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Speaker 4: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them Geese, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK every
Speaker 4: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 4: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 4: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 5: Good Evening Coca Story is based on the brutal murder
Speaker 5: of a housewife in the Denver suburbs in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 5: A college student back then, Stephanie Kane, was more than
Speaker 5: a witness to this terrible crime. For nearly thirty years,
Speaker 5: she remains then. In two thousand and one, she tried
Speaker 5: to exercise the crime by fictionalizing it in a mystery
Speaker 5: novel called Quiet Time. But instead of laying the murder
Speaker 5: to rest, Quiet Time brought it rowing back to life.
Speaker 5: Cold Case Story is about a family that fractured along
Speaker 5: the fault lines of a murder. It's about fiction colliding
Speaker 5: with a cold, hard crime and the very personal story
Speaker 5: of how it feels, the ping pong between participant and observer,
Speaker 5: novelist and witness to one's own an easy set of facts.
Speaker 5: In the end, all are punished, even the guilty. The
Speaker 5: book that we're featuring this evening is Cold Case Story
Speaker 5: with my special guest journalist and author, Stephanie Kine. Welcome
Speaker 5: to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 5: Stephanie Kane.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having me, Dan.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for joining us. Let's get right
Speaker 5: to this exciting story and very detailed and complex as well,
Speaker 5: I might add, and your participation in this incredible story.
Speaker 5: Let's get right to June nineteen seventy three, June eighth,
Speaker 5: I believe and tell us who you were living with.
Speaker 5: Tell us the living arrangements. You had a fiance named Doug,
Speaker 5: and this is in Boulder, Colorado. His mother called. But
Speaker 5: give us the background on your situation at that time
Speaker 5: and Betty and Dwayne fry situation at that time. Give
Speaker 5: us the information that was given to them about your pregnancy.
Speaker 5: Give us your status in terms of where your marriage was,
Speaker 5: in terms of planning. Give us that background before we
Speaker 5: get into June nineteen seventy three, June eighth, So I
Speaker 5: had just.
Speaker 6: To the University of Colorado and Boulder. I grew up
Speaker 6: in New York, Brooklyn. I basically came to Colorado because
Speaker 6: it was two thousand miles away from my folks. It
Speaker 6: was the only place I applied. I knew nothing about it,
Speaker 6: and of course, you know, I fell in love with
Speaker 6: the guy I met in a karate class who was
Speaker 6: as different from me as anything I could imagine, and
Speaker 6: we started dating in our I guess it was our
Speaker 6: freshman year, and he brought me home to meet his parents,
Speaker 6: and they were very, very different from my family. I'm Jewish,
Speaker 6: so you know, we were ethnically as different as can be,
Speaker 6: which was part of the attraction. I think his family
Speaker 6: was Catholic. His mother was very something sort of out
Speaker 6: of the pages of No Better Homes and Gardens. She had.
Speaker 6: She was very beautifully put together, blonde, et cetera. His father, Dwayne,
Speaker 6: was an engineer who worked at Martin Marietta, very buttoned
Speaker 6: down and domineering. And you know, so I was, you know,
Speaker 6: the girlfriends, and Doug brought me home. We had dinner
Speaker 6: with his parents on the way back to the ball
Speaker 6: that we were living together in a little apartment off
Speaker 6: the hill in Boulder, which is like a student district,
Speaker 6: and his parents knew that we were living together, and
Speaker 6: you know, I we drive home and I'd be crying, Oh,
Speaker 6: they'll never accept me. Blah blah blah. Anyway to cut
Speaker 6: it short, get cut to the chase. In June nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy three, we were engaged to be married, and I
Speaker 6: had gotten pregnant earlier that year and had had an abortion,
Speaker 6: and it was right after, like literally within a week
Speaker 6: or two after Roe versus Wade was decided, So it
Speaker 6: was a legal abortion, and you know, nevertheless it was
Speaker 6: a wrenching decision, but it had the effect of pulling
Speaker 6: us closer together and making us more committed to having
Speaker 6: a life together. So we got engaged and we were
Speaker 6: set to be married that June. We informed his parents
Speaker 6: and you know, they were certainly not thrilled because there
Speaker 6: were cultural and ethnic differences. And then Doug decided to
Speaker 6: tell them about the abortion, and I you know, he
Speaker 6: didn't run it by me first or anything, because that
Speaker 6: would certainly have made it impossible for them ever to
Speaker 6: accept me. So you know, it was not something I
Speaker 6: thought they needed to know. Or should know, and that
Speaker 6: was like right before Mother's Day that may. Things between
Speaker 6: us were very very tense leading up to the murder.
Speaker 6: On the day of the murder, it was a Saturday morning,
Speaker 6: the first or second Saturday in June, so just a gorgeous, beautiful,
Speaker 6: hot day, and Doug was teaching classes at the karate
Speaker 6: studio where we met. I was taking some summer courses
Speaker 6: so I could graduate earlier from college. We were both
Speaker 6: college students. And that morning, after Doug had left to
Speaker 6: go to the karate studio, Betty called and it was
Speaker 6: it was completely out of the blue as far as
Speaker 6: I was concerned, because you know, she had never called
Speaker 6: our number before, and she did not like acknowledging that
Speaker 6: we were living together, and you know, it was really
Speaker 6: just a hot point, and she wanted to know, you know,
Speaker 6: if we could get in touch with one of his
Speaker 6: older sisters who was also living in Boulder and apparently
Speaker 6: didn't have a thong as I was a very short,
Speaker 6: no food conversation. I think actually Doug was in the
Speaker 6: shower when she called, but anyway, I was the one
Speaker 6: who spoke to her, and you know, his take on
Speaker 6: it was, well, maybe she's finally coming around to their wedding,
Speaker 6: because at that point we didn't even know that she
Speaker 6: would be attending the wedding anyway. So a couple of
Speaker 6: hours later, I went to meet Doug at the karate
Speaker 6: studio and his father, Dwayne was there, which was another
Speaker 6: total shock because we had no idea he was coming.
Speaker 6: It's about an hour drive from where his parents moved
Speaker 6: to Boulder, so it wasn't like just a you know,
Speaker 6: a casual kind of thing where you just drop by.
Speaker 6: And he had a bruise on his forehead, and he
Speaker 6: was wearing dark clothing, a long sleeved shirt and a
Speaker 6: T shirt underneath, and it just, you know, I mean,
Speaker 6: it was shocking to kind of see in there because
Speaker 6: they weren't really acknowledging that we were living together and
Speaker 6: things were tense between us, and he had this big
Speaker 6: old bruise on his forehead, and he was just such
Speaker 6: an immaculate person that, you know, I mean, it just
Speaker 6: really jumped out of me. Also, I had just walked
Speaker 6: down the hill and I was sweating, and I was
Speaker 6: wearing shorts and a T shirt and here he was
Speaker 6: in these dark clothes, and you know, I asked him
Speaker 6: about his bruis, and he said that he had been
Speaker 6: doing some house cleaning with Betty that morning and a
Speaker 6: chair had fought, a lawn chair or something had fallen
Speaker 6: on his head from a shelf or something, and you know,
Speaker 6: the whole thing was just very bizarre. Then it was
Speaker 6: also bizarre because his ostensible reason for being in Boulder
Speaker 6: was to pick up Doug's thirteen year old brother, who
Speaker 6: had taken the bus from where his parents lived to
Speaker 6: Boulder that morning to take a karate class from his
Speaker 6: big brother Doug. As far as we knew, we were
Speaker 6: going to put him on a bus to go back.
Speaker 6: So Dwayne showing up to pick Greg up made no sense.
