Poisoned Dreams

by A. W. Gray

  For Richard’s part, he now had his own gathering of loved ones. His father, Allan, and his mother, Rosemary, had flown in from Connecticut to be with their son, and the Lyon family set up their own private watch in a separate waiting room downstairs. Allan Lyon is a short man with a slight middle-aged paunch and curly graying hair. Richard’s mother is small and dark, obviously the source of Richard’s good looks. Like Allison and Anna, Richard’s parents will never quite understand what happened. As the tragedy unfolded, they did what they could to be a comfort to Richard. Other than stiffly formal greetings, few words passed between Richard’s folks and Nancy’s family, but that had little to do with the gravity of the situation. The two groups of in-laws had not been close during the entire marriage.

  So as afternoon moved into evening and another dreary day passed, two opposing factions sat in different hospital waiting rooms. They had two more days of gloom before Nancy died.

  On January 11, one well-wisher dropped by who was not particularly welcome—at least not to the Dillard family. The visitor was named David Bagwell, a slender brown-haired man who’d attended the same high school as Nancy. Later he’d worked with her. The Dillard family had reason to be distrustful of the man; in fact, it was somewhat of a surprise that Bagwell would visit the hospital at all.

  After his visit, as he was leaving, Bagwell encountered Richard just outside the waiting room. The two men shook hands and engaged in serious conversation as they walked together down the hallway to the elevators. They continued to chat as Bagwell pressed the Down button, and Richard waited until the elevator doors closed with Bagwell inside the car before returning to the waiting room.

  It was a harmless meeting, a supporter comforting a bereaved husband in time of need, but Richard would remember the incident. In the year to come, in fact, David Bagwell’s name would surface many times.

  During the time that Nancy fought in vain for her life, there was yet another Bagwell moving about the corridors of Presbyterian. This Bagwell is named John. He is a doctor, and he is David Bagwell’s older brother.

  John Bagwell is a cancer specialist, and he doesn’t normally practice at Presbyterian. Crosstown Baylor Medical Center is his usual stomping grounds, though he does duty at Presbyterian occasionally under another doctor’s contract. His presence at Presbyterian during Nancy’s final hours was pure chance, nothing more; there’s no official record that John Bagwell ever paid a visit to Nancy Lyon’s room at any time. But just as David Bagwell’s visit was indelibly etched in Richard’s memory, John Bagwell’s presence at Presbyterian struck home to Richard as well. Along with Bill Dillard Jr. the Bagwell brothers were to become odd-shaped pieces to a puzzle that Richard Lyon would frantically strive to assemble in his own defense.

  The thirteenth of January fell on a Sunday, and as church pews filled for morning services all over Dallas, a duty doctor paused in Nancy Lyon’s room at Presbyterian. He stood at the foot of her bed for a few moments, his expression gentle as the life support’s air pump moved up and down in a series of hisses and the monitor beeped in toneless monotony. Finally the doctor sighed, adjusted his pale green smock, and stepped to the bedside table to examine Nancy’s chart. He thumbed through the clipboarded pages, his brow knotted as he searched in vain for the answer. There was no answer. He sadly shook his head.

  Finally, reluctantly, the doctor began to write. He noted Nancy’s current vital signs, noted the different procedures attempted over the past five days, then paused to gaze once more at the still form beneath the covers. Nancy’s chest rose and fell in rhythm with the breathing apparatus, but otherwise there was no movement, no reflexive eyelash flutter, nothing. One corner of the doctor’s mouth tugged reflectively to one side as he bent his head to write once more. His final entry on her chart was brief but caring: “There is nothing left for us to do but offer our condolences to the family.” Before he left, the doctor duly noted the time: 10:42 a.m.

  Big Daddy flew into an uncharacteristic rage around three o’clock in the afternoon, when he came to Nancy’s bedside to find nurses and staff surrounding her, and Richard alone in one corner of the room. “My son says you’re turning off her life support,” Big Daddy said. He swept the room with a cold-eyed gaze.

  Nurses and attendants watched the floor and, vacantly, so did Richard. “Who authorized this?” Big Daddy demanded.

