A Pastor Drowns His Wife to Save His Job
(‘Ghost in the Machine,’ Forensic Files)
Early in life, Bill Guthrie acquired a way with all things biblical. While at Natrona High School in Wyoming, he took home the Outstanding Boy award at a local Christian service camp. He was later sent to Oklahoma to compete in a youth preacher contest at the Kiamichi Clinic, a religious retreat for men.
He met Sharon Ann Provance at Platte Valley Bible College in Gering, Nebraska. They married in 1963 when they were both 20 years old. The nuptials featured an organist and a vocalist who sang “Whither Thou Goest” and the Lord’s Prayer. The wedding notice said that Sharon’s “only jewelry was a drop pearl necklace, a gift of the groom.”
By 1999, the couple had three daughters and Bill was serving as a pastor at two churches at the same time. Worshippers filled up the pews to hear his sermons.
But Bill didn’t always practice what he preached. He indulged in one of the Seven Deadly Sins (lust) and forgot about two of the Ten Commandments (adultery, murder). Unfortunately, it was his wife who paid the ultimate price for his waywardness.
For this week, I looked for more details about the case. So let’s get going on the recap of “Ghost in the Machine”:
On May 14, 1999, Bill Guthrie called 911 to report that he found his wife unresponsive in the tub. Bill said that when he left their residence to pray for 10 minutes at the United Presbyterian Church next door, Sharon was fine; she was drawing a bath. After returning home at about 7 a.m., he found Sharon, 54, unconscious and face down in the water.
Sharon’s friend Nancy Holst, who was on duty as an EMT that night, remembered that Bill sounded appropriately desperate on the phone.
Court papers say that first responders found Bill, also 54, on his hands and knees crying and asking for help — and Sharon was naked, face down in the empty tub. Bill had tried to lift her out but was unable, so he drained the water, he explained.
The EMTs revived Sharon’s heartbeat, but she had no brain activity and was pronounced dead the next day.
The loss of the popular and outgoing Sharon was a horrible tragedy for the family and the community around Wolsey, a South Dakota town with dirt roads and a population of fewer than 1,000.
Sharon had a way with children and she would tell them stories before her husband’s sermons. She had also been a teacher’s aide for handicapped young people and was working for the Reed Clinic in Huron at the time of her death.
“We lost that bubbly personality that she was,” Holst said during an interview on Forensics: You Decide.
Forensic pathologist Brad Randall, M.D., found no sign of trauma on Sharon’s body. She had low levels of antianxiety medications Diazepam and Lorazepam — which she had prescriptions for — in her blood. Tests also found that she had ingested the equivalent of as many as 20 Temazepam tablets, not a fatal dose but enough to cause unconsciousness.
Randall suspected murder but had no evidence, so he reluctantly gave accidental drowning as the cause of death.
Three weeks after losing her mother, middle daughter Jenalu decided to go ahead with her planned wedding because it was what Sharon would have wanted. Bill performed the ceremony.
But the authorities weren’t likewise committed to letting things continue as normal for Bill. Investigators found out that the Temazepam in Sharon’s system came from Bill’s prescription. In the weeks before Sharon’s death, he had filled his prescription at Statz’s drug store, and then lied by saying he lost his Rx so that he could get a second bottle, at a Kmart pharmacy.
Bill said that perhaps Sharon had ingested the Temazepam by accident while she was sleepwalking.
Sharon had no confirmed history of sleepwalking.
And Bill had a mistress, who court papers identify as Debbie Christensen, a woman he knew from his previous job as a pastor for a church in Orleans, Nebraska. The affair with Debbie, a married elder at the church, had started in 1994. When officials learned of it, they suggested Bill resign.
The affair continued after the Guthries moved to South Dakota in 1996. There, Bill worked at the United Presbyterian Church and Bonilla Presbyterian Church.
Bill told his employers that he needed to travel to Nebraska periodically for treatments for impotence. In reality, he was going to the Cornhusker State to see Debbie, and they had plenty of sex, she would later tell investigators.
But Debbie was tired of secret rendezvous in motel rooms. She wanted to go out to a movie or dinner with Bill sometimes. She left her husband so that she and Bill could take their relationship public, but he was reluctant to end his marriage to Sharon because it would hurt his career and image.
A frustrated Debbie broke up with Bill but, according to court papers, she mentioned getting back together if he divorced Sharon.
At some point, Bill decided to get rid of his wife without the hassle of dividing assets or changing jobs.
Sharon experienced a couple of suspicious brushes with death (Bruce Moilanen, Ted MacArthur) before the lethal drowning. Bill once asked Sharon to join him downstairs in the basement and she nearly tripped on a cord someone had stretched across the staircase for an unknown reason. Another time, Sharon was washing her hair in the sink or tub (accounts vary) while the bathroom light wasn’t working, and Bill brought in a corded powered-on electric lamp, which “accidentally” fell in the water.
Fortunately, Sharon wasn’t injured either time.
The drowning plan came next. Bill set the stage early by taking Sharon to a clinic on April 29, saying that he was worried because he couldn’t wake her up. She might have taken sleeping pills while sleepwalking, he said. The next day, Sharon felt well and remembered nothing of the incident.
Just two weeks later, Sharon was dead in the bathtub and police had a murder investigation on their hands.
Detectives found out that, while Jenalu Guthrie Simpson and younger sister Danielle supported Bill’s innocence, the eldest, Suzanne Guthrie Hewitt, had doubts.
Suzanne agreed to work with police by wearing a concealed recording device and confronting her father about the affair and Sharon’s death. At first, he admitted nothing. Later, he showed up at Suzanne’s workplace to say that, the night before Sharon’s death, he told Sharon of his affair and asked for a divorce, which caused Sharon to have an anxiety attack.