Speaker 6: And then you know what happened next made even less sense,
Speaker 6: which is he said he wanted to see our apartment
Speaker 6: and to show it to Greg, which was like completely
Speaker 6: bizarre because Betty did not want She had made us
Speaker 6: promise that Greg would never even know that we were
Speaker 6: living together, so you know, here it was, you know,
Speaker 6: and it just seemed like it was, you know, and
Speaker 6: plus Betty had not mentioned anything about Dwayne coming up
Speaker 6: to Boulder, So for all these reasons, you know, it
Speaker 6: was it was a very very strange situation. So he
Speaker 6: drove us back to our apartments with Greg. They looked
Speaker 6: at our you know, basically one room apartment, and then
Speaker 6: after that fifteen minutes, Dwayne just kind of jumped up.
Speaker 6: He stood up abruptly and said, we gotta go, we
Speaker 6: gotta go. And you know, when he left, he had
Speaker 6: said something about trying to find a place for our
Speaker 6: wedding dinner or something like that, which was another bizarre
Speaker 6: thing because, as I said, we didn't even we were
Speaker 6: even not sure whether they would be coming to the wedding.
Speaker 6: So the whole thing was just completely bizarre. And then
Speaker 6: the next thing we knew. Later that afternoon, we got
Speaker 6: a phone call, I think from a neighbor saying, you know,
Speaker 6: you need to come home. There's been a terrible accident.
Speaker 6: And the accident, of course, was that Betty was murdered.
Speaker 6: So we drove to the house and there we were.
Speaker 6: That was that day. So I last people to speak
Speaker 6: to Betty and one of the first to see your
Speaker 6: a killer.
Speaker 5: You know, you include that the last time that you
Speaker 5: did see Betty personally was at a restaurant. To tell
Speaker 5: us about that event and what was strange, if anything.
Speaker 6: Well, but The significance of that event is this was
Speaker 6: after Mother's Day. This is between Mother's Day and the murder.
Speaker 6: So Betty or Dwayne called I guess, I'm sure it was.
Speaker 6: Dwayne called us up and said that they wanted to
Speaker 6: take us to dinner. And you know, again we thought,
Speaker 6: oh gosh, you know, maybe they're accepting the marriage. And
Speaker 6: we had dinner at this place called the flag Staff House,
Speaker 6: which is still in Bolder. It's, you know, a place
Speaker 6: where parents visiting their kids, you know, take them through
Speaker 6: a fancy dinner, you know, in the college town. And
Speaker 6: Betty cried, and that is when she made us prompt
Speaker 6: I mean, Dwayne ordered these little glasses of krem demond
Speaker 6: to toast us. But Betty cried and dropping us driving
Speaker 6: us back to our apartment, which she refused, you know,
Speaker 6: they didn't want to get out of the car. And see,
Speaker 6: she made us promise that Greg would never know, this
Speaker 6: is Doug's little thirteen year old brother, would never know
Speaker 6: that we had lived, that we were living together before
Speaker 6: we got married. So when Dwayne showed up, you know,
Speaker 6: a couple of weeks later, you know, after killing his wife,
Speaker 6: and he wanted to show Greg where we were living.
Speaker 6: It was like completely you know, crazy. I mean, I
Speaker 6: felt like we were violating a promise to Betty and
Speaker 6: un now she was dead. But you know, if she
Speaker 6: had been alive, that would never have happened.
Speaker 5: In retrospect, now you found out about Betty's murder or
Speaker 5: Betty's death, and now how do police proceed? What do
Speaker 5: you find find out? And what do the police find out?
Speaker 6: Well, bear in mind that I'm speaking, I'm answering your
Speaker 6: question on the basis of what I learned after the
Speaker 6: cold case, because at the time of the murder we
Speaker 6: were told virtually nothing. Dwayne, you know, led us into
Speaker 6: the house he sat his children. Doug had two older
Speaker 6: sisters who were you know, living in Boulders, So we
Speaker 6: drove to the house with them and he sat us
Speaker 6: all down at the dining room table and said that
Speaker 6: Betty had been killed by a burgler. She had surprised
Speaker 6: a burglar, you know, And the police were all over
Speaker 6: the house. There was fingerprint dust everywhere. We were not
Speaker 6: allowed to go into the garage where her body was.
Speaker 6: Her body was still there when we arrived because there
Speaker 6: was an ambulance in the driveway, and you know, police
Speaker 6: never reviewed me. I think they spoke to Doug briefly,
Speaker 6: and you know, we spent the night there, which is
Speaker 6: certainly something we never could have, you know, in Doug's
Speaker 6: bedroom old you know, high school bedroom, which certainly would
Speaker 6: never in a billion years have happened if Betty was alive.
Speaker 6: So you know, that was very strange. And so what
Speaker 6: we knew.
Speaker 1: Then was.
Speaker 6: Like the kids lined up completely unquestioningly behind Dwayne, and
Speaker 6: there was it was sort of taboo to talk about
Speaker 6: it and partner. The first reason it was was because
Speaker 6: there was a grand jury and Doug was a witness,
Speaker 6: and I think his sisters were, at least one of
Speaker 6: his sisters was as well, and so you know, the
Speaker 6: thing was, you can't talk to anybody about anything because
Speaker 6: you know, Doug met with Dwayne's lawyer, but he couldn't
Speaker 6: tell me what they talked about. And you know, we
Speaker 6: we were very much in the dark. And then when
Speaker 6: Dwayne was indited for first degree murder in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 6: we were all all of the kids and me were
Speaker 6: brought to the courthouse for his bail hearing because they
Speaker 6: wanted to put a big show of you know, family support,
Speaker 6: and but the minute they started talking about what had
Speaker 6: happened to Betty. You know, the children were made to
Speaker 6: leave the bourtroom. I mean, it was just part of
Speaker 6: the show that the lawyers put on, so you know,
Speaker 6: we just know talk about it. Then, you know, he
Speaker 6: was This trial was scheduled for right before Thanksgiving of
Speaker 6: that year, you know, within the six month speedy trial period,
Speaker 6: And just before the trial, he called and said that
Speaker 6: the charges had been dropped, that there was some witness
Speaker 6: who had seen a suspicious pickup truck on the street
Speaker 6: in front of the fry house that day or something
Speaker 6: like that, and some carpenter who had seen something from
Speaker 6: a roof. And that's all that we knew, and it
Speaker 6: was never discussed again, at least not in my presence,
Speaker 6: and I don't think in Dougs either. So everybody just
Speaker 6: kind of went on with their lives. And Dwayne married
Speaker 6: a very close family friend who I also knew because
Speaker 6: she was part of the you know, sort of the
Speaker 6: family circle, who divorced her husband abruptly. And then they
Speaker 6: they moved away. At first they moved to California, then
Speaker 6: they moved to Florida, and you know, his sisters scattered
Speaker 6: and the family basically just you know, it just it
Speaker 6: just not disintegrated. But everybody just left and there was
Speaker 6: never any discussion. So, you know, I had this feeling
Speaker 6: because she had been Betty had been told about the
Speaker 6: abortion and was strongly opposed to a marriage, that somehow
Speaker 6: our impending wedding had been a trigger or a factor
Speaker 6: in what had happened. And you know, but I just,
Speaker 6: you know, we all just went on with our lives
Speaker 6: because talking about it was to boom and there was
Speaker 6: nobody to talk to about it anyway.
Speaker 5: You know, when did this all change for you? And
Speaker 5: tell us about the origins of quiet Time?
Speaker 6: Well, what happened is I basically our marriage lasted about
Speaker 6: ten years when we got divorced, and I was just
Speaker 6: no longer a part of their family. And I was
Speaker 6: left with all of these feelings that somehow my coming
Speaker 6: into that family had upset some kind of fragile balance
Speaker 6: or something, and I didn't talk to anybody about it.
Speaker 6: I became a lawyer, I went to law school, got
Speaker 6: a job at a fancy farm, didn't tell anybody anything
Speaker 6: about my past, you know, And then in the early
Speaker 6: nineteen nineties, I met my second husband coincidentally happens to
Speaker 6: be a judge, and I told him he's a federal judge,
Speaker 6: not a state judge, so he had nothing to do with,
Speaker 6: you know, any of the prosecution of Dwayne or anything
Speaker 6: like that. And you know, his question, quite naturally, was, well,
Speaker 6: didn't you ever find out why the charges were dropped?
