Nancy Lyon Page II



	At the time of Nancy's death, the doctors still didn't know the exact cause. But hours after she was admitted on January 9, her father told Dr. Ali Bagheri, the resident overseeing her care, that the family suspected Richard had poisoned Nancy. A few days later, her brother Bill told the Dallas County district attorney the same thing. Nancy, it turned out, had suspected Richard of poisoning her four months earlier. She had related her fears to her divorce lawyer, Mary Henrich, and to her sister-in-law, Mary Helen Dillard. In early September, she told them, she found a bottle of wine on her porch with an anonymous note to her; the cork looked as if it had been tampered with. Soon after, Nancy said, she and Richard went to the movies. When Richard brought her a soft drink, she took one sip and immediately spit it out because of a foul taste. She then saw a white powder floating on top. According to Henrich, Nancy said Richard "threw a fit" because she didn't drink it. She said she was sick that night. It's hard to say why Nancy would have reconciled with Richard in the face of such suspicions, which apparently continued. Henrich urged her to have the wine tested, but Nancy never followed through, saying it would embarrass her to accuse her husband. Then, in late October, friends saw Nancy with a collection of unusual "health pills" Richard had given her. In December, after she and Richard went on a ski weekend in Colorado, Nancy told Mary Helen she had stayed in the bathroom vomiting for an entire night during the trip. Richard, she said, never once got out of bed to check on her. After Nancy's father talked to Bagheri, it was at least ten hours before the doctor did anything. Bagheri later testified that his patient load was busy that day and that he was waiting for Richard to leave Nancy's bedside so he could talk to her alone. Finally, around midnight, he saw Nancy in her room. She told him about the soft drink, about the wine and the health pills. When Bagheri left Nancy that night, he recalled, she was writhing in pain, pleading with him to find out what was wrong with her. "I remember what she said," he testified. "`Please help me. Help me. Don't let me die.'" Early the next morning, Bagheri asked the Dillards to search the duplex. Later that day, they returned with a red bag. Inside was an eight-compartment container filled with various pills and an open bottle of wine. The bags had been in the car trunk of Allison and Anna's nanny, who said she saw Nancy place them there amid sundry garage sale items a few months earlier. Richard, meanwhile, apparently knew nothing of the Dillard family's suspicions. Shortly after Nancy was admitted to the ICU, he himself asked doctors if tainted food could have made her ill. He said she had been drinking foul-tasting coffee the morning before she got sick. He brought in a bag of food from the house to be tested. By this point, I later learned, observers were clearly divided into two camps. Doctors viewed Richard's efforts with skepticism, and Nancy's family and friends were quick to catalog his misplaced gestures, indifferent responses, and odd refusal to leave her bedside. Yet others saw nothing strange about Richard's behavior. They saw him pray with his minister. They saw him barely sleep. When Nancy died, he appeared as bereft as any husband would be. Gary Perkins, a business associate and close friend of Richard's, came to the hospital just as Nancy's life support was being turned off. At first Perkins was directed to an upstairs waiting room where the Dillards were congregating separately from Richard. When he walked off the elevator and asked for Richard, he felt a discernible chill. A woman showed him downstairs to a room where Richard's parents sat alone, waiting for their son to exit Nancy's room. "Richard came out, and he was crying real hard," Perkins recalls. "He was surprised to see me, and he hugged me. It upset me, because I'd never seen him upset like that." Perkins ended up driving Richard home. It wasn't until they were in the car that he learned Nancy had died. "I cried and told him I was sorry," Perkins says. "He had her pair of shoes there in his lap and he kept rubbing them in his hands. Man, it just ripped me apart. I couldn't stand it. And he kept saying, `How am I going to tell my girls? How am I going to tell them?'" THE DAY BEFORE NANCY DIED, I took down their Christmas lights. I raked and swept the back yard, picking up pieces of wood shavings, screws, and nails while my son played. In the center of the small lawn stood a stone statue of a curly haired angel playing a harp. Richard had given it to Nancy for Christmas. For some reason, my son knew it was hers and would occasionally point tO it and call out her name. When he did, I felt a loss of surprising depth. I hadn't known Nancy as a close friend; although we had talked nearly every day, our relationship was seasoned with a cordial neighborly distance. For