Death in Small Doses: A good marriage gone bad, a wife’s slowly failing health. Is she being poisoned, and if so by who? The answer is far from straightforward.
The Wedding Crasher: A joyous day is turned into a night of pure terror when a killer comes calling.
The Case of the Flying Corpse: When body parts start washing up on the English coast, the police are left with a baffling puzzle to solve. The solution will leave them dumbfounded.
Terror at the Mall: Everyone thought Sylvia Seegrist was a harmless kook – until the day she showed up at the mall brandishing an assault rifle.
Killer Behind a Badge: Antoinette Frank should never have been accepted into the police force. Now she’s out on the streets, using her badge in a robbing and killing spree with her drug dealer boyfriend.
Hollywood Whodunnit: A beautiful model is found strangled to death in her home. But who killed her? The jilted boyfriend, the millionaire lover, or the 6-foot-tall female “enforcer?”
Murder in the Peace Corps: They called her the most beautiful girl in the Peace Corps. But beautiful women often attract unwanted admirers – and this one’s a killer.
Death by Corned Beef: When a marriage devolves into outright warfare, even a favorite meal can be used as a weapon.
Butcher Boys: Two roommates, working independently of each other, commit three of the bloodiest murders in Australian history.
The Mystery of the Murdered Wife: Only one man could have committed the murder, but he was miles away at the time. One of history’s most enduring murder mysteries.
Click the "Read More" link below to read the first chapter of
Murder Most Vile Volume14
Death in Small Doses
To the casual observer, it appeared that Richard and Nancy Lyon
had the perfect marriage. The handsome, successful couple first met in 1979 at
Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where they were both studying
landscape architecture. She was a member of a prominent Dallas family, the
Dillards. He was strictly middle-class, the son of a Connecticut insurance
salesman and his teacher’s aide wife. Yet that class divide did nothing to
derail the path of true love. The couple courted for three years and married in
1982, thereafter moving to Nancy’s hometown.
And they could not have chosen a
better time to settle in Dallas. The city was experiencing a property boom
which of course, played right to their skill set. Nancy soon accepted a
management job with a real estate firm owned by a friend of her father.
Richard, on his father-in-law’s recommendation, was hired to oversee some of
the largest landscaping projects in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
By 1986 when the Lyon’s first daughter Alison was born, the couple
had moved onward and upward in the world. Nancy had by now made partner at her
firm and while Richard’s career had stalled somewhat, he was still making good
money. The intervening years had seen them purchase an upmarket condo in one of
the city’s most sought after areas, Park Cities. And in 1989 they blessed their
home with a second daughter Annie. By then however, the golden hue of this
gilded couple had dimmed somewhat. Their marriage in fact was in serious
trouble.
It is difficult to isolate the genesis of the Lyon’s marital
problems. Some might point to Richard’s insecurities, which had been evident
even before the wedding. He’d never truly felt part of the Dillard clan, or of
the Park Cities set for that matter. He was convinced that the Dallas elite,
including his own wife looked down their noses at him. Exacerbating those
feelings of inadequacy was the way in which Nancy’s career went from strength
to strength, while his appeared to flounder. He became jealous and frustrated,
unable to confide his true feelings to Nancy. Casting about for some solace in
this emotional maelstrom, he turned to an attractive co-worker Tami Ayn
Gaisford. Before long they were involved in a passionate affair.
Nancy soon became aware of her husband’s infidelity, but she
wasn’t ready to give up on her marriage just yet. Over the Memorial Day weekend
of 1989, she persuaded Richard to see a sex therapist with her at the Sierra
Tucson Hospital. During that session she sought to explain her issues with
sexual intimacy, a constant source of conflict in their marriage. The
revelation she made was shocking. Nancy admitted that during her teens, she had
been involved in an incestuous relationship with her brother Bill.
Her intention in revealing this skeleton in the Dillard closet may
have been to garner some sympathy from her husband, but it had the opposite
effect. Richard was repulsed, disturbed and angry. Over the months that
followed he refused any physical contact with Nancy at all. He also became more
open in his affair with Tami, further increasing the tensions within the Lyon
household. Eventually after months of bickering, Richard packed up his things
and moved out, driving away from the family home a day after Christmas 1989.