Speaker 6: You know, don't you want to know? Then I thought, well, yeah,
Speaker 6: I guess so, so I he did. He had he
Speaker 6: had gone to law school with the guy who had
Speaker 6: been the DA back in nineteen seventy three, and the DA,
Speaker 6: you know, we arranged to meet with him, and we
Speaker 6: met for I don't know, five or ten minutes, very
Speaker 6: brief meeting. The DA said he couldn't remember much about
Speaker 6: the case. He blamed dropping the case on, you know,
Speaker 6: the lead detective, who he said had come from the
Speaker 6: state patrol and we don't investigate cases like that anymore.
Speaker 6: In other words, that the guy was some old timer
Speaker 6: who didn't know what he was doing. And he gave
Speaker 6: me just a little, you know, a few, maybe a
Speaker 6: dozen sheets of microfiche fragments of police reports that were
Speaker 6: almost illegible. And then I went to the courthouse and
Speaker 6: I asked if I could you know, get a copy
Speaker 6: of the nineteen seventy three case file and by for me,
Speaker 6: and I got, you know, one of the the defense
Speaker 6: lawyers had attached a transcript the grand jury transcript of
Speaker 6: the lead investigators testimony in the nineteen seventy three grand jury.
Speaker 6: And that gave me, for the first time a sense of,
Speaker 6: you know, the physical evidence and the forensics, you know,
Speaker 6: at the currency and you know, so I thought it
Speaker 6: was fat. I mean, all of a sudden I had
Speaker 6: some sense of what had happened physically on the day
Speaker 6: of the murder, you know, and and what evidence the
Speaker 6: police had had to work with. And then I, you know,
Speaker 6: I did some more research. I got whatever news articles
Speaker 6: I could find, and then I started to write it down,
Speaker 6: you know, just first of all, just my memories of
Speaker 6: that day. And then I start I knew nothing about
Speaker 6: writing a novel or you know, I'd never written a
Speaker 6: book or anything like that. And I just then I
Speaker 6: started imagining to try to come to some closure myself.
Speaker 6: Now that I have at least the facts of what
Speaker 6: the police had seen that day. I then tried to
Speaker 6: imagine what other people in the family might have felt
Speaker 6: or seen or experienced, and I wrote them out in
Speaker 6: their imaginary first person voices. And this was all for
Speaker 6: purpose of me getting some kind of closure on what
Speaker 6: had happened. And then I just I wrote draft after draft,
Speaker 6: and I started to you know, I would show it
Speaker 6: to people when they'd say, oh, no, this would make
Speaker 6: a great mystery, and you know, I started to teach
Speaker 6: myself the craft of writing a mystery. And with each
Speaker 6: draft it got more and more fictionalized, because it basically
Speaker 6: the first draft had served my purpose of, you know,
Speaker 6: sort of just getting it all out. And now the
Speaker 6: characters became imaginary. You know, I fictionalized them. I drew
Speaker 6: up a plot, you know, and I mean the problem
Speaker 6: with Betty's murder was that it had had no ending,
Speaker 6: so you know, I just I just ran with it,
Speaker 6: and you know, and I wrote an imaginary, fictionalized version
Speaker 6: of it. And then after about twenty drafts, I got
Speaker 6: an agent and she submitted it to Bantam. And I
Speaker 6: was very very frank with Bantam about the origins of
Speaker 6: the story, and Banson made me make other changes so
Speaker 6: that the characters would be unrecognizable. They made me change
Speaker 6: Denver and Boulder to Windom and Stanley or Windholm and Stanley.
Speaker 6: You know, it was it was to make it all
Speaker 6: so that nobody could ever imagine and it had anything
Speaker 6: to do with the real crime. And I also adopted
Speaker 6: my second husband last name is my pen name, because
Speaker 6: you know, I didn't I didn't want anything to come
Speaker 6: of it. To me, it was now just a completely
Speaker 6: fictional mystery. And so it got published and it actually
Speaker 6: came out like a week or two before nine to eleven,
Speaker 6: and so, you know, it just it just that it died.
Speaker 6: The book died at a very short life and died
Speaker 6: a really fast death. It bombed, you know, which was
Speaker 6: fun with me, you know. And then about four years later,
Speaker 6: I had been interviewed by a public TV station on books,
Speaker 6: and you know, it was just a short little interview,
Speaker 6: and you know, it was about my fictional book Quiet Time,
Speaker 6: and the station says it turned out lost its funding
Speaker 6: so or the program lost its plumbing, so the station
Speaker 6: would play I came for a long and later we
Speaker 6: run said this interview with me, like in the middle
Speaker 6: of the night. In two thousand and five, Dwayne, my
Speaker 6: former father in law's sister, who was at that time
Speaker 6: like seventy eight years old or something, was watching late
Speaker 6: night TV, and she saw me be interviewed, and she
Speaker 6: recognized me, and even though the story was a fictional story,
Speaker 6: she recognized elements of the life. She went out and
Speaker 6: buy a time and then she read it, and then
Speaker 6: I guess, in some sort of crisis of conscience, she
Speaker 6: came forward with information about a confession that Dwayne had
Speaker 6: made to their mother, and that their mother had told
Speaker 6: her before she died, and so a cold case was opened,
Speaker 6: and you know, kind of a horrifying thing for me
Speaker 6: about the confession, which again I didn't know anything about.
Speaker 6: I'd never imagined, was that Dwayne said that he lost
Speaker 6: his temper began beating Daddy and the trigger for that
Speaker 6: was the abortion. And already so in a horrific way,
Speaker 6: you know, my worst fears were actually realized. It had
Speaker 6: been a trigger, and so I but I didn't know
Speaker 6: any of this until, you know, sometime in two thousand
Speaker 6: and five, I got an email from a cold case
Speaker 6: cop and he said, you know, were you Betty Fry's
Speaker 6: daughter in law and did you have an abortion in
Speaker 6: nineteen seventy three, and you know, and do you mind
Speaker 6: talking to us? So you know, I felt, you know,
Speaker 6: I certainly had nothing to hide or anything that I
Speaker 6: was ashamed of, and so I called the cop and
Speaker 6: then we met for about six hours, and then you know,
Speaker 6: they had a grand jury. I certainly wasn't the only witness,
Speaker 6: and you know, it just went from there. It became
Speaker 6: it was reopened as a cold case, and Dwayne I
Speaker 6: think it was about eighty at the time, was re
Speaker 6: indicted for his wife's murder, and you know, the whole
Speaker 6: thing started up anew. He had very very aggressive lawyers.
Speaker 6: He'd done quite well for himself, and he spared no expense,
Speaker 6: so it became a sort of a war of attrition.
Speaker 6: You know, in cold cases, the defense is the defense
Speaker 6: lawyer's playbook is to basically run the clock, you know,
Speaker 6: in the in the hopes that witnesses will die and
Speaker 6: that the case would be transferred to another judge and
Speaker 6: you know, the dare will be rotated off the case,
Speaker 6: and you know, just basically delayed, delay, delay, And that's
Speaker 6: indeed what happened. I mean, the cold case hearings went
Speaker 6: on after the grand jury period. Hearings went on for
Speaker 6: at least a year and a half, and you know,
Speaker 6: and then it got admired in you know, the appellate
Speaker 6: courts because of the admissibility of the confession, and indeed,
Speaker 6: witnesses died. Indeed, the original judge was rotated off the case. Indeed,
Speaker 6: the original DA had to leave because she had to
Speaker 6: try a death penalty case involving gang members who had
Speaker 6: executed a witness. You know. So, so the strategy worked,
Speaker 6: and you know, then when the cold case was officially over,
Speaker 6: it took literally, I think about six years through the
Speaker 6: appellate courts, and by then almost everybody, including the sister
Speaker 6: who had come forward with the confession, had died, and
Speaker 6: then if Drain was still alive, and then I got
Speaker 6: so I once it was officially over as a witness,
Speaker 6: I couldn't do anything. I couldn't you know. I didn't
Speaker 6: look at you know, eddy material that I had had.
