The Higher You Fly: A love triangle at a skydiving club sparks an intense rivalry between two women. One of them is in for a hard landing.
Deceiver: It was the most amicable separation imaginable. Steven and Tricia were moving on but staying friends. At least, that’s what she thought.
Just a Fantasy: An online flirtation inflames passions in cyberspace. The consequences cross over into the real world... and they’re deadly.
Death in the Dunes: A husband-and-wife team decide to end their partnership as con artists. One of them will walk away, the other will be leaving feet first.
Falling Down: He was a man with a temper, the self-appointed custodian of acceptable behavior in the apartment complex. It didn’t take much to set him off.
Deep Water: Some called him a genius inventor but there were rumors too, stories about his dark side. Those stories turned out to be true.
An Unquiet Death: Loyd Dejohn has a new woman in his life, a sexy little thing who happens to be his first cousin. His wife is less than pleased.
Murder Most Vile Volume 55
Killing You Slowly
It was a beautiful day in Southern California, the kind of day that seemed to be beckoning you to the beach, or out onto the water if that was your preference. It certainly was the preference of Janet Overton and her teenage son, Eric. The pair had arranged to go boating with friends off Dana Point. Whales had been spotted in the bay. They were hoping to get a look at the magnificent creatures. The date was Sunday, January 24, 1988.
However, Janet and Eric would not make it to the marina that day. They would not even make it to their car. Janet had not yet reached the vehicle when she suddenly collapsed in the driveway. Eric ran to his mother’s assistance and realized that she was having difficulty breathing. He shouted out to his father, Richard, to call 911. First responders were there within minutes and rushed Janet, fitted with an oxygen mask, to the hospital. Richard and Eric followed close behind. They arrived to terrible news. Their wife and mother was dead. She’d taken her last breath in the ambulance.
Janet’s death came as a great shock to her friends and family. The 46-year-old had been an outgoing and energetic woman who had served on the local school board. No one could understand how this had happened. Yes, Janet had been ill in the last few months of her life, but no one had imagined that her condition was life-threatening. Her symptoms had amounted to intermittent nausea and lesions that appeared on her skin and did not respond to treatment. Several doctors had been consulted, but none of them could diagnose the problem. Doctors now were equally baffled. They could find no obvious cause of death. The death certificate would read, ‘unknown.’ Tissue and organ samples were taken. Then, the body was released to the grieving family for burial. Richard opted for cremation. It was what Janet had wanted, he said.
And that was how things stood – an unexplained death, a medical mystery, a family tragedy. Certainly, the police had no interest in the case. No one had even hinted at foul play. Then, in July 1988, six months after Janet’s death, a call came into the Dana Point Police Department that changed everything. The caller was a woman named Dorothy Boyer. She was Richard Overton’s former wife.
Dorothy had been married to Richard 20 years earlier and was the mother of his four oldest children. She’d thought that they had a happy union until she made a staggering discovery. Richard was living a double life. He had secretly (and bigamously) married a woman named Caroline Hutcheson and had a child with her. Dorothy consulted a lawyer soon after and filed for divorce. Given the situation, she did not expect much opposition from her husband. She was wrong in that premise.
Rather than acknowledging his role in the breakdown of the marriage, Richard was livid at Dorothy for initiating divorce proceedings. He insisted on remaining in the family home while the settlement was being negotiated. It was around this time that Dorothy fell ill. She was constantly nauseous and started to find sores on her skin that were painful when touched. She became convinced that her husband was poisoning her. One day, she detected an odd odor in some milk and decided to take it to the police for testing. The tests came back positive for selenium, a substance that can be fatal in large doses. This same substance would later be found in Dorothy’s shampoo and face cream.
Confronted by the police, Richard admitted that he had been spiking his wife’s food, drink, and beauty products. However, he denied trying to kill her. He’d only wanted to make her ill, he insisted, in revenge for divorcing him. Dorothy was then asked if she wanted to press charges, and decided not to. The divorce was contentious enough. She had her children to think of. Her health improved once Richard moved out of the house, and the divorce was eventually finalized. She’d long since moved on from Richard when she heard about the strange death of Janet Overton. The symptoms described so closely match her own that she decided to take her concerns to the police.
