- - Sandra Bridewell has fallen from Grace in Dallas society, shown by neighbors and most friends in the posh Highland Park community that is home to oil and real estate parents. Her connection to three mysterious shooting deaths and the stories about them label Sandra the Black widow, she flees to the West Coast to escape her scandalous reputation.
True crime author John Lee unveils in his book, the Meaning of Malice, the Black Widow of Highland Park, how Sandra Bridewell tries to reinvent herself eventually as a missionary - De magazine. It's our local glossy monthly magazine about events and gossip and events. In Dallas De Magazine in May of 1987, did a cover story on the Black Widow. So by then, she's given that moniker, the Black Widow, that d magazine cover story, which is published a year after Sandra left Dallas, was a sensation.
- The Black Widow story would've gone viral, but this was the pre-internet age. But someone started pumping out copies of the story on their fax machines to wherever Sandra Bridewell showed up in the Bay area of California. - So Belvere is an upscale, affluent community just on the north side of the Golden Gate. The San Francisco Yacht Club is actually in Belvedere on the north side of the Golden Gate. Sandra's taken up residence in Belvedere in an apartment next door to the Yacht Club.
She's ingratiated herself with this affluent society in Marin County. These de magazine copies start showing up at the homes and offices of prominent people, and the signal is clear. Be very, very careful with this lady, - But all these wealthy men are loaning her money. Yeah. - She's gotten back into the borrowing money from married men, - Tens of thousands of dollars.
- The two men that came forward, and their wives were fully cognizant of this, and even supportive of the husband's decision to come forward. Said that one. Okay. Remember, this is 1986. Okay? So a dollar went a lot further back then. I think one guy said that she'd gotten about 30 K out of him, 30,000. The other guy, she'd gotten $76,000 out of him, and they claimed that she asked for this money as a loan after they loaned her the money. She then said, well, thank you for your generosity.
I think I'll be moving on my married way. And then when, when the men then said, well, no, wait a minute, that that, what are you talking about? That was a loan. She said, I don't know what you're talking about. Why didn't you discuss this with your wife? These two guys concluded they didn't want to be pushed around like this. So they told their wives what had happened.
The wives forgave them, let's say, or decided that they were going to stand by their husbands, even though their husbands had made these indiscreet decisions with Sandra. So those were two civil cases that added to the fact pattern. This is what she does. She befriends, let's say, married men. She borrows money from them, and then she doesn't pay them back. Now, I believe those two guys that came forward are the tip of the iceberg, and - It's a classic romance scam.
So where to then, uh, they're figuring out who she is out there. - So now we're getting into the section of my book. I title it, wandering Spirit. She becomes a wanderer, a a, a drifter. She, she leaves the Bay Area. She turns up in Tucson, Arizona. And then through the very excellent reporting of an investigative journalist in Dallas named Glenna Whitley. You know, now we're getting into this era of Sandra, or wandering around, but a kind of heightened awareness.
So Glenna starts getting calls from people from different parts of the country saying, I've encountered this woman. She's in Tucson for a while. She then circles back to the Bay Area. She goes to the South Bay, to Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley. She lives there for a while, and then in the early nineties, she changes her persona. She seduces a married man in the Bay Area. She claims she's pregnant. He is trying to figure out a way to manage this with his wife.
His wife says, well, okay, you've suffered the relationship with her, but you know, I I don't trust that you'll stay away from her. So what he, the arrangement he makes with Sandra is he moves her to Boston and he rents an apartment on Boston's Beacon Hill, and that's the arrangement she's gonna be on the other side of the country. Okay. At that point, I found evidence that Sandra develops an interest in religion.
Okay, so now she's crossed the threshold of 50, or getting into the early nineties. Yeah, 1994. She's 50 years old, and she develops an interest in Christian, the Christian religion. Now, she'd already demonstrated an early interest in this when she was a member of the Highland Park Presbyterian Church congregation, but now she really gets into it. She actually receives some ministerial training and starts introducing herself as a minister and as a missionary.
And this is a whole nother chapter in the story of Sandra's adventures as an apparent minister and Christian missionary. - And she says she was a missionary in India, China. - People would occasionally encounter Sandra on an aircraft, you know, in an airport, just random encounters in a coffee shop, wherever. And she proclaimed to be a Christian missionary in the United States in between missions.