At this point the Lyons’ marriage appeared irretrievable. But
nothing in this complex relationship was ever that simple. Richard was back
within two weeks, only to move out again a month later. Nancy assured friends
that he was just going through a phase and that he would be back, even if it
was just for the sake of the children. Then in September Richard filed for
divorce, only to withdraw the petition a couple of months later after a
settlement had been all but finalized. By November he was back on the scene and
the couple was talking about a reconciliation. It was around this time that
Nancy began displaying the symptoms of the illness that would eventually kill
her.
It started with a bottle of Merlot left anonymously on the doorstep
of the Lyon family home as a gift. Nancy drank some of the wine and was
violently ill. Then there was the soda that Richard bought for her during a
movie date night. It tasted bitter Nancy would later recall, and there was
white powder floating on the surface. Also there were the vitamin capsules that
her husband bought for her and encouraged her to take. Soon she was losing
weight and suffering unexplained bouts of sickness. She put it down to the
stress of her marriage.
But stress alone could not have accounted for Nancy’s rapid
decline. On January 9, 1991, she collapsed and was rushed to the emergency room
at Presbyterian Hospital. There doctors fought desperately to stop her vomiting
and to ease the obvious agony she was in. But despite their best efforts,
Nancy’s vital signs refused to stabilize. Her pulse was racing at 144; her
blood pressure had dropped to 50 over 18. Fearing that they might lose her, the
doctors moved Nancy to the ICU while they tried to figure out what was causing
her symptoms. They suspected that she was suffering from ‘toxic shock
syndrome,’ but the Dillard family had a simpler explanation. They believed that
Richard had poisoned her.
If that allegation was true then Richard Lyon was putting on an
Oscar-worthy performance. He remained steadfastly by his wife’s side,
encouraging her to fight for life. With the Dillard family also in close
attendance, a tense standoff developed in the waiting room. Meanwhile Nancy’s
condition continued to deteriorate. First her lungs collapsed, resulting in her
having to be put on a respirator. Then she lapsed into a coma and doctors
requested Richard’s permission to turn off the life support machines. He said
yes, but the action was not carried out due to vociferous protests from the
Dillards. That opposition however turned out to be futile. Nancy Lyon died just
hours later. The once vibrant 37-year-old had been reduced to an emaciated
wreck by her illness. In death she was a bloated unrecognizable figure. Nearly
forty pounds of fluids had been pumped into her body as doctors sought to
stabilize her blood pressure.
On January 15, one day after Nancy's death, the Dallas County
medical examiner's office conducted a full autopsy, which showed lethal doses
of arsenic in her liver and kidneys, one hundred times the normal level of
arsenic in her bloodstream and over forty times the normal levels in her hair.
That proved that she’d been poisoned, but it did not prove who had killed her.
The following day Detective Don Ortega of the Dallas PD held a meeting with
Bill Dillard Sr., during which Dillard reiterated his belief that Richard Lyon
was responsible for his daughter’s death. Ortega sympathized but explained that
the police lacked the evidence to bring charges. It was going to take time to
build a case. He urged Dillard to be patient and asked him and his family to
keep up appearances with Richard while the investigation was ongoing.
Dillard agreed and over the months that followed he played his
role to the hilt, calling regularly at the Lyon apartment to visit his
granddaughters and reaching out to Richard in their shared grief. Richard
meanwhile was being less than decorous. Within weeks of Nancy’s death he was
hosting his mistress at their home. He also took Tami on vacation to Puerto
Vallarta, leaving his daughters with their grandparents and telling them that
he was going fishing with a friend. He returned from that trip on February 25.
Two days later Detective Ortega brought him in for questioning.
Richard of course insisted that he was innocent. But the case
against him had begun to gain momentum, especially when it was learned that he
had bought various chemicals, including arsenic from a supplier named General
Labs.
