by A. W. Gray
Poisoned Dreams
A True Story of Murder, Money, and Family Secrets
A. W. GRAY
Copyright © 1993 by A. W. Gray
First ebook copyright © 2014 by Blackstone Audio, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Trade: 978-1-4821-0187-4
Library: 978-1-62460-651-9
For Terry and Nancy Murphy,
Their daughters, Colleen and Alison,
Major sleuth lover Dr. Joseph Link Jr.,
and the children at Notre Dame Special School of Dallas.
She cried with thirst at midnight,
And (Oh mercy on my soul!)
I drew clear water from the nearby brook
and added Nightshade to the bowl.
—from “The Poisoning of Alicia”
by William Trent Holmes
(1783–1854)
What man did poison the fruit?
’Tis verily a question.
—Widmark, the Court Jester,
from “Autumn Midnight,”
a play by Robert Wilkes
1
When someone gunned down J.R., and viewers endured a summer of rabid debate before finding out that the shooter was the unassuming little Crosby girl, America had a long and scenic look at the grounds surrounding Dallas’ Presbyterian Hospital. With J.R. in intensive care and Sue Ellen charged (wrongfully, just as your mother knew all along) and in the sheriff’s custody, Bobby and Pam and Cliff and the gang strolled, frowned, and exchanged suspicion-casting glances on Presbyterian’s sunlit lawns. Always in the background, visible between the trunks of stately elms and sycamores, the tall sandy brick building and its white-pillared porch were burned indelibly into the nation’s consciousness. Come September, J.R. recovered from his coma to (rather grudgingly) clear Sue Ellen, and to emerge, evil leer intact, through Presbyterian’s portals, ready to gyp and plunder for yet another season.
The TV show’s producers had done their homework. Presbyterian in fact lies a stone’s throw east of Central Expressway on Walnut Hill Lane, a lovely tree-lined boulevard, and is the most picturesquely accessible medical facility to the Ewing offices, the site of J.R.’s attempted assassination. The hospital’s manicured lawns, sculpted shrubs, and electronically monitored parking areas cover a full half mile of frontage along Walnut Hill, and the curving drive that leads from the street and separates into forks—in one direction the main entrance and in the other the emergency room—winds among the same lawns and beneath the same trees where Pam and Bobby plotted and strolled.
Just a few miles south of Presbyterian is wealthy Park Cities, and the hospital by right of location is the receiving and recuperation point for the gallbladder surgeries, ulcer treatments, and sedately proper heart attacks had by Dallas’ superrich. A full third of Presbyterian’s rooms are private; by contrast, Parkland, the county facility on Harry Hines Boulevard, has practically no private rooms at all. If one can afford to be sick in Big D, then Presbyterian is the place to go.
On January 8, 1991, a decade after the furor over who shot J.R., Dallas as a whole still reeled from the economic disaster of the late eighties. The city had yet to evolve from the heady concept of being rich into the stark reality of being poor, but it was well on its way. Park Cities housewives, many of them in their forties and for years accustomed to nothing more thought-provoking than ringing for the butler, were for the first time in their lives learning to job-hunt, cook, and run the washing machine. The war drums that rolled through the Persian Gulf stirred faint hope in the breasts of devastated oil men; that very morning crude rose a whopping two bucks a barrel. The excitement was to be short-lived, the fluttery recovery in oil prices as brief as Desert Storm itself. By midyear, many of the oil guys would be relearning the business from the ground up, pouring the black stuff into the crankcases of paying customers and standing in line for a meager check at the end of the week.
The eighth of January was a Tuesday. The Giants, Bears, Redskins, and 49ers received modest local coverage as they prepared to square off on opposite coasts in the second round of the NFL playoffs; since the Cowboys had seemed a certain playoff team with two games left in the season and then had blown the opportunity, most of Dallas couldn’t have cared less what ball club made it to the Super Bowl. An event of greater local interest than professional football occurred around one in the afternoon on that fateful Tuesday, in the far North Dallas suburb of Richardson, when a troubled teenager placed the barrel of a .357 Magnum against his forehead and pulled the trigger before thirty stunned classmates. The year 1991 was to bring, by a whopping number of inches, the greatest annual rainfall in the history of the area, but as of January 8 the first drop of the infant year had yet to fall. The forecast called for cool to cold and partly cloudy with no chance of rain until Thursday, but experienced Dallasites had learned to rely, in predicting the weather, equally on meteorologists and on the state of the rheumatism in Grandma’s ankle.
