinnett Daily Post reported.

Carlton Hearn Jr., one of Dolly Hearn’s brothers, stated that Bart “disgraced his profession and he has stolen from the world. He deserves no place in society.”

Records showed that on the day she died, Jennifer was on the phone and internet with Anita Hearn

Bart, who remained expressionless, declined Superior Court Judge Michael C. Clark’s invitation to speak before the sentencing.

Tributes established. He received two concurrent life prison sentences and started his life of JPay and weekend visitors on September 19, 2006.

“We rejoice that this truth has been publicly revealed and that Dolly’s name is now officially cleared,” a statement from the Hearns said. “This nightmare is over.”

In 2007, the Medical College of Georgia awarded Dolly a posthumous Doctor of Dental Medicine degree. Barbara and Carlton Hearn established the Dr. Dolly Hearn Scholarship for dental students who embody PEP — professionalism, empathy, and perseverance.

‘Stay put.’ The Methodist Church where Jennifer taught dedicated the Jennifer Barber-Corbin Memorial Playground to her.

The world hadn’t quite heard the last of Bart Corbin, however. Although he gave up his right to file appeals in Gwinnett and Richmond counties, he made attempts in Georgia state and federal courts.

US District Judge J. Randal Hall dismissed his 2014 appeal because it was filed too late. His other legal salvos failed as well.

Campaign launched early. Today, Bart is inmate #0001226826 at the Central State Prison in Georgia. He no longer looks like Jon Hamm.

The Department of Corrections lists his sentence as life with no possibility of early release, although the Gwinnett Daily Post reported he can try for parole in 2024.

To preempt any attempts, the Hearn family has encouraged the public to write letters and emails of protest to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles.

New tragedy. Meanwhile, Jennifer’s younger sister, Heather Tierney, and her husband, Doug, had taken custody of Dalton and Dillon. They brought them up alongside their own two children. “Taking care of four kids is the easy part,” Heather told 48 Hours Mystery. “Missing Jennifer is the hard part.”

A mugshot of Bart Corbin looking old and worn out — Bart Corbin in a recent prison mug shot. Unlike most Forensic
Files killers, he has stayed
slim while behind razor wire

Sadly, the Corbins’ good friends Steve, 47, and Kelly Comeau, 50, both died in 2010. Bart and Jennifer would have ended up adopting their daughter.

Tabitha, the cat Bart stole from Dolly Hearn, was returned in good shape and lived to the age of 21.

Innate evil. As far as what turned a law-abiding suburban medical professional into a killer, a bad temper like Bart’s might explain murdering in a rage (see fellow dentist Glen Wolsieffer) — but not plotting ahead to kill, stage suicides, and turn his sons into half-orphans.

Bart Corbin was most likely born that way, a typical Forensic Files psychopath who couldn’t stand for a significant other to cut ties with him.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

Patricia Rorrer: An Update

Joann Katrinak’s Killer Still Has Innocence Advocates
(“A Woman Scorned,” Forensic Files)

Patricia Rorrer has been portrayed as a bully, petty thief, neglectful horse owner, and heartless killer — or a sweet, caring friend railroaded by authorities desperate to solve a double-murder case that snagged worldwide interest.

Joann Katrinak wears what you might call a 1980s mullet — Murder victim Joann Katrinak

After Joann Katrinak, the wife of Patricia’s former flame, turned up dead along with her infant son, prosecutors suspected Patricia.

Highly charged case. Patricia’s accusers theorized that she resented Joann’s domestic bliss with the tall, athletic Andrew Katrinak. They allege that the North Carolina resident stealthily drove 500 miles to Pennsylvania and killed out of a sense of deadly indignation. Strands of the accused’s dyed-blond hair at two crime scenes proved it.

Or did they? Aside from the hair, there was almost zero forensic evidence. The state made a case fueled by circumstantial evidence and public outrage over the deaths of a modern-day madonna and child.

More than 20 years after her conviction, Patricia Rorrer still has advocates working to exonerate her.

Meticulous primping. For this week, I looked into the defenders’ reasoning as well as Patricia’s whereabouts today. And because some of Patricia’s advocates have suggested Andrew Katrinak had a motive for murder, I checked into whether he had a life insurance payout to gain upon Joann’s demise.

I also communicated with Patricia via email to get her input on some matters.

So let’s get going on the recap of the Forensic Files episode “A Woman Scorned,” along with extra information drawn from internet research:

Joann Marie O’Connor was born on Oct. 11, 1968, the youngest of Sarah and David O’Connor’s four children.

The Irish-Italian girl had full, fluffy dark hair, olive skin, and a pretty face. She made an effort to look perfectly groomed “even when she took out the trash,” according to her mother, who appeared on Forensic Files.

Great catch. Joann was “fun, likable, beautiful, always happy,” said her sister-in-law Cindy Wiard.

After a very early failed marriage, the 24-year-old Joann scored a new husband in Andrew Katrinak, 38, whom she met at a club. He had worked as a semi-pro boxer in Las Vegas in his youth and later settled into his own construction business.

The couple moved into Andrew’s sturdy brick house at 740 Front Street in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania. They had a son, Alex Martin, in August of 1994.

No show. On December 12, 1994, Joann answered a phone call from a woman she’d never met, Patricia Rorrer, her husband’s onetime girlfriend. She asked to speak with Andrew, who was home during the call; Joann refused.

Three days later, Joann had plans to pick up her mother-in-law, Veronica Katrinak, to go Christmas shopping.

Patricia Rorrer picture on the left in an undated photo and right circa 1997 — Patricia Rorrer in an undated photo, left, and one taken circa 1996

Joann never showed up.

Combination locks. At 10:30 p.m., Andrew reported his wife missing. And yikes, he discovered someone had cut one of the house’s phone lines and pried the hinge on the basement door.

Family members found Joann’s tan Toyota sitting vacant in the parking lot of McCarty’s, a nearby bar. Inside the locked 1992 vehicle, police discovered some strands of blond hair stained with dried blood. DNA testing revealed the blood came from either Joann or her son.

Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but the hairs were actually brown at the top and the rest dyed blond, according to the show Autopsy Six: A Fatal Attraction.

At first, local police suspected Andrew.

Puny policy. Detective Barry Grube found it odd that Andrew fixed the severed phone line before police examined it — in essence tampering with evidence. And Andrew’s explanation of how the intruder got in through the basement door seemed contrived, according to Grube, who gave an interview to Wrong Man, a 2020 true-crime docuseries from the Starz network, which produced two episodes called “The Hang Up” about the Rorrer case.

But investigators conceded they had no solid evidence against Andrew. Plus, he had only a “minimal” life insurance policy on Joann and he passed polygraphs, according to The FBI Files: Family Secrets. His father confirmed his alibi that they were doing construction work together, putting an addition on the house of friends Tom and Kathy Holschwander, at the time of Joann’s disappearance.

The Katrinaks’ four-bedroom two-bath house

Andrew described his existence with Joanne and Alex as a “little Camelot.”

Ex-spouse off list. “I can’t lose them,” he told the media. “That’s my life.”

The state police dropped him as a suspect.

Joann’s first husband, New Jersey construction worker Michael Jack, who had reportedly abused her during their marriage, also had a solid alibi.

Search is on. The police considered the possibility that Joann ran away, a theory disputed by her family. “She’s just extremely happy with Andy,” her brother, Michael O’Connor, told the media. “She’s extremely, extremely happy with the baby. In a million years, she wouldn’t do anything to harm that.”

No activity on her bank account or credit cards took place after the day she went missing, so investigators dismissed the theory that she took her child and bolted.

Meanwhile, the case of the missing mother and baby turned into colossal news across the U.S. and internationally. State police and the Philadelphia division of the FBI appealed to the public for leads. They released a poster of Joann and Alex, noting that the baby had “almond-shaped blue eyes,” weighed 18 pounds, and was circumcised.

Sad discovery. Still, no good leads materialized. “It’s definitely getting rougher every day,” Andrew told the Morning Call. “I don’t even know it’s Christmas.”

Four months after Joann’s disappearance, farmer Paul Kovalchik reported seeing what at first looked like a pile of clothes on his land in Heidelberg Township woods, about 15 miles from the Katrinaks’ house.

On closer inspection, he saw it was the body of a woman. An infant was lying face down on her stomach. Both were deceased.

More hairs there. Police identified the pair as Joann and Alex Katrinak. His favorite rattle, shaped like a phone, lay near the crime scene.

Someone had shot Joann in the face with a .22-caliber pistol, then beaten her about the head — hitting her 19 times in all — with a blunt object. Police couldn’t determine whether the baby died of exposure or suffocation.

On Alex’s diaper bag, police found strands of the same type of hair from the car.

Stable situation. In April 1995, the family buried Joann and Alex in a single bronze casket after a funeral mass at a Bethlehem church.

