COLD CASE STORY-Stephanie Kane

Cold Case Story is about a family that fractured along the fault lines of a murder. It's about fiction colliding with a cold, hard crime and the very personal story of how it feels, the ping pong between participant and observer, novelist and witness to one's own an easy set of facts. In the end, all are punished, even the guilty. The book that we're featuring this evening is Cold Case Story

with my special guest journalist and author, Stephanie Kine. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Stephanie Kane.

and Betty and Dwayne fry situation at that time. Give us the information that was given to them about your pregnancy. Give us your status in terms of where your marriage was, in terms of planning. Give us that background before we get into June nineteen seventy three, June eighth, So I had just.

and they were very, very different from my family. I'm Jewish, so you know, we were ethnically as different as can be, which was part of the attraction. I think his family was Catholic. His mother was very something sort of out of the pages of No Better Homes and Gardens. She had. She was very beautifully put together, blonde, et cetera. His father, Dwayne, was an engineer who worked at Martin Marietta, very buttoned down and domineering. And you know, so I was, you know,

the girlfriends, and Doug brought me home. We had dinner with his parents on the way back to the ball that we were living together in a little apartment off the hill in Boulder, which is like a student district, and his parents knew that we were living together, and you know, I we drive home and I'd be crying, Oh, they'll never accept me. Blah blah blah. Anyway to cut

it short, get cut to the chase. In June nineteen seventy three, we were engaged to be married, and I had gotten pregnant earlier that year and had had an abortion, and it was right after, like literally within a week or two after Roe versus Wade was decided, So it was a legal abortion, and you know, nevertheless it was a wrenching decision, but it had the effect of pulling us closer together and making us more committed to having a life together. So we got engaged and we were

set to be married that June. We informed his parents and you know, they were certainly not thrilled because there were cultural and ethnic differences. And then Doug decided to tell them about the abortion, and I you know, he didn't run it by me first or anything, because that would certainly have made it impossible for them ever to accept me. So you know, it was not something I thought they needed to know. Or should know, and that

was like right before Mother's Day that may. Things between us were very very tense leading up to the murder. On the day of the murder, it was a Saturday morning, the first or second Saturday in June, so just a gorgeous, beautiful, hot day, and Doug was teaching classes at the karate studio where we met. I was taking some summer courses so I could graduate earlier from college. We were both

college students. And that morning, after Doug had left to go to the karate studio, Betty called and it was it was completely out of the blue as far as I was concerned, because you know, she had never called our number before, and she did not like acknowledging that we were living together, and you know, it was really just a hot point, and she wanted to know, you know, if we could get in touch with one of his older sisters who was also living in Boulder and apparently

didn't have a thong as I was a very short, no food conversation. I think actually Doug was in the shower when she called, but anyway, I was the one who spoke to her, and you know, his take on it was, well, maybe she's finally coming around to their wedding, because at that point we didn't even know that she

would be attending the wedding anyway. So a couple of hours later, I went to meet Doug at the karate studio and his father, Dwayne was there, which was another total shock because we had no idea he was coming. It's about an hour drive from where his parents moved to Boulder, so it wasn't like just a you know, a casual kind of thing where you just drop by.

And he had a bruise on his forehead, and he was wearing dark clothing, a long sleeved shirt and a T shirt underneath, and it just, you know, I mean, it was shocking to kind of see in there because they weren't really acknowledging that we were living together and things were tense between us, and he had this big old bruise on his forehead, and he was just such an immaculate person that, you know, I mean, it just

really jumped out of me. Also, I had just walked down the hill and I was sweating, and I was wearing shorts and a T shirt and here he was in these dark clothes, and you know, I asked him about his bruis, and he said that he had been doing some house cleaning with Betty that morning and a chair had fought, a lawn chair or something had fallen on his head from a shelf or something, and you know,

the whole thing was just very bizarre. Then it was also bizarre because his ostensible reason for being in Boulder was to pick up Doug's thirteen year old brother, who had taken the bus from where his parents lived to Boulder that morning to take a karate class from his big brother Doug. As far as we knew, we were going to put him on a bus to go back. So Dwayne showing up to pick Greg up made no sense.