But Suzanne had talked to her mother that night on the phone and she was fine.
Suzanne told investigators that her father might have used Sharon’s favorite beverage to convey the Temazepam. “Chocolate milk was her drink — everybody knew that, and she’d buy it by the gallon,” Suzanne told Forensics: You Decide.
A computer forensics expert discovered that a month before Sharon’s death, Bill had searched for information about sleeping pills and drowning in a bathtub. He had spent time on a website for the book Worst Pills Best Pills: A Consumer’s Guide to Avoiding Drug-Induced Death or Illness.
It’s not clear whether the Guthries’ younger daughters, Jenalu and Danielle, knew about the affair, but Bill was fairly open about the fact that he no longer loved his wife. According to court papers, he told Danielle that he found Sharon unattractive, that she was fat and ugly. (Apparently, Bill didn’t mind admitting that he was a man of the flesh as well as the spirit. He was also a hypocrite — he wasn’t exactly slim and handsome himself anymore.)
With all the tawdriness swirling about, the surviving Guthries issued a statement: “Please remember our family has lost a wife, a sister, a mother and a grandmother. We stand as a family and with God and ask the Christian community to be with us in prayer through this whole time.”
In August 1999, Beadle County charged Bill with murder and assigned prosecutor Mike Moore to try the case. Moore had originally been tasked with clearing Bill Guthrie, but incriminating evidence got in the way.
The Committee on the Ministry of Presbytery of South Dakota, however, believed Bill was innocent and gave him indefinite paid leave.
Some towns folk restrained themselves from making the case too much of a sensation, according to the Associated Press. “There’s some that talk of it a lot among themselves, and others who are completely hush-hush,” George McDonald told the AP. “It’s a pretty amazing story. I guess most people would agree to that.”
The trial kicked off on January 10, 2000, and it turned out to be quite salacious just the same. People who once flocked to pews for Bill’s sermons now occupied seats in the Beadle County Courthouse.
The prosecution contended that Bill murdered Sharon because a divorce might cause him to lose his job (or jobs) again.
Investigators alleged that, on the day Sharon died, Bill sneaked a high dose of Temazepam into her chocolate milk. Lab tests showed that the drug doesn’t affect the beverage’s taste.
Then, he dashed out to the church to give the drug time to knock Sharon out. Upon returning, he dragged her unconscious body to the tub and let her drown.
Bill’s claim that he tried to get Sharon out of the tub didn’t make sense because his hair and clothing were completely dry by the time first responders came. Also, an expert noted that, when people drown in tubs, they’re rarely found face down.
One witness testified that Sharon told her that she and Bill hadn’t had sex since they moved to South Dakota. Apparently, Sharon bought her husband’s story about erectile dysfunction.
But Bill’s side came up with evidence that could have been a game changer for the trial: a suicide note from Sharon. Dated the day before her death, it was addressed to Suzanne and consisted of an apology for ruining her wedding and a pledge not to ruin Jenalu’s. The note had no signature by hand; it was entirely typed.
Bill said he found it hidden in a liturgy book in a church office.
The reference to ruining Suzanne’s wedding had to do with a 15-minute argument between Sharon and the mother of the groom. Suzanne testified that it was a family joke and no big deal.
Suzanne also said that she couldn’t believe her mother would take her own life. “My mom always taught me that there’s ways out of things,” Suzanne would later say during an appearance on the Montel Williams Show, “and suicide is not one of them.”
The prosecution had concrete evidence to back up Suzanne’s testimony. An old computer that Bill had given to Suzanne shortly before the trial contained a file named Sharon.doc, with some of the writing from the purported suicide note — and whoever composed the note interrupted it to write sermons.
Apparently, Bill worked on the note on the family’s home computer as well as the church’s machine — and it was written in August, after Sharon’s death.
Bill admitted to writing a suicide note in Sharon’s voice because he was “trying to bring some reason into what had happened,” according to court papers. He said it helped him work through his grief over Sharon’s death.
Defense lawyer Phil Parent continued to push the suicide theory. After Debbie Christensen told the court about her relationship with Bill, Parent contended that Sharon found out about the affair and that it threw her into a state of depression that spurred her to commit suicide. Alternately, the defense contended, Sharon intentionally took the nonlethal overdose of pills as a cry for help but then accidentally drowned herself.
Jenalu said that her mother had once overdosed on Benadryl and needed medical attention. She would later tell Forensics: You Decide that Sharon was stressed out about her weight and taking diet pills to slim down before the wedding. Jenalu also implied that her mother did dramatic things to get her husband’s attention.
But the jury of five men and seven women didn’t buy it.
In a crowded courtroom with his three daughters present, Bill heard the verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. He showed little reaction, the AP reported. When asked if he’d like to say anything to the court, Bill answered, “No, your honor.”
Bill received a mandatory sentence of life with no possibility of parole.
“We are deeply saddened by the guilty verdict issued to Rev. Guthrie,” said Rev. Bill Livingston, interim executive of the Presbytery of South Dakota. “We pray God’s comfort for his family as they live through these most difficult times.”
Sharon’s body was removed from its South Dakota grave and reburied in her native Nebraska. That gave investigators the opportunity to get her fingerprints. They didn’t match fingerprints on the suicide note.
The Nebraska Supreme Court rejected Bill’s appeal in 2001. A 2009 appeal also failed.
Bill died in the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls in 2011 at the age of 66 — a man of God who had a lot of explaining to do when and if he made it to the other side.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on Youtube
The episode of Forensics: You Decide about the case, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ is on Amazon, but it costs $1.99 to view it even if you have Prime
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