  One of the nurses spoke up timidly. “Her husband,” she said, nodding toward Richard. “Mr. Lyon over there.”

  Big Daddy angrily pointed a finger. “You don’t touch her. You don’t remove her life support until you get the okay from her mother and me.” The tremor in his voice was tempered with helpless grief.

  The hospital staff and the nurses looked futilely at one another. Richard was Nancy’s husband and, officially, removal of the life support was Richard’s call and his alone. Big Daddy ignored Richard and continued to glare.

  Finally the head nurse nodded in agreement. At her order the staff people left Nancy’s bedside and went out into the hall. Richard and Big Daddy were alone with Nancy for a moment. They didn’t exchange a word. At long last Richard also left, his eyes downcast. Big Daddy stood by the bed, his head bowed, and finally reached out to pat Nancy’s hand. Then he moved on, his stride determined as he walked the corridors in search of the doctor in charge.

  As it turned out, Big Daddy had only postponed the inevitable. That evening, Nancy’s family—including Richard, but by now no one in the hospital doubted who had the final say—met with the doctors who’d treated Nancy. Somberly, tearfully, Nancy’s parents and siblings listened to the physicians, one at a time, outline the helplessness of the situation. The doctors had tried everything, every treatment, every medication. Nancy’s liver and kidneys had failed, and her other vital organs showed no responses. While the machine continued to pump air to her lungs and blood through her body, Nancy was in fact already clinically dead. Big Daddy listened to the report, conferred with Sue and his children, then agreed that all hope was lost. Nancy’s life support would be removed the following day.

  Grieved though they were, the Dillards hadn’t been idle. Bill Jr. and Big Daddy had already had private conversations with the hospital staff and, unbeknownst to Richard, the county medical examiner stood ready to perform an autopsy. Bill Jr. had received some private instructions from the ME, and once Nancy was officially no longer among the living, Bill Jr. knew exactly what to do. Even as the Dillards sadly accepted the doctors’ words, the legal processes against Richard shifted into high gear.

  The following morning, Monday, January 14, the fight for Nancy Dillard Lyon’s life came to an end. Quietly and efficiently, with Richard, Big Daddy, and Bill Jr. standing nearby, the staff disconnected Nancy’s life support. The form within the bed ceased to breathe and became still for all eternity.

  Once the disconnection process was over, Bill Jr. stepped to the bedside. Gently but firmly, using scissors borrowed from a corridor nurse, he cut his dead younger sister’s hair and carefully stored the clippings in a plastic bag. If anyone present wondered what he was doing, they didn’t ask questions.

  6

  Nothing in life hurts like the loss of a child. No parent whose son or daughter has died can explain the depths of the aching emptiness, the constant pain of living on once a child is gone. People expect their mother and dad to someday die. But their son or daughter? Never. As Nancy lay forever silent at Presbyterian, Big Daddy and Sue felt the agony for the second time in less than a decade. Younger son Tom’s death had been devastating, but Tom had been a cancer victim. Nancy’s senseless dying at the peak of her life hurt even more.

  The official hospital record attributed Nancy’s death to septic shock, but that was only a temporary finding until the county medical examiner’s report. With regard to the pending autopsy on Nancy’s remains, the hospital staff had a problem. Without permission of the next of kin, autopsy could happen only by court order, and the time
required for such a process would likely call for exhumation since Nancy’s funeral was only two days away. Ironically, the only person who could give approval to send Nancy’s body to the medical examiner was the prime suspect in her death. Hesitantly, fully expecting him to decline, hospital personnel asked Richard to sign the consent form.

  Surprisingly, he didn’t hesitate. His expression stoic, he signed his permission on the consent form without batting an eye. It wasn’t the last time that he would fail to act like a guilty man; however, even though he approved the autopsy and was well aware of its existence, in the months to follow he was never to inquire as to the medical examiner’s findings, and his lack of curiosity about the cause of Nancy’s death would contribute greatly to the case against him. Next of kin’s permission granted, the hospital detoured Nancy’s body to the medical examiner en route to the funeral home.