And then you know what happened next made even less sense, which is he said he wanted to see our apartment and to show it to Greg, which was like completely bizarre because Betty did not want She had made us promise that Greg would never even know that we were living together, so you know, here it was, you know, and it just seemed like it was, you know, and plus Betty had not mentioned anything about Dwayne coming up to Boulder, So for all these reasons, you know, it

was it was a very very strange situation. So he drove us back to our apartments with Greg. They looked at our you know, basically one room apartment, and then after that fifteen minutes, Dwayne just kind of jumped up. He stood up abruptly and said, we gotta go, we

gotta go. And you know, when he left, he had said something about trying to find a place for our wedding dinner or something like that, which was another bizarre thing because, as I said, we didn't even we were even not sure whether they would be coming to the wedding. So the whole thing was just completely bizarre. And then the next thing we knew. Later that afternoon, we got a phone call, I think from a neighbor saying, you know, you need to come home. There's been a terrible accident.

And the accident, of course, was that Betty was murdered. So we drove to the house and there we were. That was that day. So I last people to speak to Betty and one of the first to see your a killer.

a fancy dinner, you know, in the college town. And Betty cried, and that is when she made us prompt I mean, Dwayne ordered these little glasses of krem demond to toast us. But Betty cried and dropping us driving us back to our apartment, which she refused, you know, they didn't want to get out of the car. And see, she made us promise that Greg would never know, this is Doug's little thirteen year old brother, would never know that we had lived, that we were living together before

we got married. So when Dwayne showed up, you know, a couple of weeks later, you know, after killing his wife, and he wanted to show Greg where we were living. It was like completely you know, crazy. I mean, I felt like we were violating a promise to Betty and un now she was dead. But you know, if she had been alive, that would never have happened.

Betty had been killed by a burgler. She had surprised a burglar, you know, And the police were all over the house. There was fingerprint dust everywhere. We were not allowed to go into the garage where her body was. Her body was still there when we arrived because there was an ambulance in the driveway, and you know, police

never reviewed me. I think they spoke to Doug briefly, and you know, we spent the night there, which is certainly something we never could have, you know, in Doug's bedroom old you know, high school bedroom, which certainly would never in a billion years have happened if Betty was alive. So you know, that was very strange. And so what we knew.

we were very much in the dark. And then when Dwayne was indited for first degree murder in nineteen seventy three, we were all all of the kids and me were brought to the courthouse for his bail hearing because they wanted to put a big show of you know, family support, and but the minute they started talking about what had happened to Betty. You know, the children were made to leave the bourtroom. I mean, it was just part of the show that the lawyers put on, so you know,

we just know talk about it. Then, you know, he was This trial was scheduled for right before Thanksgiving of that year, you know, within the six month speedy trial period, And just before the trial, he called and said that the charges had been dropped, that there was some witness who had seen a suspicious pickup truck on the street in front of the fry house that day or something like that, and some carpenter who had seen something from

a roof. And that's all that we knew, and it was never discussed again, at least not in my presence, and I don't think in Dougs either. So everybody just kind of went on with their lives. And Dwayne married a very close family friend who I also knew because she was part of the you know, sort of the family circle, who divorced her husband abruptly. And then they

they moved away. At first they moved to California, then they moved to Florida, and you know, his sisters scattered and the family basically just you know, it just it just not disintegrated. But everybody just left and there was never any discussion. So, you know, I had this feeling because she had been Betty had been told about the abortion and was strongly opposed to a marriage, that somehow our impending wedding had been a trigger or a factor

in what had happened. And you know, but I just, you know, we all just went on with our lives because talking about it was to boom and there was nobody to talk to about it anyway.

I became a lawyer, I went to law school, got a job at a fancy farm, didn't tell anybody anything about my past, you know, And then in the early nineteen nineties, I met my second husband coincidentally happens to be a judge, and I told him he's a federal judge, not a state judge, so he had nothing to do with, you know, any of the prosecution of Dwayne or anything like that. And you know, his question, quite naturally, was, well, didn't you ever find out why the charges were dropped?

You know, don't you want to know? Then I thought, well, yeah, I guess so, so I he did. He had he had gone to law school with the guy who had been the DA back in nineteen seventy three, and the DA, you know, we arranged to meet with him, and we met for I don't know, five or ten minutes, very brief meeting. The DA said he couldn't remember much about

the case. He blamed dropping the case on, you know, the lead detective, who he said had come from the state patrol and we don't investigate cases like that anymore. In other words, that the guy was some old timer who didn't know what he was doing. And he gave me just a little, you know, a few, maybe a dozen sheets of microfiche fragments of police reports that were

almost illegible. And then I went to the courthouse and I asked if I could you know, get a copy of the nineteen seventy three case file and by for me, and I got, you know, one of the the defense lawyers had attached a transcript the grand jury transcript of the lead investigators testimony in the nineteen seventy three grand jury. And that gave me, for the first time a sense of, you know, the physical evidence and the forensics, you know, at the currency and you know, so I thought it

