Poisoned Dreams

by A. W. Gray

  Insufferable as Richard considered his brother-in-law, Bill Jr. was nonetheless family, and the two found themselves thrown together often. As is common among alcoholics, Bill Jr. became quite loud and abrasive when he’d had a few pops, and Richard spent more than one late evening, cold sober, as the last remaining person awake to hear his brother-in-law rant and rave. For Bill Jr., drinking time was bragging time. Since it was “just among us fellas” (and also because it gave him a chance to shock his more conservative brother-in-law), Bill Jr. let it all hang out during these sessions. He told Richard many stories of cocaine snorting among the trust-fund kids, and even made the less than wise decision, influenced by alcohol, of course, to let Richard know about the topless dancers at the Million Dollar Saloon and Cabaret Royale. He needn’t have worried about Richard letting Nancy in on what he knew—thus sparing Bill Jr. the problem of having his own wife find out, since Nancy and Mary Helen were thick as thieves—because Richard was the kind of guy who could keep his mouth shut. Like his knowledge of Nancy’s cosignature on the note for Bill Jr., Richard filed the information regarding the cocaine use and the topless dancers away for future reference. One day, long after he’d taken the cure and begun to walk the straight and narrow, Bill Jr. would deeply regret the times when he’d allowed liquor to loosen his tongue.

  11

  During the passage of time leading up to the final tragedy, Richard and Nancy were to move their place of residence two times. Nancy was to hold only one job while Richard was to work for three different employers. Nancy was to find success while, his declarations on the witness stand to the contrary, Richard’s business career was sort of a bust.

  Just how much her success vs. his lack of same had to do with his eventual rejection of his wife is known only to him. Chances are that the differences in their careers affected his feeling toward her very little; he is the type to take things as they come and roll with the punches. Whether he was the guiding influence behind her achievements (defense’s position once again) or she pulled her husband along by her skirt hem (you guessed it, prosecution’s version) likely didn’t matter to him; Richard and Nancy lived the good life, and which partner was most responsible for bringing in the bacon, as far as he was concerned, didn’t amount to a hill of beans.

  There is also room to speculate as to how much Big Daddy influenced Nancy’s meteoric rise at Tramell Crow Partners. Considering her meager beginning salary, her promotion to partner only a year later was the fastest climb in the history of the company, and at twenty-nine she became Tramell Crow’s youngest partner ever. But exactly what Nancy achieved to deserve such rapid promotion isn’t clear. One Crow associate (who remains anonymous, just as anyone connected to Tramell Crow Partners who will discuss Nancy at all remains anonymous) puts it this way: “Damnedest thing I ever saw. One day she’s around here learning the ropes, the next day, bam, instant partner. It’s like, last week she couldn’t even spell project supervisor, the next day she is one. She must have put together a lot of deals that the rest of us weren’t aware of, is all I can tell you.”

  But whether Nancy battled to the forefront through a series of brilliant job performances, or if Tramell Crow’s original breakfast-meeting statement to Big Daddy went something like, “Tell you what, we’ll put her on a starvation diet for a year or so and then jump her on up from there, and by the way, old buddy, about that two million you were going to sink in this project of mine,” she did make partner in just over a year, and she did become an assistant project manager. It was likely somewhat distasteful to her that in order to assume her new duties she had to drive every day to Grand Prairie, which is about as far removed from Park Cities as one can get.

  Grand Prairie is mid-cities, in between Dallas and Fort Worth, and although in the minds of many Dallasites it maintains the same blue-collar image the little town developed in the fifties and sixties, Grand Prairie has become quite progressive. Industry booms in this commuter city in between Interstates 30 and 20, and in recent years the real estate developers have realized the possibilities along Grand Prairie’s southern edge. A country club community called Woodcrest began just off of I-20 in the 1970s, and when people flocked from Dallas and Fort Worth to buy out all the Woodcrest lots in record time, Grand Prairie was suddenly on the residential builder’s map. Tramell Crow began his own development, Westchester, just a ways down the road from Woodcrest, a few years later. Westchester’s billboards along I-20 advertised homes “from the nineties,” though the nineties really wouldn’t buy too much, and at the time of Nancy’s hiring the new community had begun to thrive. Her first assistant project supervisor’s job was at Westchester, and her instructions were to report to the partner in charge of the subdivision, a man named David Bagwell.

