by A. W. Gray
“Which university?”
“Several.”
The interviewer is writing so fast that his fingers ache. “What colleges have you attended, Mr. Couch?”
“Texas Tech … University of Texas and the University of Chicago … Harvard School of Business …”
“Did you know Richard or Nancy Lyon up there?” the interviewer says.
“Up where?”
“At Harvard. That’s where they both went to school.”
“Can’t say that I did,” Couch says.
“One thing troubles me,” the interviewer says. “The Harvard School of Business is a graduate school. I’m surprised they’d let you in if you don’t have an undergraduate degree.”
“A lot of these colleges didn’t want to at first,” Couch says. “But then I’d just endow a professorship, and then they’d let me take whatever course I wanted to.”
“Endow a … ?”
“You have to know how to talk to these people,” Couch says.
“I see. Let me ask you something else. Before you got involved in the Lyon case—”
“Now, I wasn’t involved.”
“Sure. But before the bit came up about that invoice, did you happen to know any of the Dillards?”
“Not personally. When I was head of operations at Love Field, they kept a plane out there, though.”
Jesus Christ, the interviewer thinks. “You were head of operations at Love Field?”
“It was a part-time job,” Couch says.
“Before you testified, did you talk to the police or district attorney?”
“They had me up in their office the night before.”
“I see. Mr. Couch, can you think of any reason that someone might say they thought you weren’t telling the truth when you testified in the Lyon trial?”
“Just that ex-wife of mine. She’s a drug addict.”
“Rita Green is a drug addict?”
“That’s right,” Couch says.
“I see,” the interviewer says. He rolls his eyes in disbelief.
“Sure, the guy was lying,” Jim Bearden says. “Not five minutes before he went on the witness stand he told me he did sell her the poison. You think Guthrie would have put him on if we’d known what he was going to say? You work like hell on one of these cases, then you get a guy like Couch that gets up there and turns you around.”
“I’ve got to admit,” the interviewer says, “it looked strange, youall putting on a witness that would’ve said that.”
“Do you think,” Bearden says, “that Richard would have spent all that time, that we would’ve spent all that time hounding the guy to testify if we hadn’t thought the invoice was legitimate? I’ll tell you something else, too. Ortega, that police detective, he thought the invoice was for real, too.”
“He did?” the interviewer says.
“We furnished the state everything we had,” Bearden says. “And they talked to the guy. If they’d known he was going to say he never sold the poison and the invoice was a fake, don’t you think Couch would have been a state’s witness to begin with?”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” the interviewer says.
“Sounds reasonable to me, too,” Bearden says.
Epilogue
Richard continues to vehemently protest his innocence from his prison cell, and his cries in the wilderness have attracted quite a following. From the time of Nancy’s death until the present, his story about the day of her final poisoning has never changed: Richard was out of town and doesn’t have the slightest idea where the arsenic came from. His outside intermediaries have contacted police and prosecutors alike, digging for information that they hope will someday clear his name.
Since his conviction, Richard has come up with a number of theories concerning Nancy’s death, some of which are mere rehashes of things known prior to his trial, and some of which are entirely new material. It’s possible that the pressures of living in prison have caused Richard to fabricate some things, either to bolster his truthful claims of innocence or to cover his actual guilt, but at least one piece of information he provides is quite mindbending. No study of the Lyon case is complete without a telling of the “Leave Her to Heaven” tale.
The story involves Madame Bovary as well, but since “Leave Her to Heaven” is a more melodic title, that’s what I call the entire scenario. Madame Bovary, of course, is a classic French novel that ends with a systematic description of the main character’s slow death by arsenic poisoning. Leave Her to Heaven is a novel written in 1944 by Ben Ames Williams and made into a movie thriller a year or so after that. The book was out of print for three decades and then revived in 1981, and made its way to the small screen as a made-for-television production in 1988, under the title, Too Good to Be True. I never read the book or saw either motion picture, but since the TV movie starred Loni Anderson it had to be a corker. (Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide lists the television production as a “substandard remake,” but what does Leonard know?) The plot involves a woman who poisons herself and frames her husband and his lover for her own murder. Sound familiar?
I met with Richard’s intermediary at an International House of Pancakes, and to keep from having to spell intermediary over and over, I’ll henceforth refer to this person as Bob. Bob told me he had the key to unlock the mystery of Nancy’s death. He immediately produced Big Daddy’s Highland Park Public Library card, which I’ll admit got my attention. The library card was among things Richard had stored in Dan Guthrie’s office and was never able to retrieve during his incarceration. According to Bob, Nancy never had her own library card and used Big Daddy’s to check out what books she wanted to read.
Bob said that Richard had learned from Dr. James Grigson, the psychiatrist who testified for Richard at his trial, that in order to know a person’s state of mind, one needed to check on that person’s reading habits. Richard, Bob said, had spent a lot of time before his trial in finding out what Nancy had been reading. He had taken Big Daddy’s card to the library, identified himself as one of the Dillard clan, and asked the librarian to list for him the books Nancy had drawn out in the months prior to her death. The librarian used her computer, Bob said, and library records showed that Nancy had checked out both Madame Bovary and the novel of Leave Her to Heaven. According to Bob, Richard then checked out both books and read them.
My God, I thought, this information is precedent, and is almost conclusive proof that Nancy was contemplating suicide. Armed with the number of Big Daddy’s library card, I went to the Highland Park Public Library the very next day, identified myself to the librarian, and also handed her a written request under the Texas Open Records Act for all books checked out on Big Daddy’s library card for the previous two years. After the librarian finished sizing me up, she quickly set me straight.
