On 22nd November 1995 they arrested her as she arrived at her daughter’s ballet recital. Bail was set at three million dollars. Sent to a jail in Olathe, she was given antidepressants and tranquillisers and spent much of her time in a daze.
Mike was suffering much more than his ex-wife, as the ricin had led to bacterial poisoning and he now had to have a brain abscess drained, a potentially life-threatening operation. He also developed a heart valve infection and remained thin and weak.
The preliminary hearing
At the hearing, Debora pleaded not guilty and her defence team suggested that thirteen-year-old Tim had started the blaze as he was fascinated by fire and had set light to a couple of rubbish bins when he was eight years old and his parents were talking about divorce. They also suggested that Mike’s illness had resulted from swimming in Peru and eating the local food.
The garden centre staff testified that Debora had bought the castor beans, claiming that they were for a school project. And a neighbour testified that Debora had arrived at his house to report the fire with wet hair and that she seemed distant from events.
Debora remained detached in court until they were about to show photographs of her dead children, whereupon the defence shepherded her from the court. Jurors had to look at slides of Tim’s feet, which had burnt away from the rest of his body. It was an unnecessary death as he could have escaped via the roof if his mother hadn’t told him to go back inside.
Confession
As the trial neared, Debora admitted to her attorneys that she’d started the fire, though she said she had been so drunk she hadn’t known what she was doing. Her psychiatrist talked to her and Debora claimed that Tim had poisoned his dad.
Debora decided to plead no contest to the arson charges, which meant that there was no trial and she no longer faced the death penalty. On 30th May 1996, she was sentenced for forty years in jail and was transferred to the Topeka Correctional Institute in Kansas to serve her sentence. Now, as before, she could spend most of her days reading books.
Later, Debora recanted her confession and appealed her sentence, only to change her mind again and drop the appeal. She will be in her mid-eighties before she is released.
5 Dr Dirk Greineder
Though this allergist was found guilty of murdering his wife of thirty-two years, he had comparatively little motive.
A scholastic childhood
Dirk was born on the 19th October 1940 in Berlin, Germany, the second son of Renee Chaoun and Kurt Greineder. When he was five, the family moved to Beirut in Lebanon, where he remained until he was eighteen. By then, he could speak four languages: German, French, English and Arabic.
Moving to America, Dirk attended Yale and majored in Biochemistry before studying for a masters degree in Medicine and Pharmacology at a Cleveland university, meeting his future wife, Mabel (always known as May) Chegwin there. She was studying for an advanced degree in Nursing and went on to become an assistant professor at a local nursing school.
On 7th July 1967, the couple married and, in 1970, Dirk completed his studies. The following year, May gave birth to their first child, a daughter, and the couple doted on her. They went on to have two other children. In 1972, Dirk became a research fellow at Boston’s Robert B Brigham Hospital and later became a respected allergist.
A loving family
May stayed at home until their three children were adults. They loved to swim competitively and she and Dirk took them to all of their swim meets. They appeared to be happy although Dirk could be somewhat controlling and May had to run all of her decisions past him.
The children worried about how their mother would cope when they left the nest, but May returned to work, as a triage nurse, in 1993. She remained in nursing for the next five years and then left the profession to care for her dying mother. Her sister paid May’s transport costs as Dirk wanted her to keep to a tight budget. He didn’t visit his mother-in-law in the months leading up to her death. In September 1999, May enrolled at college to study for another nursing degree. By then she had lost weight, had a facelift (also paid for by her sister) and was making the most of her middle years.
A shocking murder
On 31st October 1999, Dirk and May enjoyed their usual Sunday morning routine, whereby he made breakfast and they ate together, did a little academic work and took care of various chores.
It was still early in the morning when they dressed and took one of their dogs to Morses Pond, beloved by many of the locals in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Some time later, Dirk called the police from his car phone to say that his wife had been attacked and was possibly dead.
He said that May had slipped on the path and hurt her back so she’d insisted that he walk their Alsatian alone, explaining that she’d rest and catch up with him. But the dog had been anxious so he’d returned after ten minutes to find her lying motionless at the foot of an embankment. He’d felt for her pulse and found a large gash in her neck. The police arrived and he told them the same story, then asked, ‘Are you going to arrest me?’ He also volunteered the rather unusual information that his wife had given him a back rub that morning so his skin would be under her fingernails.
Noticing that May’s trousers had been pulled down to expose her stomach, the police wondered if she’d been raped. They knew that they’d have to rule out marital sex so asked Dirk if he had recently been intimate with his wife, but he said that they had not been sexually active for the last few years.
Dirk had told them that he’d checked his wife’s carotid artery yet there was no blood on his hands, but they could see that there were spots of what looked like blood on his jacket, trainers and even his spectacles, though they didn’t test the latter as Dirk insisted that he needed them to drive home. They settled for photographing his glasses and this photograph would later be shown in court.