  Bagwell—who was later to visit Presbyterian Hospital during Nancy’s final hours, and also was to have a brief encounter with Richard in the hospital corridor—wasn’t acquainted with Nancy Lyon before her work at Westchester, though if he’d been just a little bit younger, the two likely would have been old friends. Like Nancy, David Bagwell was a graduate of Highland Park High School, and also like Nancy, he hadn’t come up the hard way. His wife is the former Suzanne Shamburger, whose older sister Lynn was married to Dandy Don Meredith of NFL and Monday Night Football fame, and whose family is worth millions in their own right. He is a man with sandy red hair, given to monogrammed shirts, tailor-made suits, and East-Coast-tycoon, small-lensed glasses, and he considered Westchester his own personal kingdom. As Nancy politely shook hands with Bagwell in Westchester’s sales office, there was instant tension between the two. Bagwell was in charge and let his people know it; anything she considered domination made her hackles rise. David Bagwell and Nancy Lyon were to work closely in Westchester’s management, but the friction between the two would one day set the entire project squarely on its ear.

  In relating the importance of the various individual straws at which Richard Lyon grasped in setting his defense to murder charges, it is necessary to go forward a bit, shift into reverse and backtrack at times, and at other times make quantum leaps into the future. It is neither the best method in which to tell, nor the most understandable way for the listener to hear, any story, but the puzzling case involving the death of Nancy Dillard Lyon is without convenient continuity.

  At the time that Nancy went to work at Grand Prairie’s Westchester subdivision, David Bagwell certainly had no past to define him as a murder suspect. The events that led Richard later to point the finger in Bagwell’s direction were sometime in the future, and even those events required a catalyst, some well-known happenstance to cause jurors and media alike, when hearing Bagwell’s name, to thoughtfully pinch chins between thumb and forefinger and reason, “Oh, yeah. That guy.” At the time of Richard’s well-publicized prosecution, the Bagwell name with which the TV and newspaper people were familiar was that of David’s older brother, John.

  Like the Dillards, the Bagwell boys were well-heeled Highland Park kids. John graduated high school in the late fifties, David a few years after that, and neither boy was particularly a yearbook personality; no student council president bios, no football team notations, no Most Likely to Succeed nominations. John was quiet and studious, came and went from the high school campus virtually unnoticed, and many of his former classmates fail to recall him at all. In fact, the only memory that anyone seems to have of John, once they prod their recollections, is of his romance with the lovely, outgoing, and quite unforgettable Betsy Monroe.

  It’s not surprising that now middle-aged former Highland Park students remember Betsy; she was, after all, a Texas high school cheerleader. But more: her father, Dr. Frank Monroe, was the Superintendent of Schools at the time, and was the man whom the kids held ultimately responsible for the bottom-paddlings in the principal’s office that were then routine. Betsy was lush of figure, sparkling of eye, and the object of many from-afar crushes, but the prospect of reporting to Dr. Frank for inspection prior t
o taking Betsy out on a date kept more than a few would-be suitors at bay. John Bagwell might have been the bookworm type, but he certainly wasn’t faint of heart; he courted Betsy with vigor, stole her right from under the noses of the letter-jacket-wearing jockstraps of the time, and ultimately claimed the prize by making Betsy his wife.

  And not only was John Bagwell lionhearted in the ways of love, he was firm of career purpose as well. Whereas a large number of his Highland Park contemporaries crammed four years into five while trudging through college, and then ultimately went to work for banks and insurance companies, John blazed through undergrad and medical school and became one of the area’s leading cancer specialists. He and Betsy settled prominently into the Park Cities mainstream; while John labored ten-to-fifteen-hour days, not only with his own private practice but in helping to establish Baylor Hospital’s cancer wing, Betsy bore two children, taught Bible classes, and sang in the choir at Highland Park Presbyterian Church, worked on Dallas’ socially prestigious Shakespeare Festival, and joined (what else?) the Junior League. John and Betsy, in fact, had everything positive going their way when in 1981 an alluring woman named Sandra Bridewell entered their lives.

