Poisoned Dreams

by A. W. Gray

  Finally, Yvette could bear the suspense no longer. During one of her daily detours by the condo, she parked her car, got out, and looked surreptitiously around. The policemen in the unmarked car sank immediately out of sight behind the dashboard, dribbling coffee on their shirt fronts as they did; the stakeout cops didn’t know Richard Lyon from Richard the Lionhearted, and for all they knew this mysterious female was the other woman in the case, Denise Woods, come to make off with the evidence. Slowly, carefully, her gaze shifting left and then right, Yvette crept upstairs to stand outside Richard’s old apartment. Then, after a final glance in all directions, the petite and eye-catching young lady snatched up the package and made a running beeline down the steps and across the lawn to her car. After first tossing the parcel onto the front seat, diving behind the wheel, and starting the engine, Yvette then wound her way home with stakeout cops hot on her trail. Once in her kitchen she slit open the UPS envelope and had a look, and barely had time to check the labels on the chemical containers inside the package before her doorbell rang. After a series of none-too-gentle questions, the two burly cops from the unmarked sedan placed Yvette under arrest and took her, package and all, downtown for booking as a material witness.

  Other than a somewhat sheepish stint on the witness stand in preliminary hearings, Yvette thereafter personally vanished from the scene. The package itself contained only pesticides, and was never introduced into evidence, so Yvette’s chain-of-custody testimony was unnecessary to the trial proceedings. In fact, the young lady relocated to California before the trial was under way. She did keep abreast of the case via long-distance calls to newsmen, however, and continued to state that she had the various principals “tied up,” and further stated that once the trial was finished she would be going into production with her movie. She left the LA phone number of Carolco Productions with the media folk, and asked that they give her a call should any important developments arise. Long after the verdict was in, curious as to why no camera crews had showed up for filming, one of the newsmen did call Carolco’s offices to make an inquiry. The person answering the phone stated that no one named Yvette Ferris was currently employed by Carolco Productions.

  The profiteer who eventually showed the mostest in the Lyon case was another California independent, Robert Greenwald Productions. Greenwald pitched and sold the story of Nancy’s death to ABC, and eventually transformed the case into a two-hour TV movie (filmed in North Carolina for some reason) with the fine actress Tess Harper starring as Jerri Sims. Greenwald Productions proved to be every bit as strong of wallet as of promise, and bought the rights to Lynn Pease’s and Detective Don Ortega’s stories. At various times there were rumors of as many as five movie deals in the works (at one time Denise Woods had not only a local movie producer but an Austin entertainment lawyer peddling her rights; the Dillard family told all callers to submit résumés to their attorney; Richard’s story finally became available to anyone willing to foot the cost of his appeal), so among local media types the Greenwald production was known in its preliminary stages as the Ortega-Woods deal (Lynn married in the year prior to Richard’s trial and testified under the name of Lynn Pease Woods).

  Detective Ortega’s comment to local reporters that he “should have held out for more” than the $15,000 fee he received from Greenwald Productions for his time in transcribing the details of his investigation on a tape recorder bears some study. Throughout the investigation and subsequent trial, Ortega received calls from numerous reporters, authors, and movie-making hopefuls, all wanting the details of his work on the Lyon case. Ortega responded to each one that he wouldn’t discuss the case until after the verdict was in, and that even then he would talk only to those whom he “liked.” The more naïve among the profiteers failed to realize that Detective Ortega might have “liked” them more were they willing to cross his palm, but Greenwald Productions had both the savvy and the greenbacks to be counted among the detective’s closest friends.

  The following may come across as a dose of sour grapes from authors and movie folk on the outside of Detective Ortega’s close-knit circle of “pals,” and there is doubtless some bitterness involved, but the widespread practice among true-crime profiteers of paying policemen for information has come under criticism from groups other than authors panting for a piece of the policemen’s high-priced information. The Supreme Court of the United States, for example. A Florida conviction involving a quite grisly series of roadside murders was recently reversed by the high court because the detectives involved in the investigation were receiving payments from movie folk, and the reasoning of the justices in remanding the case goes to the heart of the intended impartiality of the justice system.

  There is a great public outcry of “Hear, hear” with respect to the New York statute known as the “Son of Sam law,” wherein convicted criminals are prevented from making money by selling the story of their crimes, but according to our highest court, similar payments to law enforcement personnel may be even more reprehensible. For public employees to profit personally from the sale of knowledge gained as a result of their employment is a crime in itself (though prosecutors who themselves hope for future sales to movie folk are naturally reluctant to pursue indictments against other law enforcement personnel), such payments being known in the common vernacular as bribes. Movie producers and book publishers are quite liability-conscious, having fallen victim to a number of civil lawsuits over the years, and the practice in the true-crime genre has come to be that there is no publication of a book and no making of a movie when the prosecution of the defendant doesn’t result in a conviction. In December 1992, a movie crew was in the midst of filming a TV production starring Robert Conrad, based on a triple homicide in Waco, Texas, when one of the defendants in the case had his conviction reversed and, on retrial, was found not guilty. The retrial caused quite a commotion on the set. The script was rewritten on the spot, all names were changed, the author of the book on which the production was based had his name removed from the credits, et cetera, and the movie eventually aired as a piece of fiction. Nearly all movie deals are formulated while the investigation and trial are in progress. So, the Supreme Court reasons, threatened loss of revenue from movie or book deals could easily cause police and prosecutors to be somewhat overzealous in their desire to obtain a conviction.