Speaker 6: I didn't look at quiet time. I didn't look at
Speaker 6: I couldn't talk to witnesses. My hands were tied. I
Speaker 6: was basically muted and paralyzed for that long period of time.
Speaker 6: And then once it was officially over, I made a
Speaker 6: request for the case file, an official request, an Open
Speaker 6: Records Act requests, and I got the entire except you
Speaker 6: know that kept back some things that were confidential, like
Speaker 6: medical records and stuff like that, but very few things.
Speaker 6: And I got the whole file from nineteen seventy three
Speaker 6: in two thousand and five, and from that I was
Speaker 6: able to piece piece together, you know, the final things
Speaker 6: that I didn't know. And then in twenty and thirteen,
Speaker 6: I got an email from a woman who had known
Speaker 6: Dwayne and his second wife, you know, the woman he
Speaker 6: married after Betty died. And she just wrote to me
Speaker 6: out of the blue and said, did you know that
Speaker 6: if Dwayne Fry is dead? And I said, no, I
Speaker 6: have no idea, and neither did the cold case cops.
Speaker 6: So I called this woman. We had a long conversation
Speaker 6: and she filled me in on what Dwayne and his
Speaker 6: second wife's life had been like. And Dwayne basically converted
Speaker 6: his second wife, who had been a very a nice,
Speaker 6: you know, woman, but very very dumpy, not anything like
Speaker 6: Betty's sort of image of femininity and beauty and all
Speaker 6: of that. He basically reshaped her into Betty. She had been,
Speaker 6: you know, overweghed, flumpy and thick glasses and you know,
Speaker 6: kind of mousey brown hair. And according to this woman
Speaker 6: who had known them the last twenty years, she Barbara
Speaker 6: back of life. He had converted her into a slim, stylish,
Speaker 6: blonde version of Betty, and he had controlled every aspect
Speaker 6: of her life. She was allowed to see only a
Speaker 6: very small group of women they were living in Florida,
Speaker 6: whom he approved of. You know, he controlled all of
Speaker 6: her interactions and that was the price she paid. So anyway,
Speaker 6: in twenty thirteen, Barbara started to have dementia and he
Speaker 6: put her in a nursing home. And almost to the day,
Speaker 6: forty years after he had bludgeoned his wife Betty to
Speaker 6: death in their garage in Denver, he blew his own
Speaker 6: brains out in his house in Florida. And that's what
Speaker 6: this woman was emailing me to tell me. So I
Speaker 6: contacted the cold case cops. They got the name of
Speaker 6: the cop who had responded to the scene of the suicide,
Speaker 6: and I called him and I explained to him. You know,
Speaker 6: I was not encyclopedic about my relationship with the family,
Speaker 6: but I was honest with him, and I guess I
Speaker 6: called him at a at a moment you know where
Speaker 6: you know, he was open to speaking, and he told
Speaker 6: me about the scene, and I said, did he leave
Speaker 6: the suicide note, and the cops said yes, and I said,
Speaker 6: and he said, but it made no reference to Betty's death,
Speaker 6: you know, or his earlier life.
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Speaker 5: You talked about. He committed suicide, He left a suicide note,
Speaker 5: but he did not mention Betty at all, So any
Speaker 5: opportunity for him to shed some light on that deathbed
Speaker 5: confession didn't happen. We've told the audience and jumped ahead
Speaker 5: to the very end where this case is resolved. It
Speaker 5: was dismissed, the cold case, brought it back three times.
Speaker 5: They would have had to indict Dwayne Thry for this murder,
Speaker 5: and they didn't, and there was a decision at the
Speaker 5: end instead to try to indicte him again, they would
Speaker 5: go to the appellate courts because of the as you mentioned,
Speaker 5: the admissibility of that confession, which was crucial because he
Speaker 5: had made a confession to his mother Lalita, and then
Speaker 5: he had also made had also told Sherry's his sister
Speaker 5: Sherry about the confession, so there was an argument about
Speaker 5: the admissibility of that. So, as you say, they basically
Speaker 5: ran out the clock. Everybody, many many witnesses were gone,
Speaker 5: and so this case was finally dismissed. What we didn't
Speaker 5: talk about is the evidence from this the lead detective,
Speaker 5: this Sendel guy that was dismissed by the well wasn't
Speaker 5: aided very much by the prosecutor whatsoever, and was taken
Speaker 5: apart by Leonard Davies's defense attorney. But there was a
Speaker 5: lot of valuable information that you gained when you talk
Speaker 5: to him finally in two thousand and thirteen, or or
Speaker 5: tell us about that when you finally got to speak
Speaker 5: to this lead detective send them.
Speaker 6: The first thing that before I go into that, I
Speaker 6: just want to say one other thing, and that is
Speaker 6: that when the case was finally finally over, I sat
Speaker 6: down with the DA and she told me that Dwayne's
Speaker 6: lawyers in the cold case had offered to plead him
Speaker 6: guilty if he served no jail time. So there's there's
Speaker 6: no doubt that that he killed his wife. You know. Now,
Speaker 6: Sendell Sendel is a really interesting character because, as I said,
Speaker 6: when I when the DA first described my I pictured
Speaker 6: this old, rude, you know, somebody who just as my
Speaker 6: husband might say, couldn't find his butt with if it
Speaker 6: had news antlers on it. But when I got that,
Speaker 6: when I got that, I cleaned it up a little there.
Speaker 6: When I got the nineteen seventy three grand jury transcript,
Speaker 6: when I went to the courthouse back in the early
Speaker 6: nineties and I read Sendel's testimony, he was he was
Speaker 6: totally sharp. He didn't miss a thing. And one of
Speaker 6: the things, one of the pieces of evidence, which is
Speaker 6: why I don't think that the confession was, you know,
Speaker 6: a make or break for the case, because there was
Speaker 6: such strong physical evidence against him. And here's what I'm
Speaker 6: what I mean. Betty was killed, you know, sometime between
Speaker 6: like ten thirty and noon on this Saturday morning of
Speaker 6: June eighth, nineteen tenenty three, and the killer had staged
Speaker 6: it to look like a burglary gone raw. So the
Speaker 6: house had been ransacked, and Betty's body was found legend
Speaker 6: in the garage, sprawled next to some trash barrels where
Speaker 6: the supposed burglar had been gathering loot. Now I found
Speaker 6: out that this isn't, you know, unfortunately, an all too
Speaker 6: common scenario in domestic murders where the husband killed the wife.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's not uncommon at all to stage it
Speaker 6: like a burglary. But the problem but Dwayne made two
Speaker 6: mistakes that morning, and the first was that when he
Speaker 6: ran around the house gathering the loop to stage it,
Speaker 6: you know, ransacking it and gathering to make it look
Speaker 6: like a burglary, he pulled three clocks out of the
Speaker 6: wall he was gathering up to put in the garage
Speaker 6: to make it look like the burglars were carting away
Speaker 6: stuff they stole from the house. And what he did
Speaker 6: was he unplugged three clocks. This is back in the
Speaker 6: early seventies when there were clock radios or you know,
Speaker 6: when the alarm goes off the radio started playing anyway,
Speaker 6: and there were three clocks that had been plugged into walls,
Speaker 6: and two of them were in bedrooms upstairs and one
Speaker 6: I think was in the kitchen. And of course when
Speaker 6: he unplugged them, the clock stopped. So you had this
Speaker 6: sort of go pro like video track of the killer's
Speaker 6: progress to the house.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: I think one clock was like eleven twenty two or
Speaker 6: eleven twenty three. Then there was eleven twenty four and
Speaker 6: eleven twenty seven, so you knew that the burglar had
Speaker 6: been You knew exactly when the what when the burglar
Speaker 6: had been in at what moment, and Dwayne just wasn't
Speaker 6: counting on that. So that was the first mistakingdig the
Speaker 6: seconds taking Daid was in the middle of all of this. Greg,
Speaker 6: the thirteen year old son who was in Boulder that
Speaker 6: morning taking a karate class from Doug. He had a
Speaker 6: little thirteen year old friend who lived his best friend
Speaker 6: who lived a block or two away, and that morning,
Speaker 6: this other little boy named Brett was watching the monkeys,
Speaker 6: and the monkeys were over at eleven thirty. So at
Speaker 6: eleven thirty Brett walked over to the Fry house and
Speaker 6: rang the doorbell to see if Greg would, you know,
Speaker 6: wanted to for on with him. And so it's eleven
Speaker 6: thirty five and Dwane Fry answered the door like right
Speaker 6: when he was in the middle of ransacking the house,
Speaker 6: so while his wife's body wasn't even cold, he just
Speaker 6: instinctively answered the door and that placed him there, and
Speaker 6: you know, the cops. One thing that the assemble did
Speaker 6: was he checked the TV guide, you know, to confirm
Speaker 6: the time that must have been. And you know, so
Speaker 6: they had Dwayne right at the scene meeting the house.
