by Ann Rule
Patrick Brennan, a friend of Richee’s from 1992, confessed that he had helped Richee break into the Hollywood Park video arcade and mini–golf course in Crestwood, where Richee was a manager, and steal thousands of dollars from the office safe. Before the robbery, Richee showed him a copy of the key armored-car drivers used to open the safe and explained that he had made the dupe by heating up a piece of Plexiglas, sticking it in the keyhole, and then grinding it down.
In at least one robbery, Richee spray-painted graffiti to mislead police into believing gangs were behind his crime. Perhaps more alarming, friends said he viewed himself as a criminal mastermind and boasted that he could easily outsmart any dim-witted cop.
A former manager of Richee’s recalled him describing cruel pranks from his boyhood that included tearing the wings off birds and killing cats. And Duello wasn’t the only one who remembered Richee’s machete. Several former girlfriends confirmed that he kept the weapon in his bedroom at all times.
A chilling picture began to emerge of an arrogant, calculating psychopath who had systematically planned the brutal thrill killing of a complete stranger simply because he thought he could get away with it.
The O. J. Simpson case had saturated American media throughout the year before Nan Toder was murdered, and Richee had apparently learned enough about crime scene investigation from the television reports to know that shaving off his body hair and wearing gloves would reduce the risk of leaving traces of his DNA behind. He left the hair on his head to avoid attracting attention. He even knew enough about DNA to snatch a towel used by another guest ahead of time and plant it at the crime scene.
Investigators concluded that Richee realized he had only a few days to commit his crime before the upgraded locking system would make it impossible. He spotted Toder and checked to ensure that she would be a guest in the hotel for several nights. When he knew she was out of her room, he rigged the dead bolt on the door connecting 227 with 229 so that it would appear locked to Toder. Then he used the hotel’s computer to confirm that 229 was empty minutes before entering room 227 to hack Nan Toder to death, most likely wearing only gloves to prevent fingerprints and a shower cap to avoid leaving any of his hair at the scene.
After the murder, he likely got dressed in room 229, then quickly jimmied the lock on the outside of room 227 before escaping through a door at the end of the hallway, where he had already deactivated the alarm. During one of his numerous forays into the room the morning Toder’s body was discovered, he managed to genuinely re-lock the dead bolt on the adjoining room door. His two fatal mistakes were leaving a machete print in blood on the bed and failing to notice the huge suitcase that Nan Toder had shoved against her room’s exterior door, because the door was in a darkened recess beyond the bathroom.
Christopher Richee was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2002. In 2005, he won an appeal on the grounds that the trial court erred in allowing the prosecution to bring in information about his burglaries. His lawyers claimed that this unduly prejudiced the jury against him and prevented him from receiving a fair trial. The court decided there was no double jeopardy issue, so he was retried for Toder’s murder in 2006. That time he pleaded guilty despite having proclaimed his innocence in writing. Why? Because a guilty plea prevented another life sentence. The sentencing judge gave him a forty-year prison term and credited him with six years served. As of the writing of this book, Richee could conceivably be released from prison in ten years.
In the spring of 2003, Sol and Lin Toder settled their multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit against the hotel and devoted the entire sum to lobbying states to pass Nan’s Law statutes, which require hotel owners to run criminal background checks on all potential employees who would have access to guest room keys.
A few weeks after Toder’s murder, John-Campbell Barmmer was shocked to get a bill in the mail from the Hampton Inn for his late employee’s hotel stay. Naturally, he refused to pay it.
Case Study: Cloaks, Daggers, and Debts
To outsiders, the Spiro family might have looked as though they had it all. A sprawling four-bedroom house with a swimming pool in posh Rancho Santa Fe, California. Horseback-riding lessons for the kids. Cocktail parties and country club memberships for the parents. But when the oldest Spiro child failed to turn up for a riding lesson, the neighbors began to get worried. No one had seen the Spiros for three days, which seemed odd. The kids were usually out skateboarding, and the mother was always at the club playing tennis or bridge. Finally, on November 5, 1992, some friends ventured up the drive and peeked in the window. They could see the youngest child clearly, lying motionless on her bed.