Andrew mentioned to police that his former live-in girlfriend Patricia Rorrer once managed a horse stable two miles from the bodies’ location and would have been familiar with the riding trails close to the murder scene. (Media sources vary as to whether she actually worked at the stable or just rented a stall there for her own horse.)

Patricia “seemed like the girl next door but all of a sudden, something snapped,” Katrinak later told Wrong Man investigators.

No charmed life. Patricia Lynne Rorrer made for a good suspect. Then 31 years old, she had lived a rocky existence.

She was born on Jan. 24, 1964, in eastern Pennsylvania and moved back and forth between there and Davidson County, North Carolina.

At 17, Patricia dropped out of high school and married landscaper Gary Gabard.

Later, they both worked 12-hour graveyard shifts at a textile factory. Her mother, Patricia Chambers, provided day care for their baby son, Charles.

Trash-talking ex. Patricia Rorrer “was a cold woman. She was always looking for a fight,” Gary Gabard told the Morning Call, which noted that he was “a head shorter” than Patricia.

Once, when a gun-wielding farmer and his buddy caught Patricia and Gary riding motorcycles on his field, Patricia walked up and “got in their faces” and argued, Gary recalled to the Morning Call.

“She is a tough one,” Sheriff Gerald Hege would later tell the Morning Call in a June 29, 1997 interview. “I don’t think she was ever scared until we put the cuffs on her.”

Walmart woe. Patricia’s professional life included short-lived gigs as a Century 21 real estate agent and an Oldsmobile salesperson. In North Carolina, she reportedly enjoyed some success as a horse trader, riding instructor, and rodeo competitor.

Patricia Rorrer with partially blond hair — The smoking gun: This photo proved Patricia Rorrer once had blond hair

But her reputation wasn’t exactly sleek and shiny. She got 12 months of probation for shoplifting at a Walmart in Lexington, North Carolina.

She was also accused of breaking into barns, stealing horses, and underfeeding the ones she owned. But none of those charges ever stuck.

New state, new man. Tragedy also touched Patricia’s life. Charles Robert, the 3-month-old son she had with Gary Gabard, died of sudden infant death syndrome; Patricia found him blue in his crib.

Patricia and her husband broke up after the baby’s death.

After relocating to Pennsylvania, Patricia met the 6-foot-2-inch Andrew in a restaurant. They moved into her house in Salisbury County, staying together for about two years. They broke up in 1993.

Dial-a-problem. Patricia defaulted on her mortgage and then returned to North Carolina, where she eventually moved in with a boyfriend named Brian Ward. Together they had a baby girl, Nicole.

When police traveled to North Carolina to interview Patricia about the murders of Joann and Alex, she said that on the day of the homicides, she had visited a feed store, a tanning salon, and a country music club.

Andrew told investigators that the unpleasant phone call between Joann and Patricia happened just three days before his wife’s disappearance.

Conflicting versions. Patricia’s phone bill showed no record of a call to Catasauqua that day, but police noticed she didn’t make any calls at all from her house in North Carolina that day either — suggesting she could have been out of state and used a pay phone to dial up the Katrinaks.

Brian Ward was Patricia's live-in boyfriend at the time of her arrest — Brian Ward was Patricia’s live-in boyfriend at the
time of her arrest. One theory says that she had the baby with him
to sanitize her image in the wake of the murders

As for the words exchanged on the call between the two big-haired women, Joann told Andrew that Patricia had used profanity; Patricia said it was the other way around. Both sides agree Joann hung up on Patricia.

Police slowly built a case against Patricia. Her alibi about going to the club, called Cowboy’s Nitelife, got fuzzy when investigators discovered she hadn’t signed the guest book on that day. And dance instructor William Jarrett couldn’t remember whether she attended his dance class at the club the night of Joann’s disappearance. On a secret recording, Patricia asked Jarrett to vouch for her attendance or she might go to the electric char.

“Why would somebody tell you, ‘they’re going to fry me,’ if they didn’t do it?” Jarrett told Wrong Man.

Hair we go. As for the murder weapon, police didn’t find a .22 caliber pistol on Patricia’s property, but an ex-boyfriend claimed that she owned one — and it would always jam after one shot.

They also found a photo of Patricia taken 11 days before the homicide. It showed her usually all-brown hair haphazardly highlighted blond. Forensic tests suggested the hair found in the car and at the murder scene came from Patricia.

According to court papers from Patricia 2017 appeal, “DNA on the cigarette butt found near the two bodies belonged to Appellant.” (Prosecutor Michael McIntyre, however, told ForensicFilesNow.com that that the cigarette butt was never actually tested).

Incriminating words. At 6 a.m. on June 24, 1997, police arrested Patricia at her modest house in Linwood, North Carolina, and took her back to Pennsylvania.

Lieutenant Christopher Coble and Sergeant Suzanne Pearson would later testify that Patricia cried and apologized to 18-month-old Nicole, telling the baby, “I’m sorry for doing this to you” and lamenting to the officers that she would never see little Nicole again.

“If I knew I was going to get caught, I never would have brought you into this world,” the arresting officers testified they heard her say to Nicole.

Deal refused. The authorities charged her with two counts of murder. After her arraignment, she had to walk past a crowd of dozens of locals screeching “hang her!” and “baby killer!” Patricia clung to a Polaroid picture showing her and her own little girl.

Prosecutors offered Patricia a plea deal that would take the death penalty off the table, but she declined. “How could I explain to my daughter years later that I took a plea for something I didn’t do?” she said.

At the trial, prosecutor Michael McIntyre alleged that Patricia remained obsessed with Andrew Katrinak long after their breakup — despite testimony that she’d had “many boyfriends and live-in lovers” to occupy her bandwidth.

Kidnapped and killed? Ex-boyfriend Walter Blalock said that Patricia wanted him to be more like Andrew. Another former boyfriend said she talked about Andrew frequently and liked to gaze at old photos of him.

Patricia Rorrer, seen here in custody in a tan jail uniform, dressed up when in the courtroom. She looked more like an educator on parent-teacher night than an accused murderer — Patricia Rorrer in custody

The prosecution alleged that Patricia called the Katrinaks’ house from a pay phone in Pennsylvania. Angry that Joann hung up on her, she stalked her for three days, then broke into her basement and cut the phone line, put a gun to Joann’s head as she was placing Alex in the car, and forced her to drive to the rural area.

After one bullet didn’t kill Joann, the gun locked up, so Patricia had to beat her to death, according to the prosecution. The 5-foot-9-inch-tall Patricia was physically strong, no match for 5-foot-4-inch Joann.

Testimony from Walter Blalock contradicted Patricia’s claim that she never had a gun. He said she did own a firearm, with its serial numbers filed off.

Prosecutor pounds away. And in a piece of salacious testimony, Patricia Rorrer’s half sister, Sandra Ireland, said that in May 1995, about six months after the murder, their mother, Patricia Chambers, stopped by the house and asked her to hold onto or hide a gun, or both. Ireland’s husband buried it in the yard because he didn’t feel comfortable with a firearm inside, she said.

During Patricia’s hours-long turn in the witness chair, Michael McIntyre grilled her relentlessly. According to a Morning Call account from March 5, 1998:

“McIntyre leaned forward conspiratorially like someone trying to persuade another to tell a secret, lowered his voice and said: “Here’s what I want to know: After you killed Joann Katrinak, did you kill that baby or just leave it to die?”

“Sir I would not kill somebody and I definitely wouldn’t kill somebody I never met,” Rorrer said.

Dance defense. The prosecution alleged that after the murder, Patricia drove Joann’s car to McCarty’s parking lot and backed it into a parking space. Those who knew Joann pointed out that she didn’t like to drive in reverse and would have never parked that way.

When Patricia Chambers, seen here outside of court, died in 2001, there was no one to take baby Nicole to visit Patricia Rorrer in prison — After Patricia Chambers, seen here outside of court, died in 2001, there was no one to take Nicole to visit
Patricia Rorrer in prison

But defense lawyer Robert Pfeiffer said that plenty of evidence supported Patricia’s innocence. For one thing, her mother never asked Sandra Ireland to “hide” the gun, and she retrieved it on the way home the next day — she worked as a bus driver and couldn’t take it with her to school.

Plus, two men, her baby’s father and his friend, testified they saw Patricia at the line-dancing club the night of the homicide.

Pal stays true. Pfeiffer and Burke claimed that police Sgt. Suzanne Pearson fabricated quotes from Patricia — including her claim that Patricia said, “I’m going to the electric chair” upon her arrest — because a conviction would boost Pearson’s career.

And Patricia wasn’t all edges. She was bubbly and likable, not disgruntled, according to friend Kathy Barber, who visited her friend in jail.

