by A. W. Gray
Throughout the final year of her life, Richard played Nancy’s emotions like a yo-yo. Often he would be tender and caring. Then, suddenly and without warning, he would hatefully tell her that she was too fat, and that the only reason he’d married her to begin with was because of her money. Further, Nancy could never be a sexual match for Denise. Nancy responded to this form of abuse by crash-dieting down to a twig of a woman, performing whatever sex acts seemed to please Richard—although she considered some of them disgusting and degrading—and even changing her hair to blond in order to match Denise’s. Richard reacted to the dye job by laughing in Nancy’s face and telling her that she was playing the fool. No matter what she tried in order to please him, her strategy backfired, and if she was indeed nearly out of her mind during the period, her lack of total sanity is certainly understandable. During 1990 both Nancy and Denise traveled pathways strewn with thorns.
There are different points of view concerning the reasons for Nancy’s departure from Tramell Crow Partners. She took a leave from the company within two weeks after Richard moved out, and the reason given family and friends was that she wanted to spend more time at home with Allison and Anna. Many close to the company disagree; they say Nancy became so distraught over her personal problems that she was no longer doing the job, and that Crow higher-ups forced her to quit until she could get her affairs in order. Whatever the truth of the matter, Nancy was out of a job, and Richard’s income was now called upon to support two separate households in addition to his generous spending where Denise was concerned. His money wouldn’t begin to stretch that far, of course, and before the year was out Big Daddy would come to the rescue many times.
Both the telephone and the electricity at the Shenandoah duplex were disconnected during the period, and Nancy often found herself without money to buy food. Although Richard had never minded asking Big Daddy for help, Nancy simply had too much pride. She lived without electricity for three days before Big Daddy happened to drop in on her and, seeing the problem, went directly to the utility company and had her service placed in his own name. Furious, he tried to contact Richard to read his errant son-in-law the riot act, but Richard and Denise were out of town.
So desperate did Nancy become for money that she contacted Tramell Crow and attempted to collect her partnership equity, all to no avail. Company policy. Nancy had become a partner, was still a partner, and would remain so until she died.
Big Daddy finally took the financial pressure off by undertaking Nancy’s total support. He paid her bills and provided her with a weekly income. When he ran across the premiums due on Nancy’s half-million-dollar life insurance policy, though, he drew the line. He told her that he wouldn’t pay for the life insurance unless she switched the beneficiary from Richard to the girls. Gratefully, Nancy complied. Whether or not she ever notified Richard of the change is a point of contention.
There was one confrontation during the year that still gives Denise Woods sleepless nights. She was in a Blockbuster Video store with Richard when, out of the blue, Big Daddy approached. The older man was breathing fire.
First Big Daddy glared at Richard, then at Denise. Finally he sputtered angrily to Richard, “Is this your … your fiancée?” And spun on his heel and marched out of the video store. If looks could kill, Denise thought, she never would have survived the meeting.
19
Both novel and motion picture have heralded the killer bee during its inch-by-inch migration up from Mexico, and its name conjures images of horrified citizens flailing helplessly at the critters, screaming in agony, and dying in droves. Though San Antonio is about as far north as anyone has thus far spotted the abnormally aggressive hybrid flying sting-merchant, scientists from coast to coast and up into Canada religiously track the killer bee’s progress through North America.
In-the-know Texans chuckle at the furor because, reputation or no, the killer bee has yet to actually kill anyone. Smiles fade from weather-bronzed faces, however, at the mere mention of the killer bee’s lesser-known traveling companion, the fire ant. The fire ant is no laughing matter. The killer bee, in comparison to its little red buddy, is nothing but a pansy.
The fire ant has far outstripped the killer bee in its steady northward journey, having already infested Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and parts of southern Kansas. The individual insects are barely larger than the head of a pin, but each fire ant sting raises a welt that comes to a boil-like head and burns and itches for weeks. The population of each bed numbers into the tens of thousands, and humans need be wary of where they step; fire ants attack in hordes and sting hundreds of times within seconds. The tiny insect is hostile, dangerous, and even potentially deadly.
Normal pesticides are useless against the fire ant because it exhibits not only an aggressive nature, but a strangely effective survival instinct as well. At the first hint of danger to the bed, the worker ants rally around the queen, pick her majesty up bodily, and transport her to safety. Thus while a poisoned bed quickly becomes dormant, an even stronger colony will spring to life just yards away on unpolluted ground.
Given its lofty status among the universally loathed creatures of the world, the fire ant is likely unconcerned over its involvement in the death of Nancy Dillard Lyon, and is probably equally unconcerned that it is probably the only insect in history to be investigated by homicide detectives. But investigated the fire ant was, and thoroughly so.