Detectives searched the section of the woods where he had walked and found a hammer, knife and glove, all of which were bloodstained, hidden in a storm drain. The doctor was becoming a suspect and he was read his Miranda rights.
A police photographer found scratches on his neck and chest and some fingertip-sized bruises on one of his arms. They theorised that he had planned to kill May with one blow from the hammer but that she had remained conscious and had screamed – another dog walker in the area had heard a woman screaming. They alleged that he had hit her again and that she’d grabbed hold of him, leaving blood on his jacket. They claimed that she had then fallen to the ground and he had cut her throat and stabbed her ten times.
Searching his house and garage, they found that he had prescribed himself Viagra and had bought a box of condoms. Investigating his computer, they found that he had been emailing swingers’ chat rooms and had paid to join Internet porn sites. He had booked hotel rooms in the name of his college room-mate, Thomas Young, and had met prostitutes there. On their own, these events weren’t particularly damning – after all, some men crave sexual variety, especially when they fear they are ageing and their virility is declining. But a lust-filled man might want his wife out of the way…
Trial
On 29th February 2000, police arrested the doctor and, the following day, a grand jury indicted him. He pleaded not guilty. By now, tests had ascertained that it was May’s blood on the hammer, knife and glove found in the storm drain, whilst Dirk’s DNA was found on the handle of the knife and on the glove. Imprisoned, he lost over two stone and aged visibly.
In July, a prostitute told the grand jury that she’d met Dirk Greineder (who was using his alias of Thomas Young) in a hotel room and had had sex with him. He’d been visibly nervous and had given her chocolates, flowers and champagne.
The trial began on 21st May 2001 in Norfolk, Massachusetts. The jury was taken to Morses Pond and also shown photographs of the scene of the crime. The prosecution said that Dirk had killed his wife because he wanted to be free to meet up on a regular basis with swingers and prostitutes; that May could have found out about his activities and asked
for a divorce and a financial settlement. They alleged that he had chosen a public place because a man and a woman had been murdered in similar locations and the killer or killers had never been found. Dirk had saved both murder reports on his computer, indicating that he was aware of this local killer-on-the-loose.
The jury also heard that a receipt for a hammer had been found in the Greineder’s garage, bought the month before May was murdered with such a tool.
Dirk had contacted an escort girl in June, four months before his wife’s death, and arranged then cancelled a rendezvous. He was clearly conflicted. He had also sent a naked photograph of himself to a couple but they had never finalised a time to meet up.
The defence also scored a point: the DNA of three different unknown people had been found on one of the gloves May had been wearing when she was slaughtered. And, though the police said that blood hadn’t been found on Dirk’s hands, he could have wiped them on his jacket. They had failed to do an orthotoluidine test.
Dirk Greineder took the stand and said that his sexual dalliances had been very much secondary to his love for his wife, that he’d met a prostitute for the first time in February 1998 and gone on to have sex with another eight women, some of whom were escort girls and others swingers. He had also joined a dating site looking for casual sex.
May had found his Viagra and had been upset but he’d reassured her that, as a doctor, he was merely experimenting with the drug. He said that she probably knew that he was having extramarital sex but that she hadn’t questioned him about this.
He painted a picture of himself as a loving husband who also wanted extra-marital sexual excitement. For example, the day before the murder he’d called a prostitute but, that night, he’d helped May write an essay for her college course. They were intellectual equals, whereas most of the women that he met for sex were uneducated and comparatively inarticulate. The day after his wife’s death he had phoned an escort girl and cancelled a forthcoming liaison, telling her that this was not a good time for him.
The prosecution made a great deal of these liaisons, pointing out that he’d asked one prostitute if he could shower with her and if he could perform oral sex on her. She’d refused both offers but agreed to straight sex. He’d spent hours surfing the net for porn sites and had watched a porn movie in his hotel one night after attending a medical conference, but this was hardly a motive for murdering the love of his life.
The couple’s children took the stand in their father’s defence and it was clear that they’d loved their parents very much. His son Colin said that he’d become aware of his father’s interest in porn whilst using his computer. He’d asked his mother if they were happy and she’d hinted that his father was finding sex elsewhere.
In summary, Dirk Greineder’s defence team pointed to the lack of motive and also asked why a trained pharmacologist, with access to numerous poisons, would choose to batter his wife to death in a public location. If he had planned to murder her, why hadn’t he erased the history of his computer to hide the fact that he’d been accessing porn sites and contacting swingers’ clubs?
At the end of the five-week trial, the jury began their deliberations, drawing up a timeline of the day of the murder. Dirk – and Dirk alone – had been seen near the storm drain where the murder weapons were found. He said he’d seen a shadow but no one else had noticed this. They were also convinced by the blood spatter evidence; if the doctor hadn’t been standing near his wife when she was being beaten he wouldn’t have had so many drops of blood on his clothes and spectacles. After deliberating for thirty-one hours, they reached a guilty verdict and the allergist was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
In May 2006, Dirk’s appeal – based on the fact that the jury shouldn’t have been told about his secret obsession with prostitutes – was denied. He also lost his bid for a second trial.