Police who responded to their 911 call found the house quiet and locked. Firemen had to break down a door to gain entry. Moving from room to room, they soon located all three Spiro children—sixteen-year-old Sara, fourteen-year-old Adam, and eleven-year-old Dina—lying in their beds, each dead from gunshot wounds to the head. Their mother, forty-one-year-old Gail, was dead in the master bedroom. She, too, had been shot in the head. The medical examiner put the date of death at about three days earlier—November 1 or 2.
The patriarch of the clan, British-born Ian Spiro, was nowhere to be found.
He was suspect number one until he turned up three days later seventy miles north in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park’s remote Coachwhip Canyon, slumped over the wheel of his white Ford Explorer. The doors were locked and the keys were inside. An autopsy showed that forty-six-year-old Spiro had died of cyanide poisoning.
To call Ian Spiro a colorful character might be an understatement. When the family moved to San Diego County from southern France a year earlier, Spiro told the locals he was an international commodities broker. But if you believed the stories buzzing around Rancho Santa Fe, the eccentric Englishman was actually a spy with ties to the CIA, Great Britain’s MI-5, Israel’s Mossad, and some of the Arab world’s most feared terrorists.
Rumor had it that Spiro, a longtime resident of Beirut, played a role in negotiations with Lebanese extremists for the release of American and British hostages in the 1980s. By some reports, he introduced negotiator-turned-hostage Terry Waite to the Shiites who eventually kidnapped him. Others said Oliver North mentioned Spiro in his notebooks and suggested him as a go-between in Lebanon during the Iran-Contra scandal.
Could the murders be payback for some shadowy covert action? Were they a government-sanctioned assassination? An underworld hit? The case seemed to combine all the elements of a good murder mystery—wealth, glamour, and intrigue. It captivated everyone from local gossips to London newspaper reporters.
Soon plotlines worthy of a Jason Bourne blockbuster sprang up. According to one, Arab terrorists bent on revenge finally caught up with the Spiro clan. Another had renegades within Israeli intelligence bumping them off. A third pinned the slaughters on Japan’s deadly Yakuza Mafia as retribution for some shady Spiro business deals in the Far East. Yet a fourth claimed the family was eliminated by high-ranking U.S. ops because Spiro was hiding incriminating documents that proved Department of Justice misconduct. A rumor even flitted around for a while about a dark-haired stranger with a foreign accent barging into the Spiro house hold a few days before the murders, then departing abruptly when he learned Ian wasn’t home.
But while conspiracy theorists speculated wildly on which sinister ghost had risen out of Spiro’s murky spy past to haunt him, another less glamorous possibility began to emerge.
The lead came from unexpected quarters. During the many police interviews with Rancho Santa Fe residents who knew the Spiros, someone mentioned that the family had a house keeper. Detectives managed to locate the woman, eighteen-year-old Paula Rojas, and asked if she had noticed anything unusual in the family’s behavior. Yes, she said.
In broken English, she told them that her husband drove her to work at seven A.M. on the morning of November 2, as always. No sooner did she walk in than she bumped into a disheveled and dazed Ian Spiro, standing
in the kitchen wearing a red bathrobe.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Rojas said that Mrs. Spiro had asked her to work that day. Spiro told her the family wasn’t there and her services wouldn’t be needed. There were some “problems,” he mumbled vaguely.
Flustered, the maid explained that her husband had left and now she had no ride home. Spiro said he would drive her home, then ushered her out of the main house and into a guest house to wait while he got dressed. A short time later, he drove Rojas back to the migrant camp where she spent weekends. It was the last she had seen or heard of the Spiro family.