a long time, in fact, Nancy was nothing more to me than a good neighbor. She practiced that art well. When we first moved in, she would bring us gifts of soup or ice cream. If she borrowed a dish, she would always return it filled with something she or Richard had cooked. She remembered us every Christmas with a gift of raspberry vinegar or a basket of fruit. My husband--who is rarely hyperbolic about anyone--began calling her "the nicest person in the world. " Admittedly, Nancy could be aggravating. Often we would step over dirty dishes or half-full coffee mugs that she would leave for hours on the front stoop. When her children painted on the upstairs porch, globs of red or blue would drip onto the stroller we kept near our door. And in conversation, she could be infuriatingly optimistic, addressing problems with empty platitudes about how everything would work out. Even after Richard left, even as her world fell apart, she tried to hang on to her rosy views Yet when she couldn't, she seemed more approachable, softer, more real. She had quit her job shortly after Richard moved out, intent on giving her daughters stability through the marital chaos. I was home with a child too Together we began to forge a silent household alliance. On warm days and evenings our doors would swing open and our children would run back and forth, playing together as Nancy and I stayed on separate sides working or cooking. We would take turns keeping an eye on the kids. On some days we would borrow sugar, noodles, or milk from each other with an almost comic style. As the months passed, our reliance on each other grew. At times she would say how grateful she felt with us living so close, how comforting our mere presence was to her, how safe she felt. For me, too, Nancy's movements became etched into my daily routine. The sound of her step at night. The slamming of her door. The smell of her cooking. The sight of the toys strewn on her living room floor. The music she played. Then, suddenly, she was gone. IMMEDIATELY AFTER NANCY'S death the police advised the Dillards to keep up appearances with Richard. In retrospect, it amazes me how convincingly they played their roles. They received scores of guests at their home. During the funeral, which drew hundreds, Richard sat in the front pew next to Nancy's mother. The two wept with their arms around each other as they sang "Amazing Grace." At the grave site, her family calmly watched Richard hold Allison close.


	In the weeks that followed, Nancy's father came by the duplex nearly every other morning with a box of fresh-baked muffins. He sometimes helped with the household tasks or the children until Richard drove them to school. My husband and I tried to help Richard too. We baby-sat when he went to a grief-recovery program. We cooked him dinners. We tried to offer him chances to talk, although we knew he didn't bare his feelings easily. But it seemed to us that Richard was finding a way to cope with his wife's death. With his old energy and industriousness, he took up the backyard work he and Nancy had begun. He built a greenhouse. He bought rabbits for his daughters and made an open bunny hutch. He moved the angel statue into the center of the vegetable garden and planned to put a little washtub fountain in front of it--a makeshift memorial to his dead wife. As I write this now, it seems almost absurd that I held so firmly to the idea that Richard was above suspicion. I am not--as few in Dallas are, I suppose--naive about spousal murders. I know that seemingly fine, upstanding men in our community are capable of strangling, smothering, or otherwise mutilating their wives to death. But I could see no such capacity for evil in Richard; nor could friends or co-workers. "Nothing ever suggested Richard could do this kind of thing," said one of Richard's former employers. "Richard would get mad, sure, but it was never, never carried out in the form of retribution. As a child, Richard was, according to his parents, always quiet and independent, rarely outwardly emotional but always amiable. He was drawn to art and music, did well in school, and showed signs of being a perfectionist. By age 28, he was competently directing multimillion-dollar construction projects and, all the while, earning the affection of colleagues, who saw him as generous and honest. He once gave his secretary $500 to help with a down payment on her house; he paid his associate Gary Perkins $5,000 from his personal account when a company check was late. Perkins, who worked nearly every day with Richard through 1989, describes him as a gentle man who never lost his temper on the job. "Richard would get angry, and he would voice his anger, Perkins says, "but he always maintained control." By all accounts Richard also impressed the Dillards with his creativity and work ethic. As Nancy's father wrote in 1989, recommending him for membership in the Dallas Salesmanship Club, "I have had ten years to observe his