Other loyal friends and associates attested to Patricia’s kindness toward horses and devotion to her daughter, whom she took along as she worked in stables.

Not gender neutral. A newspaper account described Patricia as a soft-spoken, demure woman who had a sweet Southern accent and wore feminine clothes in court.

It all gave jurors a lot to think about — but only for six hours. They returned with a guilty verdict and a sentence of two life terms.

At the trial, Patricia Rorrer looked more like an educator on parent- teacher night than a tough cowgirl — At the trial, Patricia Rorrer looked more like an educator on parent-teacher night than a tough cowgirl

Advocates for her innocence complain of hype surrounding the case. “Men who murder are conventional, women are sensational,” posits the Worldwide Women’s Criminal Justice Network. “The media love the femme fatale.”

FBI lab blunder. The organization purports that “if there were awards for distorted reporting, the Morning Call…would win high honors.”

The Worldwide Women’s Criminal Justice Network’s website also points to a bombshell: In 2015, the Justice Department acknowledged that most of the team members from an FBI microscopic hair comparison unit gave prosecutors flawed data from 1980 to 2000 that could have unjustly contributed to a number convictions — including Patricia Rorrer’s.

Some lawyers call microscopic hair analysis junk science that today wouldn’t qualify as evidence in a trial like Rorrer’s.

Book her. Further, an early FBI report said the hairs found in the car had no roots — which contain the DNA — suggesting an evidence switcheroo.

But that’s just some of the ammo on Team Patricia’s battleship. She’s attracted the help of writer Tammy Mal (full name Tammy Malinowski O’Reilly), author of Convenient Suspect, a book about the case. And James Pfeiffer and Jim Burke have remained on her side.

They theorize that Andrew Katrinak framed Patricia and that the hostile phone call between Patricia and Joann actually took place not on Dec. 12 as Andrew said but rather on Dec. 7. Phone records confirmed Patricia placed the earlier call from North Carolina, not Pennsylvania.

Great communicator. Patricia’s defenders also say Andrew Katrinak staged the scene at his house by prying the door and cutting the phone line. The phone wire was located at the opposite end of the basement, which was dark. How would an intruder find it?

And the fact that Patricia called Andrew even after he married someone else didn’t mean she was still carrying a torch for him, according to one of her friends. “She just stayed in touch with everybody,” Kathy Barber said in her interview on NBC’s Murder in Lehigh Valley: Keith Morrison Reports in 2017. “And she would just call out of the blue.”

According to the Free Patricia Rorrer page on Facebook:

“I called him to let him know that I was going to the USA finals for a horse show. I was so excited that I called everyone, and Joanne picked up the phone … and she said Andy is married, and I said I know, then she said we have a baby, and I said yea I know, then she said don’t ever call here again. … I was like OK, maybe she was tired, you know with a new baby. …. I really never thought of it again.“

Cop defends accused. The Free Patricia Rorrer page responds to comments from supporters (“How is this even possible that this woman is still in jail?!?!”) and detractors (“This is another bs attempt to free a psycho”).

Barry Grube, one of the few — if not only—police officers sympathetic to Patricia’s cause, noted that Andrew didn’t seem particularly frantic while authorities searched desperately for his wife and son. In TV clips, Andrew didn’t come off as anguished.

Mal told Keith Morrison that Patricia’s dance teacher originally confirmed her alibi that she was in class on the day of the murder, then changed his mind.

Unbloody vehicle. At the state’s request, the instructor wore a wire during a phone conversation with Patricia. Although the prosecution used it as evidence that she was trying to create a false alibi, it actually sounded more like Patricia was simply trying to nail down the facts he had already asserted to her.

And even prosecutor Michael McIntyre, who wrote the book Hair Trigger about the case, acknowledged to Keith Morrison that it was a little odd that the police found blood on the hairs in Joann’s car but nowhere else in the vehicle. If Patricia drove it back from the murder scene after she shot Joann and then beat her to death, luminal would have lit up the interior.

There’s also the matter of a woman who suddenly remembered she saw Joann with another man at a Food Mart store five days after the disappearance. (Disclaimer: I’m not a big fan of eyewitnesses who come forward years after the fact, but it’s possible).

Flaw in reasoning. Another witness, Walter Traupman, who never testified, had told state troopers that on the day of Joann’s disappearance, he saw a couple who looked like Joann and Andrew arguing about the paternity of a baby. Traupman claimed that when he reported the dispute, trooper Robert V. Egan III got mad and practically kicked him out of his office. The police report misspells his name (“Troutman”) and doesn’t include his address, suggesting authorities didn’t want anyone to track him down, according to Patricia’s side. (McIntyre said that Egan ignored Traupman because he was a nut who said that the man he saw arguing with the woman in a car was Hispanic but wearing a fake mustache and a toupee. Traupman died in 2016.)

The Wrong Man investigators Ira Todd and Joe Kennedy have some theories of their own. They noted houses near the murder scene would have heard a gunshot in December, when no farm equipment is making noise, and question why the murderer didn’t just kill Joann inside her house instead of risking being seen in public in her car. (A good point.)

Sarah O'Connor lost a daughter and a grandson — Sarah O’Connor lost a daughter and a grandson

And in another bombshell, Joann’s good friend Karen Devine said Joann planned to leave Andrew after the holidays. “She had a suitcase packed,” Devine said. “She had money put aside. He wanted to move to Colorado and she was against it.”

Nailed? The Free Patricia Rorrer page points to a sliver of a fingernail found at the murder site that didn’t come from either Patricia or Joann.

Despite the new evidence and hypotheses, the courts have rejected all of Patricia’s bids for a new trial.

The Innocence Project has declined to take her case.

Weak wages. Today, Patricia Lynne Rorrer resides in State Correctional Institute at Muncy, a medium and maximum security facility that has the highest rate of cancer of all prisons in Pennsylvania, according to a story from northcentralpa.com.

Patricia Rorrer in a 2020 mugshot — Patricia Rorrer in a 2020 mug shot

The article also notes that most inmates earn around 19 cent an hour at their jobs and must pay $5 each time they need medical attention or medicine.

I was able to email with Patricia via the PrisonConnect platform around Christmastime. She said that she’s no fan of Forensic Files and that the show had “many misrepresentations” about her case and that she’d heard ForensicFilesNow.com mixed up some facts as well. (We didn’t get into the specifics.)

One on one? Patricia also pointed out that when author Tammy Mal “started her research and speaking to me, she was not an advocate at all” — but she reversed and ended up advocating for Patricia’s innocence.

Most of all, Patricia said, she would like a rematch with prosecutor Michael McIntyre.

Now retired, he declined ForensicFilesNow.com’s invitation to spar directly with Patricia via a podcast.

“I most definitely will not personally afford Patricia a platform,” Michael said in an email to ForensicFilesNow.com “She had her chance to answer my questions and tell her story in court over 20 years ago. She failed miserably to convince me, or anyone else who mattered, of her innocence. “

Meanwhile, interest in Patricia’s plight continues on social media. In addition to the Facebook page, there are Reddit threads on her case. On Instagram, I found a post for a two-part Win at All Costs podcast featuring journalism professor Bill Moushey’s interviews with Patricia Rorrer from prison in December 2019.

Media galore. As for an epilogue on ex-flame Andrew Katrinak, he has moved to Colorado and kept a low profile since the trial ended. He gave an audio interview to the Wrong Man investigators when they made a surprise visit to his house, but he declined to appear on camera.

As for Joann’s parents, her father died a year after the murder. “My husband passed away of a broken heart,” Sarah O’Connor said on the Montel Williams Show in 2001. “He would be alive today if it were not for Patricia Rorrer.” The mild-mannered Sarah died in 2019 at the age of 83.

For more on the Katrinak murder case, you can watch Autopsy Six: A Fatal Attraction for free on YouTube.

Murder in Lehigh Valley: Keith Morrison Reports is also available on YouTube, but it costs $1.99 to view (Keith comes off as an advocate for Patricia’s innocence on the episode).

If you subscribe to Hulu and upgrade to Starz (there’s a free one-week trial offer), you can stream the Wrong Man episodes about Patricia Rorrer. The series was produced by Joe Berlinger, who made the Paradise Lost documentaries, which garnered actor Johnny Depp’s attention and ultimately helped free the West Memphis Three.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

A Sheriff Who Traded His Star for a Pen

Harry Spiller Discusses Kathy Woodhouse’s Murder and More in a Q&A
(“A Clean Getaway,” Forensic Files)

Author Harry Spiller with his dog, Bella, whose only crime was being too cute

If there’s one takeaway from Harry Spiller’s career in law enforcement, it’s that criminals are dumb and irrational.

“You almost get to the point where you don’t expect normal things to happen,” says Spiller, who retired from his job as Williamson County sheriff and went on to write 17 history and true-crime books, including the Murder in the Heartland series about homicides in Illinois and Missouri.