And, in fact, as darkness fell over the city, cloud banks gathered and faint thunder rolled. By eleven, as most of the residents packed off to bed, a cold mist drifted down to wet the rooftops and encircle the streetlights with damp and eerie halos. Dallas kept a watchful eye on the thermometer; a drop of a couple of degrees would coat the roads with ice. Luckily for nighttime travelers, the temperature sank to thirty-three and went no lower.
Around midnight, in the western half of a Park Cities duplex located a block from Southern Methodist University, a young man named Richard Lyon prepared to take his stricken wife, Nancy, to the hospital. She’d had cramps, diarrhea, and fits of violent nausea since early afternoon, and the prescriptions that her doctor had phoned in to the nearby Eckerd’s Pharmacy weren’t helping. Richard arose from the down mattress in the upstairs bedroom and dressed himself. He checked on his daughters, ages two and four, who slept across the hall in the nursery. He then carried his remote intercom receiver, which he used to monitor the sleep noises made by the little girls, downstairs and out onto the porch. There he stood in the icy drizzle and rang the bell to waken his next-door neighbor. After a few moments, Gayle Golden cracked open the door and peered outside. She was a petite and comely young freelance writer who, along with her husband, Chris Worthington, a Dallas Morning News sports editor, were Richard’s tenants in the duplex. While in many neighborhoods a midnight knock on the door is something to fear, this was Park Cities. Gayle smiled a greeting and said hello.
Richard explained his problem quickly—he didn’t think that anything truly serious was wrong with his wife, but one couldn’t be too careful these days with the flu going around—and asked if Gayle could keep the remote receiver by her bed in case the girls cried out while Richard and Nancy were gone. Nancy hadn’t been really well of late, so her illness wasn’t all that surprising. Gayle eagerly agreed to help and murmured sleepy concern over Nancy’s well-being.
His daughters’ safety assured, Richard returned to his bedroom and wrapped Nancy in a blanket. Though a short man, he was quite strong, and he carried his wife downstairs with little effort. On the way he passed framed photos that hung beside the landing: Richard and Nancy in wedding clothes beside a huge three-tiered cake; Richard in enraptured roughhouse with the little girls, Allison and Anna; Nancy in business dress with legendary developer Tramell Crow on her left, Barbara Bush, silver-haired and handsome, on the other side, and a personal inscription from the First Lady herself underneath. As Richard arrived at the bottom of the staircase and carried Nancy around the banister, polished hardwood creaked underfoot.
By the time Richard had borne her down the drive and deposited her in the front seat of his Alfa Romeo, Nancy was nearly unconscious and her breathing was ragged. Windshield wipers t
hunking monotonously, Richard drove cautiously down Dickens Street to Lovers Lane, and east on Lovers to the northbound entry ramp to Central Expressway. Southbound traffic paraded by in the opposite direction with headlights reflecting on rain-slickened pavement. The freeway going was a crawling forty miles an hour, partly due to the misting rain and partly due to the rows of construction barriers that blocked the outside lane; Central, an ancient and outmoded expressway, is, has been, and will be under repair or renovation to the ends of time.
When Richard finally exited on Walnut Hill Lane and made the winding climb toward Presbyterian Hospital, it was almost one in the morning. Nancy’s classic head reclined against the back of the seat. She was deathly pale and gasping for breath. As the Alfa Romeo entered the hospital drive and moved through misty blackness toward the emergency room, the rain increased in volume and beat steadily on the auto’s roof. Thunder rolled in the distance and lightning illuminated the edges of sooty cloud banks, the cold rain and faraway rumblings creating the perfect backdrop for a tale of infidelity, secret incest, and, ultimately, allegations of murder most foul.