There is, it seems, an attorney general’s opinion specifically excluding library information from the Open Records Act. Furthermore, she said, the library computer doesn’t have the ability to call up such records even if the librarian had been of a mind to give them to me. Which she wasn’t. I did talk her into looking up Leave Her to Heaven, which she informed me wasn’t a book in stock at the Highland Park Public Library, and that furthermore she could locate no record that the library had ever carried the book. Red-faced, I left.
Incidentally, I later learned that Richard had told the same story to Dan Guthrie prior to the trial, but that Guthrie couldn’t use the information because he’d run into the same blank wall as I had in trying to produce evidence that Nancy had read either Madame Bovary or Leave Her to Heaven in the months prior to her death. Denise Woods also called a friend of Richard’s named Bruce Berger after Richard went to prison, and had Berger try to find Leave Her to Heaven, all to no avail. If Richard had other sources by which the story can be verified, he hasn’t provided them. If Nancy really did read the books, of course,
the implications are both self-explanatory and earth-shattering.
The story of the death of Nancy Dillard Lyon is true, and everything told in this book I either personally witnessed or have confidence in my sources. Dialogue—other than the interviews described—is reconstructed; in other words, I know the conversation took place and I know what was said, based on my research, but since I wasn’t there I am naturally unable to quote word for word. Interview dialogue is taken from notes made during the interviews themselves.
Some of the events described are told out of the sequence in which they actually occurred, sometimes because my sources couldn’t remember exactly what happened before what, but often because I felt the story would be clearer if related events were told as if they’d occurred one after the other. I have consolidated much of the trial testimony for clarity’s sake; as happens in all trials, much testimony took the form of a rambling discourse. This trial took place over several weeks, and some of the witnesses were on the stand for days. Witnesses whose testimony merely repeats something I’ve told earlier in the book, I’ve totally deleted. So, though much of the trial dialogue has been shortened, I have gotten across the highlights of what the witnesses had to say. Those wanting the unabridged version are welcome to plunk down the twenty thousand dollars required to buy a transcript, but let me warn you. I’ve read portions of the transcript, and it’s boring as hell.
I’ve changed some names, for various reasons. Barbara Moore, the exotic dancer turned college student, for example, is an assumed name even though her real name is public record. She has a new life now and is entitled to her privacy, and those suffering from sufficient curiosity to feel they have to know who she is can go look up the trial record and get a copy of the witness list. Whatever turns you on.
Dame Hazel Vincent, the old-time Highland Park eccentric, is an assumed name for another reason. Middle-agers who were the Park Cities kids of the era (I’m one of them, by the way) all remember Dame Vincent and know her name, but why embarrass her living descendants by printing it? The story stands on its own and is a jewel.
Just about everyone who was willing to talk about Richard, Nancy, or any of the Dillard family asked that their names not be used, and I obliged. Most notable was the fellow who knew Richard way back when, identified herein as a Garland contractor. This gentleman told me in no uncertain terms, “Well, okay, I’ll tell you some stuff if you’ll quit bugging me. I guarantee you, though, if I see my name in your book I’m going to whip your ass.” I changed his name with barely a second’s hesitation.
Those familiar with the case will immediately recognize Debi Denise Woods as a pseudonym, and many will be shocked. This young lady was featured prominently in newspapers and three national magazines, and it is public record that she testified at trial and was the other woman in Richard’s life. I changed her name at her request. She granted me interviews and provided valuable information without which this book likely could not have been completed in its current form; I gave my word that I would not use her name and have kept it, and sincerely hope that whatever speck of anonymity I have provided is beneficial to her.
I offer sincere thanks to the following, and if I’ve left anyone out, please believe it’s an oversight. Individually:
Pete Slover of the Dallas Morning News, father of the most beautiful baby girl born to man since my own daughter’s birth some fifteen summers ago.
Bud Gillette of Channel 4, who gave me tremendous insight in a fifteen-minute conversation one evening at the Ozona Grill & Bar.
Michael Hill of Channel 8, for providing choice monitor space when the courtroom was jammed, and who probably still wonders to this day whatever happened to the book that “Mr. Green” was writing.
Carlton and Pat Stowers, Carlton for listening to my complaints and providing an old hand’s advice in the true-crime field; Pat for the best chocolate brownie ever conceived.
Beautiful and brilliant psychologist Kathy Finch, for her insight and marvelous research on incest in general and sociopaths in particular.
Skip Hollandsworth, the last word both on Dallas’ Black Widow and the Charles Albright cases, for giving of his time and sharing his research.
Janet Fiske of the Hartford Advocate, for her research into Richard’s rural Connecticut and college backgrounds.
Dominick Abel, the agent who fished my prison-cell letter out of the stack eight years ago, and who continues to nurse me along.
And collectively:
J. W. Davis, Carol Poor, Nancy Khazabian, Jerri Sims, Dan Guthrie, Leila Thomas, John Creuzot, Rita Green, David Green, John Reamer, Charles Couch, Richard Lyon, Andy Hanson, Reed Prospere, Evan Fogelman, Stan Wetsel, Jim Bearden.
And, with apologies to none, last and most important, my beloved wife of seventeen years, Martha Crosland Gray, who chided me gently when I wanted to quit, provided late-night vittles, small talk in the wee hours of the morning, a boot to the rear when the golf course beckoned, and loving arms when all else failed.
Fort Worth, Texas
May 16, 1993
3:00 a.m.
About the Author
A. W. Gray is the author of six critically acclaimed novels: Killings, Prime Suspect, The Man Offside, In Defense of Judges, Size, and Bino. A life-long Texan, he lives with his wife and family in Fort Worth.
