Love Kills: A homely accountant and a beautiful, aspiring actress tie the knot in an unlikely match-up. One of them won’t make it past the honeymoon.
Every Contact Leaves a Trace: The tiny beach community of Port Hueneme, California is rocked by a trio of brutal homicides. The police are convinced that a serial killer is responsible. They’re wrong.
Michigan Deliverance: Two buddies out on a drinking binge stumble into the wrong bar. Soon after, they disappear. Their fate is the stuff of horror movies.
And Never Let Her Go: A woman disappears from a busy city street in broad daylight, leaving the police with a seemingly unsolvable riddle to crack.
Dressed to Kill: Dr. Richard Sharpe had some odd kinks. Dressing up in his wife’s clothes was one of them. Another was stalking her with a hunting rifle.
Mr. Saturday Night: A serial killer is cruising the backroads of South Wales, trawling for victims. Saturday nights just got deadly.
Choke Hold: When a woman is found strangled the police are certain that one of the many men in her life did it. The killer turns out to be a far less likely suspect.
Click the "Read More" link below to read the first chapter of
Murder Most Vile Volume 23
Deadly Intent
Misty Witherspoon should never have married a police
officer. With her shopping obsession, a millionaire businessman might have been
a better match, one with very deep pockets and an extremely generous nature.
Still, Misty was young and she was in love. She didn’t think twice when Quinn
Witherspoon asked for her hand in marriage. Quinn was a K-9 officer with the
Concord Police Department. He loved his job and he was good at it. That part,
Misty got. What she didn’t get was that law enforcement jobs are generally not
that well paid.
Fast forward eleven years and we find Quinn and Misty living
an apparently happy life in Mooresville, North Carolina. There were three
children in the picture by now, making them a handsome family unit. Quinn was
still with the police department and also actively involved in the running of
the Whitman Park Baptist Church, which he served as a deacon and also as church
treasurer. Misty was a good mom and was devoted to her children.
Scratch below the surface, though, and a different picture
emerges. The couple was drowning in debt, much of it as a result of Misty’s
reckless spending. She simply did not appreciate that the family was required
to work within a budget, and her constantly maxed-out credit cards were a
frequent source of friction between her and her husband. Quinn was generally a
patient man, but his wife’s behavior often left him exasperated. In all other
respects, Misty was a responsible adult. When it came to money, though, she was
like a kid in a candy store or, more aptly, a junkie looking for her next
fix.
Quinn, however, did not know the half of it. That would come
to light in 2004 when his pastor called him in to tell him that $18,000 was
missing from the church’s bank account. It did not take a forensic audit to
discover who was responsible. Misty had been siphoning off money that had been
entrusted to her husband’s care. And she’d hardly been subtle about it.
Confronted with the evidence, Misty tearfully confessed. She’d taken the money,
she said, to settle arrear utility bills. It was either that or leave her
children without water and electricity. The money Quinn had given her to pay
the family’s expenses had been squandered on luxuries.
Fortunately for Misty, the church elders decided not to
press charges. An agreement was struck whereby Quinn would repay the money, and
the matter was put to bed. But Quinn had only uncovered the tip of the iceberg.
What he didn’t know was that his wife was also juggling mortgage payments, had
maxed out several credit cards he wasn’t even aware of, had fraudulently
acquired several more credit cards in her sister’s name, and was fielding
numerous calls each day from irate creditors.
Those details would only be brought to his attention in
March 2005, when Quinn went to his credit union to discuss a delinquent account
and learned the full extent of his wife’s duplicity. Thereafter, he
significantly reduced the spending limit on his credit card and canceled the
linked facility that had been issued to Misty. He also signed off on a payment
plan for the settlement of the delinquent accounts, which meant that the family
had to tighten their already strained belts. Some harsh words were exchanged
that night, and the gist of it was that Misty really had to start acting responsibly
with money.
Quinn Witherspoon appears to have been a particularly
trusting individual. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he continued to
believe his wife when she said that she would mend her ways. Misty retained
responsibility for paying the family’s bills, and it wasn’t long before she was
back to her old habits. Utilities and mortgage again went unpaid as she
diverted the money to fund her spending. Her level of duplicity was such that
when she and Quinn were at home together, she’d carry the phone around with her
so that she could field any calls that came in. Inevitably, those calls would
be from some or other company, demanding payment of an arrear bill.