was fat. I mean, all of a sudden I had some sense of what had happened physically on the day of the murder, you know, and and what evidence the police had had to work with. And then I, you know, I did some more research. I got whatever news articles I could find, and then I started to write it down, you know, just first of all, just my memories of that day. And then I start I knew nothing about writing a novel or you know, I'd never written a

book or anything like that. And I just then I started imagining to try to come to some closure myself. Now that I have at least the facts of what the police had seen that day. I then tried to imagine what other people in the family might have felt or seen or experienced, and I wrote them out in their imaginary first person voices. And this was all for purpose of me getting some kind of closure on what

had happened. And then I just I wrote draft after draft, and I started to you know, I would show it to people when they'd say, oh, no, this would make a great mystery, and you know, I started to teach myself the craft of writing a mystery. And with each draft it got more and more fictionalized, because it basically the first draft had served my purpose of, you know, sort of just getting it all out. And now the

characters became imaginary. You know, I fictionalized them. I drew up a plot, you know, and I mean the problem with Betty's murder was that it had had no ending, so you know, I just I just ran with it, and you know, and I wrote an imaginary, fictionalized version of it. And then after about twenty drafts, I got an agent and she submitted it to Bantam. And I was very very frank with Bantam about the origins of the story, and Banson made me make other changes so

that the characters would be unrecognizable. They made me change Denver and Boulder to Windom and Stanley or Windholm and Stanley. You know, it was it was to make it all so that nobody could ever imagine and it had anything to do with the real crime. And I also adopted my second husband last name is my pen name, because you know, I didn't I didn't want anything to come of it. To me, it was now just a completely

fictional mystery. And so it got published and it actually came out like a week or two before nine to eleven, and so, you know, it just it just that it died. The book died at a very short life and died a really fast death. It bombed, you know, which was

fun with me, you know. And then about four years later, I had been interviewed by a public TV station on books, and you know, it was just a short little interview, and you know, it was about my fictional book Quiet Time, and the station says it turned out lost its funding so or the program lost its plumbing, so the station would play I came for a long and later we run said this interview with me, like in the middle

of the night. In two thousand and five, Dwayne, my former father in law's sister, who was at that time like seventy eight years old or something, was watching late night TV, and she saw me be interviewed, and she recognized me, and even though the story was a fictional story,

she recognized elements of the life. She went out and buy a time and then she read it, and then I guess, in some sort of crisis of conscience, she came forward with information about a confession that Dwayne had made to their mother, and that their mother had told her before she died, and so a cold case was opened, and you know, kind of a horrifying thing for me about the confession, which again I didn't know anything about.

I'd never imagined, was that Dwayne said that he lost his temper began beating Daddy and the trigger for that was the abortion. And already so in a horrific way,

you know, my worst fears were actually realized. It had been a trigger, and so I but I didn't know any of this until, you know, sometime in two thousand and five, I got an email from a cold case cop and he said, you know, were you Betty Fry's daughter in law and did you have an abortion in nineteen seventy three, and you know, and do you mind

talking to us? So you know, I felt, you know, I certainly had nothing to hide or anything that I was ashamed of, and so I called the cop and then we met for about six hours, and then you know, they had a grand jury. I certainly wasn't the only witness, and you know, it just went from there. It became it was reopened as a cold case, and Dwayne I think it was about eighty at the time, was re indicted for his wife's murder, and you know, the whole

thing started up anew. He had very very aggressive lawyers. He'd done quite well for himself, and he spared no expense, so it became a sort of a war of attrition. You know, in cold cases, the defense is the defense lawyer's playbook is to basically run the clock, you know, in the in the hopes that witnesses will die and that the case would be transferred to another judge and you know, the dare will be rotated off the case, and you know, just basically delayed, delay, delay, And that's

indeed what happened. I mean, the cold case hearings went on after the grand jury period. Hearings went on for at least a year and a half, and you know, and then it got admired in you know, the appellate courts because of the admissibility of the confession, and indeed, witnesses died. Indeed, the original judge was rotated off the case. Indeed, the original DA had to leave because she had to try a death penalty case involving gang members who had

executed a witness. You know. So, so the strategy worked, and you know, then when the cold case was officially over, it took literally, I think about six years through the appellate courts, and by then almost everybody, including the sister who had come forward with the confession, had died, and then if Drain was still alive, and then I got so I once it was officially over as a witness, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't you know. I didn't look at you know, eddy material that I had had.