Forensic Files watchers may recognize Spiller from his appearance on “Clean Getaway,” the episode about Paul Taylor’s rape and murder of Kathy Woodhouse.

Born and raised in Marion, Illinois, Spiller spent 10 years in the Marines, doing two tours in Vietnam before returning to the Land of Lincoln and donning a sheriff’s badge.

Spiller, who today teaches criminal justice at John A. Logan College, recently gave ForensicFilesNow.com some extra intelligence on the Woodhouse case as well as a couple of other famous homicides that happened 50 years apart.

Edited excerpts of the conversation with Harry Spiller follow:

Do you watch true-crime shows now? They don’t hold my interest as much as other people’s. It’s always, “Can you believe it really happened?” I say, “Ride around with us in a squad car for a while.” You see the way people can treat one another — child abuse, domestic abuse.

Is it true that the area around Herrin, Illinois, is so safe that police almost laughed off the anonymous call reporting Kathy Woodhouse’s murder? The police didn’t really think it was a joke. Everyone wants to think they live in Mayberry, RFD, but we have a lot more crime than what people would imagine.

You mentioned that Kathy’s killer, Paul Taylor, had a tough life. Do you think it drove him to rape and murder? I’m not saying that’s why he did it, but it could be a reason he got off keel.

After years of watching Forensic Files, I’m curious: When ATF or FBI agents join an investigation, does local law enforcement resent it? No, they’re used to working together. Sometimes the FBI would have information it couldn’t share and they’d want us to help but wouldn’t tell us what’s going on, which was difficult. But overall, I have the highest respect for the FBI.

Are there any cases you discuss with students in your work as a professor? I use the Jeff MacDonald Fatal Vision case.

Do you think that Jeffrey MacDonald [a handsome surgeon and Green Beret convicted of stabbing his wife and daughters to death in 1970] is guilty? In court, I think he was railroaded because people didn’t like him because he was cheating on his wife and he didn’t do much to push for looking for another suspect.

Colette, Kimberley, and Kristin MacDonald and Dr. Jeff MacDonald

But, yes, I think he’s guilty.

He took a polygraph, but you can beat a polygraph. He never would take truth serum — if you take that and they start asking you questions, you can’t fake it.

I wrote to Jeff MacDonald and his team, and I asked why he didn’t take truth serum.

He wrote me back and said, “We already have enough evidence to prove I’m innocent.”

Fast-forwarding to today, what’s your take on the case of Jacob Blake, the unarmed black man who a police officer shot in the back multiple times in August 2020? There are times when someone does something and the police have to react quickly — but not in that case. ♣

You can buy Harry Spiller’s books from Amazon or at a discount via his Facebook page or by emailing harryspiller@icloud.com.

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

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Paul Taylor’s Murder of Kathy Woodhouse

He Raped and Killed Before Turning 21
(“Clean Getaway,” Forensic Files)

Forensic Files viewers know the frustration of finding out that the justice system could have prevented a rape and murder if only it doled out a longer sentence the first time the perpetrator committed a sexual assault (Colvin “Butch” Hinton and Thomas Jabin Berry).

Kathy Woodhouse, left, with her daughter. Paul Taylor liked to prey upon petite women double his age

Kathy Woodhouse’s 1992 rape and murder falls into that category. “Clean Getaway,” the episode about the case, mentions that the killer spent some time in a juvenile detention facility before he committed the deadly attack on the mother of three. But the show doesn’t mention what he did to earn his bunk there or why he got out early.

Mysterious ring. For this week, I did some research and learned of the horrible crime he committed at the age of 14. I also looked into his whereabouts today.

So let’s get going on a recap of “Clean Getaway” along with extra information from online sources as well as Murder in the Heartland author Harry Spiller, who gave a phone interview to ForensicFilesNow.com:

On a Saturday on January 18, 1992, a caller told police that a woman had been raped and murdered in the back of a dry cleaning store in Herrin, Illinois.

Worst case scenario. It sounded like a legitimate concerned-citizen call except for two things: The man didn’t give his name and murders didn’t usually happen in the small town of about 12,000 people in Williamson County.

At first, police believed the call might be a prank.

But when they arrived at Fox’s Laundry and Dry Cleaners, they found a deceased woman beaten about the head, probably with a mop wringer that remained on the scene.

Pandemonium. The murder victim was Kathy Ann Woodhouse, a 40-year-old Herrin native who had three kids ranging in age from 13 to 22 and had been married to Joe Woodhouse for 18 years.

After hearing that something out of the ordinary had happened at Fox’s, Kathy Woodhouse’s mother headed to the scene.

“I saw all these cops around and they wouldn’t let me go inside,” Sybil East later recalled, adding that Kathy’s employer had been planning to transfer her to a store in Marion in just a couple of days.

Not a ‘secrete.’ Police questioned a customer who had left a check for $14.30 on the counter and retrieved her own dry-cleaning..

She gave a police artist a description of the tall white man who poked his head out of the backroom and asked if she needed help as she was exiting the store. The customer guessed the man’s age at 30 to 35.

Police believe Paul Taylor entered the dry-cleaning store shortly after Kathy Woodhouse opened it up in the morning

Unfortunately, lab work on semen recovered from the victim revealed it came from a nonsecretor — someone whose bodily fluids carry no indications of blood type.

Locals shaken. A fingerprint found on the payphone used to make the 911 call didn’t match that of any known offender.

In the meantime, state police Captain William Barrett warned the rattled community to stay alert but not give in to “excess hysteria.”

Early on, police got a tip that threw them off course — and probably mortified a slightly perverted young customer. Kathy had told a friend that an anonymous man called the store and asked what color toenail polish she was wearing.

Nailed. Investigators tracked down the gentleman via phone records. Under police questioning, the suspect, a 25-year-old construction worker, disclosed that he knew Kathy from visiting the store and eventually admitted he made the call. He said it was something he liked to do every so often, but he had no involvement in the murder.

Kathy and Joe Woodhouse with their children. The eldest came from Kathy’s first marriage

Luckily for him, he had an alibi that checked out.

Next up, an anonymous source suggested that the police look at a local man named Paul E. Taylor.

Odds against him. Paul, who was just 20 years old, had led a turbulent life. His parents divorced when he was 2 and his mother was reportedly an alcoholic. She remarried, to a man named Douglas Jackson, and he allegedly would physically assault her and verbally abuse young Paul.

“It’s my understanding that as he grew up and in school, he was picked on because he was extremely poor,” said Harry Spiller.

Paul also ran away and spent some time in a foster home.

By his mid-teens, he had landed at the Louisiana Training Institute, a detention facility for juveniles. But his offenses were way more serious than vandalizing cars or shooting garden gnomes with a BB gun.

Savage teen. In 1984, at the age of 14, Paul entered the women’s bathroom at a Baton Rouge hotel that was hosting a school administrators conference. He grabbed an attendee named Sandra Lott while she was drying her hands, according to court papers.

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After dragging her to a stall, the teenager brandished a butcher knife, told her to take off her clothes, and sexually assaulted her; he made a failed attempted at penetration. When another woman entered the bathroom, he threatened to kill Sandra Lott if she made a sound.

Next, Paul let Sandra dress, forced her to go to a nearby field with high grass, and made her disrobe a second time. The victim, who weighed 84 pounds, said she suddenly realized that if he raped her, he would probably kill her. Sandra fled and got help from a man who gave her his coat and alerted police.

Guess who’s out. Paul evaded capture at first — no one knew his identity yet — but two weeks later, authorities arrested a male who trespassed in the same women’s bathroom. Sandra Lott confirmed him as her attacker.

Harry Spiller during his appearance on Forensic Files

Despite the severity of his assault on Sandra, Paul got a sentence for only the “remainder of his juvenile life,” that is, until he turned 21. He spent the time at both the Louisiana Training Institute, now known as the Jetson Center for Youth, and the low-security Ponchatoula Police Jail.

But Judge Kathleen Stewart Richey let him out a few months early after psychologists said he had made “maximum progress” and recognized the seriousness of his crime. He had a job lined up, and Illinois officials had assured the judge that parole officers would supervise the young man on the outside.

Free to flip burgers. After his release, he moved in with his mother two blocks from the future murder scene, and began working at Hardee’s.

The fast food restaurant used Fox’s to clean employee uniforms.

Paul’s manager at Hardee’s told police that Paul had just quit and had said he planned to return to Louisiana. The law nabbed him as he was leaving a Van Halen concert with friends.

Forensic Files stated that Paul Taylor’s appearance surprised authorities because he didn’t look like the artist’s sketch — but I disagree. The drawing lacked the mustache Paul wore in real life, but the facial features, especially the nose, were very similar. (The composite looked more convincing than the police sketch used to wrongfully convict Richard Alexander of rape.)

