Patricia Hill: Patricia was a devout Christian woman; Frank was a porn-loving pervert. He’s ignored her pleas to mend his ways. She’s done talking.
Nancy Larios: According to Nancy, her husband slipped and fell while running up the stairs. That does not begin to explain his injuries.
Wanda Stopa: A brilliant, beautiful, but neurotic young lawyer falls for an older man. She wants him to leave his wife and she’s not taking no for an answer.
Carol Croydon: Phillip had been lured to the hotel with the promise of kinky sex. He had no idea what awaited him on the other side of the door.
Reta Mays: Patients are dying in unusually high numbers at the VA hospital. The alarm has been raised. There’s a killer on the wards.
Linda Carty: Desperate to hold onto her husband, Linda lies and claims she’s pregnant. Now, she has a problem. Somehow, she must come up with a baby.
Carmen Montelongo: Samuel swore that he’d never get married. But that was before he met Carmen. Sultry, sensual, duplicitous Carmen, deadly as a viper.
Susan Russo
Fortunately, David had married the perfect woman in Susan. She was a self-confessed “clean freak” who actually enjoyed the chores she was set. Her only bone of contention was the tight rein her husband kept on the family finances. David Russo was a man who was careful with money. An uncharitable person might call him tight-fisted. Susan had to scrimp and scrape to make ends meet. No amount of pleading would get David to loosen the purse strings.
And so, Susan came up with her own solution. She enjoyed cleaning and had time on her hands. Why not put that time to profitable use? Why not start a house-cleaning business? She began advertising her services around the neighborhood and soon had several clients. Just like that, the problem was solved.
Or was it? The thing was that Susan was spreading herself too thin. No matter how much enjoyment she got out of scrubbing floors and doing laundry, she was only one person. There was only so much she could do while still maintaining her own home to the standard her husband expected. Stretched to her limit, she began looking for solutions. She found it in a renowned energy booster – methamphetamine.
You can already guess where this goes. What started as an occasional pick-me-up quickly developed into full-blown addiction. Susan was spending all of her house-cleaning profits on drugs. She was neglecting her duties, including the maintenance of her own home. Her drug use also introduced her to a whole new world of fellow junkies. One of them was a lowlife named Jason Andrews. Soon, she and Jason were sleeping together.
Susan Russo’s transformation from suburban housewife to drug-addicted adulteress had happened in mere months. However, Susan still had a lower rung to find. In mid-1994, a military advisor visited the Russo residence to advise David on his financial affairs. David insisted that Susan sit in. He wanted her to know that she and the girls would be looked after should anything happen to him. Well looked after, as it turns out. David’s Servicemen’s Group Life Insurance currently stood at $1 million, with Susan named as the primary beneficiary. That got Susan’s mind ticking over. Here was a way to free herself from domestic bondage, to have everything she’d ever dreamed of.
On the morning of July 14, 1994, David’s friend and colleague, Eugene Stokes, arrived at the house to give David a ride to work. This had been pre-arranged, so Eugene was somewhat surprised when Susan told him that David wasn’t home. According to her, he’d gone out to buy cigarettes at around 11 o’clock the previous night and had not returned. Eugene found this odd, especially since Susan seemed strangely unconcerned about her husband’s disappearance. However, he did not want to pry. He assumed that the couple had some marital disagreement and that David would tell him about it when he got to the base.
Only, David wasn’t at the base. For the first time in his career, the ultra-reliable Navy officer had failed to show up for work. When another co-worker, Matthew Raven, called the house at 8:30 a.m., Susan told the same story. David had gone out to buy a pack of Marlboros and had not returned.
The story of David Russo’s disappearance circulated around the Lemoore Naval Air Station all through that day. By evening, David’s best friend, William Cole, was concerned enough to stop by the house and ask Susan if David had checked in yet. He hadn’t, and Susan had a theory as to why that might be. She thought that he might have absconded for Las Vegas with his friend Jimmy.
To William Cole, that made no sense at all. The David he knew was a straight-shooter, a stickler for the rules. Nonetheless, Cole assumed, like Eugene Stokes before him, that Susan was being coy. Likely, there was discord in the marriage that she didn’t want to talk about. Cole left but only after getting Susan to promise that David would call him the minute he returned.
At around the time that William Cole was departing the Russo residence, a farmer named Herman Dunkerken was driving a stretch of Maple Avenue, near the Kings River in Fresno County. Dunkerken was just approaching the water when he spotted a white Dodge Intrepid pulled to the side of the road. The vehicle appeared to be abandoned, so he pulled over to inspect it. Peering through the driver’s side window, he saw a sleeping bag and several blankets piled on the back seat. There was a shape under the blankets, an ill-defined shape that nonetheless troubled Dunkerken. He decided not to investigate further. Instead, he drove home and called the Fresno County Deputy Sheriff’s Department.
A deputy was dispatched to the scene. He arrived to find the vehicle exactly as the farmer had described it. Running the plate told him that the car was registered to David Russo of Riverside, California. The deputy entered the vehicle to conduct a search. A surprise awaited him on the back seat. The body of a middle-aged white male, dressed in nothing but his undershorts. Cause of death was obvious. A single bullet had penetrated the back of the man’s skull.