I didn't look at quiet time. I didn't look at I couldn't talk to witnesses. My hands were tied. I was basically muted and paralyzed for that long period of time. And then once it was officially over, I made a request for the case file, an official request, an Open Records Act requests, and I got the entire except you know that kept back some things that were confidential, like medical records and stuff like that, but very few things.

And I got the whole file from nineteen seventy three in two thousand and five, and from that I was able to piece piece together, you know, the final things that I didn't know. And then in twenty and thirteen, I got an email from a woman who had known Dwayne and his second wife, you know, the woman he married after Betty died. And she just wrote to me out of the blue and said, did you know that if Dwayne Fry is dead? And I said, no, I have no idea, and neither did the cold case cops.

So I called this woman. We had a long conversation and she filled me in on what Dwayne and his second wife's life had been like. And Dwayne basically converted his second wife, who had been a very a nice, you know, woman, but very very dumpy, not anything like Betty's sort of image of femininity and beauty and all of that. He basically reshaped her into Betty. She had been, you know, overweghed, flumpy and thick glasses and you know,

kind of mousey brown hair. And according to this woman who had known them the last twenty years, she Barbara back of life. He had converted her into a slim, stylish, blonde version of Betty, and he had controlled every aspect of her life. She was allowed to see only a very small group of women they were living in Florida, whom he approved of. You know, he controlled all of her interactions and that was the price she paid. So anyway, in twenty thirteen, Barbara started to have dementia and he

put her in a nursing home. And almost to the day, forty years after he had bludgeoned his wife Betty to death in their garage in Denver, he blew his own brains out in his house in Florida. And that's what this woman was emailing me to tell me. So I contacted the cold case cops. They got the name of the cop who had responded to the scene of the suicide,

and I called him and I explained to him. You know, I was not encyclopedic about my relationship with the family, but I was honest with him, and I guess I called him at a at a moment you know where you know, he was open to speaking, and he told me about the scene, and I said, did he leave the suicide note, and the cops said yes, and I said, and he said, but it made no reference to Betty's death, you know, or his earlier life.

plus terms and condition to plue. What's every details.

They would have had to indict Dwayne Thry for this murder, and they didn't, and there was a decision at the end instead to try to indicte him again, they would go to the appellate courts because of the as you mentioned, the admissibility of that confession, which was crucial because he had made a confession to his mother Lalita, and then he had also made had also told Sherry's his sister Sherry about the confession, so there was an argument about

the admissibility of that. So, as you say, they basically ran out the clock. Everybody, many many witnesses were gone, and so this case was finally dismissed. What we didn't talk about is the evidence from this the lead detective, this Sendel guy that was dismissed by the well wasn't aided very much by the prosecutor whatsoever, and was taken

apart by Leonard Davies's defense attorney. But there was a lot of valuable information that you gained when you talk to him finally in two thousand and thirteen, or or tell us about that when you finally got to speak to this lead detective send them.

no doubt that that he killed his wife. You know. Now, Sendell Sendel is a really interesting character because, as I said, when I when the DA first described my I pictured this old, rude, you know, somebody who just as my husband might say, couldn't find his butt with if it had news antlers on it. But when I got that, when I got that, I cleaned it up a little there.

When I got the nineteen seventy three grand jury transcript, when I went to the courthouse back in the early nineties and I read Sendel's testimony, he was he was totally sharp. He didn't miss a thing. And one of the things, one of the pieces of evidence, which is why I don't think that the confession was, you know, a make or break for the case, because there was such strong physical evidence against him. And here's what I'm

what I mean. Betty was killed, you know, sometime between like ten thirty and noon on this Saturday morning of June eighth, nineteen tenenty three, and the killer had staged it to look like a burglary gone raw. So the house had been ransacked, and Betty's body was found legend in the garage, sprawled next to some trash barrels where

the supposed burglar had been gathering loot. Now I found out that this isn't, you know, unfortunately, an all too common scenario in domestic murders where the husband killed the wife. I mean, it's not uncommon at all to stage it

like a burglary. But the problem but Dwayne made two mistakes that morning, and the first was that when he ran around the house gathering the loop to stage it, you know, ransacking it and gathering to make it look like a burglary, he pulled three clocks out of the wall he was gathering up to put in the garage to make it look like the burglars were carting away stuff they stole from the house. And what he did

was he unplugged three clocks. This is back in the early seventies when there were clock radios or you know, when the alarm goes off the radio started playing anyway, and there were three clocks that had been plugged into walls, and two of them were in bedrooms upstairs and one I think was in the kitchen. And of course when he unplugged them, the clock stopped. So you had this sort of go pro like video track of the killer's progress to the house.

