Two Elegant Sisters, One Murdered Ophthalmologist
(“The Wilson Murder,” Forensic Files)
Technical problem: If the photos of Betty Wilson and Peggy Lowe aren’t showing up in this post, please try viewing it here.
Forensic Files doesn’t always feature suspects who look like middle-aged belles from a Tennessee Williams drama.
But when it does, they’re twins with refined Southern accents that make you wonder what deviousness could be hidden inside.
Betty Wilson and Peggy Lowe probably conspired to kill Betty’s husband, but only one of them has to rely on the prison commissary for pomegranate iced tea today.
Jack Wilson, an ophthalmologist who had been married to Betty for 14 years, ended up dead on the lacquered floor of their brick mansion in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1992.
More to the story. At first, figuring out who murdered him and how seemed like a matter of connecting a few numbered dots.
But over the course of the separate trials, conflicting forensics experts, a hit man whose story kept changing, and the pristine reputation of one of the sisters made things go askew.
For this week, I searched for more information about murder victim Jack Wilson, whose importance gets lost amid the intrigue surrounding his colorful wife and sister-in-law.
So let’s get started on the recap of “The Wilson Murder,” the Forensic Files episode about the case, along with information culled from internet research:
Two weddings. Betty Joy and Peggy Gay Woods were fraternal twins born in Gadsden, Alabama, on July 14, 1945. They were both popular in school.
Betty was a student council officer and performed in plays and talent shows. Peggy was a homecoming queen and considered the class beauty, according to an AP account.
They both got married immediately after high school, had children, and divorced within a few years.
The sisters seemed to do better on their second marriages. Peggy, a first grade teacher, hitched up with a Baptist deacon named Wayne Lowe and became lead singer of the church choir. He adopted her two kids and they had another one together.
Loving the life. Betty took up with Jack Wilson, a doctor she met at Huntsville’s Humana Hospital, where she worked as a nurse specializing in kidney dialysis.
After they married, the social-climbing Betty quit her job and enjoyed the perks of being an eye surgeon’s wife. She wore a Rolex watch and cruised around town in her burgundy Mercedes convertible. The couple also owned a black BMW.
On May 22, 1992, Jack Wilson was looking forward to leaving on a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Betty the next day. He hoped it would rekindle his relationship with his wife, whom he still loved and would reportedly do just about anything to please.
Shocking discovery. The doctor, 55, was generous to others as well, sometimes waiving the charges for struggling patients. “They were always treated the same, if they had $5 or $500,000,” one of his office staff members told WAFF 48 News. “He treated me like a daughter. He treated everyone who worked here as family.”
And he kept them entertained with his “unapologetically cornball sense of humor,” according to People magazine:
“He wore Christmas ties in the summer. Even the way Wilson concluded his will was meant to be funny. ‘To be used only if absolutely necessary, i.e., if I am dead,’ he wrote. ‘Try real hard to revive me if I only look dead.’”
His sister-in-law said he was fun to be with, sincere, kind, and “didn’t have a pretentious bone in his body.”
Noncommittal crime scene. Betty had just returned home from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when she discovered Jack’s lifeless body in a pool of blood on the hardwood bordered by two Persian rugs and pale blue wall-to-wall carpeting. A metal baseball bat was lying next to him.
Betty ran to a neighbor’s house and dialed 911. She sounded convincing enough on the call.
At the murder scene, police couldn’t find any helpful fingerprints or signs of a burglary. All of Jack’s credit cards were in his wallet and there was nothing much in the way of ransacking in the house.
But investigators soon learned that things weren’t exactly in order between the victim and his pretty wife. The couple slept in separate bedrooms.
Salacious revelations. Numerous sources reported that Betty had a distaste for Jack and the surgery he’d had because of his Crohn’s disease. Witnesses would later testify about the various unkind things she said to and about him. (Although, to her credit, she accepted Jack’s marriage proposal the day he told her he needed a colostomy.)
Another prospective motive for homicide: Jack’s will left the bulk of his $6.3 million estate to Betty.
There was also the matter of her extra-marital lifestyle.
A New York Daily News report would later describe her as a woman with a “thriving sex life that rarely involved her husband.” The AA meetings she attended regularly — she’d been sober for five years — made for convenient hookups.
With only gossip and speculation and minimal forensic facts, however, investigators couldn’t build a solid case against her.
Then, a police informant came forward.
None-too-reputable. The tipster said that James White, a 41-year-old handyman at the elementary school where Peggy Lowe taught, had been hired to kill Jack Wilson for $5,000.
White, described by a reporter as a “dirty man with ungroomed hair and bad teeth,” had a dishonorable discharge from the military and a record with the law.
Detectives found Betty’s revolver in an abandoned house next to White’s trailer as well as a library book of poetry signed out by Betty in White’s truck. He later said that Betty placed his cash advance in the book after Peggy negotiated his fee for the murder.
Police arrested Peggy Lowe and Betty Wilson. Peggy got out on $300,000 bail, but her sister was stuck in jail.
Hitman cooperates. The murder charges against twin sisters — with their smooth, articulate speech, tasteful wardrobes, and commercially attractive facial features — made news around the country.
The Boston Globe sent a reporter to Alabama to cover the case.
So many spectators flocked to the ensuing trials that the courthouse had to assign admission tickets to tame the chaos.
James White made a deal for a lighter sentence in exchange for implicating Betty and Peggy.
He said that he knew Peggy Lowe from the school in Vincent where he did some carpentry work. They had struck up a friendly relationship, speaking on the phone regularly.