personality, drive, wit, and determination. Richard is hard-working, serious, and dedicated, but he can laugh at himself and has a great appreciation for the simple pleasures in life." "He was the Pied Piper of all times with kids," says an acquaintance. "He'd get out on the lawn at these picnics, and all the parents would be eating and drinking, and Richard was just there frolicking with the kids and having a good time. " When Richard left Nancy, however, her friends saw him change; he became disdainful, cold, and angry. Yet Nancy would always defend him, saying he was simply having an acute mid-life crisis. "Richard had always been so compliant in his family," says Emily Comstock, a longtime friend of Nancy's. "I think Nancy felt like he just hit a point where he didn't want to be a good boy anymore." I FIRST SAW TAMI AYN GAISFORD at the duplex just a few days after Nancy's funeral. Her car was parked in the driveway, with the same "94.5--The Edge" bumper sticker that had appeared on Richard's Mustang shortly after he had left Nancy. As I walked to our door, I glanced briefly through Richard's window and saw a blond sitting at the dinner table with Richard and the girls. She appeared every two or three days after that, once lazily reading while he worked in the back yard. At first I didn't recognize her as the "other woman" that Nancy had mentioned. She was not, as Nancy had said, a sultry, miniskirted hussy who frequented bars. She was fit and attractive, with a demeanor undoubtedly sensual but not at all cheap. The daughter of a residential contractor in Dallas, Ayn Gaisford was an intelligent, reasonable woman who had met Richard in the summer of 198,9 while both worked on the renovation of the Saks Fifth Avenue Pavilion in Houston. As I later learned, the affair had not been a casual one. For Christmas 1989, Richard had bought her a $4,900 ring. And their affection appeared mutual and deep, lasting even through Richard's attempts at reconciliation with Nancy. "Richard knew he was in love with Ayn," says one business associate who knew them. "What to do about it was the confusing part. He loved his kids. Obviously it was awkward seeing Ayn at the duplex so soon after Nancy's death. It was unseemly, really--particularly late one night in early February, when I heard laughter in the back yard and saw her, Richard, and another couple having a dinner party. One early February morning I opened our dining room blinds at the exact moment she walked out of Richard's back door, carrying a small overnight bag. Yet I continued to give Richard the benefit of the doubt. He had few close friends, I thought; who was I to decide what he needed in his grief? There was, after all, so much I didn't know. ON JANUARY 15, ONE DAY AFTER Nancy's death, an autopsy was conducted by the Dallas County medical examiner's office. It would show lethal doses of arsenic in her liver and kidneys. Her blood had as much as one hundred times more arsenic than normal. Her hair showed as much as forty times the normal amount at the root. That day, Detective Don S. Ortega of the Dallas Police Department's homicide unit met with Nancy's father. Ortega told him the investigation would take a while. In most cases Ortega questions his prime suspect within a day or two, but this one was trickier. This time he would wait. The Dillards had told him that during 1990 Nancy had seen a canceled check from Richard to General Laboratory Supply, a chemical distributor in Pasadena. Apparently worried that Richard was using drugs, Nancy had mentioned the laboratory's name to her sister. Ortega subpoenaed bank records for Richard's accounts and asked General Labs to search their files. Within a month he obtained receipts showing Richard had bought several toxic chemicals in powdered form, including barium carbonate and sodium nitroferricyanide, from the supplier throughout 1990. None showed an arsenic purchase. In late February the duplex grew quiet for days. Richard had told the Dillards he was going fishing in Mexico with a friend named John, and he left his daughters with Bill Junior's family. While he was gone, Ortega checked airline records and discovered Richard had flown to Puerta Vallarta with Ayn Gaisford. Their return date was February 25. Ortega picked up Richard for questioning two days later. Richard, pleasant and cooperative, spent five hours downtown with Ortega. During their talk, Ortega recalls, Richard's eye contact never wavered. He answered questions calmly, without obvious emotion--even at times when Ortega felt emotion was warranted.

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It's the action, not the fruit of the action,
that's important. You have to do the right thing.
It may not be in your power, may not be in your time,
that there'll be any fruit.
But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing.
You may never know what results come from your action.
But if you do nothing, there will be no result.
~Gandhi