  Actually, the inaccessibility to (or, at least, the equal sharing of) police information for authors and scriptwriters might turn out to be a boon to readers and viewers. Although it is true that listening to a tape recording made by investigating law enforcement personnel is certainly the lazy person’s utopia of information-gathering technique, the scope of the story becomes limited to a single viewpoint. Elimination of the practice of paying policemen for information would cause writers to get off their respective fannies and do some heavy research, thus giving readers the benefit of something other than the usual cop-investigation (plod, plod) slant on things.

  29

  Dan Guthrie had plenty to say when he found out that Richard was still seeing Denise Woods in the face of a murder investigation based on his extramarital relationship. At least until the case was over, Guthrie told Richard, he and Denise would have to cool it. Richard would simply have to explain to her that every public sighting of the two of them together could very possibly drive another nail into his coffin. Richard agreed that in the future he would see Denise only in private, but his method of going undercover with the relationship was, in retrospect, somewhat less than discreet.

  Denise moved her contracting operations to Austin, two hundred miles south of Dallas, where she still had contacts from her days as a university student. The reason given for her relocation was that because of the splash of publicity she’d received over recent months, her Dallas business had gone to pot, and that in Austin she could have a fresh start in a locale where her involvement in a murder investigation wasn’t generally known. On the surface, Denise’s move could have worked out well for Richar
d’s defense, but his frequent trips up and down Interstate 35 to visit his lover didn’t go unnoticed by the district attorney’s investigators, and at trial Jerri Sims was to portray Denise’s move as nothing more than a sham to keep carrying on with Richard out of the limelight.

  Having burned his bridges where Architectural Site Services was concerned, Richard needed a job. Allison and Anna still lived with their father, and in addition to supporting his daughters, he had to keep up payments on the Shenandoah duplex. Not surprisingly, a man whose face had been splashed all over the newspapers and on television sets as the prime suspect in a murder investigation—even a man with Harvard credentials—had difficulty in finding work. Eventually Richard had to settle for a job influenced by outside sources, only this time the string-puller wasn’t Big Daddy. Concerned over Richard’s pending financial straits, Denise Woods made a call, and Richard went to work for her father at Woods Construction. It was understood from the outset that the job was only a stopgap until Richard could clear himself, at which time he’d find work on his own. However, no matter how brief his stint at Woods Construction, his employment with Denise’s father was to heap more coals on the fire Jerri Sims was building.

  In between the breaking of the story and the onset of the trial, Richard was to make several urgent phone calls to Dan Guthrie and others to give the news that he’d uncovered startling new evidence in the case. The first of these had to do with a phone message recorded on Richard’s answering machine. Guthrie, himself a Park Citizen living across the street from the high school, was less than ten minutes from Richard’s home, and on this occasion sped to the Shenandoah duplex to hear the recording himself. If legitimate, it could indeed have had a bearing on the case. As is true with most persons aware that they are under investigation, Richard wanted to do everything possible to head off the police before any charges were filed. After a strategy discussion with his client, Guthrie decided first to make a copy, then turn the recording over to Detective Ortega in the hopes that the homicide cop might pursue other avenues and run down other suspects.

  Ortega listened to the recording, but wasn’t impressed. Guthrie later played the message in open court in front of jurors and spectators, and the man in the recording sounded somewhat like Sydney Greenstreet with a cold. The tone was quite sinister, and guttural to the point that it was difficult to understand the words. The message stated that since the caller had “gotten her,” then Richard “was next.” The audio evidence came about during Guthrie’s cross-examination of the detective, and the expression on Ortega’s face as the jury listened made his opinion of the recording quite clear; in fact, it is easy to picture the detective alone in his office, playing the message over and over while he roared with laughter and slapped his thighs in glee.

  A second red herring came in to the police department, this one in the form of a letter in a plain business envelope addressed to Ortega. The letter was typed, and purported to be from the hit man who had done Nancy in. According to the letter’s author, Bill Jr. had hired the dirty deed done, but since he refused to pay up once the job was over, the letter writer had decided to snitch to the police.

  Ortega carefully preserved the envelope, stamp intact, placed the letter and envelope in a sealed evidence carrier, and sent them over to the crime lab for DNA testing. This is a relatively new and highly publicized procedure wherein it’s possible to take saliva samples from the stamp or gummed portion of the envelope flap and isolate the sender into specific groups of individuals. Alas, DNA didn’t work in this instance because whoever sent the letter had wet both stamp and envelope either with a sponge or rolling moistener. When Guthrie questioned Ortega in court about the strange letter, the detective made it clear in his answer that he believed he knew who had sent the red herring to the police department. The sender, Ortega believed, was Guthrie’s own client, who was at the moment seated in the courtroom at the defense table. Inarguably, the entire investigation wore blinders, and the only suspect whom the police were willing to consider was Richard Lyon.