Confronted by this allegation, Lyon first lied and then sought to
bluff his way out by saying that he had misunderstood the question. Eventually
he admitted to buying the arsenic, although he insisted that it was to treat a
fire ant infestation at his home. That explanation saw him walk away from the
interview with his liberty still intact. In reality though, his days were
numbered. When investigators found barium carbonate, another of the toxic
chemicals he’d purchased, in the “health pills” he’d foisted on Nancy, Richard
Lyon was arrested and charged with murder.
The prosecution case against Lyon seemed exceptionally strong,
with evidence that provided him with the means, motive and opportunity to
murder his wife. The motive, prosecutors insisted was money. Richard Lyon had
at first intended to divorce Nancy so that he could be with his mistress. But
he’d had a change of heart once he sat down to consider the financial
implications. Walk away from the marriage and he’d leave with nothing but a
lifetime of alimony payments. But if Nancy were to die he’d gain the couple’s upmarket
home and their joint savings, as well as the proceeds of a $500,000 life
policy. This was why Lyon had withdrawn his petition for divorce and returned
to the familial home. Could it really be a coincidence that Nancy had become
ill soon after?
It was a compelling argument but it was circumstantial, something
which the defense immediately pounced upon. Seeking to introduce reasonable
doubt, Lyon’s attorney offered three alternate suspects. First there was the
Lyon children’s nanny, who apparently had had a fractious relationship with
Nancy; then there was Bill Dillard Jr., the brother who had sexually abused her
during their childhood; finally there was David Bagwell, Nancy’s former boss.
Bagwell had been indicted on fraud charges and Nancy had received a threatening
letter after she was subpoenaed as a potential prosecution witness. “Stay out
of the Bagwell case or you and your family will face the wrath of God,” the
note had warned.
The defense had certainly regained some ground with this line of argument
but they had one more suspect to offer up, Nancy Lyon herself. They suggested
that Nancy might have committed suicide and offered in support of this a
receipt from a Dallas chemical company, which showed that Nancy had signed for
a delivery of arsenic trioxide. They even produced a handwriting expert who
testified that the signature was indeed Nancy's. Then there were the suicidal
ramblings in Nancy’s diary, writings that pointed to a deeply troubled woman
who might have done anything to get her own back. So had Nancy Lyon taken her
own life? And had she, as an act of revenge, deliberately tried to frame her
cheating husband for her murder?
By now there was a palpable sense that the trial was swinging in
Richard Lyon’s favor. But the defense attorney still had one more card to play.
He called Richard to testify in his own defense. This, as any trial lawyer will
tell you, is a risky strategy, but in the Lyon case it seemed a masterstroke.
Richard was articulate, calm and rational, displaying just the right degree of
sadness, balancing it with a forceful case for his innocence. Several of the
jurors would later admit that by the time he stepped down from the witness box,
they were ready to vote for an acquittal.
But here the prosecution produced a trump card of its own. The
defense had called a handwriting expert to verify that the signature on the
receipt and the writing in the diaries was Nancy’s. The State was therefore
allowed to offer a rebuttal. The witness they called was Hartford R. Kittel, a retired
document examiner from the FBI. The evidence he offered would be explosive.
Unlike the defense expert who had merely compared the receipt and
diary to other samples of Nancy’s writing, Kittel had matched the documents
against both Nancy’s and Richard’s hand. He came to the conclusion that the
couple’s writing was remarkably similar but not identical. This was not an
accident. At Harvard Richard and Nancy had actually worked at making their
writing look alike for shared design projects. As a result, they produced the
same angular n's and similarly long loops below their g's and y's. But as
Kittel pointed out, there were differences, particularly to the i's, f's and
s's. It was due to these differences that Kittel was able to state
categorically that Richard had signed Nancy’s name on the receipt and had also
written the supposedly suicidal entries in her diary. And why would he do that
if not to cover up his own guilt?
In the end, it took the jury just three hours to find Richard Lyon
guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, a
sentence later upheld on appeal. To this day he continues to protest his
innocence.
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