2
The processions begin in mid-December, just after sunset, as the autos merge from all directions to create honking bottlenecks at North Central Expressway off-ramps on the southern fringe of Highland Park. A few drivers manage to duck the freeway snarls, sneaking through side streets near Oak Lawn Avenue, but once inside Park Cities it’s impossible for anyone to avoid the traffic jam. The processioners are families mostly, riding in plain-Jane-and-Joe Fords, Chevys, and minivans. Mothers and dads sit in front while tykes gang up in back, the children jockeying against their brothers and sisters for nose-pressing room, pointing and giggling and oh-ing and ah-ing. Mom and Dad tour in silence for the most part. Occasionally Mother will gasp in appreciation or even envy. Dad wonders about the electric bill.
Many join the parade near the intersection of Hillcrest Avenue and Beverly Drive, proceeding west on Beverly at a snail’s pace. The mansions are there on both sides as always, massive hulks against a blue-black sky, but on mid- and late-December nights they seem hidden in the background. It is the light show that the folks have come to see: dazzling in a word, blinding in another, fifty-foot trees wrapped from trunk to twig in shimmering points of fire, illuminating perfectly clipped lawns like noon daylight. In a few places Neiman-Marcus reindeer of burnished bronze soar among the treetops, forelegs bent, hooves sparkling and reflecting in the blaze. There are color schemes. Some of the trees have their trunks wrapped in sparkling white, their branches in dazzling green. There is an occasional Santa, to be sure, laden with gaily wrapped packages, standing on a majestic verandah with mechanical arms waving to and fro, but even Santa seems to mock rather than to beckon. Dad’s thumb is sore, and throbs when pressed against the steering wheel; he suffered the injury while nailing his own meager string of Christmas lights above his doorway. Beverly Drive decorations are hung in minutes by casts of thousands.
In the final days of 1990, Park Cities Christmas cheer seems hollow, gaudy, and even a bit symbolic of the economy as processioners in the they-got-it-and-we-don’t parade move in awe past the mansion home at 3517 Beverly Drive, the Robert B. Cullum estate. “You remember ol’ Bob, doncha?” Dad says to Mother. “Tom Thumb Supermarkets, huh? Helped build this town from the ground up, ol’ Bob Cullum did.” As he cruises slowly past the lighted Christmas tree in front, he humbly bows his head.
Farther down Beverly Drive—right next door, in fact, to the hallowed fairways of Dallas Country Club—elms and sycamores wrapped in candy-cane patterns of red and white lights blast into view. It’s Ed Cox’s place, Dad thinks. First National Bank, that was the Coxes’ baby, now that was a bank, I’m tellin’ you. First National is now gone with the wind along with its big-buck competitor, Republic Bank. Once enduring symbols of Dallas Progressive, the two giants were late-eighties victims of soaring interest rates, vicious dips in real estate values, and, some say, bloodthirsty meddlers from FDIC. But the brief stretch of Ed Cox Jr., in the federal pen after First National’s closing hasn’t dimmed the Yuletide brightness in his father’s yard one iota. Processioners gape, pause to gape again, and turn south on Lakeside Drive.
It’s a short run in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Lakeside Drive to Armstrong Boulevard. The brief Lakeside jaunt carries ogling processioners past even grander homes with grander, neck-popping light displays, the wide, still waters of Turtle Creek to the west reflecting the brilliance like Disneyland Lake at fireworks time.
At Armstrong Boulevard, Dad steers to the west and crosses the bridge over Turtle Creek. The barest of trickles in late summer, the creek is swollen with heavy December rain and flows sluggishly downstream toward the Trinity River. By now the youngsters in back have tired of the game, their oh’s and ah’s turning to whines of let’s-go-home. Mother threatens bottom-whippings. Dad moves grimly on, determined to see it all.