Paul Taylor was living in this house on South 16th Street when he murdered Kathy Woodhouse

Nylons afoot. Many YouTube viewers who saw Paul Taylor’s photo expressed surprise that he was only 20 (“in dog years,” wrote Poelo Mokgotho19).

Whatever the case, a partial pair of pantyhose Paul hid under his bed looked similar to a piece of hosiery found near the murder scene. His palm print matched an impression left on a plastic bag near Kathy’s body.

Prosecutors alleged that Paul pulled pantyhose over his face, forced Kathy Woodhouse into the backroom and raped her.

Disturbed dialer. When he heard the customer come in, he took off his stocking mask and greeted her to make sure she wouldn’t come to the backroom, they contended. Then, the 6-foot-2-inch-tall rapist killed Kathy because she could have identified him.

Paul had robbed her purse of $3.

So why did he call the police to report the murder and rape?

“Sometimes you get people — especially the psychos — who think they’re smarter than everyone else,” Harry Spiller told ForensicFilesNow.com. “They have a tendency to think ‘I did it. You can’t catch me.’ You’ve heard about serial killers who write letters to the police.”

Curse in the courtroom. Under questioning, Paul Taylor confessed to the robbery and murder. Later, he reluctantly admitted that he raped Kathy Woodhouse, too.

Still, the case went to trial. In addition to Sandra Lott, the prosecution had Linda Schott, the accused’s first cousin, as a witness.

Paul audibly grumbled the word “bitch” as Linda took the stand. She told the court that he propositioned her for sex and mailed her threatening letters after she declined. He signed his name to the letters and wrote his return address on the envelopes.

Manson wannabe. A prison employee testified that he overheard Paul bragging to another inmate about the murder. Paul said he tried complimenting Kathy Woodhouse on her looks and said her jeans “were like a second skin.” He also confessed to the other prisoner that he “had to have her.” And once he had her, he “didn’t want her anymore” so he murdered her, and his only regret was not wearing gloves, according to the witness.

Paul Taylor definitely had loose lips. Linda Schott testified that Paul told her that he considered Charles Manson his idol and wanted to gather himself a band of followers.

On the defense’s side of the aisle, there was clinical psychologist David Warshauer. He testified that Paul Taylor suffered from alcohol abuse, depression, antisocial personality disorder, and schizotypal personality disorder.

Mother fumes. Nonetheless, on cross-examination, Warshauer admitted that Paul probably knew right from wrong.

For Kathy Woodhouse’s 77-year-old mother, Sybil East — who often held hands with older daughter Nancy Burlison during the trial — the proceedings were an exercise in terse self-control.

“In the courtroom, I couldn’t cry,” Sybil told the Southern Illinoisan years later. “I was just so angry. I wanted to kill him.”

Chamber closes. For a while, it looked as though she might get to see him perish. On Oct. 15, 1992, a jury decided that the case against Paul contained no mitigating factors that would preclude capital punishment. Paul “stared intently” as jurors individually confirmed the decision, according to a Southern Illinoisan account.

Paul Taylor, then 21, received a sentence of death by lethal injection.

But in 2003, Gov. George Ryan gave a blanket commutation to all 167 convicts on death row in Illinois because of inequities in the legal system.

Husband lawyers up. Paul ended up resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole — and he declared that he would stop appealing and resign himself to life behind razor wire unless Illinois reinstates his death sentence.

He later said he had no remorse for the murder but didn’t realize Kathy Woodhouse left three children behind and felt sympathy for them.

In December 1992, Kathy’s widower and children filed suit against Louisiana for letting Paul Taylor out of the juvenile facility early. The release enabled Paul to murder Kathy, they contended. (Of course, if the state kept him until he was 21, he probably would have raped and murdered someone else.)

He got lots of ink. Today, Paul Taylor resides in the Illinois River Correctional Center, a medium-security facility in Canton.

The Illinois Department of Corrections’ website states clearly that the 230-pound inmate — whose collection of tattoos includes a smiley face, a dog, and a rose — is ineligible for parole.

No word on how the Woodhouses fared with the lawsuit, but the family took comfort in an outpouring of support from friends and neighbors. The Southern Illinoisan published a letter written by Frank Starkweather, the minister of the Christian Life Center, where the Woodhouses attended services, to thank the community for its kindness.

Author, author. According to older sister Nancy Burlison, Kathy Woodhouse had experienced a religious awakening in early adulthood.

“Everyday life is so mundane and boring,” Kathy once said. “I want to live in the heavens.”

That’s all for this post. Coming up next week is a Q&A with Harry Spiller, who has studied Paul Taylor’s homicide case and written a set of books on true crime in the Midwest.

Until then, cheers. — RR

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Richard Dean White’s Explosive Crimes

A Mentally Ill Man Terrorizes Churches
(“Holy Terror,” Forensic Files)

The Forensic Files episode about Richard Dean White’s bomb attacks ends with a suicide rather than a trial and a prison sentence.

Murder victim Brian Plawer was closing a door to eliminate a draft when he spotted an object just outside his church

White’s death saved Vermilion County the expense and drama of prosecuting him for planting explosives in two Illinois churches in 1997 and 1998.

“Holy Terror,” the episode about White, explains that he committed the crimes out of disgruntlement after one of the religious organizations denied him membership. But the show leaves another question largely unanswered.

Suspicious box. How did churchgoers react to sudden terror and contend with what happened in the aftermath?

For this week, I looked for some answers, so let’s get going on the recap of the episode along with information from internet research:

On Dec. 30, 1997, a popular Sunday School teacher named Brian Plawer noticed a green object outside the Oakwood United Methodist Church. He had been helping with the church’s newsletter that day.

Drama outside. Brian, a 46-year-old father of three who worked as a superintendent of Kickapoo State Park, touched or moved the item, triggering an explosion that killed him.

The blast was quiet enough that the attendees listening to Rev. Bill Adams’ sermon inside didn’t know anything had happened until a messenger whispered the news into Adams’ ear.

“We went out the back door and immediately saw Brian lying on his right side,” the victim’s wife, Wanda Plawer, told the News-Gazette. “I could see that he had wounds on his left arm, but there wasn’t any blood. I knew his heart had stopped. I ran over to him and knelt beside him.”

Sourced from Walmart. If there’s anything fortunate about a homicide caused by an explosion, it’s that local authorities can get help from the Feds.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives identified a green fragment of plastic at the scene as part of an Igloo 12 cooler model sold only at Walmart. The remnants of a pipe bomb included 30-gauge blue insulated silver-coated copper wire that probably came from a local Radio Shack (Mark Hoffmann, David Copenhefer).

Meanwhile, the police had received an intriguing anonymous tip: They should check out Oakwood High School students Jimmy Morris and Phil Ryan (it’s unclear whether those are their real names or pseudonyms used because of their young ages).

Powder-keg potential. A Radio Shack employee recalled seeing Jimmy, 18, in the store but couldn’t remember what he bought. In their police interviews, Jimmy and Phil, 16, changed their stories about their whereabouts at the time of the bombing, then ratted each other out. Each said that the other owned a green cooler.

Investigators found out Jimmy and Phil enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing game sometimes scapegoated when its devotees commit crimes.

A story about homicidal teenage D&D enthusiasts could have turned into a global sensation, but before any serious hype ignited, there was a new attack with a larger and louder bomb.

Mess and mayhem. On May 24, 1998, an explosion tore through the First Assembly of God Church at 428 N. Walnut St. in Danville.

One member said at first he thought lightning hit the roof.

“I heard all this screaming and praying,” church youth group member Amanda Brady told the Chicago Tribune. “Everything was white at first and you couldn’t see too well. It was all in my mouth. It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted.”

Apocalypse not yet. Nicole Lewis Miller recalled that she was praying with her eyes closed when all of a sudden the sun shone through a 20-x-20-foot hole in the western wall.

“I’m thinking it’s the rapture or the end of the world. Then, I saw my friends bleeding and it dawned on me that something’s not right,” Nicole told the Commercial-News in 2018. She herself suffered a fractured temporal bone and severed nerve; she needed a blood transfusion and multiple surgeries.

The First Assembly of God Church after the explosion

Rev. Dennis Rogers, who found himself thrown to the floor, managed to reach his microphone and instruct everyone to leave via the back doors.

Kids all right. In all, the blast injured 33 people, some of whom had shrapnel embedded in their faces; one girl had a nail travel through her leg. A boy suffered hearing loss and said he periodically found splinters in his shoulder years after the incident.

This time, teenage suspects Jimmy and Ryan had solid alibis. The two said their previous accusations against each other were just an extension of D&D.

Meanwhile, investigators started getting reports about a suspicious individual spotted near the first bombing site. He was Richard Dean White, a 39-year-old man with a German Shepherd for a best friend.