David Russo’s body was photographed in situ and then moved to the morgue. Then, a crime scene team got to work processing the car and the area surrounding it. By morning, the police were ready to break the tragic news to the victim’s next of kin. However, when they arrived at the house, they found nobody home. They were about to leave when they heard the roar of a motorcycle. The bike pulled into the drive, and the female passenger got off. She introduced herself as Susan Russo and her male companion as a “family friend,” Jason Andrews. According to her, they’d been out all night searching for her husband. “I’m afraid we have bad news,” one of the officers told her.
All of us react differently to being informed of a tragedy. In Susan’s case, the response was decidedly muted. She simply said that she hoped they were wrong, that it was a case of mistaken identity. The officers then asked if they could look inside the house. Susan said that they could. The place was spotless with not a hint that anything untoward had happened there. One of the deputies asked Susan to come down to the morgue to make a formal identification, and to stop by the station to answer some questions. Then they left.
Detective novels and Hollywood police dramas are fond of giving us protagonists with near-supernatural powers of observation. Think Lincoln Rhyme, think Alex Cross, think Kay Scarpetta. Real detectives are not like this. Nonetheless, cops have sharper instincts than the ordinary man, especially if they’ve been on the job a while. The detectives who interviewed Susan Russo on the first day of the investigation formed some impressions. The first was that the body language between Susan Russo and her “family friend,” Jason Andrews, was off. The way she’d clung to him on the motorcycle went a bit beyond friendly. The second was Susan’s reaction to being informed of her husband’s death. There was no surprise in her response, no follow-up questions. That spoke volumes.
And so investigators started delving into the Russos’ marriage and soon discovered trouble in paradise. A neighbor told them about an argument during a card game when Susan screamed at David that she had connections in the criminal underworld and could have him killed if she wanted. Another neighbor told of male visitors to the house while David was at work. From a police informant they learned that Susan had a meth habit and had been buying from a local dealer. She’d also been spending a lot of time with a fellow junkie, Jason Andrews.
By the time Susan Russo showed up for her police interview, investigators already had enough evidence to move her to the top of their suspect list. They had learned of the $1 million she stood to inherit. They also knew that David Russo had owned several firearms, including a 9mm Beretta. The slug pulled from his head was a 9mm. The only question was whether Susan had pulled the trigger herself or whether she’d got someone else to do it, perhaps her boyfriend, Jason.
The detectives got straight to the chase, laying out what they knew and telling Susan that they believed she was involved in her husband’s death. Susan swore that she’d had nothing to do with it. The cops then asked if they could conduct a more thorough search of the house. Susan said that they could. “You won’t find any blood,” she assured the cops. They found that an odd thing for her to say.
Susan Russo had always prided herself on the thoroughness of her cleaning routine. Perhaps that was why she was so confident in asserting that the police would find nothing. Unfortunately for her, forensic searches go far deeper than any level of deep cleaning she could ever hope to achieve. The forensic team recovered micro tracings of blood from the bedroom carpet, blood that was later matched to David Russo. They also found a pillowcase and some yellow twine, similar to bloodstained items found inside David’s car. Then there were three firearms – a shotgun, an AK-47 rifle, and a .357 magnum, all registered to David Russo. The only gun missing was the Beretta 9mm, the one believed to be the murder weapon.
Backed into a corner, Susan decided to come clean. She admitted that she had arranged her husband’s murder, hiring two men for the job – Jason Andrews and his drug buddy, Bobby Morris, paying them just $100 each. She had gone to bed beside her husband that night, knowing what was about to happen. Andrews and Morris arrived at the house at 1:00 a.m., as arranged. Susan got out of bed and let them in, handing them her husband’s 9mm to do the deed. She stood aside as they entered the room where David lay fast asleep. Moments later came a muzzle flash and the snap of a single gunshot.
The plan now was to load David’s body into his car, to drive the vehicle to a remote location, to douse it with gasoline and set it alight. However, the bumbling conspirators had failed to check the fuel level and ran out of gas well short of their intended destination. Andrews and Morris were forced to abandon the vehicle and hike back to Riverside. Meanwhile, Susan was hard at work cleaning up the crime scene. She thought that she had removed all trace of the evil she’d wrought. She was wrong.
Susan Russo was brought to trial in 1996, charged with first-degree murder. She was convicted and sentenced to life without parole for murder and 25-years-to-life for conspiracy. While in prison, she tried to arrange for the murders of her co-accused, believing she’d walk on the charges if they did not testify. However, the plot was uncovered, earning her an additional six-year term. Meanwhile, in separate trials, Jason Andrews and Bobby Morris entered guilty pleas, and each got 25-years-to-life. It remains unclear which one of them pulled the trigger.
Given her sentence, Susan Russo probably never expected to taste freedom again. However, she was thrown a lifeline in 2017, when California Governor Jerry Brown announced that he was commuting her sentence, allowing her to apply for parole immediately. The move sparked a huge public outcry, led by Susan and David’s two daughters who demanded that the governor rescind his offer. Under increasing pressure, Brown backed down. Susan Russo remained behind bars. She died there in September 2022, of natural causes. She was 67 years old.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.