Nancy first noticed the dangerous ant bed in the backyard of the Shenandoah Avenue duplex in early summer during her separation (or semi-separation, since he spent about as much time at home as he did in his Richardson condo) from Richard. The fire ants had taken up shop in a hard-to-reach location; the center of the bed was underneath a sidewalk twenty steps outside the Lyon back door, and right beside a sand pile where Allison and Anna played. Nancy was horrified. Her immediate reaction was to scoop both little girls up, tote them inside, and forbid them to enter the backyard until Mommy said. Instructions to two toddlers were useless, of course, and Nancy had to lock the back door and keep it secured. On Richard’s next visit, Nancy told him of the problem.
The battle against the backyard fire ants became one of the only things during Nancy’s final months in which she and her husband totally cooperated. The insect invasion brought out the inventor in Richard, and in addition to working for Architectural Site Services and alternately sleeping with Nancy and bedding Denise Woods, he spent the rest of the summer scheming against the nasty critters. He tried dousing the bed with boiling water, but that only increased the fire ants’ aggressiveness. Various ant and roach killers proved useless; the queen was so protected by the sidewalk roof over the bed that the ants didn’t even bother relocating their quarters. As summer dragged by, the fire ants thrived.
Whatever differences there were between Richard and Nancy at the time, the two Harvard grads put their heads together in the fire ant war. Between the two of them they finally concocted a plan, and even set their campaign down in a series of elaborate drawings. They’d studied the creatures’ habits and knew that whatever they used to kill the ants must be applied in a hurry, before the workers could move the queen. The Lyon plan of attack included an electric drill with a large bit attachment; they would use the drill to break through the sidewalk and instantly zap the bed with poison. They were sure the plan would work; the only thing of which Richard and Nancy were uncertain was which poison they should use. In selecting the proper lethal potion, they agreed that they should consult someone who knew.
Charles Couch is a big, sturdy bear of a man, and tracks time around the football season, recalling events as to point in time by whether or not the season was in swing when the event occurred. His love for the game isn’t surprising; his son is a bang-up linebacker now on scholarship at Vanderbilt, and the son’s visits to various college campuses for recruiting purposes would one day affect the trial of Richard Lyon. Astonishing but true.
That Charles C
ouch ever became involved in the case at all is somewhat curious. He isn’t an exterminator, and his name appears on no known list of insect experts. What he did for a living during the summer of 1990 was about as far removed from the ant extermination business as it could possibly be; Couch was proprietor of a firm called Chemical Engineering, Inc., a manufacturer of industrial soaps, and as a sideline he engaged in carpet recycling. He didn’t know Richard Lyon, Nancy Dillard Lyon, and Denise Woods from Adam, Eve, and the serpent.
Couch is dead certain that the phone call he received came in late July. Why is he so positive? Why, the Dallas Cowboys were in training camp at Thousand Oaks, California, at the time. What connection Couch made between the call and the Cowboys isn’t clear; perhaps his phone rang while he was going over the rookie scouting report. Nonetheless, he did receive the call.
Just where the woman on the phone got Couch’s name—or why she thought that Couch might be a fire ant consultant—isn’t known, either. Also somewhat hazy is the reason for Couch’s instant cooperation; he didn’t disavow knowledge of fire ants, and he didn’t tell the woman to consult the Yellow Pages. What he did, in fact, was enter the fire ant war as if he were the Green Berets.
According to Couch, the woman told him that she lived in a duplex near SMU, that she had fire ants in her backyard, and that she needed a formula for a no-baloney poison to kill the nasty things. In this instance the lady had certainly dialed the right number. Had one of Couch’s Chemical Engineering employees taken the call, the uninformed employee might’ve told her that if she didn’t want to buy some industrial soap or recycle some carpet, she should take her business elsewhere. But Couch agreed to drop everything and, without any compensation whatsoever, get right on the lady’s problem.
That very night Couch went to the science library at SMU. He certainly knew the way. Football again; the SMU Mustangs had heavily recruited Couch’s son. And in a couple of hours’ research Couch came up with the answer. Normal insecticides used for roaches and whatnot have no effect on fire ants, because while the garden-variety poisons easily penetrate the roach’s soft underbody, the fire ant is a hard-shell creature and resists everything that doesn’t pack a real Sunday wallop. By the time he left the college library, he had concocted a formula he was certain would be foolproof. The formula, of course, included arsenic trioxide as one of its pivotal ingredients.
20
Nancy endured Richard’s comings and goings for slightly better than half a year. She felt during the time that she had reversed roles with Denise Woods; though she and Richard were still married, she felt as if she’d become the other woman. And in a manner of speaking, she had. Richard made no bones about extolling Denise’s sexual prowess to Nancy, but where Denise was concerned, the fact that Richard still slept with his wife on occasion was a deep, dark secret.
