NANCY LYON Page IIII

NANCY LYON, Conclusion



	After Richard and Rosemary returned, jubilant, from court that day, I knocked on their door. Richard ushered me in. He had loosened his tie; his face looked more relaxed than it had in months. He had seriously hurt the Dillards' case, he said, by testifying about the incestuous relationship Nancy had had with her brother Bill while the two were adolescents. According to Richard, Nancy first told him about the incest in late spring 1989, when they and other Dillard family members spent a "family counseling week" at Sierra Tucson, a psychiatric facility in Arizona, where Bill Junior was undergoing treatment for alcohol and drug abuse. While there, Nancy and Richard saw a sex therapist. The incest came out at that session, and as he said later, it left him "disgusted" and "repulsed." What actually happened between Nancy and her brother 25 years ago is disputed. After Richard's trial, Bill Junior spoke to me frankly about it. There was never any intercourse, he said, and no one victim or perpetrator. He and Nancy cooperated in fondling games that confused physical closeness with emotional intimacy. The two had even talked forgivingly about it months before she died, he said. But as I sat in his living room that day, Richard painted the ugliest of pictures: that Bill Junior would "pounce" on Nancy with advances she escaped by mentally withdrawing--by reading, in one instance, even as it happened. According to Richard, Nancy's parents only discovered the incest when she complained of vaginal bleeding. I sat, speechless, at his descriptions. He looked back at me calmly. "Now you know," he said. That evening, when Richard drove his daughters back to the duplex, he got a police escort. Even though the day was wet, Richard brought out his guitar and began singing Raffi songs out back. The atmosphere was very festive, and it stayed that way for days. I remember, most clearly, one evening when Shawn brought out his toy guitar for another sing-along. Allison hung on Richard's back, holding her blanket, while Anna played in the sand nearby. At the end of one song, Richard reached down and stroked Shawn softly on the cheek. For a moment, in that warmth, it was if the whole matter of Nancy's death had disappeared. We moved out six weeks later, into a house we had bought before Nancy died. In that time, we felt close to Richard. We shared dinners. When Anna was hospitalized with a rare viral syndrome, I watched how tenderly he cared for her. From time to time, Richard frolicked with my son. Their favorite seemed to be a tickling game, which Richard called "typing torture." It always made Shawn giggle wildly. Before we left, Richard gave us two bonsai trees. "Please keep these trees," he wrote in a note, "as they will survive for decades with the same care that you give each other." We heard about Richard's arrest in May. I felt helpless, seeing his picture on the front page. I went to his bond hearing and embraced Rosemary when his bail, originally set at $2 million, was reduced to $50,000. We didn't see them much after that. We became, like so many who knew Nancy and Richard, intent on escaping the ordeal. But escape was impossible. I had mistakenly taped the news report of Richard's arrest on my son's favorite Barney and the Backyard Gang videotape. I could barely listen to Raffi music. When one of the two bonsai trees died, I couldn't stop seeing Nancy in its thin, withered trunk. And Shawn began having bedtime fears of men coming to "type" him. One night, months after we had moved out, I cradled him close and asked him, "Who types you?" "Richard," he answered. THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE STATE DIStrict judge John Creuzot's courtroom was packed when I arrived on December 2 for Richard's trial. It was an unusual scene from the start. For three weeks nearly everything in the courtroom, including the white-collar jury, masked the carnality of murder with a veneer of North Dallas propriety and aesthetics. Richard appeared clean-shaven, in finely tailored suits, always carrying a briefcase full of legal pads and files. His lawyer, Dan Guthrie, a former assistant United States attorney with a reputation for defending savings and loan executives, was tall, handsome, and impeccably dressed. The state's case was led by assistant district attorney Jerri Sims, whose elegant skirts, spiked heels, and waist-long blond hair effectively disguised her hard-nosed reputation for winning convictions. And each day, scores of well-scrubbed Dillard supporters came: elderly benefactors, young women with hankies pinned to their sweaters, Episcopalian ministers, ladies doing cross-stitch. Richard's parents, and sometimes a friend or two, sat quietly apart from that crowd. I sat with the journalists, believing I could watch Richard's trial with their dispassion. I acted the part well, recording every minute of testimony in my little notebooks. Only later did I realize that I had never been dispassionate. I had hoped Guthrie would show me that his client didn't kill Nancy. He had pledged as much in an unusual press conference nine months earlier, which he called after University Park police named Richard as a suspect. Then, Guthrie declared Richard innocent and promised that if the case went to trial it would be a "real Perry Mason whodunit." I was hoping it would be, I suppose, for the same reasons I had continually denied Richard's guilt. It wasn't just my belief in his right to a fair trial. I also