morning taking a karate class from Doug. He had a little thirteen year old friend who lived his best friend who lived a block or two away, and that morning, this other little boy named Brett was watching the monkeys, and the monkeys were over at eleven thirty. So at eleven thirty Brett walked over to the Fry house and rang the doorbell to see if Greg would, you know,

wanted to for on with him. And so it's eleven thirty five and Dwane Fry answered the door like right when he was in the middle of ransacking the house, so while his wife's body wasn't even cold, he just instinctively answered the door and that placed him there, and you know, the cops. One thing that the assemble did was he checked the TV guide, you know, to confirm the time that must have been. And you know, so they had Dwayne right at the scene meeting the house.

You know, right while he was answering the door. The other interesting little piece of evidence back then was there was some carpenters working on a house that was catercorner to the Fry house, and one carpenter in particular was on a scaffold and had kind of a bird's eye view into the fry backyard, and right at that in that same timeframe, he saw a guy exit the back of the Fry house, walk through the backyard and fiddle with the back gate the way he initially described the guy.

It fit d Wayne Fry's description, and the fact that he was fiddling with the gate was significant because when the police arrived at the crime scenes, that gate, which was like a six foot tall wood slack gate facing the street, you know, fencing off the front yard from the back, that gate was a jar and it had never been a jar because in fact, if he a historically had been wired shut from the inside from the

backyard side with a wire coat hanger. So whoever fiddled with the gate removed the cold hanger and opened the gate to make it look like that had been the point of entry, when if it was a legitimate burglar, it never could have been because it was wired shut from the inside, so that was more evidence of the

crime scene being staged. And then when my hands were untied after the cold case was officially over, and you know, I got this just mountain of material, including crime scene photos and you know, audio tapes and transcripts of interviews of the Fry children in two thousand and five, and you know, just this massive amount of material. I thought, you know, I wonder if this guy Sendal is still alive, because in my mind I was still picturing him as

some old guy, you know. And I looked him up on the web and found that he was a retired police chief up in Minnesota, and I just I called them because I had questions for him. And you know, a day later I left a message, and the day later he called me back from Arizona, where he and his wife spend the winters, and he said, I said, you know, would you be willing to talk to me

about your memories of that day. And it turns out he had been a grand jury witness in two thousand and five, and according to the cold case cops, he had the jury eating out of his hand. And the guy was nothing like what I had imagined. He was nothing like what that DA had described him. He was totally sharp, he had a great memory. He was in his seventies, he was very vigorous, and he'd never forgotten

the case. And so I went and I visited him down in Arizona at a trailer park where he and his wife spend their summers at mobile home park, and I had brought crime scene photos and he was able to explain to me, you know, things that I hadn't understood, like why the crime scene photographer had maken a particular shot, you know, what he was trying to capture, and there were lots of shots of the gate with the you know, the wire hanger, and he just you know, he was wonderful.

He was just he explained to me very briefly in back in nineteen seventy three, the fourteen year old boy Greg, my little brother in law, had been a suspect, really briefly, and you know, he explained he had he had Sendel, had vivid memories of how each of the witnesses had struck him at the crime scene, you know, his impressions of him, and it was just it was just priceless,

and I, I, you know, it really angered me. That that DA had thrown him under the bus in nineteen seventy three, blamed him for the case being dropped when nothing could have been further from the truth, and then in the early nine had, you know, scapegoaded him again. You know, So that became actually one of my little timey, little motivations in writing cold case story. But I wanted to set the record straight, and Semdel was somebody who had really been wronged.

And one thing he did was after the crime scene had been released by the cops by Sendel and his guys. This guy Blake purports to find fingerprints that the cops had overlooked, and he said he found them I think in a drawer and an addresser upstairs which had been ransacked,

and so he says, look, I found these fingerprints. And he goes to I think a buddy, but I'm not sure who was on the police squad, and he says, you know, I found these fingerprints, and the cops says to or a DA that he went to, and assistant DA maybe says to Blake, well, gosh, you know what

a coincidence. You know, we just nabbed two would be burglars kids really teenagers basically, who had been caught, like right in that same time frame, within days of the murder, I think, attempting to burgalize a burger joint that was a mile or two from the fry house. And so they were in jail and the cops had taken their fingerprints.