  After Richard had signed the autopsy form, he rode home to his duplex with his good friend and business associate, Gary Perkins. Perkins, a raw-boned, no-nonsense subcontractor who’d met Richard on one of the many construction jobs that he supervised, has no doubt that Richard’s grief over Nancy’s death was real. During the ten-minute drive, Richard sat morosely in the passenger seat and cradled Nancy’s running shoes in his lap, his gaze vacantly on the passing landscape. Richard was crying, and his voice broke as he spoke of his wife as if she were still alive. When Perkins parked in front of the duplex, Richard sat for a moment and stared at the floorboard before finally climbing down into his yard. Before he went inside, he wondered tearfully what to say to Allison and Anna. Gary Perkins had no answer for his friend.

  Back at the hospital, Big Daddy moved into action. He was totally convinced that Richard is guilty, just as many who know Richard quite well are certain of his innocence, and as long as there was breath in Big Daddy, he would do everything within his power to see that his daughter’s murderer paid for his crime. Big Daddy had a brief meeting with Bill Jr., and father and son planned strategy. In spite of his wealth of energy, Big Daddy was getting on in years, and in the time to come he was to lean heavily on his one remaining son for support. Bill Jr. was not to let his father down. Once the two surviving Dillard men had finished their talk, Big Daddy called the Dallas Police Department and asked the operator for Homicide.

  Although Nancy died within the city limits of Dallas, the Lyon duplex where she presumably received her fatal dose is in Park Cities, and these two facts presented a problem of venue. Park Cities—or the Town of University Park, to be exact, which along with its sister city Highland Park combines to form the Park Cities—is a separate municipality with its own fire and police departments, and like any ghettoless wealthy community, University Park has a very low crime rate. Murder is a rarity, rape nearly unheard of, drug busts generally limited to a few hand-rolled joints in the pockets of experimenting teenagers. Under flexible Texas law, either the University Park or Dallas police could have headed the investigation into Nancy’s death. Though not having the homicide experience of the grittier Dallas force, the University Park police would have had more time to devote to the case, but pinpointing the exact location where Nancy took the poison was going to be difficult. What if, for example, Richard had slipped his wife an arsenic-laced drink en route to the hospital after he’d crossed the boundary line? With that problem in mind, the University Park police took a back seat and left the bulk of the investigation up to the more burdened Dallas cops. Whether or not it was fortunate that the City of Dallas became the lead investigative unit in Nancy’s death is a point of contention.

  Dallas, a city that constantly sticks out its chest over its progress, continues to treat its police department like an unwanted stepchild. A mile to the southeast of the glistening new city hall and public library, law enforcement labors on in the same surroundings it has occupied since the thirties. The underground police garage through which Jack Ruby walked to his rendezvous with destiny thirty years ago is still in use, and so is the old city jail.

  Main police headquarters, next door to the jail and garage, is a four-story building of ancient stone block on the eastern edge of downtown Dallas, surrounded by storefront single-stories that house boxing gyms, bail bondsmen, and stand-up barbecue restaurants. The chiseled inscription, “Municipal Building,” has weathered to the point that the words are barely discernible, and the once majestic steps leading from street level to the second-floor main entry are littered with trash and pigeon droppings. In fact, the main entry is seldom used anymore, and is often padlocked. Visitors and officers alike generally enter and leave the building through the basement, descending a dusty stone staircase through two sets of double doors. At night the basement steps are an ideal sleeping place for druggies, drunks, and drifters. At times, depending on the mood of the current police chief—the office of the main city law enforcement mogul has, in recent years, contained a revolving door—night-duty personnel vigorously keep the homeless at bay, but on other occasions permit street people to snore on uninterrupted and step over the slumbering bodies on their way in and out of police headquarters.

  Rundown as is the exterior of Dallas’ main police headquarters, the inside of the building is even more in need of a facelift and, some say, even poses a health hazard. The walls are loaded with cancer-causing asbestos; in places there are holes in the sheetrock. Clerical personnel make do with gray government-issue desks and metal chairs, and store records in old green steel file cabinets. The computer system is modern and up-to-date, though the furniture on which the monitors sit is anything but, and the sharply creased navy blue uniforms of the officers seem out of place in the dilapidated surroundings.

