Jordan Linn Graham: A man goes missing on his honeymoon, his body discovered at the bottom of a ravine. Did he fall or was he pushed?
Debby Foxwell: A dispute between neighbors spirals out of control. It ends in a deadly confrontation, medieval in its savagery.
Barbara Scott: Benny Scott is gone and his wife Barbara claims he’s in Oklahoma visiting a friend. What then is that freshly turned patch of dirt in the garden?
Victoria Mendoza: Their romance had been blighted by fights and accusations of infidelity. Then things turn physical. Knives are involved.
Elizabeth Wettlaufer: The patients were elderly so their deaths attracted little attention. But the death toll is mounting. Is there a serial killer on the wards?
Stella Lipcynska: For years rumors hung over the church, rumors of a dead nun buried in the basement. Those rumors turned out to be true.
Lena Driskell: At the grand old age of 78, Lena’s fallen in love again. But her elderly beau is a bit of a ladies’ man. Lena won’t stand for that.
Marie Poling
It started with a report of a body lying in the undergrowth along Interstate 79, near the old Meadows racetrack in western Pennsylvania. That sent officers racing to the scene where they expected to find the victim of an auto accident, perhaps a pedestrian or cyclist killed in a hit-and-run. What they found instead was one of the most gruesome homicides any of them had encountered. This wasn’t the victim of an accident. This was a murder victim, naked, partially decomposed, minus a head.
The dismembered corpse was of a white male. It was wrapped in blankets, drapes, and garbage bags. The cuts to the neck were crude, inflicted with a bladed instrument like an ax. However, if the intention was to conceal the victim’s identity, the killer had erred. The hands were still intact, and from these the police were able to roll fingerprints. That allowed them to put a name to the man. He was 33-year-old Richard Poling, a married father of three from Warren, Ohio. That gave investigators a place to start their investigation. Their first call would be Richard Poling’s wife, Marie.
Marie Poling seemed surprised when she opened her door and found a couple of detectives standing on her porch. Then they told her the purpose of their visit, and Marie went into meltdown. To the officers, her overt display of emotion seemed contrived. Then again, people respond differently to tragedy. Perhaps Marie was prone to histrionics. As trained homicide investigators, they knew not to jump to conclusions.
Finally, Marie was calm enough to answer questions. Through her snivels and occasional sobs, she told a sad story of a marriage gone wrong. She and Richard had wed young, she said, and had three children in their 20s. She’d been blissfully happy in their relationship and assumed that Richard was too. But then, two weeks earlier, on January 9, 1988, he’d dropped a bombshell on her. He’d been having an affair and was leaving her and the children to be with his lover. He’d driven away that day, and she hadn’t seen him since.
Marie was keen to add the salacious details of her husband’s infidelity. She claimed that she’d found a receipt from a local florist for a rose arrangement that Richard had sent to his lover. She’d also found some of his love letters, she said. That had made her so mad that she’d thrown the letters out into the front yard, along with Richard’s clothes. The memory of that incident got her crying again. The officers knew they’d get no more from her that day. They put an end to the interview and left.
What the police had so far was this. A man’s dismembered corpse shows up along a stretch of highway across the state line. His widow claims that he deserted her two weeks earlier and that she hadn’t seen him since. If they took that story at face value, then perhaps they had a motive. What if Richard Poling’s lover was married or in a relationship? What if a jealous husband or boyfriend murdered Richard and disposed of his body? It wasn’t only possible, it was plausible. Murders like this happen all the time. To follow the theory to its conclusion, they’d have to identify Richards’s lover. Maybe his friends or co-workers would know.
But everyone they spoke to told them the same thing. Richard wasn’t the cheating kind. He was a solid guy who loved his wife and children and worked long shifts at the steel mill to provide for them. The words the detectives heard over and over again were “honest, devoted, reliable.” No one they interviewed had a bad thing to say about Richard Poling. The next stop was at the florist that Richard had supposedly used to send flowers to his lover. Turns out, that never happened. The florist had no record of the transaction. Marie had lied to them. In doing so, she’d just elevated herself to the top of the suspect list.
Then other evidence started building up. The blankets and drapes that Richard’s body had been wrapped in were from the Poling residence. The drapes had been a gift to Marie from her cousin. Then the police learned that while Richard had been faithful to his wife, Marie had not returned the courtesy. She’d been sleeping with a co-worker at the care home where she worked, a man named Rafael Garcia Jr., who was several years her junior. According to sources, Marie had Rafael wrapped around her little finger. He’d do just about anything for her.