Around the same time that Rojas’s story came to light, investigators poring over mounds of documents in Spiro’s office unearthed troubles that had little to do with cloak-and-dagger politics. Despite his family’s lavish lifestyle, Ian Spiro was flat broke. He hadn’t paid his rent or even his grocery bills in months. Hundreds of lottery tickets were stashed near a Ouija board, suggesting that he had been trying to conjure spirits to pick winning numbers. Though there were notes on countless business schemes, Spiro’s main enterprise seemed to be providing 900 numbers for dating services, psychics, and chat lines that advertised on late night television. His business, Home Media Promotions, earned a small amount from every call placed, but records showed Spiro was spending far more to advertise than he was collecting.
At one time, Ian Spiro had been a prosperous entrepreneur. But those days were evidently gone. The catalyst for his downward spiral seemed to be a plan to export Porsches to Japan. He had made money on the first shipment but sank huge profits into the second, which vanished mysteriously en route. Japanese police suspected the Yakuza were to blame but could do little to help Spiro recoup his losses. Since then, the man had been taking more and more desperate measures to stay afloat, luring new investors into his schemes and then paying the furious existing ones with their capital.
Spiro owed thousands of dollars to relatives, friends, and other creditors and millions to a bank that had loaned money to his wife for home repairs several years earlier. The spring before his death, he had taken out a $1.5 million life insurance policy on himself.
Friends from the children’s schools said the once tidy Brit had become unkempt and distracted in recent weeks. Always a doting dad who showed up for every class activity, Spiro had lately grown irritable and brusque with his kids.
Next, a local jeweler came forward to say that he had sold cyanide to Spiro, ostensibly for gold processing, two weeks before his death. Spiro’s attorney, James Street, added that he had loaned his client a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver because Spiro said he was getting threatening phone calls at all hours and feared for his family’s safety. Were the callers mysterious figures from the world of espionage or irate creditors? It was hard to say.
Though investigators were granted access to Spiro’s CIA files and confirmed that he had in fact done work for the agency a decade earlier, mounting evidence pointed to a tragic decision made by a man crushed under a mountain of financial pressure.
Then the month after Spiro’s body was found, a group of hikers in Anza-Borrego stumbled upon two battered green-and-gold-striped suitcases and a black briefcase, all filled with Spiro family documents, three miles from the spot where Ian Spiro’s body was found. Among the reams of papers was a cassette tape with a recording of Spiro rambling somewhat incoherently and referring to himself in the third person. “The house of cards,” he said, was “falling down.” The investors he had bilked in his failed businesses wanted his head. Gail was going to leave him. The tape seemed to bear out the notion that Spiro had contrived a deadly escape hatch from the debt threatening to engulf his family.
Relatives didn’t buy it. Ian Spiro was a devoted husband and father, they said, a gentle man who would never hurt anyone.
Police weren’t so sure. In their interview with Rojas, the maid had mentioned a red robe twice. That piqued their interest. They searched the house and found the garment. But when they examined it, they found no trace of blood spatter. After the FBI stepped in to investigate the Spiro murders, they, too, scrutinized the robe and found no blood on it—not even on the white cuffs.
So investigations stalled. The DA’s office couldn’t get involved because no arrests had been made. Still, pressure to solve the case remained intense. An entire family, a family living in a haven of privilege where violent crime was virtually nonexistent, had been executed. The public wanted closure.
Three years went by before my old pal Tim Carroll—a retired San Diego detective with whom I had worked undercover narcotics operations years earlier—agreed to reexamine the Spiro case as a favor to the local sheriff. Tim called me in 1995 and asked whether I would be willing to take a look at the robe and some other clothes from the Spiro murders as well as the crime scene photos. He also wanted my help finding an unbiased, independent forensics lab to examine the physical evidence.
Tim hand-carried the items to me in Portland. First we took the robe to Dr. Raymond Grimsbo, whom I’d worked with on the Green Thread Mystery. We all examined it under high-intensity lights and a microscope but found nothing.
Then we sprayed it with Luminol and, to our amazement, blood popped up everywhere.