didn't want to admit that I had put my faith in a man who had coldly killed his wife. What I saw instead was the state's carefully-laid-out case, which implicated Richard at every turn. In testimony from Nancy's father, her doctor, Detective Ortega, and others, the state fashioned a picture out of her suspicions of Richard, Richard's apparent lies to the police, the autopsy report, the health pills packed with barium carbonate, and the paper trail of chemical purchases that ended with the December arsenic delivery. I was stunned, too, by the testimony of a man who, in January 1991, repainted and cleaned the apartment Richard had lived in while he was separated from Nancy. Among Richard's belongings the man saw several empty clear gelatin capsules--the same as those containing the two tainted health pills. There was also the subsequent tenant at the apartment, who testified that while cleaning the back of a bathroom cabinet, she found a prescription bottle in Nancy's name. Along with the pills inside were two antibiotic capsules laced with sodium nitroferricyanide--another poisonous chemical that Richard had bought from General Labs in August 1990. Money, not just his romantic liaison with Ayn, appeared to be the motive. Nancy was worth about $1.2 million, including $500,000 from her life insurance policy. Four months before her death, she had removed Richard as beneficiary, naming her children instead. The children's nanny, Lynn Pease-Woods, had signed as witness to the change. According to Lynn's testimony, it seemed as if Richard didn't know about the switch, even after Nancy's death. The defense's attempts to counter Lynn's testimony looked suspicious. Guthrie introduced a typewritten note, addressed to Richard, dated November 1, 1990, and signed "Nancy," which mentioned the beneficiary change. But Lynn testified that Nancy didn't know how to type and even took pride in that fact.


	Through his cross-examination of other state witnesses, Guthrie deluged the jury with a muddle of doubts. He suggested other suspects: Bill Junior, for instance, or Nancy's former boss at Crow Development, David Bagwell, who had been sued by the Crow companies for misappropriating $720,000. Nancy had been a potential witness against Bagwell and had received a death threat relating to the case in 1989. Guthrie also hinted at suicide. But that scenario seemed unlikely when the state introduced a nine-page letter from Nancy to Richard, written four months before her death in powerful, intelligent, eloquent prose. When read aloud, it was as if Nancy's voice had suddenly come into the courtroom to state her own case: My nature has always been to be so optimistic, so positive, so charged up about my life, and over this last year, in losing what I valued most in my life, I have let myself be so consumed by fear, unhappiness, heartache, and misery that I have compromised my values and principles and lost sight of myself, my needs and my dreams... I can see clearly that the children and I need and deserve so much more. They need a loving, consistent parent who is there for them day and night... They need stability and predictability and a promise that no matter what, they will be defended, protected and safe, every moment, every day... I no longer have any desire to hold you to your marriage commitment. Not only are you free to go, but I need to demand that you go before even more damage is done to the children and to me. I watched Richard cry as the letter was read. I will never believe, as some suggested, that his tears were just a ploy to win the jury's sentiments. But I could feel my focus changing. I no longer wondered if he had killed her. I wondered, instead, what twisted passion had carried him through the months of premeditation, through the hours of her retching at home, through the days of her decline and death. I cannot pretend to know what happened between Richard and Nancy, but I believed then, as now, that Richard loved her once--as deeply as he must have grown to hate her. On the day the state rested its case, Richard came over to me in the courtroom. He asked about Shawn and told me about Anna's funny antics. As we talked, I had trouble looking into his eyes. I could feel the Dillards' friends staring at us. When he asked how I thought the trial had gone, I shrugged and said nothing. "Just wait," he told me. "All the facts will come out." WHEN HE TOOK THE STAND two days later, Richard never denied ordering the arsenic. He said he bought the poison to kill fire ants at the duplex and at a job site. Although his testimony drew snickers of disbelief that his supposedly all-organic company would sanction arsenic as a fire ant control, I knew the duplex had an ant problem. In late summer 1990 it had gotten so bad that I asked Nancy about it. "Richard's working on something," she told me. As Richard described it, he planned to bore into the mounds and then spray poison. Nancy had worked with him on the scheme, he said; in fact, it was Nancy who suggested buying arsenic in the first place. Richard's testimony also put him 250 miles from Nancy during the hours on January 8 when she would have gotten the fatal dose of arsenic. Airline tickets, restaurant receipts, and eyewitnesses all confirmed that he had been in Houston since early that day and had arrived home around six, about the time Nancy began feeling sick. He portrayed his wife as a vulnerable, sickly woman. All through the fall of 1990, he said, Nancy had called him often, complaining of