  Stone-faced plainclothes detectives report to the third floor, where they work in one of two divisions: Crimes against Property (investigating theft and burglary mainly) and Crimes against Persons. Crimes against Persons handles just what the name implies, and within the division are further breakdowns: Assault (including rape), Robbery, Homicide.

  Of the several thousand felonies committed annually in the city of Dallas, less than four hundred involve murder. Drunken barroom shootings and stabbings are the bulk of the lot, followed by husband or wife killings and murders committed during robberies. In recent years a disturbing number of teenagers have been involved, mostly black underprivileged kids with a boiling anger against the society that has deprived them. Park Cities poisonings are definitely outside the norm.

  Case assignments in Homicide are the luck of the draw, and often depend on which detective happens to be lounging in the office when the call comes in to the lieutenant-in-charge. Lady found a stiff in the alley behind the Drop Inn Bar, Harry. Get off your ass and get out there. The original inquiry into the death of Nancy Dillard Lyon wasn’t a high-priority item because, first of all, there wasn’t any concrete evidence that there had been a murder at all. There was no disfigured corpse, no bloody hatchet, no smoking gun. With hundreds of active homicide investigations in progress, the Dallas police were naturally to place a possible murder on the far back burner. Whatever preliminary inquiries were made into the Lyon case went on the department’s assignment sheet under the already burdensome case load of Homicide detective Donald Ortega.

  Don Ortega is a short, round-faced man with smooth olive-complexioned skin. He is given to light-colored suits and ties and speaks in a soft and pleasant tenor with just the barest trace of a Hispanic accent. Ortega doesn’t joke much, and regards the world through heavy-lidded, I’m-suspicious eyes; as a twenty-year murder cop he’s seen ’em come and seen ’em go. He is a private man, both in his personal life and in the cases he investigates. He doesn’t like newspaper people and lets it show; other than his public testimony from the witness stand he has no comment for eager reporters. Up until he handled the Lyon investigation, Ortega had shunned publicity like the plague. He didn’t know it as yet, but as he was assigned the death of Nancy Lyon, Don Ortega’s life was about to change.

  Crime victims mak
e good prosecutorial props, tearfully outlining their devastation in front of sympathetic jurors, but the cold, hard fact is that victims receive little comfort from the system. To detectives with an impossible load of cases, inquiries from victims are often considered bothersome hindrances in the process of getting the job done. When Big Daddy’s call came in on January 14, Ortega had little to go on and said so. Without the medical examiner’s report—and with the hospital staff’s official finding that Nancy had died from septic shock—the Dallas Police Department was without cause to officially enter the case at all.

  With most crime victims, Ortega’s statement of his lack of cause would have ended the issue until the ME’s report—which wasn’t to come for eleven weeks—but William Wooldridge Dillard Sr. is far from your normal victim. Putting Big Daddy off where his little girl’s murder was concerned, the police were to find, wasn’t going to be easy. Big Daddy was insistent. He had information for the police, and he wanted action now. Somewhat reluctantly, Ortega agreed to meet with Big Daddy on the following day. Gazing about the homicide office, at the old desks and chairs, at the gashes in the sheetrock, Ortega decided that main police headquarters wouldn’t be the best place to meet with a distinguished citizen from Highland Park, and set up his initial conference with the victim’s father at the department’s central substation.

  The central substation is the nearest Dallas police facility to Big Daddy’s office at 2001 Bryan Tower, and while its interior is newer and in better condition than main police headquarters, the neighborhood isn’t any more exclusive. The big white buildings of the substation sit beside Thornton Freeway just north of the state fairgrounds, and on a certain October afternoon each autumn the roar of the Texas–OU crowd in the nearby jam-packed Cotton Bowl assaults the visitor’s ears. Glass double doors lead from the parking lot into a wide, pleasant lobby. The station’s interior is spotless, done in greens and beige, easy on the eyes. Detective Ortega met with Big Daddy in a small conference room off the lobby just after noon on January 15, even as Nancy’s body lay with the medical examiner. Her funeral service was scheduled for the following day.