Speaker 6: You know, right while he was answering the door. The
Speaker 6: other interesting little piece of evidence back then was there
Speaker 6: was some carpenters working on a house that was catercorner
Speaker 6: to the Fry house, and one carpenter in particular was
Speaker 6: on a scaffold and had kind of a bird's eye
Speaker 6: view into the fry backyard, and right at that in
Speaker 6: that same timeframe, he saw a guy exit the back
Speaker 6: of the Fry house, walk through the backyard and fiddle
Speaker 6: with the back gate the way he initially described the guy.
Speaker 6: It fit d Wayne Fry's description, and the fact that
Speaker 6: he was fiddling with the gate was significant because when
Speaker 6: the police arrived at the crime scenes, that gate, which
Speaker 6: was like a six foot tall wood slack gate facing
Speaker 6: the street, you know, fencing off the front yard from
Speaker 6: the back, that gate was a jar and it had
Speaker 6: never been a jar because in fact, if he a
Speaker 6: historically had been wired shut from the inside from the
Speaker 6: backyard side with a wire coat hanger. So whoever fiddled
Speaker 6: with the gate removed the cold hanger and opened the
Speaker 6: gate to make it look like that had been the
Speaker 6: point of entry, when if it was a legitimate burglar,
Speaker 6: it never could have been because it was wired shut
Speaker 6: from the inside, so that was more evidence of the
Speaker 6: crime scene being staged. And then when my hands were
Speaker 6: untied after the cold case was officially over, and you know,
Speaker 6: I got this just mountain of material, including crime scene
Speaker 6: photos and you know, audio tapes and transcripts of interviews
Speaker 6: of the Fry children in two thousand and five, and
Speaker 6: you know, just this massive amount of material. I thought,
Speaker 6: you know, I wonder if this guy Sendal is still alive,
Speaker 6: because in my mind I was still picturing him as
Speaker 6: some old guy, you know. And I looked him up
Speaker 6: on the web and found that he was a retired
Speaker 6: police chief up in Minnesota, and I just I called
Speaker 6: them because I had questions for him. And you know,
Speaker 6: a day later I left a message, and the day
Speaker 6: later he called me back from Arizona, where he and
Speaker 6: his wife spend the winters, and he said, I said,
Speaker 6: you know, would you be willing to talk to me
Speaker 6: about your memories of that day. And it turns out
Speaker 6: he had been a grand jury witness in two thousand
Speaker 6: and five, and according to the cold case cops, he
Speaker 6: had the jury eating out of his hand. And the
Speaker 6: guy was nothing like what I had imagined. He was
Speaker 6: nothing like what that DA had described him. He was
Speaker 6: totally sharp, he had a great memory. He was in
Speaker 6: his seventies, he was very vigorous, and he'd never forgotten
Speaker 6: the case. And so I went and I visited him
Speaker 6: down in Arizona at a trailer park where he and
Speaker 6: his wife spend their summers at mobile home park, and
Speaker 6: I had brought crime scene photos and he was able
Speaker 6: to explain to me, you know, things that I hadn't understood,
Speaker 6: like why the crime scene photographer had maken a particular shot,
Speaker 6: you know, what he was trying to capture, and there
Speaker 6: were lots of shots of the gate with the you know,
Speaker 6: the wire hanger, and he just you know, he was wonderful.
Speaker 6: He was just he explained to me very briefly in
Speaker 6: back in nineteen seventy three, the fourteen year old boy Greg,
Speaker 6: my little brother in law, had been a suspect, really briefly,
Speaker 6: and you know, he explained he had he had Sendel,
Speaker 6: had vivid memories of how each of the witnesses had
Speaker 6: struck him at the crime scene, you know, his impressions
Speaker 6: of him, and it was just it was just priceless,
Speaker 6: and I, I, you know, it really angered me. That
Speaker 6: that DA had thrown him under the bus in nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy three, blamed him for the case being dropped when
Speaker 6: nothing could have been further from the truth, and then
Speaker 6: in the early nine had, you know, scapegoaded him again.
Speaker 6: You know, So that became actually one of my little timey,
Speaker 6: little motivations in writing cold case story. But I wanted
Speaker 6: to set the record straight, and Semdel was somebody who
Speaker 6: had really been wronged.
Speaker 5: You know, you talk about how he was wrong, but
Speaker 5: it was the prosecution didn't do him any justice and
Speaker 5: let the defense tear him apart as well. Can you
Speaker 5: explain what exactly happened in that regard?
Speaker 6: Well, there was another interesting characters that surfaced back in
Speaker 6: nineteen seventy three, and he was a defense investigator who
Speaker 6: Dwayne's lawyers had hired. And this guy, his name was
Speaker 6: Jim Blake. He was a retired New York City Police
Speaker 6: lieutenant who had relocated to Colorado because his wife was
Speaker 6: ill or something like that. And so you know, he
Speaker 6: was doing some pride that I work as kind of
Speaker 6: a sideline in his retirement, and he took over the case.
Speaker 6: And one thing he did was after the crime scene
Speaker 6: had been released by the cops by Sendel and his guys.
Speaker 6: This guy Blake purports to find fingerprints that the cops
Speaker 6: had overlooked, and he said he found them I think
Speaker 6: in a drawer and an addresser upstairs which had been ransacked,
Speaker 6: and so he says, look, I found these fingerprints. And
Speaker 6: he goes to I think a buddy, but I'm not
Speaker 6: sure who was on the police squad, and he says,
Speaker 6: you know, I found these fingerprints, and the cops says
Speaker 6: to or a DA that he went to, and assistant
Speaker 6: DA maybe says to Blake, well, gosh, you know what
Speaker 6: a coincidence. You know, we just nabbed two would be
Speaker 6: burglars kids really teenagers basically, who had been caught, like
Speaker 6: right in that same time frame, within days of the murder,
Speaker 6: I think, attempting to burgalize a burger joint that was
Speaker 6: a mile or two from the fry house. And so
Speaker 6: they were in jail and the cops had taken their fingerprints.
Speaker 6: So this defense investigator, Blake says, well, I'll tell you what,
Speaker 6: you know, give me their fingerprint cards and I'll compare
Speaker 6: them to the prince that I found, and you know,
Speaker 6: we'll see if it's a match. And of course the
Speaker 6: quid from Quoll was that that Blake would give the
Speaker 6: cops this set of prints and they could make you know,
Speaker 6: their own comparisons. But that never happened in cards and
Speaker 6: he says, gosh, they're a match. And so you know,
Speaker 6: the cops in the DA not Fendle, but you know,
Speaker 6: the DA says, oh my goodness, you know, and they
Speaker 6: drop the charges against Dwayne Fry, using the fingerprints as
Speaker 6: their main reason for doing so. And the two would
Speaker 6: be burglars were never charged. One of them was polygraphed
Speaker 6: about Betty's murder. He completely passed the polygraph. He had
Speaker 6: nothing to do with it. He was never in trouble
Speaker 6: with the law again, you know, when we went totally straight.