This put a whole new spin on things. It also offered potential answers to many of the unresolved questions surrounding Janet Overton’s death. The police, therefore, launched an investigation to look into Dorothy’s claims. Their first task was to establish whether Janet had indeed been poisoned. Janet’s remains had been cremated, of course, but the medical examiner still had tissue and organ samples that could be tested. The investigation team asked him to test these for selenium, and got an answer they did not expect. The tests came back negative.
However, the investigators were not ready to give up on their case just yet. They now turned to Paul Sedgwick, a retired Orange County coroner with particular expertise in toxicology. Sedgwick agreed to examine Janet Overton’s stomach contents for signs of poisoning. He had only just begun his examination when he detected the distinct whiff of almonds, a sure sign of cyanide poisoning.
The police had their answer. They were looking at a homicide. Janet Overton had been poisoned. By whom? The obvious suspect was her husband Richard, but they could not simply assume that he was the person responsible. Was there anyone else who might have harbored a grudge against the dead woman?
It turns out that there was. Janet Overton had not been universally popular. She was an outspoken progressive who clashed frequently with the more conservative members of the school board. She was also having an affair with one of her fellow board members, a married man. Just months before her death, flyers had been placed around the school campus, exposing the affair. This had caused Janet great embarrassment. She’d been convinced that it was the work of her rivals on the school board, but the perpetrator turned out to be closer to home. It was Richard who had printed and distributed the flyers.
So, Richard Overton, who told anyone who’d listen how much he loved and missed his deceased wife, had run a vindictive campaign against her while she was still alive. He had also admitted to poisoning his previous wife, and he had a potential source for various toxins. A close friend of his was involved in gold mining, an industry that uses both cyanide and selenium in its processes. Motive, opportunity, and access to a murder weapon. It did not take much persuading to obtain a search warrant.
Officers who arrived at the Overton residence that day were hoping to find Richard’s stashes of arsenic and selenium. They didn’t find that, but what they did find was just as valuable. Richard Overton was obviously a brilliant man. A college professor with a master’s in mathematics and a doctorate in psychology, fluent in several languages, a consultant to various high-value companies. However, in the simple matter of planning and executing a murder, he would prove to be a novice, and a careless one at that.
The search turned up journals and computer files, all of them crammed full of venomous writings about his wife. He labeled Janet a “slut” and wrote that he hated her and that he’d “deal with her soon.” The source of this hatred was his wife’s many alleged affairs. According to his journal, Janet had slept with at least 17 men during their marriage. Whether that was true or not, Richard clearly believed it, recording his suspicions in painstaking detail. These were the writings of a man who seemed to enjoy torturing himself, a man teetering on the edge of madness, a man you could easily imagine resorting to murder.
But how had Overton committed this homicide? How had he administered the poison to his wife? Given what they had already learned from Dorothy Boyer, the police thought they knew. Janet’s cosmetics were bagged as evidence and sent to the lab for testing. The tests found traces of selenium in Janet’s face cream and on her mascara brush. Janet had literally been poisoning herself every time she applied her makeup.
However, it wasn’t selenium that had killed her. It was arsenic. How had that happened? Retracing the events of Sunday, January 24, 1988, investigators thought they had the answer. Janet had been due to go on a whale watching trip that morning, aboard a boat owned by her lover, Bill Dawson. That had likely spiked Richard’s anger. His careful, methodical poisoning campaign was abandoned as he dropped a quantity of arsenic into his wife’s morning coffee. Janet finished the cup before leaving the house. Within an hour, she’d be dead.
Richard Overton was arrested and charged with the first-degree murder of his wife. He would face two trials for murder. During the first of those, he suffered an apparent heart attack, forcing the judge to declare a mistrial. Second time around, there was no medical drama to derail the process. Overton was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He was sent to serve his time at Folsom State Prison, never wavering from his insistence that he was an innocent man, wrongly accused. He died behind bars in 2009.
Overton had remarried before his trial, and his fourth wife, Carol Townsend, remained his staunchest supporter right to the end. “He was a wonderful man, a brilliant man,” Townsend told the media after her husband’s death. “He did not kill his wife. She died of natural causes.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.