So this defense investigator, Blake says, well, I'll tell you what, you know, give me their fingerprint cards and I'll compare them to the prince that I found, and you know, we'll see if it's a match. And of course the quid from Quoll was that that Blake would give the cops this set of prints and they could make you know, their own comparisons. But that never happened in cards and

he says, gosh, they're a match. And so you know, the cops in the DA not Fendle, but you know, the DA says, oh my goodness, you know, and they drop the charges against Dwayne Fry, using the fingerprints as their main reason for doing so. And the two would be burglars were never charged. One of them was polygraphed about Betty's murder. He completely passed the polygraph. He had nothing to do with it. He was never in trouble with the law again, you know, when we went totally straight.

The other guy became sort of a career, you know, low level burglar, an alcoholic, but he was never These guys were never charged, even with the attempted burglary that they were arrested for. And you know, the DA just used it as an excuse to dumped the case. And a month or two after the case was dumped, you know it's in the file. This is how I know this. There's this letter from the assistant da to Blake or the defense lawyers saying, by the way, could you show

us those fingerprints found? You know, we kind of liked to make our own comparison, But the fingerprints were never found. That's because they never existed. And you know that's how that's how the case got dumped in seventy three, and then in two thousand and five, you know, all of

a sudden, they resurrected, the defense resurrected Blake. As you know, one of their arguments for why the culture should be dismissed was that Blake, who by then had been dead for I don't know ten or twenty years, that because he was no longer alive, Dwayne Fry could not have a fair trial because Blake had been you know, the White Knight, you know, that was indispensable to the defense, and his death meant that Dwaine could not properly mount a defense where it was so cynical. It just know,

it makes me angry just talking about it now. How and I think that the this is not the thing about this case is I think that's just stuff like this happens all the time. And the only difference between Betty's case and other cases, is that you know there isn't somebody who looks more deeply into it after the fact and tries to piece together what happened because they

have some personal involvement in it. You know that they want to, you know, come to terms with So I just think, I think this happens more often than we want to believe, and it happens today.

family or Betty's family had. She was just kind of a little bohemian, you know, if you can use the word for somebody growing up in Depression era at Tansas, you know, and she was just very much her own person. She was pinte sized, she had sort of a long shoreman's voice, and she just, you know, everybody told her not to come forward with the confession. One or two of her children were lawyers, and they said, oh, you know, the confession, it's going to get thrown out of court.

It's hearsay, and they're risking it. But she just did what she thought was right, and it cost her her relationship with her entire family, not her children, but with the extended Fry family in Kansas, and certainly with Betty's children, who even in two thousand and five lined up behind

their father, which is another curious thing to me. You know, I've always wondered why, because you see, you see these stories all the time, a father kills a mother usually and the kids line up behind the father, and I just always wondered why, you know, what that was about. And uh, you know, I don't have a good answer

for that. I'm not a psychologist or you know, somebody who studies families, but that's a very troubling thing and it's uh for culture's story, you know, just to jump ahead to the you know, something that happened that wasn't part of the crime, but it was part of my coming to terms with it. I interviewed a guy named Howard Morton who founded this with cold case Families advocacy group called Families and Victims and Homicides and Missing Persons.

And Howard had founded this organization in Colorado because his oldest son, Guy had been burgered in Arizona in nineteen eighty six and that case has never been fold but anyway, it made Howard, in his retirement and his wife start this organization, which continues still even though he's no longer part of it. But you know, I had questions about cold Case Families and Howard's experience, so I, you know,

once again, I turned to the internet. I didn't even know if he was still alive, he was no longer without organization, but I found him through LinkedIn, which I joined for the express purpose of trying to reach Howard Martin.

And you know, I emailed him and he got back to me right away, and then we had a very very you know, hours and hours long conversation and I asked, Howard, you know, did you in your working with cold case families did you ever come across families that didn't want to know the truth, you know, that resisted having a

cold case opened? And he said yes, And they were always families where it was an inside job and the survivors, the children didn't want to know because in all livelihood, knowing would me you know, that they would have to admit that their parents had killed their other parents. He told me some other really a go ahead.

for that. But what actually does happen, What does Dwayne actually say to his son about his mother?

she was murdered in early June. And after she was murdered, but before we were married, Dwayne called us up and said, I guess I should have been you know ner anytime Dwayne called us up and said, hey, would you like I'd like to come to Boulder and take you to dinner. But anyway, that's what he did, and he said that he wanted to share some memories about Betty with Doug.