Speaker 6: The other guy became sort of a career, you know,
Speaker 6: low level burglar, an alcoholic, but he was never These
Speaker 6: guys were never charged, even with the attempted burglary that
Speaker 6: they were arrested for. And you know, the DA just
Speaker 6: used it as an excuse to dumped the case. And
Speaker 6: a month or two after the case was dumped, you
Speaker 6: know it's in the file. This is how I know this.
Speaker 6: There's this letter from the assistant da to Blake or
Speaker 6: the defense lawyers saying, by the way, could you show
Speaker 6: us those fingerprints found? You know, we kind of liked
Speaker 6: to make our own comparison, But the fingerprints were never found.
Speaker 6: That's because they never existed. And you know that's how
Speaker 6: that's how the case got dumped in seventy three, and
Speaker 6: then in two thousand and five, you know, all of
Speaker 6: a sudden, they resurrected, the defense resurrected Blake. As you know,
Speaker 6: one of their arguments for why the culture should be
Speaker 6: dismissed was that Blake, who by then had been dead
Speaker 6: for I don't know ten or twenty years, that because
Speaker 6: he was no longer alive, Dwayne Fry could not have
Speaker 6: a fair trial because Blake had been you know, the
Speaker 6: White Knight, you know, that was indispensable to the defense,
Speaker 6: and his death meant that Dwaine could not properly mount
Speaker 6: a defense where it was so cynical. It just know,
Speaker 6: it makes me angry just talking about it now. How
Speaker 6: and I think that the this is not the thing
Speaker 6: about this case is I think that's just stuff like
Speaker 6: this happens all the time. And the only difference between
Speaker 6: Betty's case and other cases, is that you know there
Speaker 6: isn't somebody who looks more deeply into it after the
Speaker 6: fact and tries to piece together what happened because they
Speaker 6: have some personal involvement in it. You know that they
Speaker 6: want to, you know, come to terms with So I
Speaker 6: just think, I think this happens more often than we
Speaker 6: want to believe, and it happens today.
Speaker 5: You write about one of the heroes of this story.
Speaker 5: If there can be such a person, but at least
Speaker 5: somebody willing to risk certain things, lose certain things because
Speaker 5: of telling the truth, and that would be Dwayne's daughter,
Speaker 5: our pardon me, sister, Sherry.
Speaker 6: She shot her a no sister, but the one who
Speaker 6: came forward with a confession. Sherry. She was a wonderful person,
Speaker 6: just a very I mean I knew her way back,
Speaker 6: you know, in seventy three when I was part of
Speaker 6: that family, and she was sort of the black sheep.
Speaker 6: She was kind of artistic and creative, and she didn't
Speaker 6: have any of the prejudices that the rest of Dwayne's
Speaker 6: family or Betty's family had. She was just kind of
Speaker 6: a little bohemian, you know, if you can use the
Speaker 6: word for somebody growing up in Depression era at Tansas,
Speaker 6: you know, and she was just very much her own person.
Speaker 6: She was pinte sized, she had sort of a long
Speaker 6: shoreman's voice, and she just, you know, everybody told her
Speaker 6: not to come forward with the confession. One or two
Speaker 6: of her children were lawyers, and they said, oh, you know,
Speaker 6: the confession, it's going to get thrown out of court.
Speaker 6: It's hearsay, and they're risking it. But she just did
Speaker 6: what she thought was right, and it cost her her
Speaker 6: relationship with her entire family, not her children, but with
Speaker 6: the extended Fry family in Kansas, and certainly with Betty's children,
Speaker 6: who even in two thousand and five lined up behind
Speaker 6: their father, which is another curious thing to me. You know,
Speaker 6: I've always wondered why, because you see, you see these
Speaker 6: stories all the time, a father kills a mother usually
Speaker 6: and the kids line up behind the father, and I
Speaker 6: just always wondered why, you know, what that was about.
Speaker 6: And uh, you know, I don't have a good answer
Speaker 6: for that. I'm not a psychologist or you know, somebody
Speaker 6: who studies families, but that's a very troubling thing and
Speaker 6: it's uh for culture's story, you know, just to jump
Speaker 6: ahead to the you know, something that happened that wasn't
Speaker 6: part of the crime, but it was part of my
Speaker 6: coming to terms with it. I interviewed a guy named
Speaker 6: Howard Morton who founded this with cold case Families advocacy
Speaker 6: group called Families and Victims and Homicides and Missing Persons.
Speaker 6: And Howard had founded this organization in Colorado because his
Speaker 6: oldest son, Guy had been burgered in Arizona in nineteen
Speaker 6: eighty six and that case has never been fold but anyway,
Speaker 6: it made Howard, in his retirement and his wife start
Speaker 6: this organization, which continues still even though he's no longer
Speaker 6: part of it. But you know, I had questions about
Speaker 6: cold Case Families and Howard's experience, so I, you know,
Speaker 6: once again, I turned to the internet. I didn't even
Speaker 6: know if he was still alive, he was no longer
Speaker 6: without organization, but I found him through LinkedIn, which I
Speaker 6: joined for the express purpose of trying to reach Howard Martin.
Speaker 6: And you know, I emailed him and he got back
Speaker 6: to me right away, and then we had a very
Speaker 6: very you know, hours and hours long conversation and I asked, Howard,
Speaker 6: you know, did you in your working with cold case
Speaker 6: families did you ever come across families that didn't want
Speaker 6: to know the truth, you know, that resisted having a
Speaker 6: cold case opened? And he said yes, And they were
Speaker 6: always families where it was an inside job and the survivors,
Speaker 6: the children didn't want to know because in all livelihood,
Speaker 6: knowing would me you know, that they would have to
Speaker 6: admit that their parents had killed their other parents. He
Speaker 6: told me some other really a go ahead.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, sorry you you talk about not knowing why
Speaker 5: a sibling or you know, a child could look the
Speaker 5: other way or not want to know the truth. And
Speaker 5: you were married to his son, Doug. What we didn't
Speaker 5: talk about? And there's so many of these these events
Speaker 5: and these antidotes where his father gets to talk to
Speaker 5: him after his mother is dead, and so he thinks
Speaker 5: there's an opportunity to share some reminisce some stories about
Speaker 5: his mother because he's craving that he has a hunger
Speaker 5: for that. But what actually does happen, What does Dwayne
Speaker 5: actually say to his son about his mother?
Speaker 6: Well, well, this personally, just speaking as Stephanie, the thing
Speaker 6: that I hold the most against Dwayne Fry is not
Speaker 6: I'm ashamed to admit this. It's not that he killed
Speaker 6: his wife. It's that I believe he basically killed his son.
Speaker 6: And what I mean by this is that shortly after
Speaker 6: I guess it was right. It was after Dwane was arrested.
Speaker 6: We put off our marriage or a wedding for a
Speaker 6: month or so. So we got married in July, and
Speaker 6: she was murdered in early June. And after she was murdered,
Speaker 6: but before we were married, Dwayne called us up and said,
Speaker 6: I guess I should have been you know ner anytime
Speaker 6: Dwayne called us up and said, hey, would you like
Speaker 6: I'd like to come to Boulder and take you to dinner.
Speaker 6: But anyway, that's what he did, and he said that
Speaker 6: he wanted to share some memories about Betty with Doug.