  To call Sandra Bridewell a woman is akin to calling Michael Jordan a basketball player; the listener misses the total picture. She is fantastically sexy, but at the same time she drips with class. She is a magnet for men and the envy of women, the stuff of which viciously delicious rumors are made. She lists among her former lovers Norman Brinker, the ex-Steak ’n’ Ale magnate and now the owner of Chili’s restaurants, polo player supreme, international jetsetter second to none. While Sandra was seeing Brinker, one of his former girlfriends (it is presumed that the culprit was one of Brinker’s exes, at least; there are those who accuse Sandra of doing it herself) broke into her home and scrawled a threat on her mirror in lipstick. The incident was the talk of Park Cities, and afterward Brinker provided Sandra with a bodyguard for a time.

  Though still a young and voluptuous woman, Sandra has survived three husbands, two of whom died from other than natural causes. She was a suspect in one husband’s death and, if one listens to gossip (and who in Park Cities doesn’t) the principal cause for the suicide of another. She is known around Dallas as the Black Widow.

  Husband number one, David Stegall, was a dentist, and so intent on becoming Dallas’ “society tooth doctor” that he borrowed enormous sums of money to set up a Park Cities practice straight out of dental school. He and Sandra spent money like water, and plunged further and further into debt to the point that bill collectors sat in David’s waiting room more often than patients. None of the creditor harassment slowed the Stegalls’ lifestyle one iota; once, as David borrowed $100,000 from his father just to make ends meet, Sandra spent $45,000 remodeling the Stegall home. Apparently, attempting to cope with the financial pressure finally drove David over the edge. His lawyer thwarted his first suicide attempt by breaking into a closet, finding David crouched on the floor with a pistol to his head, and disarming the frantic dentist. The second attempt, three weeks later, was successful and David did quite a job of it. By this time he and Sandra slept in opposite wings of the house, and she awoke one morning to find him not only with his wrists slashed, but with a .22-caliber bullet hole through his brain. Sandra collected life insurance, sold her home, paid off the debts, and had enough left over to continue to live the good life.

  Husband number two, Bobby Bridewell—whose last name Sandra continues to use—was the stereotype of the Dallas wheeler-dealers of the seventies and eighties. He made one fortune in real estate, lost it all in joint ventures when the market bottomed out, and then miraculously regained his chips through a unique and resourceful scheme. He talked Caroline Hunt Schoellkopf (Rosewood’s owner, Richard Lyon’s eventual employer) into buying a grand old Italian villa on Turtle Creek Boulevard and, under Bobby’s direction, converting it into a hotel and restaurant. The Mansion on Turtle Creek remains today as the uppitiest of the uppity, and is known far and wide as Bobby Bridewell’s baby. The hotel grounds cover more than four acres of pleasant lawn and shady wooded areas, and the original construction cost of the Mansion’s rooms came to $143,000 per unit. The dining room features original eighteenth-century paintings, walls of soft forest green fabric, a stunning mantel over a replica of the fireplace in England’s Bromley Castle, and an inlaid ceiling constructed of 2,400 individual pieces of carved and lacquered wood. Among the set that tosses off thirty-dollar lunches like Big Macs, the Mansion is definitely the place to see and be seen.

  Her marriage to Bridewell gave Sandra the ultimate in visibility among the Dallas social set, and she certainly made the most of it. She lunched daily at the Mansion—at the best table, of course—and became one of the hostesses for the Cattle Baron’s Ball, which in Dallas is the primary social event of the year. She made whirlwind shopping trips to Houston during which she stayed at the Remington or Post Oak Park Hotel (another Rosewood project of which Bobby was in charge) and spent thousands of dollars at the Galleria Mall. With Bobby’s flair for the upscale hotel business and Sandra’s penchant for glamour, the Bridewells’ marriage seemed the perfect union.

  At the height of Bobby’s success (and of Sandra’s prominence in the social whirl), however, tragedy struck. During a routine physical, doctors diagnosed Bobby as suffering from deadly lymph cancer. Faced with almost certain death, he determinedly gritted his teeth. In his fight for his life, he would settle for only the best in medical care, and the best available physician by far was Dr. John Bagwell.