And you know, there's been such silence and you know, towing the line and not being able to talk and craving, as you put it, some some way to come to terms with his mother's brutal death and for for and especially because he must have felt I mean, I know I did, but it's nothing that we really discussed. But I always felt that he must have felt some responsibility also because he had told her about the abortion, and that was completely unnecessary, and uh, you know, I think

that that's what had tipped the fragile balance over. But anyway, so Dwayne calls us up and he says that he'd like to take us to dinner, you know, and talk about Betty. And and so we went to this place west the Boulder called the Red Lion, in this beautiful, rustic restaurant and and he's immediately, you know, we're expecting all these warm, you know, loving memories of Betty, so that Doug would have that to hang on to, and instead,

Dwayne gave this nittany of his grievances against Betty. I knew that Betty had had some kind of mental illness because Doug had been aware of it, but not the details. But apparently she had manic depression and she had been hospitalized for periods while Doug was growing up, which he and his siblings were unaware of because there was such shame around it that Dwayne would you know, nobody would

talk about it. And you know, she had shock treatments and at the time of her murder, she was on lithium, which back then was a pretty experimental drug, and you know that it was hard to gauge the dosage and stuff like that. But Dwayne just just launched into this this nittany of you know, how her illness had prevented him from you know, becoming more successful, and you know, if he could have invested in this, he had had

to take care of her. And then he said that if it was up to him, the two youngest children, Doug and thirteen year old Gregg, would never have been conceived, would never have been born, that she essentially tricked him into having them. And you know, I mean, Doug was

just it gutted him. I mean, it's just and you know, luckily, after the charges were dropped, Dwayne, you know, moved to California and then Florida, and you know, we didn't we saw him, and he came back to Denver for a period of time and we saw him and his new life, and you know, but but for the most part, he

was out of our lives. And then in nineteen I want to say nineteen eighty, Doug, Doug got into medical school, I got into law school, and Doug had a mental breakdown in I think it was his second or third year of medical school. And you know, we attributed it to stress because he was commuting. We lived in Boulder, where I was going to law school and he was going to medical school in Denver, so he had a long drive every day. And but but he basically he and I don't know why we didn't talk about it,

but we would take you know, every Christmas. We had a hot of vacation that overlapped because he was on quarters and when I was on semesters, and we would go and visit my parents for you know, a few days in New York. You know, we saw him once a year and this and this year, Doug, one of Doug's older sisters, was living in New Jersey because the family had just scattered after Betty's death. So he had

one sister in California, won in New Jersey. And Doug said to me, you know, I think I'd like to go and see Lynn, his sister in New Jersey while we're in New York, because I want to talk to her about our mother. And you know, so he took when we were in New York, Doug took the bus to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or wherever then was living. And he came back and he was like he was, you know, not catatonic, but just you know, gutted. And

I said, well, what did Lynn say? And he said, Lynn told me that she always knew that Dad killed Mom and that she was surprised that I even had a question about it. So, you know, we go back to Colorado. I start law school again. He starts medical school, and he had a mental breakdown. He made a suicide attempt and then and he was in a hospital on a hold, and he had to take a semester off, and he was anew the care of a psychiatrist. And he would come with me to my law school classes

and he couldn't let me out of his site. I also had a job working in a court, you know, after school, and he was with me all the time. And then one day he said, you know, I'm feeling better now. I think I think, I you know, i'd like to you know, I don't need to come to school with you today. So he stayed home and I got home and when I got home, the house was empty. There was a note on the table and he said, you know, I've gone to Florida to talk to my father.

You know, he wanted to talk to Dwayne for the first time about the reality of Betty's murder and Blaine's involvement in it, and he got you know, then the phone rang and it was Dwayne calling me, saying, oh, I got this message from Doug. You know, he says he's coming down here. Do I have to be here? And I said, well, you know, he's coming down because he wants to talk to you, you know. And anyway, then there was everybody, you know, there was like radio

silence for two or three days. I couldn't reach anyone. Nobody called me. And then finally my mother in New York called me and said, you know, do you know that Doug is in a mental hospital up in Pennsylvania, And you know, he had apparently called my mother, who he was close to, and you know, she said, I said, okay, if I talked to the uh the to his doctors, and I said yeah, and she said, then can I

give them your phone number? I said, of course. That night I had a long conversation with was psychiatrists in Pennsylvania and they said, you know, we don't Doug is basically not community fading at all. You know, he's like a zombie, and you know, we don't his father deposited him here, you know, just just flew him up there from Florida. I think because it was mere Lynn and we don't know anything about his background. We didn't even realize he was married. We've been married almost ten years