Speaker 6: And you know, there's been such silence and you know,
Speaker 6: towing the line and not being able to talk and craving,
Speaker 6: as you put it, some some way to come to
Speaker 6: terms with his mother's brutal death and for for and
Speaker 6: especially because he must have felt I mean, I know
Speaker 6: I did, but it's nothing that we really discussed. But
Speaker 6: I always felt that he must have felt some responsibility
Speaker 6: also because he had told her about the abortion, and
Speaker 6: that was completely unnecessary, and uh, you know, I think
Speaker 6: that that's what had tipped the fragile balance over. But anyway,
Speaker 6: so Dwayne calls us up and he says that he'd
Speaker 6: like to take us to dinner, you know, and talk
Speaker 6: about Betty. And and so we went to this place
Speaker 6: west the Boulder called the Red Lion, in this beautiful,
Speaker 6: rustic restaurant and and he's immediately, you know, we're expecting
Speaker 6: all these warm, you know, loving memories of Betty, so
Speaker 6: that Doug would have that to hang on to, and instead,
Speaker 6: Dwayne gave this nittany of his grievances against Betty. I
Speaker 6: knew that Betty had had some kind of mental illness
Speaker 6: because Doug had been aware of it, but not the details.
Speaker 6: But apparently she had manic depression and she had been
Speaker 6: hospitalized for periods while Doug was growing up, which he
Speaker 6: and his siblings were unaware of because there was such
Speaker 6: shame around it that Dwayne would you know, nobody would
Speaker 6: talk about it. And you know, she had shock treatments
Speaker 6: and at the time of her murder, she was on lithium,
Speaker 6: which back then was a pretty experimental drug, and you
Speaker 6: know that it was hard to gauge the dosage and
Speaker 6: stuff like that. But Dwayne just just launched into this
Speaker 6: this nittany of you know, how her illness had prevented
Speaker 6: him from you know, becoming more successful, and you know,
Speaker 6: if he could have invested in this, he had had
Speaker 6: to take care of her. And then he said that
Speaker 6: if it was up to him, the two youngest children,
Speaker 6: Doug and thirteen year old Gregg, would never have been conceived,
Speaker 6: would never have been born, that she essentially tricked him
Speaker 6: into having them. And you know, I mean, Doug was
Speaker 6: just it gutted him. I mean, it's just and you know, luckily,
Speaker 6: after the charges were dropped, Dwayne, you know, moved to
Speaker 6: California and then Florida, and you know, we didn't we
Speaker 6: saw him, and he came back to Denver for a
Speaker 6: period of time and we saw him and his new life,
Speaker 6: and you know, but but for the most part, he
Speaker 6: was out of our lives. And then in nineteen I
Speaker 6: want to say nineteen eighty, Doug, Doug got into medical school,
Speaker 6: I got into law school, and Doug had a mental
Speaker 6: breakdown in I think it was his second or third
Speaker 6: year of medical school. And you know, we attributed it
Speaker 6: to stress because he was commuting. We lived in Boulder,
Speaker 6: where I was going to law school and he was
Speaker 6: going to medical school in Denver, so he had a
Speaker 6: long drive every day. And but but he basically he
Speaker 6: and I don't know why we didn't talk about it,
Speaker 6: but we would take you know, every Christmas. We had
Speaker 6: a hot of vacation that overlapped because he was on
Speaker 6: quarters and when I was on semesters, and we would
Speaker 6: go and visit my parents for you know, a few
Speaker 6: days in New York. You know, we saw him once
Speaker 6: a year and this and this year, Doug, one of
Speaker 6: Doug's older sisters, was living in New Jersey because the
Speaker 6: family had just scattered after Betty's death. So he had
Speaker 6: one sister in California, won in New Jersey. And Doug
Speaker 6: said to me, you know, I think I'd like to
Speaker 6: go and see Lynn, his sister in New Jersey while
Speaker 6: we're in New York, because I want to talk to
Speaker 6: her about our mother. And you know, so he took
Speaker 6: when we were in New York, Doug took the bus
Speaker 6: to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or wherever then was living.
Speaker 6: And he came back and he was like he was,
Speaker 6: you know, not catatonic, but just you know, gutted. And
Speaker 6: I said, well, what did Lynn say? And he said,
Speaker 6: Lynn told me that she always knew that Dad killed
Speaker 6: Mom and that she was surprised that I even had
Speaker 6: a question about it. So, you know, we go back
Speaker 6: to Colorado. I start law school again. He starts medical school,
Speaker 6: and he had a mental breakdown. He made a suicide
Speaker 6: attempt and then and he was in a hospital on
Speaker 6: a hold, and he had to take a semester off,
Speaker 6: and he was anew the care of a psychiatrist. And
Speaker 6: he would come with me to my law school classes
Speaker 6: and he couldn't let me out of his site. I
Speaker 6: also had a job working in a court, you know,
Speaker 6: after school, and he was with me all the time.
Speaker 6: And then one day he said, you know, I'm feeling
Speaker 6: better now. I think I think, I you know, i'd
Speaker 6: like to you know, I don't need to come to
Speaker 6: school with you today. So he stayed home and I
Speaker 6: got home and when I got home, the house was empty.
Speaker 6: There was a note on the table and he said,
Speaker 6: you know, I've gone to Florida to talk to my father.
Speaker 6: You know, he wanted to talk to Dwayne for the
Speaker 6: first time about the reality of Betty's murder and Blaine's
Speaker 6: involvement in it, and he got you know, then the
Speaker 6: phone rang and it was Dwayne calling me, saying, oh,
Speaker 6: I got this message from Doug. You know, he says
Speaker 6: he's coming down here. Do I have to be here?
Speaker 6: And I said, well, you know, he's coming down because
Speaker 6: he wants to talk to you, you know. And anyway,
Speaker 6: then there was everybody, you know, there was like radio
Speaker 6: silence for two or three days. I couldn't reach anyone.
Speaker 6: Nobody called me. And then finally my mother in New
Speaker 6: York called me and said, you know, do you know
Speaker 6: that Doug is in a mental hospital up in Pennsylvania,
Speaker 6: And you know, he had apparently called my mother, who
Speaker 6: he was close to, and you know, she said, I said, okay,
Speaker 6: if I talked to the uh the to his doctors,
Speaker 6: and I said yeah, and she said, then can I
Speaker 6: give them your phone number? I said, of course. That
Speaker 6: night I had a long conversation with was psychiatrists in
Speaker 6: Pennsylvania and they said, you know, we don't Doug is
Speaker 6: basically not community fading at all. You know, he's like
Speaker 6: a zombie, and you know, we don't his father deposited
Speaker 6: him here, you know, just just flew him up there
Speaker 6: from Florida. I think because it was mere Lynn and
Speaker 6: we don't know anything about his background. We didn't even
Speaker 6: realize he was married. We've been married almost ten years
Speaker 6: by then. We didn't even realize he was married until
Speaker 6: your mother contacted us and can you fill us in
Speaker 6: on on you know, what's wrong with Doug? And I said,
Speaker 6: and I said, well, what did Dwyane tell you? And
Speaker 6: they said that Dwayne said that Doug had some some
Speaker 6: bizarre fantasy that Dwyane had had some involvement in Betty,
Speaker 6: Doug's mother's death, you know, ten years earlier. And I said, well,
Speaker 6: it's hardly a fantasy. He was indicted for first degree
Speaker 6: going to buy a grand journey and they were they
Speaker 6: were like flapper gast. So I you know, when I
Speaker 6: look back on Dwayne, what makes me so angry is
Speaker 6: what he did to his son. And he did it
Speaker 6: just to save his own skin, you know, he just
Speaker 6: he just threw him under the bus time after time
Speaker 6: to justify or rationalize. And you know that. I mean
Speaker 6: the day of the murder, he came to Boulder, not
Speaker 6: because he wanted to see us, but because you know,
Speaker 6: we were an alibi for the murder. You know, time
Speaker 6: after time he used I mean, I don't know what
Speaker 6: his relationship was with his other children the way I
Speaker 6: know what it was with Doug. But you know, it
Speaker 6: was just I hold that against him, you know, I
Speaker 6: just I can't find any way to, you know, to
Speaker 6: justify that or rationalize it, or you know, I think
Speaker 6: that is that That is the man. You know.