So she claimed she was often in, in Africa or India, doing the work of the Lord as, as a missionary looking after the, the needy, the, the undernourished like Christ himself tending to the sick and the poor. And people found this very compelling, and she knew the Bible very well. - And she meets a man at a church conference in Colorado. Now she's changed her name. Now she's Camille, which was the name of her mother, first name of her mother.
But, uh, , uh, she marries this person, whirlwind romance, and then he's left holding the bag for money, - Right? So this is her fourth husband. And, and I think that he was a man that was genuinely seeking spiritual renewal. His, his, his first marriage had not worked out. And so he, he attends ministerial training Institution, and they had this seminar in Colorado Springs.
And so he's doing this sort of ministerial apostolic training at this institute, and he meets this woman who introduces herself as Camille, and he's genuinely moved by her apparent embrace of the Holy Spirit. First of all, her, her knowledge of particularly the New Testament is just astonishing. And she seems to be, as he perceived her, sort of burning with the spirit of, of God.
So he marries her, and the way he describes it, as soon as they married, I mean, on their wedding night, her personality seems to undergo a radical change. The the sort of sweet Christian lady turns into very quickly what he perceived to be in his own words. These aren't mine, uh, uh, like a witch. And he quickly comes to wit, and she's taken out a bunch of credit cards in his name. She's never there.
She's doing all of this, traveling to Tony Resorts and spends all of his money and steals his gold coin collection, steals his car. I mean, he, it's like he just doesn't know what hit him. Now, what I think is astonishing about the story is he had traveled to Colorado Springs from San Antonio. His home is San Antonio, Texas. He's never heard anything about this woman. Mm-Hmm. . So it's a huge shock to him to discover, you know, you're not this lady's first rodeo.
He gets the marriage an old and, and, and escapes from this thing. He's dead broke. - Yeah. She sticks him with what, $150,000 and charges on his credit cards. Correct. - And, and he was very proud of his gold coin collection. She, she decided to take that along with his Ford Explorer, and none of that property was, was ever seen again. So - Then there's an encounter on a flight with a missionary, and she's Camille. Now, Sandra Bridewell is claiming she's back from a mission overseas.
Where does, where does this lead now? - She lands in San Francisco. She, you know, it's not, it's funny. She off oftentimes circles back to the Bay Area. This lady with whom she's sitting on the plane lives in Santa Rosa, which is north, just north of Marin County. And Sandra is talking to the lady. She says, I'm headed back to San Francisco after my last mission. And she says, well, where do you live? And the lady says, I live in Santa Rosa. And Sandra says, oh, really?
I'm on my way to Santa Rosa, but gee whiz, turns out I don't have a place to stay. I'm meeting with some people in Santa Rosa, but I haven't yet organized accommodation. So that quickly lands her in a church congregation in Santa Rosa. She meets an elderly man. He's really, at the end of his life, he's on dialysis. I mean, he's not in good shape, but Sandra makes the case that she could be a caretaker of this elderly man.
His wife who's initially grateful for the, for the home care quickly realizes there's something strange about this woman. She seems to be trying to ingratiate herself with my husband, who has an estate, and who's at the end of his life that turns into a rupture with, with the elderly man's wife. But by then, he's already been pretty charmed by Sandra. A a a conflict develops the Santa Rosa Sheriff's Department gets involved.
They report Sandra to, um, protective services of some sort of adult protective agency. And they tell her, you know, you're gonna have to back off from this family. She's not arrested for anything, but it's an important moment in terms of law enforcement. Sheriff's Deputy writes an incident reports saying, law enforcement should keep an eye on this lady. He says, I don't think she's a minister or a missionary.
I think that she is con artist who seeks elderly people with an estate in order to ingratiate herself and to obtain access to the estate. So I have that incident report. Sandra then disappears. Okay, so this is California, right? She turns up again a few years later in North Carolina. She's introducing herself to elderly people as Camille Bowers. So now she's really changed her name. And - Does she at this point resemble like a bag lady she's carrying around? She had boxes.
- She does, her circumstances have obviously diminished considerably from when she was a socialite in Highland Park. She looks, first of all, she's very thin, but in a kind of fascinating way, it almost adds to her saintly appearance. She almost looks like an acetic saint Mm-Hmm. the way she's presenting herself. But yes, people observed. She seems to be carrying around sort of tattered bags and worn out old suitcase.