There were other revelations, each more devastating than the next. Apparently, Marie had talked openly about getting rid of her husband. She’d spoken about hiring a hitman from New York. Then she said that she might kill him herself and was asking around about where she might obtain a silencer. She also spoke about disposing of a body. To one shocked colleague, she described testing out acid on a frozen chicken leg, to see how long it would take to dissolve flesh. She also spoke about dismembering her husband’s corpse and dispersing the remains in different locations.
The case against Marie Poling was building. But was it enough for a murder conviction? The answer to that question was no. Any defense lawyer worth his or her salt would be able to talk up reasonable doubt. What the police needed was physical evidence. What they needed was the testimony of someone close to Marie. Their next move was to bring in Rafael Garcia Jr.
Rafael made little effort to deny his affair with Marie. He seemed almost proud of having seduced an older, married woman. However, he was firm in his denial of murder. He was not involved in Richard’s death, he insisted, and neither was Marie. The detectives then decided to call his bluff. They told him that they were arresting him for the murder of Richard Poling. They’d barely spoken the words when Rafael cracked. He was ready to talk.
Garcia insisted, however, that he was not involved in the actual murder. It was Marie who had killed her husband. The first he knew about it was when he was summoned to Marie’s house and arrived to find Richard dead on the couch, bleeding from a bullet wound to the head. According to what Marie had told him, Richard had arrived home from work exhausted after a long shift at the mill. He’d spread out on the couch to watch TV, as he always did. And as was common, he was soon asleep. That was when Marie fetched the revolver that she’d borrowed from Rafael. She snuck up on her husband and placed a pillow over his head to muffle the gunshot. A single bullet was all it took. Richard Poling died in his sleep.
You might think that Rafael Garcia would have freaked out when he found what Marie had done. But Rafael was, as always, at his lover’s beck and call. First, he helped her carry the body down to the basement. Then, Marie pointed to a chainsaw and told him to cut off Richard’s head. Rafael wasn’t going to do that. He told her that the chainsaw would make too much mess. An ax was a better option. Two swipes was all it took to detach Richard Poling’s head from his body.
Now followed one of the most bizarre episodes of this already gruesome murder. With Richard’s severed head lying on the concrete, Marie suggested, “Let’s laugh our way through this.” She and her lover then took turns tossing the head around, abusing and kicking the corpse. When they eventually tired of this macabre game, they wrapped the body in blankets and drapes. The corpse was loaded into Garcia’s Chevrolet Cavalier and taken on the two-hour drive to Pennsylvania. There, the torso was dumped beside Interstate 79, while the head was thrown into a wooded area, 20 miles away in Washington County. Garcia later directed officers to the site, where the dismembered head was recovered.
Marie Poling was arrested and charged with the first-degree murder of her husband. Rafael Garcia, who agreed to testify for the prosecution, was charged with abuse of a corpse and obstruction of justice. That created a problem for Marie. With her former lover spilling the beans, she could hardly deny culpability. She was in a tight spot, but, as always with Marie, she saw a way out.
That involved a tactic commonly employed by defense attorneys in cases like this – putting the victim on trial. According to Marie, Richard had been a cruel and violent man who constantly abused her and the children and subjected her to spousal rape. On the night she killed her husband, Richard had a gun to their youngest child’s head. She thought he was going to pull the trigger. She was acting in self-defense.
Unfortunately for Marie, there was forensic evidence that disproved her story. After killing her husband, Marie had thrown out the couch that he’d been sleeping on when she shot him. But investigators were able to track it down, and the police lab retrieved blood and bullet fragments. It all proved that Marie was lying. Richard was flat out on the couch when she shot him. He presented no threat at all.
Quite aside from that, several prosecution witnesses contrasted her characterization of the victim. Richard wasn’t a violent abuser, they told the court. He was a kind, considerate man who was devoted to his children and loved his wife. His only crime was that he stood in the way of the life Marie wanted to live, a life of sexual promiscuity and prescription drug abuse.
Marie Poling was convicted on one count of aggravated murder and one count of abuse of a corpse. She was sentenced to life in prison with no parole eligibility for 20 years. That minimum term has long since expired. Marie has come up before the parole board on five occasions and has been turned down each time. Now in her 60s, she remains an inmate at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, Ohio. Rafael Garcia Jr. was sentenced to 20 years and served 13 before his release in 2001. He probably dreads the day that he crossed paths with this deadly woman.
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