  It has been long established that the results of a polygraph examination are inadmissible as courtroom evidence, but when the suspect has flunked, police and prosecutors extract a great deal of mileage from these tests by leaking information to the newspapers. By the time Richard went to trial, it was general knowledge that he’d failed a lie-detector test administered by the police. What wasn’t known to the press and the public was that Dan Guthrie arranged a second polygraph exam for his client, this one given by a private firm, and that Richard passed the second lie-detector test with flying colors.

  Police openly pooh-pooh the results of polygraph tests administered by defense attorneys, claiming that the questions are rigged, and though they know that they can’t get the results of tests given by police examiners into evidence, policemen take the results of their own lie detectors as gospel. The public perception of the reason for the inadmissibility of polygraphs is that certain persons are such habitual liars that they can fool the lie detector, but experts on the subject disagree.

  According to those who supposedly know their stuff, it is quite easy for a person under stress to bust out on a polygraph and still be telling the truth. When Richard took the police test, he’d just been through Detective Ortega’s aggressive grilling session, and no doubt was extremely nervous. From any standpoint, he would have been better off to wait a day or so before submitting to the exam.

  None of the foregoing sheds much light on the reason for Richard’s failure to pass the police polygraph or his success on Guthrie’s; the various lie-detector tests administered to Richard simply provide further food for thought. For all we know, he lied through his teeth at the police station, and the questions on Guthrie’s lie-detector test were limited to Richard’s name and Social Security number. However, in evaluating the pros and cons of the various polygraph tests employed in the case, a little-publicized fact should also be taken into consideration. In order to clear the air in the face of the finger-pointing done by Richard and his lawyer over television and in the newspapers, Ortega had Bill Jr. come to the station for a police-administered polygraph of his own. To Ortega’s surprise, the results of Nancy’s brother’s test were inconclusive. At trial Ortega had to testify two different times, the first outside the presence of the jury, because the defense had filed a motion that certain testimony the detective was going to give should be excluded. The judge eventually admitted everything Ortega had to say, but during the session with the jury out of the courtroom, Guthrie asked Ortega whether he’d given a lie-detector test to Bill Jr. At that point Jerri Sims objected vehemently. Her objection was sustained, and Ortega successfully dodged the issue.

  The medical examiner’s ruling of homicide in the Lyon case was in the hands of the police department in early April, eleven weeks after Nancy’s death, but Richard still faced no official charges. The Dillards’ anxiety increased with each passing day as Big Daddy and Bill Jr. made one telephone inquiry after another, seemingly to no avail. To their way of thinking, the police had simply forgotten the matter. The investigation, however, wasn’t nearly as inactive as it may have appeared.

  In spite of all the evidence that pointed at Richard, there were enormous snags in the prosecution’s case. The information that Richard had ordered arsenic from Houston’s General Laboratory Supply had come from Richard himself, an indication to a jury, Jerri Sims feared, that the suspect had nothing to hide. Richard also maintained that the arsenic order was intended to kill fire ants, both at his home and on a job site, and the DA’s own investigators had learned that the little red critters were in abundance at both locations. Furthermore, Richard had told authorities that he’d never received the materials from General Lab even though he’d paid in advance, and there was backup for his story here as well. Ellen Rose’s records indicated that they’d shipped the order to a Sherry Lane address in Dallas—the headquarters of Architectural Site Services, Richard’s employer at the time�
��but there the paper trail ended. The investigation was further complicated by the fact that the receptionist at ASS who’d receipted for the poison was no longer employed; in fact, she’d been dismissed for embezzlement, and there was no one to refute Richard’s story that he’d never received the shipment. Since the police search of the Shenandoah duplex hadn’t turned up so much as a smidgen of arsenic, not only was the case against him circumstantial, even the circumstantial evidence was a great deal less than air-tight.

  It was another month before law enforcement decided that they simply weren’t going to turn up anything else against Richard, and to go ahead with the evidence that they had. Dillard perseverance finally prevailed when, on May 16, 1991, Detective Ortega swore out an affidavit to be affixed to an arrest warrant. In his affidavit Ortega referred to the ME’s report, to information supplied by Lynn Pease, to Dr. Bagheri’s talk with Nancy in the wee hours of the morning at the hospital, and to Richard’s admission of having purchased arsenic from General Laboratory Supply. It still wasn’t much, but was sufficient information for a magistrate’s determination of probable cause. Detective Ortega obtained his warrant.

  Though the magistrate signed the warrant on Thursday, Ortega didn’t act until the following morning. Early on Friday, Detectives Ortega and McNear waited around the corner from the Shenandoah duplex as Richard drove by on his way to take his daughters to school. The policemen, driving an unmarked squad car, fell in behind Richard and stayed a block behind as the suspect drove his Alfa Romeo to an exclusive private day school in far North Dallas and, holding Allison’s hand and carrying Anna, took the girls inside. When Richard came out he was alone, and as he left the school grounds the detectives were close on his bumper. He’d gone barely a block before Ortega flashed his roof lights. Richard pulled to the curb.