But she says, I'm a Christian missionary and I'm in between missions to Africa. I could use a place to stay in the interim. So she and Grace, she answers herself with an elderly lady in Southport, North Carolina, a lady named Sue Mosley. - Mosley was an affluent elderly woman who lived alone and had serious health problems. The Good Samaritan took in Broadwell, who professed to be an itinerant minister in missionary, who quoted the Bible chapter in inverse Bridewell, who used the alias.
Camille Powers helped with the shopping and cooking. Once she had won Mosley's trust, she stole her identity. Bridewell got caught trying to transfer Mosley's monthly social security check to her bank account. Jane Todd, a North Carolina sheriff's detective who investigated the case, said Bridewell was a psychopath who moved in on the elderly Ms. Mosley, like a predator. The detective said, quote all that business about being a good Christian and a missionary tending to the needy of the world.
That was just a lie. No doubt. She was the evilest person I've ever encountered. In 2007, Sandra Broadwell finally had a day of reckoning with a criminal justice system. In the case of the elderly, Ms. Mosley, while awaiting trial on federal charges of aggravated identity theft, John Leak interviewed broadwell behind bars. - The voluptuous smoldering, femme fatal had, had been replaced by a slightly gaunt looking. And, and her, her demeanor was very dignified. She had this erect posture.
She made direct eye contact, kind of had this dignity about her, which I, I found, I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I found it very interesting. And, but clearly either through her own wits or her attorney, you know, told her, don't talk to anybody about any of this. I could not get her to tell me anything. - Bridewell AKA Sandra Camille Powers pleaded guilty to federal charges of aggravated identity theft. In 2008, she served two years in a federal prison.
While behind bars, she became a prison pen pal with a North Carolina minister, - A church minister or pastor in a rural county of North Carolina, for some reason, has taken a fancy to Camille Bowers, as he is still calling her. He persuades the prison system that upon being released from her federal sentence, he will look after her. She can work for his church and his charity.
You know, during her probationary period where she has to remain in North Carolina, she then charges a very large Victoria Secret lingerie purchase on the pastor's credit card. And, but he's too embarrassed by this to actually, he told the sheriff's deputy, but he stopped short of filing a formal report with a statement - In the wake of the federal identity theft conviction. Oklahoma City prosecutors reopened the homicide investigation of Alan Reig, Bradwell's third husband.
The grand jury declined to indict her. Broadwell then turned up in Vermont, offering to bail out a farmer who was in financial by purchasing his herd of fleece bearing alpacas. - And she says she's interested in purchasing his alpaca herd. She says that she has experience in animal husbandry because her first husband was a thoroughbred racehorse breeder. And she would likes rural living, likes living on a farm, likes animals. So she answers the Craigslist ad. A whirlwind romance ensues.
And it's yet another saga in this story. He, like others in the internet age, begins to think, well, there's something odd about this woman. He does a Google search for her alias, and she gets this, he gets this hit, and he realizes she's done time in a federal pen in North Carolina. And the story unfolds from there. But she, - Uh, she tells him she's had a, she's pregnant, correct? Back to the same old - Scam. Correct. She, she says, oh, and by the way, I'm pregnant now.
He doesn't know her age. He assumes that she's in her fifties. She still looks like an attractive woman, but he, nevertheless, his parents are both doctors. He thinks she's too old to get pregnant. Now, unbeknownst to him at the time she claims to be pregnant, she's actually in her late sixties. I, I think she's 66 mm-Hmm. . Later upon discovering her true age, he realizes that that's rather absurd claim. - The Vermont farmer cut off the relationship and Sandra Bridewell faded away.
There was a recent sighting of her at the Boston Logan Airport. Lee obtained a heavily censored FBI report that raises questions. If Bridewell had allegedly been involved in cocaine smuggling, international arms trafficking, and with an accomplice in the murder of her third husband, now 80 years old, Sandra Bridewell wants a celebrated Dallas socialite continues to be a figure shrouded in mystery and intrigue.
She's a woman of many faces, murder, suspect, seductress, romance scammer, saintly, missionary, and convicted identity thief. Sandra Broadwell endures in the public imagination as a mysterious princess of darkness. This is Robert Riggs reporting.