Tag: Betty Lee murder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fry stayed quiet after the authorities detained him.

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

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

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

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

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

Engh got 40 years.

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

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

Fry received life sentences for those crimes.

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

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

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

So what happened to the killer and his accomplice?

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

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

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

The most recent execution in New Mexico history took place in 2001 for Terry Clark’s rape and murder of 9-year-old Dena Lynn Gorre in 1986. Before that, the last one was in 1960, in the state’s gas chamber.

A decision will likely take months and, if it goes against the condemned men, the justice system will see years of appeals before executions take place, according to The New Mexican.

In the meantime, Fry has started toting a bible. He says God has forgiven him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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