Speaker 5: You talk about you right about pardon me that there
Speaker 5: was You look for the motive and others looked for
Speaker 5: the motive for this. You talk about life insurance policy
Speaker 5: that would end up being in today's money eight hundred
Speaker 5: and fifty thousand dollars. But we didn't talk about was
Speaker 5: this humiliating scene where a friend of Betty's, Barbara, is
Speaker 5: laughing and joking and having a great time with her husband,
Speaker 5: and then the crime jag that started at night and
Speaker 5: was still going on the next morning. You talk about
Speaker 5: that this announcement from Doug that the abortion that you had,
Speaker 5: an abortion that he was involved with that as well,
Speaker 5: that this strict Catholic that had mental issues would be
Speaker 5: so upset. But tell us about this event and this
Speaker 5: seemingly obvious motivation for murder.
Speaker 6: Well, I have to be I've always looked at Barbara Doug,
Speaker 6: her Dwayne's second wife, kindly because she was nice to me. Frankly,
Speaker 6: she was nice to me in nineteen seventy three, and
Speaker 6: when Doug left me, she sent me a Christmas card
Speaker 6: saying I'm so sorry. How it turned out, that was
Speaker 6: the only thing I ever heard from the fry, you know,
Speaker 6: once Doug and I had split up, you know, there
Speaker 6: was like kill they were glad to see me gone.
Speaker 6: I guess. So I've always looked on her somewhat kindly.
Speaker 6: And in the incident you're referring to, happened good night
Speaker 6: before Betty's murder was a Friday night, And I learned
Speaker 6: this only when I got the case by well, but
Speaker 6: I also had it confirmed from Betty's closest sister, a
Speaker 6: woman named Jeannie, who also you know, still gave me
Speaker 6: lots of hours of interviews on the family and growing
Speaker 6: up and you know, all of the forces in Betty's
Speaker 6: life and stuff like that, and and her marriage to
Speaker 6: Dwayne before I was ever a part of the family.
Speaker 6: And this is what happened. Apparently, the night before the murder,
Speaker 6: Dwayne and Betty were having dinner at a popular Mexican
Speaker 6: restaurant in Denver, which no longer exists. And there was
Speaker 6: a third person in that party, and this was the
Speaker 6: family friend Barbara, whom Dwayne married shortly after the case
Speaker 6: was dropped. And apparently, you know, he and Barb were
Speaker 6: sitting there having drinks and laughing, you know, just yucking
Speaker 6: it up and.
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Speaker 6: Betty was sitting across the booth from them, looking disturbed
Speaker 6: and somewhere. And this came from a witness who was
Speaker 6: in the restaurant that night, who was a friend of
Speaker 6: all the families knew everybody, and she stopped by the
Speaker 6: table the booth to say hi to Dwayne and Betty
Speaker 6: and she later told Betty's sister Jean the way they were.
Speaker 6: Barbara and Dwayne were laughing together, just enjoying each other,
Speaker 6: and Betty was sitting across the room watching the way.
Speaker 6: This woman described that it was as if Betty was
Speaker 6: suddenly realizing something that she had not known, i e.
Speaker 6: That there might be a relationship between Dwayne and Bob.
Speaker 6: And you know, this was in and this witness, who
Speaker 6: was in her nineties by the time Nicole case was
Speaker 6: interviewed in Texas. I mean, the cold case detectives really
Speaker 6: did as much as they could to to you know,
Speaker 6: convict him and have the case go to trial. And
Speaker 6: one of the things they did was they sent somebody
Speaker 6: to Texas to interview this woman who had seen Barb
Speaker 6: and Dwane and Betty the night before the murder. And
Speaker 6: she had a clear memory of it and she you know,
Speaker 6: it was in the nineteen seventy three police report, but
Speaker 6: nobody had followed up on it then, but they followed
Speaker 6: up on it in two thousand and five and found
Speaker 6: her to be credible. So Dwyane's confession was that the
Speaker 6: argument or whatever it was, had started the night before
Speaker 6: the murder. In other words, Betty had launched into a
Speaker 6: crying drag that Friday night, evidently after the you know,
Speaker 6: the dinner at the Mexican restaurant, and then it had
Speaker 6: started up again the following morning, and he couldn't take it,
Speaker 6: and he started hitting her and couldn't stop. But there's
Speaker 6: also evidence that it was a little more premeditated than that,
Speaker 6: and that's something that Sendel, the lead cop in seventy three,
Speaker 6: filled me in on in two thousand and thirteen or
Speaker 6: so when I interviewed him because I had brought all
Speaker 6: the crime scene photos, and his theory was that Dwayne
Speaker 6: had lured Betty into the garage where she was bludgeoned
Speaker 6: to death. And one of the crime scene photos shows
Speaker 6: a step ladder next to the door between the entrance
Speaker 6: door between the door that connected the garage to the house,
Speaker 6: and her body was sprawled right in front of the
Speaker 6: door on the garage side, and the door is partly open,
Speaker 6: and right next to the door is a step ladder
Speaker 6: that's open. It's you know, and the way the direction
Speaker 6: of the blows on Betty's head, most of them were
Speaker 6: blows to the head. They never found the murder weapon,
Speaker 6: but Sunder was pretty sure it was a golf club
Speaker 6: because one was apparently missing from Dwayne's golf bag, and
Speaker 6: it was you know, that would have fit the wounds,
Speaker 6: and it looked like somebody here her from above, and
Speaker 6: the way the ladder is set, it's exactly the vantage
Speaker 6: point that a killer would have used to strike her,
Speaker 6: you know, with in the head, in the back of
Speaker 6: the head, with you know, a golf club. And one
Speaker 6: of the things that the cold case detectives did in
Speaker 6: two thousand and five is they did a reenactment in
Speaker 6: an attempt to identify what the murder weapon would have been.
Speaker 6: And interestingly that some of the blood spatter was still
Speaker 6: they could trace where the blood spatter had been, and
Speaker 6: they went to the house that had not been remodeled,
Speaker 6: and you know, they did mock ups of dummies with
Speaker 6: you know, hair and all that. You know, they try
Speaker 6: to figure out, you know, what she'd been hit with.
Speaker 6: And I think they used three different kinds of weapons
Speaker 6: and a golf club best match the spatter and the wombs,
Speaker 6: so you know, SENDO was that Dwayne called her into
Speaker 6: the garage, summoned her, and he was waiting behind the
Speaker 6: door on the ladder and he beat her. So in
Speaker 6: that sense, you know, there, I think there was an
Speaker 6: element of premeditation. I mean, I think he decided that
Speaker 6: he had had enough.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: I don't think there was like a push in a
Speaker 6: shove that escalated. I think he decided he'd had enough,
Speaker 6: and you know, he acted on it. They never found
Speaker 6: his clothes, the clothes that he was wearing during you know,
Speaker 6: when she was murdered. They and they knew they had
Speaker 6: a description of the clothes because somebody else had seen
Speaker 6: him earlier that day. And the clothes he was wearing
Speaker 6: when he arrived at the karate studio nobody would have worn,
Speaker 6: you know, in eighty degree weather, you know, so he
Speaker 6: was obviously wearing something else, you know. So I think
Speaker 6: there was a level of.
Speaker 5: Premeditation, absolutely, absolutely by definition. I want to thank you
Speaker 5: so much Stephanie for coming on and talking about your book,
Speaker 5: Cold Case Story. It's been absolutely fascinating for people that
Speaker 5: might want to take a look at this work. Do
Speaker 5: you have a website and is there an Amazon I
Speaker 5: page for this book? As well.
Speaker 6: There's a My website is writer Kane. That's w R
Speaker 6: I T E R Kine with a K, K A
Speaker 6: N E dot com. I've got an Amazon author page
Speaker 6: under Stephanie Kane again with a K, and I'm on
Speaker 6: Facebook at author Stephanie Kane. And I love to hear
Speaker 6: from people. I always respond to email, and you know
Speaker 6: so I like the contact.
Speaker 5: Yes, thank you so much Stephanie Kane for Cold Case Story.
Speaker 5: You have a great evening. Thank you so much, good night.
Speaker 6: Thank you.
Speaker 5: I but