Armstrong Boulevard crosses Preston Road and widens into a parkway where two mammoth pecan trees sit majestically in the center island. The decorating of the Armstrong Parkway pecans has been for decades a Park Cities tradition, as city crews come out in early December to drape the trees in red and green lights, even to the topmost branches. When Dad was a boy, the sighting of the Christmassy pecans was a major event, but Dad’s own children barely notice the enormous trees. The light shows from neighboring yards have all but obliterated the Armstrong Parkway pecans, the steadily glowing red and green lights bobbing among the trees’ branches pale by comparison to smaller trees wrapped in fiery white points. A life-size nativity scene is set near the curb; the Santa who kneels beside the baby Jesus seems somehow out of place. Close to the nativity scene is a huge doll house, draped in light and encased in glass. The glitz goes on and on. J. Fred Schoellkopf, the downtown real estate baron, lives on Armstrong Parkway, in the forty-two-hundred block. So, in 1990, does Dmitri Vail, the celebrity artist whose paintings of the famous once adorned museums from coast to coast. Now his mansion home sits dark as Dracula’s castle. Within months Dmitri Vail will die in poverty, and his house will become the spoil in a tangled lawsuit between a lawyer who claims rights to the painter’s work and the younger woman who comforts Dmitri in his declining years.
Rheims Place slants off Armstrong Parkway a couple of blocks east of Preston Road, and processioners pass the intersection with barely a glance. There are a few light shows on Rheims Place, but nothing to write home about. A mere block from the light shows, Rheims is ominously dark on either side. No blazing Christmas displays here, no waving mechanical Santas. The mood is dismal. The mammoth homes are silent in the blackness.
The Rheims Place neighborhood is a million miles removed from Our Town America. There’s no friendly barber across the street, no Mr. Jones the butcher down the way. Beaver Cleaver never lived here, and the residents throw few block parties. John D. N-N-N-Neuhoff parks his Mercedes at 4300 Rheims, goes inside, and prays that bacon will rise again. One of the few employees in the neighborhood bunks at 4340 Rheims. He’s Ward Huey, Chairman and CEO of the Bela Corporation. This Christmas, Bela’s pup companies offer both good tidings and bad tidings: the Dallas Morning News can drive its competition, the Times-Herald, out of business before ’91 draws to a close; on the downside, though, Channel 8 faces massive losses in a lawsuit brought by Vic Feazell, the former McClennan County DA who was smeared in a Channel 8 news campaign. Before Christmas next the Times-Herald will indeed give up the ghost, and Feazell will win the largest slander judgment in US history—a whopping fifty-eight mil—and settle for half of it. Also on Rheims Place, Charles P. Storey, the resident at 4400, has a few streets named after him. In 4456 resides Ted Zale the jewelry man. In the decade past Zale’s has closed hundreds of stores.
The modern two-story at 4465 Rheims Place is set back from the street and is practically hidden behind leafy evergreens. It’s where the Dillards live. The real estate guy, not the department store guy; in Dallas, the n
ames are often confused. Like his nearly hidden home, Bill Dillard keeps a low profile among the movers and shakers, and likes it that way. This Christmas there is some cheer at the Dillard place, emphasized by the sprinkle of lights above the doorway and the nativity scene adorning the window. Nothing gaudy, of course, a bit of Yuletide glitter to greet visiting family, not enough brilliance to divert the processioners from Armstrong Parkway. The economy has hit Bill Dillard as hard as some and even harder than most, but there are a couple of things to celebrate. The lone surviving Dillard son has completed a year of sobriety, no mean trick based on past performance, and the youngest Dillard daughter’s marriage, on the rocks for quite some time, seems about to come together again. So the Dillards’ Christmas season of 1990 gives hope, a glimmer of anticipation that bad things will come to an end. It is a false hope, however. Though the season provides little warning, within a scant two weeks the entire Dillard clan will be immersed in tragedy and, eventually, awash in a spotlight cruel beyond reason.
Christmas comes and goes and Baby ’91 toddles in, rosy cheeks puffed out in a smile and eyes glistening in naïve excitement. The Yuletide lights along the Highland Park Corridor go into mothballs until the next season. Eight days pass with much smoke but no fire as Bush and Hussein glare at each other from opposite corners of a troubled world. On the ninth morning of the year, Rheims Place residents wake up in a cold and lonely drizzle.
Things happen early in the Dillard home. Though past seventy, William Wooldridge Dillard Sr. moves, acts, and thinks like a man many years younger. His prolonged youth is no accident. He keeps in shape with the same rigid discipline with which he conducts his business affairs, rising at the crack and going full steam while others have yet to open an eye. Jogging eventually destroys the joints, so running is out, and walking is a bore, so Bill Dillard gets his exercise in other ways.