Weighty subject. White, who weighed 300 pounds, had a history of struggling with paranoid schizophrenia, which led to his discharge from the army, where he reached the level of sergeant. Over the years, he checked in and out of a number of psychiatric treatment facilities. An unnamed associate who appeared on FF said White imagined demons beneath the floor.

A neighbor would later describe White as a “weird” man who wore flip-flops to ride his motorcycle and didn’t seem to have a job, the Associated Press reported.

Some other churchgoers recalled White as strange and withdrawn and neighbors described him as melancholy and depressed, according to a Chicago Tribune account.

Short marriage. “He was an okay guy until he shorted out, then he’d go on a rampage,” an unnamed acquaintance told the Journal and Courier.

Nonetheless, at one juncture in his life, White got his illness under control for long enough to snag a spouse and find work at a General Motors plant.

Forensic Files criminals seem to enjoy buying components at Radio Shack

But his wedded bliss lasted only six months and he lost his job.

Car thievery. At some point, the First Assembly of God Church turned down his bid for membership, although he reportedly continued to attend services there off and on. An unidentified source interviewed on FF said that White’s psychiatric problems probably contributed to the rejection.

Even before the bombings, White had a troublesome legal history. He got two years of probation after attempting to steal a Corvette from a Chevrolet dealership in Danville in 1987. A weapons charge prompted the state to revoke his gun permit. He sometimes used the name Richard D. Shotts in order to get around firearms laws.

White lived with his mother (or grandmother, depending on whose version of the story you read) and his teenage daughter at 203 Grace Street in Danville.

Best friend goes with him. Soon, the law began to close in on White. According to a Chicago Sun-Times account, when police called his home, White’s grandmother answered, saying, “He’s here now. Why don’t you come over?”

First Assembly of God Church shown intact and with the blast hole — The bomber placed the explosive on an air conditioner just outside the First Assembly of God Church, but it ripped the building open and injured dozens inside

She woke up Richard to let him know company was on the way.

As authorities knocked on the Whites’ front door, they heard a bomb go off in the garage. They found a decapitated Richard Dean White with his arm around his dog.

Dress rehearsal. In the rubble, they discovered pipe bomb components that matched those from the explosive device found at the Danville crime scene.

They also uncovered a second, intact explosive device in the wreckage.

Investigators believe White’s goal was to bomb the First Assembly of God Church because of the rejection and that he planted the smaller device at the Methodist church first as a test or perhaps to divert attention from his real target. White’s ex-wife belonged to the Methodist church, but police ultimately concluded that White had targeted no specific victim in either attack.

Widow’s grief. But what about the emotional toll of the bombings on the victims?

For the wife of the only person killed, the pain stayed fresh over the years.

“No matter how good of an imagination you have, if you haven’t experienced it, the reality is 100 times worse,” Wanda Plawer said of Brian Plawer’s death at the Oakwood United Methodist Church. “You just force yourself to get through each day… but the hole that’s left by Brian is still there. You just learn to live around it.”

Remorse for bomber’s treatment. Citizens of Danville, the town where the second bombing happened, reacted with shock, an “eye for an eye” sentiment, and paranoia, according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch account published a few months after the bombing.

Or, as Journal and Courier reporter Mark Rahner put it, “The town’s face has gotten a few more lines on it.”

Nonetheless, members of the First Assembly of God Church, which had dozens of injuries but no fatalities, dealt with the attack via reconstruction, forgiveness, and regret for not helping White before he turned to violence and terror.

“Here’s a man raised in the city of Danville and I wonder what our church and other churches could have done or should have done to have given him a better perspective on life,” said First Assembly of God’s Rev. Rogers, as reported in the Chicago Tribune.

Good will. Rogers officiated at Richard Dean White’s funeral and told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that White’s family deserved sympathy regardless of his guilt or innocence.

“The kids that were hurt were saying prayers for the person who did it,” church member Nancy Richards told the Post-Dispatch.

After the bombing, church members increased their donations to pay for $30,000 in repairs. They managed to salvage a stained-glass window with a large dove image.

Membership intact. On the 10-year anniversary of the bombing, Rev. David Rumley told his congregation, “We want to be remembered as not the church that was bombed, but as the church that has compassion and does things for other people,” according to a News-Gazette account.

The church has since maintained the same number of members but changed its name to The Assembly.

No word, however, on whether it’s changed its membership policy, which some Forensic Files viewers decried on YouTube.

Prejudice amid the pews. As Mike Aftos wrote:

“You need a membership to join a church! Goes to show how misled Americans are.”

Or as Chris Fox typed:

“And then Jesus said, ‘You must fill out form 2-7b in order to be a member of my congregation.'”

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

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Tracey Frame’s Murder of David Nixon

A Charismatic Real Estate Agent Meets His End
(“Separation Anxiety,” Forensic Files)

Tech snafu: If the pictures aren’t visible in this post, read it here

When it came to brokering deals on houses, David Nixon had great instincts. He “could sell a screen door to a submarine,” according to one friend.

Donna and David Nixon at their wedding — David Nixon’s first wife, Donna, described him as vivacious and fond of surprises

In the 1990s, the personable 6-foot-4-inch Texan’s name dotted the Fort Worth Star-Telegram‘s real estate ads, where he advertised homes with “commercial grade appliances” and “pool & cabana.”

Early exit. By the millennium, he was collecting commissions on million-dollar spreads.

But he didn’t always make the right decisions when managing his money or his personal relationships, and it ultimately cost him his life at age 40.

For this week, I looked for additional information on the case and whether Tracey Frame — the younger woman who cut down David Nixon in the early years of his mid-life crisis — is still in prison. So let’s get going on the recap for “Separation Anxiety,” the 2010 episode of Forensic Files, along with extra information drawn from internet research:

Friendly skies. In 1990, David Nixon married Donna Lella and they had a son the following year.

They enjoyed a happy union until David began an affair with a big-haired flight attendant referred to as Lisa Hill on TV and Lisa Hemby in court papers.

After divorcing Donna, he married Lisa. That relationship lasted for just a couple years, and things had turned so stormy toward the end that David obtained a temporary protective order against Lisa.

Making a splash. Soon after, he met Tracey Frame at a party. A number of sources give her occupation as accountant, but she was really a bookkeeper who had taken some accounting classes and liked to tell people she was a CPA, according to Detective Larry Hallmark’s interview on the “Tracey Frame” episode of Snapped.

Lisa Hill invoked her Fifth Amendment rights when questioned about Nixon, but she was cleared of anything to do with his death

Whatever the case, David found her crystal green eyes and confident personality irresistible, and they settled into a house on Pecan Hollow Court in Grapevine, an upscale lakeside community known for socializing, boat-riding, and general high living.

Tracey and David were a popular, fun-loving couple, but they began arguing about money a lot, according to acquaintances.

Uncle Sam in pursuit. Despite that he bought Tracey a Lexus and took her on ocean cruises, she reportedly resented the child support he paid Donna for their son, Nicholas.

The finances behind Tracey and David’s shared home aren’t completely clear, but one report said that she had contributed about $80,000 of her own money toward the four-bedroom three-bathroom abode and he paid for the rest. (Not sure of the purchase price in 2002, but the house is worth $488,000 today, according Zillow.)

At the same time, David was also around $100,000 in debt to the IRS and, as Forensic Files watchers know, folks who owe money to the government sometimes turn to inadvisable solutions (Amy Bosley) instead of sucking it up and finding a way to pay off their tax bill.

Cops called. In David Nixon’s case, he attempted to shield his house by putting it in Tracey’s name. But once their relationship deteriorated, she intended to keep the property all to herself.

The red brick house Tracey frame and David Nixon — Tracey was reportedly afraid she’d have to move into an apartment instead of staying at the house with its covered patio and heated pool at 3344 Pecan Hollow Court

On April 9, 2002, he called 911 for help after he came home to find she had changed the locks. “Basically, it’s my house,” he told the operator. “I was dumb enough to put it in my girlfriend’s name.”

Tracey eventually allowed him in the house that night, and the visit from the police ended in no arrests.

Off the radar screen. Little did David Nixon know that Tracey had far more insidious plans to ensure she could stay ensconced at the 2,647-square-feet residence in Grapevine.

On April 20, 2002, Donna Lella called police after David skipped a dinner date with Nicholas, then age 10, and didn’t answer his phone.

David and Nicholas Nixon — David Nixon’s son, Nicholas, seen here as an infant, said he liked Tracey Frame at first but ultimately came to believe in her guilt

No one remembered seeing David Nixon after April 18, 2002, when he showed a property in Southlake to a prospective buyer, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Horrifying sight. Four days later, a motorist alerted emergency services of a fire in the parking lot of an abandoned building in Grand Prairie, Texas.

