NANCY LYON Page III

Nancy Lyon Page III


	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.



	Ortega already knew that in the 44 days since Nancy's death, Richard hadn't once called the medical examiner's office to ask about the autopsy results. When he told Richard that Nancy had been poisoned, Richard barely reacted. "He remained calm," Ortega testified. "He didn't say anything and did not appear upset. No response at all." The most telling moment, in Ortega's view, came when he asked Richard if he had any poisons at the duplex. Richard mentioned that Amdro, an ant killer, and Vapam, a herbicide, were stored in the garage. When he then asked if Richard had ever bought any chemicals, Ortega testified, Richard "thought for a moment and then said, `No.'" "Right then, I knew I'd found my suspect," Ortega told me after the trial. "I knew that he killed her. He lied to me, and I let him lie to me." In Ortega's view, Richard's lies only continued. When he asked if Richard had ever bought chemicals "from a laboratory outside Houston," Richard said he had: mercury and lead to repair a battery, along with cyanide and "arsenic acid" to kill fire ants. At first Richard said he didn't recall what he had done with the poisons; later he said he had put them in a trash bag and thrown them away. After the interview, Richard allowed police officers to search the duplex and his car. They turned up no evidence--no tainted food, none of the chemicals purchased by Richard, and no medication in Nancy's name, not even the Zovirax capsules prescribed by her gynecologist just two days before she got sick. As it happened, Richard had ordered arsenic, in both liquid and powder form, on November 19, 1990, from General Labs. On December 26, Richard called the company to ask about its status and was told it should arrive within two weeks. The package was delivered to Richard's office the next day. Early that morning, Richard, Nancy, and the children had left Dallas on a flight to Connecticut. A receptionist signed for the package and placed it in the mail room. The earliest Richard could have picked it up was January 3, six days before Nancy went to the hospital. At the trial, when Richard took the stand in his defense, he told a different version of his talk with Ortega. He said he initially answered no to the question about chemicals because he thought Ortega was asking about pesticides. And he testified that he never told Ortega that he had received the December 27 delivery of arsenic. In fact, nobody was ever able to prove Richard had actually picked up the arsenic at his office. Shortly after Richard's arrest in May, he contacted the receptionist who signed for the delivery and asked her if she remembered him complaining that he hadn't received a package. The receptionist said she didn't recall any such complaint--yet neither she nor any other witnesses saw Richard take the package from the mail room.nIt was nearly three months after Richard's trip downtown before Ortega arrested and charged him with first-degree murder. In that time Dallas County toxicologists had analyzed the "health pills" that Nancy said Richard had given her. Most were benign vitamin formulas, but two of the sixteen capsules contained pure barium carbonate--one of the toxic chemicals Richard had ordered in August. ON A COLD SUNDAY IN EARLY March, four days after his initial interview with Ortega, Richard knocked on our door and asked to see my husband. Richard told him about the police investigation and said Bill Junior had filed a temporary restraining order to gain custody of his daughters. As my husband recalls it, Richard began hinting at a Dillard conspiracy--a family effort to pin Nancy's death on him, to take away the girls. Maybe the hospital screwed up, Richard said, or maybe someone else killed his wife. As they talked, my husband sensed concern and fear in Richard's voice but no anger at the apparent injustice of the police accusations. "He looked serious and shook up," my husband later told me. "He looked more scared than outraged." Ayn Gaisford stopped visiting after that. Richard hired lawyers and was gone often. I started a journal. Three days after Richard talked with my husband, I sat in the back yard, struck by the stark contrast of two weeks earlier. Then, the yard had been full of life, with Allison, Anna, and Shawn running after the bunnies while Richard sawed and hammered and potted plants. "Now," I wrote, "the plants have been strewn about, upturned by the wind or the rabbits. A light has been on for several nights in Richard's tool shed. No one has been in to turn it off. The face of Nancy's angel has streaks of light brown muck on it--sap, rusty water, bird crap for all I know. All life has gone, suddenly, except for the bunnies. Even they are thin, shaking, and hungry. Shawn and I feed them every day. Sometimes they run wild in the alley. The other night, their hutch collapsed in the wind." That night, I was awake in bed when Richard's car pulled into the driveway. I heard his key in the door, his step on the stair six feet from my head. I felt, for the first time, a naked and nauseating fear. Maybe it was Rosemary Lyon, Richard's mother, who made me feel better. Within a few days she had left her job in Connecticut, moved in, and was washing and ironing his shirts, opening his mail, and cooking his meals. "I finally got him to eat something last night," she said to me. "Now I can't fill him up." Rosemary had a gritty, comforting, no-nonsense warmth about her. A second generation Lebanese American, she seemed to be a woman who orders life by simple rules. She believes in the power of saints and is deeply loyal to her family and friends. I never heard her doubt Richard's innocence. As she saw it, whoever killed Nancy was out to get Richard too. When she arrived, she emptied all of Richard's spices in the trash. She looked warily at bottles of vinegar Nancy I had kept above the sink. Through Rosemary, I began to see Richard as a mother's son. I found myself, once again, warmed to him, able to view him with uncertainty--a feeling that was far more comforting than the terror I had felt days earlier. My trust was still tenuous. One night Rosemary came to our door with a plate of apple pie Richard had made that day. I could never bring myself to eat it. Yet I remember, too, the beautiful, sunny, cool, windy afternoon when Richard and Rosemary came back from the first day of the custody hearing. I sat on the front porch while Richard complained about having to plead the Fifth Amendment on nearly every question, which his lawyers had advised. He said his stomach felt like it had "a hole in it" after he heard the Dillards' testimony against him. "It hurts when you see your family, or what you thought was your family, saying you did something so horrible, he said. He looked so sad, so sincere in his stated incredulities. In that moment, I felt genuine sympathy for him. THE DILLARDS NEVER STRUCK ME as conspiring people. If anything, the manner of Nancy's death left them stunned, outraged, and somewhat mortified. They were also scared. "I was sure that once Richard knew the jig was up, he would do something crazy, like kill the girls and then kill himself," Bill Junior told me months later. "I had a lot of fear, a lot of fear." At the time, though, I didn't know what to believe about Richard's hints of secrets in Nancy's family--secrets, he said, that tied into the mystery of her death. I found it hard to imagine. But by this point, nothing would have surprised me--or so I thought. I hadn't heard the testimony in the custody hearing. Richard's lawyer had subpoenaed me as a witness, but after two days of waiting outside the courtroom, I was never called. Faced with no hard evidence proving Richard an unfit parent, the court gave the Dillards visiting rights but temporarily returned the girls to their father.

Continued...

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