6 Dr Jonathan Nyce
When his mail-order bride was unfaithful to him, this biologist became fatally violent.
A Filipino bride
Though he was a highly regarded molecular biologist in New Jersey, Dr Jonathan Nyce failed at relationship after relationship with women. He was too possessive and, at age forty, was still single and often alone. Determined to marry and have children, he began a pen pal relationship with a beautiful nineteen-year-old Filipino girl, Michelle, from an impoverished family, telling her that he was only thirty-one.
The wealthy doctor flew out to the Philippines in 1990 to meet her and fell in love, and it seemed that the feeling was mutual. They married shortly afterwards and he brought her back to his mansion on millionaires’ row. The lovely young girl who was used to sharing a makeshift house with six brothers and sisters now had a very palatial home.
Jonathan had his pride so he told his colleagues that Michelle was the assistant of a medical professor, that he’d met her in Hawaii at a medical conference. With the jewellery and expensive outfits that he’d bought her, she looked every inch the professional.
Over the next few years, the couple had three children and Nyce’s career – he ran his own business specialising in asthma treatment – rose to even greater heights. He spent much of this money on others, sending cash gifts to his wife’s parents and building a children’s playground in their village in the Philippines.
When the couple’s own children started nursery school, Michelle became bored and restless. Jonathan was working long hours and she wanted to go back to work. The doctor, however, liked to be able to keep checks on her and would frequently phone her mobile and ask to speak to her companions, just to make sure that she’d told the truth about the friends that she was with that day. He didn’t want her to join the gym or a running group as she’d be in contact with other men there. He also disapproved of the figure-hugging dresses she wore, but she had a fantastic figure and wanted to look good.
Adultery
In 2002, the doctor hired a gardening firm to landscape his estate and Miguel DeJesus arrived to carry out the work. He and Michelle began an affair and they frequently met in hotel rooms for sex.
The Nyces’ circumstances changed drastically the following year when the doctor’s business began to fail and he had to sell his controlling shares to pay off his increasing debts. He continued to struggle financially and the company went into receivership.
Unemployed, he began to spend every day at home, making it difficult for Michelle to sneak out to see her lover. She got a job as a cosmetics rep in an upmarket department store but this caused further problems as Jonathan wanted her to be at home for their offspring during the long summer holiday. He wrote a book of poetry for children but failed to find a publisher and became increasingly depressed. He was also aware that Michelle resented him being around, as she told him that it was ‘her house’ during the day.
Also that summer, Michelle found that her lover was seeing two other women. When he asked her to lend him money, she took umbrage and wanted to end the relationship. She told her husband about the affair and he angrily phoned Miguel DeJesus and warned him, in no uncertain terms, to stay away. Undaunted, DeJesus said that he’d taped some of his sex sessions with Michelle and that, if Jonathan didn’t pay him $500,000, he’d release them to the couple’s family and friends.
The doctor reported this blackmail threat to the police and a judge granted a temporary restraining order, keeping DeJesus away from the Nyces’ estate until the alleged crime could be fully investigated.
By the New Year, Michelle had foolishly returned to her lover. She again began to meet him in hotel rooms, telling her husband that she was with friends. Jonathan was suspicious as she would return home glowing with happiness and looking freshly showered…
A violent death
A showdown was inevitable and it happened in the early hours of 17th January 2004, a particularly stormy night. Michelle had spent so long with her lover that it was the early hours of the morning before she crept back to the marital home, expecting her husband to be fast
asleep. But Jonathan confronted her in the garage, they quarrelled and he beat her to the ground. He’d later say that she went for him with a stiletto (but such a shoe was never found), that he had pushed her out of the way and she had hit her head against the concrete floor, dying instantly.
But Jonathan’s subsequent actions were not those of a man who hadn’t intended to take a life. He lifted his wife’s body into her car, drove to a creek that was less than a mile away and pushed the vehicle down an embankment into the swirling water. He hoped that it would look as if she’d careered off the road during the night’s storm.
Detectives were immediately suspicious as Jonathan kept close tabs on his wife yet hadn’t phoned around to find out where she was or reported her to the police as a missing person. He also refused to let Michelle’s best friend near the garage and kept talking about her affair rather than mourning her death. Investigators found blood in the garage, a bloody trail leading to the bathroom and bloodstained towels hidden in the chimney. There was also proof that someone had used chemicals to clean up further pools of blood.
Michelle’s body was badly battered but her injuries hadn’t been caused by crashing her car. Indeed, the vehicle had slid so gently into the water that it was barely scratched and the windscreen was still intact.
Charged with first-degree murder, Jonathan described the death as a stupid accident. He wept and pointed out that he had no criminal record or previous history of violence.
Doctors Who Kill Page 4
