Kathleen Lipscomb Dies for Learning a Secret
(‘True Lies,’ Forensic Files)
Kathleen Lipscomb’s life was going off-kilter. A respected nurse, Kathleen had separated from William “Bill” Lipscomb, an Air Force sergeant with whom she shared custody of two children. That wasn’t going smoothly.
To complicate matters, the attractive platinum-haired Kathleen had fallen in love with a co-worker, a handsome gynecologist. He planned to leave his wife for her, he said. Kathleen probably didn’t know that, over the years, he had made that same promise to other women and not kept it.
Dangerous tale. Bill Lipscomb, who was blond and good-looking, had been cheating with one of his colleagues as well.
Still, the Lipscombs’ marriage could have given way to a functional, albeit acrimonious, divorce. And at barely 30 years of age, Kathleen had time to reroute her romantic trajectory — or she should have.
She learned of a secret about her husband that was way more explosive than any gossipy workplace affair, and it led to her doom on June 8, 1986.
For this week, I looked for more information on Kathleen’s young life and an epilogue on Bill. So let’s get going on the recap of “True Lies” along with extra information from internet research:
Nursing career. Ella Kathleen Adams was born on September 1, 1956 in Shreveport, Louisiana. She and Bill Lipscomb went to New Caney High School in Texas together, and both of them came from military families who had moved around a lot. Bill could be charming, said Darlene Koons, Kathleen’s sister. Kathleen and Bill were high school sweethearts, according to the Houston Chronicle, although the Military Murder podcast says they merely knew each other in high school and started a romance later.
After graduation in 1974, Bill joined the Air Force. Kathy took classes at Steven F. Austin University and then West Texas University but left school when she and Bill got married, according to the Houston Chronicle. They had two children, Karl and Laura. Kathleen returned to college to study nursing, getting a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas San Antonio.
She worked for the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. Bill was an instructor assigned to Lackland Air Force Base.
Different kind of G-man. The marriage started to go askew after the children came along. Bill became verbally abusive to Kathleen and used harsh corporal punishment on the kids.
For Kathleen, things were going much better at work than at home. She excelled at her work in the gynecology department and hit it off especially well with a colleague, a doctor whom Forensic Files calls David Pearle. “She loved what she did, she absolutely loved it,” Darlene Koons said in an interview on “Worth Killing For,” an episode of My Dirty Little Secret. “I think that, because he was a doctor in that field, it added to her infatuation with him. I think he was a very astute individual. He knew the words women like.”
Whereas Bill felt threatened by Kathleen’s success, Dr. Pearle took pride in her accomplishments and encouraged her, according to an interview with Houston private investigator Tom Bevans on “Sex, Secrets and Sergeants,” an episode of Scorned: Love Kills. Kathleen and Dr. Pearle spent time together at his apartment
Big man on base. But Dr. Pearle had another home, a house he shared with his wife. She probably didn’t know about the apartment. Or perhaps she accepted a story about his using it on late nights when he needed to collapse into bed.
Kathleen believed that the Pearles had separated.
Meanwhile, Bill was deriving plenty of ego-gratification at his job. He had been promoted faster than any master sergeant in Air Force history, according to Forensic Files. His colleagues respected and feared him as the one who gave orders to new recruits and put them in their place.
No show. In 1985, Kathleen filed for divorce. Bill scooped up the kids and fled across state lines. Kathleen dropped the divorce and the family reunited briefly.
She refiled in 1986 and they began living separately.
But there would be no divorce. On June 6, 1986, Kathleen’s colleagues grew concerned when she didn’t show up for work on time. As Forensic Files devotees have observed, victims tend to be prompt and reliable. (No word on whether she also had a smile that lit up a room).
The kids were staying with Bill, and he told police that Kathleen didn’t come to pick them up when expected.
In the fold. Later that same day, a passerby spotted a woman’s body lying near a road northwest of San Antonio in Bexar County. She was naked and posed in a suggestive way, perhaps the work of a sex criminal — or a killer who wanted police to assume so.
“Someone wanted her found,” said Bexar County Deputy Sheriff Dalton Baker.