Bathed in the luminescent chemical compound, the robe revealed the high-velocity impact spatter typical of blowback from gunshot wounds all over the right sleeve. It dissipated in the direction of the shoulder. Blood also dotted the front of the robe, and a smaller amount speckled the left sleeve. Spatter was visible even on the white cuffs, though the flecks were too minute to see with a microscope.
Was Spiro right-handed? Yes.
Would the pattern revealed be consistent with contact wounds, meaning the killer held the gun close enough to literally touch his victims when he fired? Yes.
Was there enough spatter to have come from multiple victims? Yes, again.
Confirmatory lab tests bore out our suspicions that the substance embedded in the fibers of the terry-cloth robe was indeed blood. Now we needed to find out whether it belonged to the Spiro victims. Fortunately, samples of their blood had been saved from the postmortems. Dr. Grimsbo conducted DNA tests on the sections of the robe that reacted with the Luminol; experts at a crime lab in San Diego County followed with similar tests.
Both labs concluded that the blood on Ian Spiro’s robe came from his wife and three children. The blood on the left sleeve belonged to Spiro’s youngest child, Dina, who appeared to have been the only family member to wake up and resist. We already knew this from the crime scene photos. Hers was the only bedroom wall spattered with blood. Hers were the only covers turned back. It appeared that Spiro had started with his wife, then moved systematically to his older daughter and then his son, holding the gun against their heads and firing. Dina heard the noises and came out to see what was causing them. Her father forced her back to her room and held her down on her bed with his left hand while he placed the gun barrel against her forehead and fired with his right, resulting in a concentration of her blood on his right sleeve and a smaller amount on his left.
The solution to a mystery that had captured the imagination of several continents was there all along. It had been sitting on the shelf of an evidence room year after year without anybody noticing.
Tim Carroll filed a report on the homicide-suicide evidence, and police called a press conference to announce the long-awaited answer to the Spiro whodunit in the presence of the family’s surviving relatives.
Though the murder weapon was never found, there was strong evidence to suggest that Spiro used the gun his attorney, James Street, loaned him. Gail Spiro’s head bore bruise marks with the imprint of a gun barrel with an unusual sight line—a sight line that matched just one particular heavy, thick-barreled model of Smith & Wesson .357—the model Street loaned to Spiro a few weeks before the murders occurred.
There are conspiracy theorists out there who still argue that Ian Spiro was no midlevel conduit with connections in the Lebanese
business world, but a full-fledged ace of spies who became inconvenient and got taken out with his family as collateral damage. But blood evidence doesn’t lie. Much as crime buffs would prefer a cold war thriller, the blood-spattered red bathrobe told a sadder, less sensational story.
Case Study: Sledgehammers and Finger-Pointing
If the killing of Nan Toder was unsettling for its ice-veined premeditation and random choice of victims, the murder of Betty Lee was equally horrifying for its vicious, spur-of-the-moment fury and targeting of a specific woman because of her race and her vulnerability.
Lee was a thirty-six-year-old single Navajo mother of five living in Shiprock, New Mexico. She had grown up in the town, part of the Navajo reservation, and most of her family still lived there. Lee was taking business courses at a local Navajo tribe–run college, hoping they would help her land a better-paying job to support herself and her kids.
On the evening of June 8, 2000, she joined two female acquaintances making the thirty-mile drive into Farmington for a few drinks. The evening began well, but as the night wore on, her friends started flirting with a pair of Navajo men, and Lee felt like a fifth wheel. The five left a bar together, but the others made it clear they wanted Lee out of the picture and had no intention of driving all the way to Shiprock to drop her off.
It was after two A.M. when, to Betty Lee’s dismay, her friends left her at a group of pay phones outside a convenience store and drove away. She was crying openly when a burly stranger approached her and asked what was wrong. Sobbing, she explained that she was stranded in Farmington and was trying to reach someone she knew to give her a lift.