Police found a burning body wrapped in blue camping tarp and a blanket with fibers characteristic of electric blankets; gasoline had been used as an accelerant.

It looked as though someone tried to stuff his body into a drainpipe at the scene, failed, and then left him there to burn beyond recognition.

Chief suspect. An investigator would later tell 48 Hours Mystery‘s “Secrets and Lies on Grapevine Lake” that the blaze consumed the body to such a degree that he couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. Dental records identified the remains as those of David Nixon.

Tracey Frame around 2005, just before her trial

Although Forensic Files made the investigation into the murder sound like a long haul with early leads centering on second wife Lisa as well as Donna — whose son would be receiving David’s $500,000 insurance payout — the police actually arrested Tracey Frame just a few days after the body turned up.

“Once everybody heard that David was missing, I don’t think there was a soul who didn’t say, ‘Tracey did something,'” his friend Karl Ekonomy later told Snapped.

Seat shifter. Donna Lella told 48 Hours Mystery that David had a premonition Tracey would kill him.

Investigators would ultimately conclude that Tracey shot David in his sleep, then wrapped him in the electric blanket and tarp. In the house, police had found electric blanket controls without the blanket.

She used a hand truck to move his body — he weighed nearly 100 pounds more than she did — into a rented Penske moving vehicle, and abandoned his white Lexus in a Tom Thumb supermarket parking lot, investigators alleged. The driver’s seat had been moved forward, as though someone shorter than 6-foot-4 had driven it; Tracey is 5-foot-7.

Penske problem. Employees from H&H Janitorial Supply told police a woman matching Tracey’s description came into their store to buy cleansers and asked how to get blood out of her carpet. They suggested trying muriatic acid.

Next, investigators found video footage of a woman who looked like Tracey buying muriatic acid at the Tom Thumb supermarket. She used her customer loyalty card when she paid. (Forensic Files, Snapped, and 48 Hours Mystery all made a big deal of how cheap Tracey was to risk getting caught to save less than 50 cents on her purchase but, to be fair, getting out your plastic discount card is pretty much an automatic reflex these days.)

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Additional security footage caught Tracey parking David’s Lexus in the lot and also leaving the Penske truck there, presumably because it would have raised suspicions to have it parked in front of her house for a long period of time.

Get your story straight. And Tracey seemed to know, before anyone told her, that David’s body suffered trauma. When authorities informed Tracey about the murder, her first words were, “How did they identify him?” according to trial reporting from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

An unregistered small-caliber gun that David kept in the house was missing and Tracey had recently bought a new mattress.

David Nixon’s family members heading into the courtroom to observe the trial

It also came out that Tracey had given varying explanations for why David disappeared. She told Donna Lella that he had gone on vacation, but told an investigator he had moved and was working out of state. When Gary Yarbrough, the managing director of David’s real estate office, asked about his whereabouts, Tracey said she had no idea.

Speak ill of the dead. On the police video of her initial interrogation, Tracey came off as weepy and pathetic, but she was confident and articulate three years later in her interviews with 48 Hours Mystery, which covered the case from pretrial (Tracey had been free on $100,000 bail with an electronic ankle bracelet since 2002) to conclusion.

At the 2005 trial, a buddy of the victim, John Hartenbower, testified that their friendship dwindled after he got involved with Tracey Frame. The prosecution alleged that Tracey interfered with David’s other relationships.

Tracey’s defense claimed the woman in the security footage wasn’t Tracey and that someone else had used her customer loyalty card at the Tom Thumb. Her side also tried some smear-the-victim tactics, alleging that David was involved with prostitutes and had gambling debts that might have prompted someone to kill him.

New Man in Her Life. Team Tracey contended that Jerry Vowell, a used car salesman who owed money to David, might have killed him to cancel the debt. (Vowell said on TV that he had repaid David.) Or maybe an anonymous robber killed David, who often walked around with large amounts of cash on his person, according to Tracey.

Tracey’s new fiancé, a British dentist named Roland Taylor, maintained she was nothing like the intimidating shrew the prosecution portrayed. He would later tell 48 Hours Mystery that Tracey had a strong motive to keep David alive because he owed her money. He also said Tracey was a sweet person who just wanted to “love and be loved.”

In March 2005, a jury took four hours to convict Tracey Frame, then 35, of first-degree murder. She got 40 years and will be eligible for parole after 20.

She lost an appeal in 2006.

Tracey Frame in prison — Tracey Frame in a prison interview shortly after her conviction

Sweet gig? Today, Tracey Ann Frame resides in the William P. Hobby Unit in Marlin, Texas. Although she will have a shot at parole, her Texas Department of Criminal Justice record makes no mention of a date, but it notes that she’s eligible for visitation.

“Hobby” seems an apt name for the institution because it offers prisoners opportunities to work in a peach orchard or with horses or security dogs.

Her release date is Sept. 29, 2044, when she’ll be 74 years old.

You can watch the 48 Hours Mystery about the case on YouTube (thank you to reader Kattrinka for sending in the new link).

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

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Joanne Chambers and Paula Nawrocki: Strange Lesson

One Teacher Sabotages Another
(Forensic Files, “Sealed with a Kiss”)

The “Sealed with a Kiss” story differs from most other Forensic Files episodes in that it involves no violence.

If fact, no one touched anyone or stole anything during the extended course of the criminal activity.

Bad Barbie. But it’s a sordid case just the same, and the episode features on-camera interviews with both the accused and the victim, who ultimately trade places.

The drama kicked off when someone began menacing Joanne Chambers — a teacher admired for her warm, unconventional approach to her job — with threatening letters, offensive photos and, yes, a voodoo Barbie doll.

The episode was produced back in 1997, when Forensic Files still went by the name Medical Detectives, so for this week, I looked around to find out what happened to Joanne Chambers and whether she’s retained any of the respect she earned as a teacher before things got weird.

So, let’s get going on the recap of “Sealed with a Kiss” along with extra information from internet research.

Positive reinforcement. In 1993, Joanne Chambers and Paula Nawrocki both taught first grade at the Coolbaugh Learning Center, which sounds like a for-profit tutoring business, but was actually a public school in Pennsylvania’s Poconos region.

Joanne, 41, lived in Carbondale with her husband, who owned a painting business, and her 10-year-old son.

She taught first-grade reading and liked to make school fun and nurturing. Joanne did entertaining things like dressing up pillars to look like palm trees. She ended each class with the words, “You are wonderful and beautiful. You make my heart happy,” according to Redbook magazine.

Students and parents loved her.

Poison pen. Paula Nawrocki, who had started working for the district in 1975, was stricter and more formal in her teaching but was well-respected, too. The Allentown Morning Call would later write that Paula “had a record as clean as a new chalkboard.”

That seemed to change when the principal of the school where both women worked started receiving anonymous letters trashing Joanne. Pretty soon, Joanne herself began getting the disturbing missives and other teachers did, too.

So started a strange and upsetting period lasting 18 months.

Tawdry collages. All the letters disparaged Joanne. At first, they simply mocked her, criticizing her for wearing jeans at school and organizing a faculty water fight.

They progressed to calling the soft-spoken Joanne a bitch and claiming she smoked marijuana.

Other letters accused Joanne of child molestation and threatened to drag her into the woods and torture her to death. The tormenter pasted Joanne’s face on nude pictures in sex scenes, then sent them to parents and posted them out in the open.

Someone planted a whiskey bottle in her desk drawer.

J’accuse. Joanne told police that she cut her hand after the anonymous evildoer placed a razor blade under her car door handle — and later sent her a typed note saying, “You’re sliced.” She needed eight stitches to close the wound on her right middle finger.

As the campaign of terror waged on, Joanne received sympathy and concern from her colleagues.

Perhaps a bit overzealous in their efforts to find the culprit, officials called a faculty meeting in March 1994 and told teachers that the menacer “is someone sitting in this room.”

Secret audio. Soon, a solid clue came to light when video footage caught Paula Nawrocki entering Joanne’s classroom and removing Joanne’s mug, which immediately made her a suspect because the anonymous letter-writer had threatened to poison Joanne’s coffee.

When questioned, Paula explained that Joanne had asked her to retrieve the mug. She also allegedly said something to the effect of “You’ll never prove it’s me.” That sounded fishy to Coolbaugh Township Police Chief Anthony Fluegel.

The police wired up Joanne and had her talk to Paula about the terror campaign in hopes that something incriminating would slip out.

Lie detector. But it didn’t work. Paula said nothing incriminating on the tape, and in fact expressed sympathy: “Joanne, I can’t, I can’t imagine how this person can do what they’re doing,” Nawrocki said on the recording. “We are all amazed, Joanne, that you can be surviving through the whole thing.”

Some of the offending materials anonymously sent and posted

But when both women took polygraph tests, Paula failed. Joanne passed.