Her clothing had been rolled up neatly in military fashion and left at the scene. Police recovered some strands of dyed-red hair there as well. Kathleen’s legs were folded as though she had lain in a cramped space.
A medical examiner determined that Kathleen had been strangled to death shortly after eating Chinese food, that the murder probably took place somewhere other than the site where her body turned up, and that she had intercourse within 24 hours of death. The presence of sperm indicated that the person she’d had sex with wasn’t Bill; he’d had a vasectomy.
Red herring. The Lipscombs’ children backed up Bill’s alibi that he was with them at the time of Kathleen’s disappearance.
Neighbors said they saw a suspicious person, a red-haired woman, exiting Kathleen’s apartment around the time of the murder. It made for tantalizing theories. Perhaps it was a man dressed as a woman to throw off suspicion.
Bill told investigators that Kathleen had frozen him out sexually and might have been having a lesbian affair — and maybe that’s where the red hairs originated.
Police brought the doctor in for questioning. Accounts differ as to whether he came in alone or brought his wife with him. He admitted that he saw Kathleen shortly before she died. Then, he clammed up and called his lawyer.
Smooth operator. I’m not sure how the doctor pulled it off, but he did a great job of keeping his name out of the press amid all the scandal. Forensic Files calls him “David Pearle,” and a couple of other television sources mention “Dr. Pearle” without giving his first name. But newspaper articles I found mentioned “a doctor” but didn’t give any name at all. It’s not clear whether part or all of the names that Forensic Files and other TV shows assigned to the doctor were pseudonyms.
“He had everything to lose, his career, his family,” Darlene said. And he probably had no intention of leaving his wife. Kathleen was being played, according to Darlene.
But the doctor didn’t have red hair, and police found no forensic or circumstantial evidence linking him to Kathleen’s death. Over the years, he’d had affairs with other women without harming them, except perhaps for breaking their hearts.
Nice try. For a time, investigators considered the doctor’s wife, who might have wanted to get rid of the other woman, as a suspect. But that theory went nowhere.
Next up, one of Kathleen’s neighbors got an anonymous phone call, a man who said, “You’re next.” Could a serial killer have murdered Kathleen? No more calls took place and no serial killings happened.
The police kept searching for Kathleen’s killer, but had little luck for two years.
Lady’s home journal. In the meantime, Bill found a new wife, Beverly, and transferred to Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, where he served as a motor pool chief. The couple lived in Poquoson as a combined family with Beverly’s child and Bill’s son and daughter from his marriage to Kathleen, according to newspaper accounts.
Kathleen’s family members still suspected Bill. About two years after the homicide, they hired Tom Bevans to investigate.
The big break came when Bevans took note of an entry written in Kathleen’s diary: “baseball tournament” and “Shannon Gilbert there.” (Again, that name might be a pseudonym. My Dirty Little Secret calls her Teresa.)
Other woman. Kathleen had attended one of Bill’s baseball games and seen him and Shannon engaging in PDA like a couple of newlyweds. Others later corroborated the story.
When Bevans, who described Shannon as good looking and well built, showed up at her door, Shannon immediately said she needed a lawyer. She arrived for questioning in full military dress, and her lawyer made sure she won immunity from prosecution before she divulged anything.
Shannon said that Bill had told her he wanted to kill Kathleen.
Soon all sorts of evidence came tumbling out.
Second failure not an option. Bevans found an entry in Kathleen’s diary mentioning WAPS, the Weighted Airman Promotion System, a test that encompassed career skills and overall military knowledge — and counted toward 43 percent of the points needed for a promotion.
The private investigator looked into a theory that Bill had cheated on a test to move up the ranks. Early in his Air Force career, Bill had failed a test for a promotion — and wanted to make sure that never happened again, Bevans suspected.
It turned out that Bill had not only cheated on the test for his own advantage but also created what the Daily Press called a cheating ring. Bill was paying informants for answers to various tests and collecting them in a study book. Bill presumably sold, or planned to sell, the answers to other test takers, according to the San Antonio Express-News.
Child speaks up. Bevans believed that Kathleen planned to use that information to give her an advantage in the custody dispute. If Kathleen disclosed the cheating, it could ruin Bill’s career and anger colleagues who took part in the scam.