But of course, this was a deception that could only be
maintained for so long. On September 6, 2005, Misty received a letter of demand
from Duke Power saying that her electricity would be cut off unless settlement
of the arrears was made within seven days. Misty did nothing about that letter
until the afternoon of September 13. Then she called Duke Power and asked for
an extension on the heavily overdue account. Since the grace period had already
expired, they gave her just 24 hours to come up with the money.
Misty was now in a spot. She had no way to pay the debt
which meant that she was going to have to confess to Quinn that she had again
deceived him. After stealing money from the church, after defrauding her
sister, after running her family close to financial ruin, after all the
promises she’d made the last time around, she had fallen off the wagon again.
Quinn was a patient man, but even he had his limits. She did not know how he’d
react.
And so Misty Witherspoon made a decision, a terrible, wicked
decision that would end up costing an innocent man his life and leaving three
innocent children to be raised without either of their parents. Misty decided
that she’d rather kill her husband than admit to him that she had let him down
again.
At around 2:08 p.m. on September 13, 2005, a dispatcher at
the Iredell County 911 call center received a call from an apparently
distraught Misty Witherspoon. She said that she had been bringing her husband
his service pistol when she had tripped and accidentally fired the weapon.
Quinn had been hit in the head and she believed that he had been killed.
The shooting of one of their own sent police officers racing
to the Witherspoon residence. First to arrive was Officer Corey Barnette, who
found Quinn lying face down on a couch, his pistol on the floor a few feet away
beside a hard-covered children's book. According to Misty, she had been
carrying the gun when she’d stepped on the book, causing her foot to slide.
That is what had caused the gun to fire.
By now, an ambulance had arrived, and it did not take the
EMTs long to confirm what Officer Barnette already knew. Quinn Witherspoon was
dead. In fact, as Barnette had already noted and as one of the medics now
pointed out, the blood around the bullet wound had already dried. That
suggested that Misty Witherspoon had not called 911 immediately after the
shooting. It was the first indication that she was not telling the truth.
Over the next 24 hours, Misty would repeat her story, almost
verbatim, to several other officers. But nothing that she said added up. The
position of the body, the angle of the bullet wound and the location of the
single shell casing all suggested that someone had leaned over Quinn
Witherspoon and shot him as he dozed. In order to resolve the inconsistencies,
detectives asked Misty to do a re-enactment of the shooting. Then they asked to
make another statement, clearing up any earlier discrepancies; then they
brought her in for a second interview and then a third.
Misty had spent most of her adult life around cops, and she
must have known by now that the police were not convinced by her story. And so,
during an interview on October 5, she changed it. She now said that the reason
she’d been carrying her husband’s gun that day was because she had decided to
kill herself.
According to this latest version of events, Misty said that
she had spoken to the power company at around 1:30 and had been told that her electricity
was about to be cut off. That had left her feeling distraught, so she had
walked to the bathroom to “think things through.” There, she’d opened a closet
to look for some hand lotion. As she did so, her husband’s gun fell out. She
took this as a “sign.” Picking up the gun, Misty had walked with it to the
outside workshop, where she planned on shooting herself. She would have done
it, too, had Quinn's K-9 dog, Tank, not come in and started nudging her. The
dog appeared to know what she was about to do, and it seemed like he was
preventing her from doing it.
Misty then walked back into the house, still carrying the
gun. She was trembling so badly over her near-suicide that she thought she
might collapse. She therefore grabbed the backrest of the couch where Quinn was
sleeping, holding onto it to steady herself. Then one of the family cats jumped
up onto the backrest and bumped against her arm. That was what caused her to
pull the trigger.
If anything, this new story was less believable than the
first. The police certainly weren’t buying it. That same day, Misty Witherspoon
was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Further charges followed,
for identity theft, for obtaining property by false pretenses, and for
embezzlement. Misty struck a plea deal and admitted to those. She remained
adamant, however, that her husband’s death had been an accident.
Misty was still telling that story when the matter came to
trial in June 2007. However, the evidence soon stacked up against her.
Particularly damning was the medical examiner’s report, stating that Quinn
Witherspoon had been shot from a distance of no more than six inches. Then
there was a courtroom re-enactment, using a mannequin, which showed that the
trajectory of the bullet that had killed Quinn made Misty’s version of events
impossible. She could not have been standing where she said she was when the
bullet was fired.
The defense, of course, produced its own expert witness who
contradicted the prosecution evidence, but in the end, the jury was not
convinced. Misty Witherspoon was found guilty as charged and was sentenced to
life in prison without the possibility of parole.
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