Contract taken out. White found Peggy enchanting and wanted to win her favor — the eighth-grade dropout loved that she came from the right side of the tracks.
After confiding in him that she “had a friend who was in a bad marriage and whose husband mistreated her,” Peggy Lowe agreed to pay White $5,000 for a hit, with some of the money up front so that he could pay off debts and help his four children, White said, according to court papers.
White said that on the day of the murder, he hid upstairs in the Wilsons’ house until Jack Wilson came upstairs.
But White would later claim that he had already decided not to use the gun for the murder — and then realized that he didn’t want to kill him at all.
Boyfriend obligated to testify. Unfortunately, White testified, when he encountered Jack Wilson in the hallway, there was a struggle and White beat Wilson with the bat and stabbed him twice in the abdomen. Then, he said, Betty met him outside and drove him to his truck.
Police found no evidence he’d been inside Betty’s vehicle, so prosecutors took what forensics they had plus Jack’s testimony — and threw in some character assassination.
The state subpoenaed one of Betty’s lovers, an African American city official named Erroll Fitzpatrick, to testify about their relationship. Defense lawyer Buck Watson complained it was a maneuver to play upon racism.
The prosecution also presented numerous witnesses who attested to demeaning comments Betty had made about her husband.
Despite that Betty had four defense lawyers, including courtroom star Bobby Lee Cook — allegedly the inspiration for Andy Griffith’s character on Matlock — the prosecution had the edge.
Twin with the halo. After deliberating for two days, the jury convicted Betty of capital murder. She received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
Eight months after Betty’s trial, it was Peggy Lowe’s turn. The prosecution alleged that the poised and proper twin was a conspirator who hired killer James White.
But Peggy Lowe’s encounter with the judicial system was markedly different from her sister’s modern-day stoning.
First off, there was little leeway to assassinate Peggy’s character. She was a happily married first grade teacher known for her kindness toward people in need. Her husband was minister of music at their church.
The defense made a point of introducing the jury to Peggy’s husband, three daughters, and son, who were in the courtroom to support her.
Teflon defendant. Dozens of her fellow First Baptist Church parishioners, some carrying “Free Peggy Lowe” signs, showed up at the courthouse to support her innocence.
There was a bit of salaciousness during the trial, however. White claimed that Peggy Lowe used sex to seduce him into the murder plot.
But Peggy denied the accusation, and it seemed to bounce right off of her.
The defense trashed White — whose lawyers had given him a makeover including new teeth — maintaining that the kind-hearted Peggy Lowe met with White to help him get carpentry work at the Wilsons’ house, and also lent him money to help his four kids.
White had a long history of abusing drugs and alcohol and a criminal record that included an escape from jail. He had even attacked his own troops while serving in Vietnam and sexually abused his daughter, Peggy’s defense team told the jury.
Two-assailant theory. Oddly, at the same time, the defense made a case that White wasn’t the murderer, noting that White had never actually admitted he killed Jack Wilson.
His original story didn’t make sense either, according to a forensic specialist who testified for the defense, because the murder weapon was probably an implement like a fireplace poker, not a baseball bat.
And, the defense alleged, the homicide required two people, who probably attacked Jack Wilson in the garage, beat, stabbed, and strangled him, then wrapped his body in a tarp, carried it upstairs, dumped it on the floor, and smeared blood on the bat so it looked like the murder weapon.
The jury took less than three hours to return a not guilty verdict.
Back to the routine. ″I asked the Lord to send me a good lawyer and he did,″ a teary Peggy Lowe said after the verdict, according to an AP account.
A prosecutor grumbled that trying to convict Peggy Lowe was like “fighting God.”
After the trial, Lowe returned to her respectable life, telling a newspaper reporter she was looking forward to attending a high school football game to watch her teenage daughter, who was a cheerleader.
As for Betty, she still resides behind razor wire, in Julia Tutwiler Prison, which Mother Jones magazine once named one of the 10 worst prisons in the U.S., although the facility has since been overhauled.
In 2006, Betty snagged herself a new husband, a former Green Beret named Bill Campbell who had become fascinated by her plight after watching a 48 Hours episode about the case.
Sister act still strong. They had a traditional wedding ceremony, although the wedding cake had to be sliced before it was allowed in the prison, the Gadsden Times reported.
Alabama does not allow conjugal visits.
Betty’s twin, known as Peggy Peck after she remarried, to a University of Alabama professor, was maid of honor at Betty’s jailhouse wedding.
Today, in addition to the support of her newest husband, Betty has the comfort of knowing that the murder and its aftermath didn’t drive a wedge between her and her sister – even when they both faced the prospect of Alabama’s electric chair and police falsely told each of them that the other had blamed her.
As for convicted hitman James White, he later changed his story — saying that he had never met Betty Wilson or slept with Peggy Lowe. He recanted his claims that Lowe ensnared him in a murder-for-hire plan. He also said that he blacked out during the time of the murder.
He later changed his story back to the original.
No country club. White resides in Limestone Correctional Center in Harvest.
It’s a maximum security prison recently targeted by Alabama’s Civil Rights Division for alleged cruel and unusual punishment, including subjecting some men to bucket detail.
White is up for parole consideration on March 1, 2020.
Judging from online comments, there’s not a whole lot of sympathy out there for James White, but many viewers are bothered by the lack of forensic evidence against Betty Wilson — and believe she was railroaded.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Tubi or Amazon Prime