illness. Her calls always drew him back to the duplex, he said, to check on the children or to help her. As proof he offered writings he said were Nancy's--pages of notes, which Richard said he found in a file box three months before the trial. Nancy had been in counseling nearly all of her final year. I knew she wrote often about her therapy; once, I had seen the walls of her bedroom covered with sheets of paper. Two pages offered by the defense particularly played into suggestions of suicide or other suspects. One described how Bill Junior had incestuously "violated" Nancy for years, how her family had denied it, and how Richard had tried to help her--"tried to save me," the note said, "with his sincere heart and his un-ending patience with my than" ups' about sex." On the bottom of another page was written, "fears of bill and what his desires are--sex--sick sex-incest issues with me?--my girls?" The defense had hired a handwriting expert, who had said the writing was Nancy's. Later, they would put on the stand James Grigson, the psychiatrist known as Dr. Death for his controversial death-penalty testimony. Solely on the basis of the notes, Grigson described Nancy as deeply troubled, calculating, controlling, and manipulative. He suggested that she had made herself sick with poisons to lure Richard back to the marriage. By itself, the theory seemed preposterous. Arsenic poisoning is a painful, prolonged, and agonizing way to kill oneself. What's more, Nancy hadn't acted one bit suicidal in the weeks before her death. She made her usual Christmas gifts and planned trips for the coming year. Her daughters seemed far too important to her. And why would she have cried out for help in the hospital if she had known, all the while, what was killing her? Then Guthrie produced the receipt. It was dated September 6, 1990, from a company called Chemical Engineering in Dallas. It listed purchases of four chemicals: barium carbonate, lead nitrate, cyanogen bromide, and arsenic trioxide. It was signed "Nancy Lyon," with her driver's license number beneath her name. As Richard stood before the jury, pointing to a blowup of the receipt, the change in the courtroom was physical. He testified that he had found it stashed in the same files with her private writings. For the first time during the trial, Rosemary leaned forward and tried to catch my eye. "Can you believe it?" she mouthed. It was hard to know what to believe, particularly when the president of Chemical Engineering, Charles Couch, testified later that his firm specialized in recycling old carpeting. But Couch, a large man with a cocksure manner, also acknowledged he was rknown in the business" as someone who could devise chemical formulas. In September 1990, he testified, a woman had called him to discuss fire ant poison. According to Couch, the woman never identified herself, but she told him that she and her husband were trying to inject poison into the mounds with a long drill. When Couch offered to look up a formula for her at the Southern Methodist University library, the woman asked if he could drop the notation by her house--which, she said, was right next to campus, as our duplex was. Couch testified that he did look up a formula, which matched the items on the receipt. But he never dropped it off. Instead, the woman apparently came to his plant the next day to get it. He testified that that he never saw her: He was on the phone in a back office at the time. Through one of his employees, he passed on the formula, which he had jotted on notepaper with his company's logo. But Couch called the receipt a forgery. It had no invoice number. It was typed, while all his are handwritten. And, oddly, it had a notation to call Keith or Charles on the bottom--names of contractors who transport huge quantities of chemicals for the company. Couch said he remembered inadvertently jotting their names on the bottom of the notepaper with the formula right before the woman came to pick it up. Yet even if Richard had forged the receipt, it was hard to explain the call Couch had gotten. Equally puzzling were the results of additional forensic tests on Nancy's hair, which the medical examiner's office had requested in May. Bundles of the hair had been sent to Vincent Guinn, a chemist at the University of Maryland, who uses a technique called neutron activation analysis to detect various chemicals in hair. Before analyzing the hair, Guinn had sliced it into tiny segments, each representing roughly two weeks growth. The results showed that in addition to the lethal dose in early January, Nancy probably had ingested arsenic at least two other times before that: a sizable dose sometime between mid-December and New Year's Eve, and a much smaller one in mid-November. Both were before Richard could have received the arsenic from General Labs. There were theories to explain the evidence. Richard might have gotten arsenic elsewhere. Maybe Nancy's hair grew faster than normal. Maybe shellfish or hair coloring caused the small November dose. Yet the autopsy also showed Nancy's fingernails had at least five times more arsenic than her toenails--a result that suggested she might have handled the chemical, either by touching poisoned food or the arsenic itself. TWO DAYS BEFORE THE END OF the trial, it seemed Guthrie had achieved reasonable doubt. That day, Shawn visited me at the courthouse for lunch, and Richard chatted easily with him in the hallway. As I watched, it seemed that more harm would come from a conviction