  Even the nosiest of the Highland Park gossips (and there are a number of contenders for the title) were never able to establish that Sandra Bridewell and John Bagwell conducted an affair while Bobby’s health failed, but this much is known: As Bobby grew weaker and weaker, and finally became bedridden, Sandra was seen more and more often in Bagwell’s company. It is quite possible that the numerous times when Sandra popped by Bagwell’s office during the day, or joined him at the Mansion for lunch or dinner, were merely to discuss Bobby’s condition, and lacking evidence to the contrary, Sandra’s relationship to John should be left at that. By any stretch of the imagination, however, her actions during Bobby’s last days were to say the least unusual.

  During Bobby’s final winter, even as he lay in a hospital bed in the Bridewell home, Sandra hired remodelers and redid the house. The heat went out in the area where Bobby stayed, but as horrified friends brought blankets and space heaters by to comfort the dying man, Sandra continued to supervise work on other portions of the house and left Bobby to shiver in a frigid bedroom. In fact, she never did anything to improve his living conditions until the following spring, when the temperature outside had climbed into the seventies and eighties, and then the warm weather brought on her strangest behavior of all. She contacted a friend of hers named Marian Underwood, explained that a new heating unit was being installed at the Bridewell house, and asked if Ms. Underwood, a retired teacher, could keep Bobby in her home for a week while the work was done. A good and caring neighbor, Ms. Underwood agreed. One day in late March, Sandra loaded Bobby and his hospital bed into a van and delivered him to Marian Underwood’s house.

  And left Bobby there, and never returned for him. Too weak to move, he stayed at the Underwood home for three weeks while Sandra allegedly had her heating redone. Even the accommodating Ms. Underwood finally had had enough, and at the end of the three weeks she contacted Bobby Bridewell’s father. The elder Bridewell, himself a successful landowner, was furious to learn what Sandra had done, and immediately had Bobby moved into a suite at one of the Bridewell motels. There Bobby remained until, one late April day, it became apparent that his body was shutting down and the end was near. Bobby’s dad then contacted Dr. John Bagwell, who had Bobby moved from the motel into the cancer wing at Baylor Hospital. Bobby died at Baylor two weeks later at the age of forty-one.

  Local suspicion aside, there was never anything concrete to show that
Sandra wasn’t alone in the Bridewell house during Bobby’s final days, and if she did move Bobby out to clear the way for a series of trysts, she conducted her affairs with the utmost of secrecy. At Bobby’s funeral, Sandra was properly grieved. Two weeks later she vacationed in Hawaii. Upon her return she began to show up at John Bagwell’s house on a daily basis, and more or less forced herself on John’s wife, the former high school cheerleader Betsy Monroe.

  To say that she forced herself on Betsy is likely putting it mildly. According to all who knew Sandra, she was the type to drop by unannounced and stay for hours, and since Betsy was never one to hurt another’s feelings—particularly in Sandra’s case, where the woman had just lost her husband—Betsy did her best to make Sandra feel at home. Aside from her numerous visits to Betsy, Sandra continued to drop by John’s office from time to time, though whether Betsy knew that Sandra was calling on her husband isn’t known. The drop-ins on Betsy continued for about a month, a time during which Sandra told several Highland Park acquaintances that Betsy Bagwell was “my new best friend.”

  In early July 1982, two months after Bobby Bridewell had died, Sandra called the Bagwell home one evening and, when Betsy answered, asked to speak to John. Betsy was puzzled, but called her husband to the phone. John talked to Sandra briefly, hung up, and told his wife that Sandra’s car had stalled. He then struck out into the night, presumably to aid Sandra, but when he returned home a couple of hours later he seemed furious. He told Betsy that when he’d followed Sandra’s directions and arrived on the scene, a policeman was already there, and that with the policeman behind the wheel, Sandra’s car had started at once. John further told his wife that he believed Sandra had made up the car trouble story in order to lure him out of the house, and finally instructed his wife to stay the hell away from her. For Betsy, following John’s orders not to see Sandra anymore was easier said than done.