Bill also had a financial motive as he had raised the amount of life insurance on Kathleen, to about $315,000, shortly before her death. He had already collected most of it.
Word of more deception surfaced: Kathleen’s daughter, Laura, told her grandmother, Nadine Adams, that Bill lied about having her and her brother the whole night on the evening their mother disappeared. Up until that time, the children had feared Bill’s temper too much to implicate him. A friend of Bill’s — whom Forensic Files calls Tony Barello but whose real name appears to be Staff Sgt. Clint Nicholas Richards — took the kids out to dinner that evening, according to Laura.
Off his chest. Thanks to a new girlfriend, Richards had started going to church by the time the investigation heated up. His conscience began to bother him, or maybe he just wanted a deal. Richards told investigators that, while he and the kids were at McDonald’s, Bill killed Kathleen and stored her body in a cedar chest — her legs stayed folded because of rigor mortis.
After Richards brought the children home and Bill put them to bed, Richards returned to collect Kathleen’s body and then left it by the side of the road. Although accounts don’t elaborate, he probably rolled up her clothes neatly out of force of habit, then posed her body to suggest someone had perpetrated a sex crime against her. More important, he left the body where someone would find it — proving Kathleen was dead and paving the way for Bill to collect on her insurance.
Bill asked Richards to dispose of the chest. Sources vary as to whether Richards neglected to do so or dumped it at the Scenic Loop off of Texas 16 highway. Regardless, investigators found it and recovered Kathleen’s blood inside.
Caught off guard. Investigators believed that, on the night of the murder, Bill asked Kathleen to pick up the kids at his place earlier than usual — when in fact they were still at McDonald’s. When Kathleen arrived, they argued and he strangled her to death.
During Bill’s questioning, an investigator asked him why he killed Kathleen; Bill said he didn’t know. Realizing what he had blurted out, Bill leaned forward, crossed his arms and said, “I did not kill my wife.”
His arrest on July 10, 1989 brought some relief to Kathleen’s family. “It’s been a nightmare that’s almost over,” Nadine Adams told the Houston Chronicle.
Admits to rape. Bill cracked and starting telling the truth. He admitted that when Kathleen came to pick up the children, “we entered into a conversation, sir, and during the course of that conversation, I used the cable,” according an AP account.
He confessed to sodomizing Kathleen before killing her, although My Dirty Little Secret says that the two of them had been dividing up family photographs when he sneaked up behind her with the cord and choked her, which meant that he sodomized her after the murder.
As for the sperm found in Kathleen’s body, a lab mishandled the specimen and could never determine the source. It presumably came from consensual sex with the doctor.
Husband stands alone. A judge sentenced Bill Lipscomb to life for rape, murder, and obstruction of justice. He was transferred from the barracks at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas to a federal lockup in Pennsylvania. The Air Force demoted him, dishonorably discharged him, and canceled any future pay.
His prison sentence was shortened to 60 years.
In return for his cooperation, Clint Nicholas Richards got immunity and an honorable discharge. Shannon Gilbert changed her name and went into a witness protection program.
Unrepentant widower. The red hairs at the murder scene, investigators believe, were placed there to throw off investigators. And the mysterious flame-haired lady was just a concerned co-worker who stopped by Kathleen’s apartment to check on her. She had nothing to do with murder.
In 2004, Darlene and Nadine appeared on the Montel Williams Show. Darlene said that Bill never apologized for what he did. “I think Bill needs to realize that he’s very selfish,” Darlene said. “For a very selfish reason, he affected so very many lives.”
Below the radar. As for the cheating scandal that set the homicide plot in motion, it didn’t do enough to discourage others. In 2006, Capt. Rhonda McDaniel of the 45th Aeromedical-Dental Squadron faced court martial for allegedly compromising controlled test material before her promotion to commissioned officer. The scam resulted in charges against other Air Force personnel and was believed to have been going on for 10 years in the U.S. and overseas.
As for Bill, the Federal Bureau of Prisons lists three inmates named William Lipscomb, all of them released. It looks as though Kathleen’s former husband, William T. Lipscomb, got out at the age of 68 in 2021, and is keeping a low profile.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or TubiTV or Amazon Prime