by then. We didn't even realize he was married until your mother contacted us and can you fill us in on on you know, what's wrong with Doug? And I said, and I said, well, what did Dwyane tell you? And they said that Dwayne said that Doug had some some bizarre fantasy that Dwyane had had some involvement in Betty, Doug's mother's death, you know, ten years earlier. And I said, well, it's hardly a fantasy. He was indicted for first degree going to buy a grand journey and they were they

were like flapper gast. So I you know, when I look back on Dwayne, what makes me so angry is what he did to his son. And he did it just to save his own skin, you know, he just he just threw him under the bus time after time to justify or rationalize. And you know that. I mean the day of the murder, he came to Boulder, not because he wanted to see us, but because you know,

we were an alibi for the murder. You know, time after time he used I mean, I don't know what his relationship was with his other children the way I know what it was with Doug. But you know, it was just I hold that against him, you know, I just I can't find any way to, you know, to justify that or rationalize it, or you know, I think that is that That is the man. You know.

was still going on the next morning. You talk about that this announcement from Doug that the abortion that you had, an abortion that he was involved with that as well, that this strict Catholic that had mental issues would be so upset. But tell us about this event and this seemingly obvious motivation for murder.

And in the incident you're referring to, happened good night before Betty's murder was a Friday night, And I learned this only when I got the case by well, but I also had it confirmed from Betty's closest sister, a woman named Jeannie, who also you know, still gave me lots of hours of interviews on the family and growing up and you know, all of the forces in Betty's life and stuff like that, and and her marriage to Dwayne before I was ever a part of the family.

And this is what happened. Apparently, the night before the murder, Dwayne and Betty were having dinner at a popular Mexican restaurant in Denver, which no longer exists. And there was a third person in that party, and this was the family friend Barbara, whom Dwayne married shortly after the case was dropped. And apparently, you know, he and Barb were sitting there having drinks and laughing, you know, just yucking it up and.

at Chumbuck Casino dot com. That's Chumbuck Casino dot com. Billberg, Necessary Dad, where I lost the terms conditions eighteen plus.

This woman described that it was as if Betty was suddenly realizing something that she had not known, i e. That there might be a relationship between Dwayne and Bob. And you know, this was in and this witness, who was in her nineties by the time Nicole case was interviewed in Texas. I mean, the cold case detectives really did as much as they could to to you know,

convict him and have the case go to trial. And one of the things they did was they sent somebody to Texas to interview this woman who had seen Barb and Dwane and Betty the night before the murder. And she had a clear memory of it and she you know, it was in the nineteen seventy three police report, but nobody had followed up on it then, but they followed up on it in two thousand and five and found

her to be credible. So Dwyane's confession was that the argument or whatever it was, had started the night before the murder. In other words, Betty had launched into a crying drag that Friday night, evidently after the you know, the dinner at the Mexican restaurant, and then it had started up again the following morning, and he couldn't take it,

and he started hitting her and couldn't stop. But there's also evidence that it was a little more premeditated than that, and that's something that Sendel, the lead cop in seventy three, filled me in on in two thousand and thirteen or so when I interviewed him because I had brought all the crime scene photos, and his theory was that Dwayne had lured Betty into the garage where she was bludgeoned

to death. And one of the crime scene photos shows a step ladder next to the door between the entrance door between the door that connected the garage to the house, and her body was sprawled right in front of the door on the garage side, and the door is partly open, and right next to the door is a step ladder that's open. It's you know, and the way the direction of the blows on Betty's head, most of them were

blows to the head. They never found the murder weapon, but Sunder was pretty sure it was a golf club because one was apparently missing from Dwayne's golf bag, and it was you know, that would have fit the wounds, and it looked like somebody here her from above, and the way the ladder is set, it's exactly the vantage point that a killer would have used to strike her, you know, with in the head, in the back of

the head, with you know, a golf club. And one of the things that the cold case detectives did in two thousand and five is they did a reenactment in an attempt to identify what the murder weapon would have been. And interestingly that some of the blood spatter was still they could trace where the blood spatter had been, and they went to the house that had not been remodeled, and you know, they did mock ups of dummies with

you know, hair and all that. You know, they try to figure out, you know, what she'd been hit with. And I think they used three different kinds of weapons and a golf club best match the spatter and the wombs, so you know, SENDO was that Dwayne called her into the garage, summoned her, and he was waiting behind the door on the ladder and he beat her. So in that sense, you know, there, I think there was an element of premeditation. I mean, I think he decided that he had had enough.

was obviously wearing something else, you know. So I think there was a level of.