Next up, Paula consented to having her house searched. That helped her a little. Examination proved that her typewriter wasn’t the one used to send the frightening letters.

Domestic melodrama. Meanwhile, the school had received the aforementioned Barbie, which someone had dressed and coiffed to look like Joanne, then stuck a razor blade in the neck and drizzled with red paint.

“I said good-bye to my husband like I wanted him to remember me saying good-bye,” Joanne told Forensic Files. “I lived every day thinking that it was truly possible that it could be my last.”

Next up, Joanne told police that Paula Nawrocki had tailgated her and tried to run her off the road on I-380.

Press picks it up. That alleged offense was enough for authorities to arrest Paula for the entire horror campaign — 100 counts, including making terroristic threats, stalking, and recklessly endangering life.

Paula’s husband, Leonard Nawrocki, who worked as an inspector for the Department of Environmental Protection, would years later tell the Morning Call of his shock at seeing news of the arrest in the paper just one day later. According to the Morning Call, the Nawrockis suddenly felt like the subjects of a witch hunt fueled by overeager investigators and journalists:

“When a reporter seeking a comment phoned their home in Moscow, Lackawanna County, [Leonard] told him, ‘She’s not talking to anybody.’ He said the reporter noted in his story, ‘A man answered the phone at the Nawrocki residence and said, ‘She’s not talking to anybody.”‘

Suddenly pariahs. “Basically we were isolated people,” Leonard Nawrocki, father of the couple’s son, Kevin, told Morning Call reporter Mike Frassinelli. “We felt like there wasn’t a friend in the world.”

Leonard also said that other teachers ignored Paula at lunch and administrators snubbed her at a basketball game.

The parents of one student asked the school to remove him from Paula’s class. She was suspended with pay shortly afterward.

Joanne Chambers made class fun but also was effective at teaching kids with reading difficulties

Harassment stops. Fluegel later told Dateline NBC that at least 10 teachers he spoke to said they suspected Paula Nawrocki as the party behind the terror campaign against Joanne.

After Paula’s arrest, the menacing behavior toward Joanne stopped.

But the FBI couldn’t find forensic evidence to help build a case against Paula.

Past comes to light. The private investigator and lawyer who Paula Nawrocki hired had better luck. She paid $7,000 to have some of the threatening letters tested for her DNA. The lab found a small number of epithelial cells under one set of stamps and an envelope flap.

None of them matched the DNA from Paula or Leonard. But those forensics weren’t enough to clear Paula.

Fortunately, some circumstantial evidence materialized. Police from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, told Paula’s defense team that, going back years, Joanne had a history of reporting suspicious incidents such as fires and burglaries. Colleagues from Joanne’s prior employer, the Lackawanna Trail School District, near Scranton, testified that Joanne had said that other teachers had threatened to torch her house.

Compulsive complainer. Some of her ex-coworkers from the previous school said that Joanne liked to cause trouble for other teachers and that her arrival made waves in what had been a harmonious workplace.

In a precursor to what happened at Joanne’s Coolbaugh job, at the Lackawanna school, a superintendent had called a meeting of teachers to disclose the alleged threats made against Joanne — and announced that the guilty party “is someone sitting in this room.”

“Every crime she said she was a victim of had some weirdness attached to it,” Paula’s private investigator, Jim Anderson, said in one of my favorite Forensic Files quotes.

Garbage comes in handy. And like most compulsive liars, Joanne didn’t keep her stories straight. She told one teacher that she broke her leg jumping from a burning building at Marywood College and another that it happened when she jumped to escape evil nuns trying to keep her in a convent against her will, according to a Morning Call story from Jan. 21, 1996. (A couple of newspaper articles referred to Joanne as a former nun or student nun, but it’s not clear whether or not that was one of her tall tales.)

Anderson retrieved some items from Joanne’s trash with DNA. One the samples matched DNA from the stamps and the envelope flap.

Joanne’s explanation was that the stamps from the threatening letter came off — she was alone with them in some type of evidence room, she said — and she licked them to reattach them.

Prolonged trauma. At the trial in 1996, which Dateline NBC covered, Coolbaugh’s principal and some of its teachers testified that they suspected Paula Nawrocki of creating the terror campaign against Joanne Chambers. Paula had started acting jumpy and nervous around the time the incidents began.

The courtroom presentation of the hate letters and threats initially put the jurors in Joanne’s corner.

“I felt so bad for this woman, this poor thing, to have had to go through all these terrible things,” one juror later told Dateline NBC, which broadcast a segment about the case on Aug. 25, 1997.

But Paula’s lawyer Phil Lauer managed to turn the tables.

Revelations from the past. Some former colleagues of Joanne Chambers from a different school testified that Joanne had a history of complaining about anonymous threats.

Jim Anderson discovered that Joanne had reported about a dozen fires and burglaries on her property — more proof, the defense contended, that she liked playing the role of victim.

After five days of testimony and two hours of deliberation, the jury reached a not guilty verdict. Paula cried with relief, and some of the jurors hugged her outside the courtroom. One said, “Our hearts are with you.”

Reinstated at last. Paula commented that Joanne “needs help.” (Before the trial, Fluegel had said Paula needed help.)

In 1997, Paula faced another hearing of sorts when the Pocono Mountain School Board investigated her for “immorality” based on other aspects of Joanne Chambers’ accusations.

Nawrocki was cleared again and allowed to resume her $55,000-a-year job “after months of school board hearings that were peppered with audience cheers for Nawrocki and jeers for Chambers,” the Morning Call reported.

Six-figure compensation. Joanne lamented that the polygraph evidence couldn’t be used as evidence but ultimately said she just wanted to get on with her life.

Paula agreed to appear on the Dateline segment about the case but later said she found it tedious. She also gave an interview to Redbook magazine but soon regretted it, feeling the resulting article cast some doubt on her innocence.

She filed a $9 million lawsuit against the school, Joanne Chambers, and the police. In 2000, she received a $600,000 settlement from the school plus $25,000 from Chambers. (Joanne’s lawyer, John E. Freund III, said that she settled only because she wanted to avoid the cost of defense.)

Paula Nawrocki gets a chance to smile after the court verdict

No payday from us. Paula sued Police Chief Anthony Fluegel as well, but Fluegel went to trial instead of settling and won the case. Court papers from 2002 noted, in Fluegel’s defense, that other teachers passed lie detector tests. Only Nawrocki failed, so Fluegel had reason to make her the prime suspect.

“I thought from the beginning I was just doing my job,” Fluegel later said, calling the Nawrockis’ allegations against him baseless.

None of the authorities who Nawrocki accused of malicious prosecution ended up paying any damages to her — and rightly so, considering that they had evidence against Nawrocki that seemed credible. The fault lay with Joanne Chambers for lying, not those who had every reason to believe her.

Under the radar. A note from the producers at the end of the episode said that Paula spent $100,000 in her defense and mentioned that both women still taught in the Pocono Mountain School District but at different schools.

But that was back in 1997. What’s happened since then?

Well, Paula Nawrocki has kept a low profile since 2002, after she lost her suit against the police. She has no presence on social media and no longer speaks to journalists.

Her husband, Leonard Nawrocki, gave an interview to the Times-Tribune in July 4, 2012 — but the article was about a rally featuring then-Vice President Joe Biden that Leonard attended.

On Oct. 19, 2015, a Morning Call obituary for a local woman who died at age 96 mentioned that Paula Nawrocki was “like a daughter” to her. So, it sounds as though Paula stayed in the area.

Back on the job market. As for Joanne Chambers, she retired in June 2015 after having received the prestigious National Board Certified status.

But just three months later, on Sept. 25,2015, an article titled “Scandalous past gives school board pause” appeared in the Hazleton Standard-Speaker.

The story noted that the Hazleton Area School Board was ready to hire Joanne Chambers as a Wilson reading specialist — that is, an educator who teaches dyslexic kids.

The Pennsylvania Wilson program officials highly recommended Joanne.

Supporter speaks out. But just in time to spoil the party, the Barbie doll reared its ugly head. Some parents put her name in Google and reported the resulting intelligence about the terror complaints, decoupage porn, etc., to the school board, which tabled the decision to hire her.

Still, Joanne has at least one fan of her professional accomplishments.

A former colleague named Jamie Schweppenheiser from the Pocono Mountain School District wrote a letter to the editor praising Chambers as a professional who “helped countless children and young adults learn how to read” and saying “what a shame for the teachers and students of the Hazleton Area School District to miss out on the opportunity to be mentored by Joanne Chambers.”

In other words, Joanne Chambers remains a divisive and contradictory figure, someone who allegedly created an absolute nightmare for one woman but also gave many children the gift of better reading skills, higher self-esteem, and a sense of accomplishment that will make them happier, more productive adults.

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

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

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