than from an acquittal. I lost all faith less than two hours later. On rebuttal, the state produced Hartford R. Kittel, a retired document examiner from the FBI. Unlike the defense's handwriting analyst, Kittel compared all writings in evidence not just with Nancy's known samples but also with Richard's. I had always marveled at how similar Richard's and Nancy's handwriting was. In graduate school, I later learned, they had actually worked to make their writing look alike for design projects, giving it the same angular n's, the same long loops below their g's and their y's. But Kittel pointed out their differences. Richard's i's were a straight line down; Nancy's were framed by little cross lines. Richard's f's sometimes had a backward loop; Nancy's never did. Nancy's s's were always serpentine; Richard's were sometimes scripted. And then I saw how, in the most powerful of Nancy's personal writings--in the pen scratches that spelled out "bill violated me for years," "sick sex" and "Richard... with his sincere heart"--in nearly every word that damned Nancy, there were Richard's handwriting peculiarities. To my eyes, the call wasn't even close. Kittel also questioned the authenticity of the signature on the insurance note and couldn't identify the one on the receipt from Chemical Engineering. The jury returned its verdict less than three hours later. As the courtroom doors opened, I saw an ashen Richard looking back at the crowd filing in. When the foreman read, "Guilty," Richard's eyes widened. Then he stared straight ahead, hung his head, and sighed. "I can't believe this has happened," he told Guthrie minutes later, as they sat in a holding cell. "I'm innocent." Outside, amid a flurry of television cameras, the Dillards were whisked away. In the emptiness that followed, journalists milled the halls, looking for someone who would comment on the case. I walked toward the elevators and left. Soon I was driving up Central Expressway in a pouring rain. As I had done so often in the years before, I turned off at Mockingbird and zigzagged past SMU to the duplex. The shutters were drawn. The Christmas lights were hanging in the same loose way as the year before, when I had taken them down as Nancy lay dying. Sitting there in my car, it seemed absurd that after all these months, my doubt about who killed Nancy should have fallen apart based on the shape of an i, an f, and an s. But that was all it took. Mere markings of a pen had become, for me, the desperate imprints or a very convincing liar. ON NEW YEAR'S DAY, I WENT TO see Richard in jail. He wasn't expecting me. I didn't quite know how to alert him that I was coming, so I simply showed up. Richard entered on the other side of the bulletproof glass dressed in white jail overalls. An orange ID band encircled his wrist. He looked pale but lively. He sat down easily and picked up the phone. He looked as even-tempered and pleasant as I remembered him. There was no desperation in his voice or face. "How are you doing?" I asked. "Not great," he said. "But we're working on getting a new trial now..." His talk quickly moved into a litany of reasons why he should have been acquitted, especially with what the forensic evidence showed. "You tell me how I could have given her those prior exposures," he said. "You tell me, and then I can sit in a jail cell and think about it. But you can't tell me. That's reasonable doubt." I was blunt with him. The handwriting analysis had hurt him. So did his apparent lies to the police. And it simply didn't make sense that Nancy would beg for help in the hospital if she had killed herself. "I don't understand it either," he said. "I lived with her, and I don't understand it. All I know is that she bought arsenic. That receipt is real.... Why would I forge that stuff?" As he talked, he looked me straight in the eye, and I found myself searching his pale green irises for some hint of the truth. All I saw was calm, logical analysis. He had an answer for every question. The thought crossed my mind, at one point, that Richard is either delusional, thoroughly evil, or innocent. And at that moment I really could not tell which it was. "You know me," he said. "You know I would never do anything to hurt the girls. I would never have taken away their mother. Why would I need to kill her? I would have walked away from the marriage." I was hoping my visit would give me some closure to the matter of my neighbor's death. It did not. What was I expecting, after all? That Richard would suddenly break down, confess, set forth the story without ambiguity, allow me to walk away that night satisfied that at least I knew the whole wretched truth? Instead, as the guard came to get him, Richard left me with this: "I can only pray that the truth will come out someday," he said, "because it didn't at the trial." I cannot say Richard Lyon killed his wife beyond all possible doubt. Like the jury, I believe he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but my knowledge will always be in fragments, like the glimpses I had during the years I lived under his roof, like the pieces of evidence that became the court record. Or, as I thought driving back from the jail that night, like the way I saw his eyes shift downward only twice during my visit with him. The first time was when I asked about his daughters. The second time was when I suggested that maybe Nancy got her poison in the Zovirax capsules she had been taking at the time.

-END-

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