Nancy went ahead with her incest counseling and devoted most of her time to Allison and Anna. She was hoping against hope that Richard would come to his senses and return home for good, but after six months of him bouncing back and forth between home and his rented condo, Nancy made up her mind that reconciliation was never going to happen. Finally, emotionally drained, she wrote Richard a long, tearful letter and mailed it to his Springbrook Lane condo address. In it she reaffirmed her love for him, but stated that it would be harmful to both her and the girls to continue this way. She told Richard that if Denise was what he wanted, so be it. Nancy wanted a divorce.
It is likely that Nancy was attempting some reverse psychology in the hope that Richard would come back to her, but her strategy backfired once again. By this time Richard was under heavy pressure from Denise to put up or shut up. In fact, she had temporarily ended the relationship, telling him that if he ever chose to proceed with his divorce and make an honest woman of her, he should give her a call. She had begun seeing other men, and a headline story on the society pages featuring Denise and her escort, jetset restaurateur Shannon Wynne, at a gala opening of Dallas’ Northpark location for Barney’s New York, drove Richard into a frenzy. Therefore, Nancy’s letter played right into his hands. He replied that he wanted a divorce as well, and immediately made arrangements for him and Nancy to see a mediator.
The divorce mediator is a creation of Texas law, though a number of states have now begun the same practice. It is the function of the mediator to bring warring couples together on property settlement prior to filing of the divorce petition, and the idea behind mediation is to save the court time. If the couple has already agreed on a division of debt and assets, the divorce proceeding itself becomes quite simple. The couple can then file their own petition and thus save on legal fees. In the Lyons’ case, Richard selected the mediator.
So badly did Nancy want heartache out of the way and to get on with her life, she was determined not to let material things delay the proceedings. She meekly agreed to a down-the-middle split of everything; if she couldn’t have Richard, money and property meant nothing to her. The eventual property settlement drawn up by the mediator, and originally approved by both Nancy and Richard, illustrates the point. While Nancy was allowing emotion to rule her decisions, it is clear that Richard was not. He had honed directly in on the financial issues.
The truth of the matter was that Richard and Nancy Lyon were, in their own right, penniless. There was no net worth to divide. All three of their duplexes—the two M-Street locations where they’d previously lived plus the Shenandoah Avenue house they now called home—were mortgaged to the hilt, and would likely not bring enough to settle the debt against the property. Further—largely due to his erratic spending on trips with and presents for Denise Woods—Richard and Nancy were up to their eyeballs in debt to the credit card companies. The only assets of value were Nancy’s profit-sharing interest in Tramell Crow Companies (which she was unlikely to see), and her trust funds that Big Daddy had set up for her. Under Texas law, gifts from relatives are separate property and not subject to division under divorce proceedings; nonetheless, Nancy agreed to give Richard one-half of the whole nine yards.
The divorce might have proceeded according to Richard’s plan, and he and Denise might have lived (arguably) happily ever after, but just before the agreement was finalized, Nancy took a step that her estranged husband hadn’t anticipated. She showed the mediator’s settlement agreement to Big Daddy, and, understandably, he hit the ceiling. If his daughter didn’t understand the Texas community vs. separate-property laws, Big Daddy certainly did.
He knew Mary Henrich through her participation in the Masters Swim Club, and also knew her reputation as a stand-up, knock-’em-dead women’s divorce attorney. Within twenty-four hours after he viewed the settlement agreement, he had retained Ms. Henrich in Nancy’s behalf. Mary Henrich immediately put Richard on notice that she was now Nancy’s attorney, and that any contact he had with his wife was to be through her lawyer. To the courthouse Mary went and filed the petition, and the anticipated mediator’s property settlement was forevermore out the window.
Thus Nancy Lyon, largely through Big Daddy’s prompting, stood on her hind legs and began to fight. It was shortly after her lawyer rejected the settlement and informed Richard that she’d see him in court that Nancy first became nauseous. During the short time left to her, she would experience strange illnesses over and over again.
21
One of the first things Nancy did when she and Richard separated, and she left her job with Tramell Crow Companies, was to fire Lynn Pease, the nanny. No small consideration was Lynn’s salary, which Nancy could no longer afford. Additionally, there had been a conflict brewing between Nancy and Lynn for quite some time.
Though Nancy publicly said that she liked Lynn and considered her a hardworking and genteel person, she secretly thought Lynn a threat to her influence over the two little girls. Since they’d been more often in the nanny’s care than in their natural parents’, it’s not surprising that Allison and Anna had come to look on Lynn as more of an authority
figure than their mom.
For Lynn’s part, she had grown quite fond of Richard, but thought Nancy a bit standoffish. The young man from rural Connecticut had never been accustomed to having servants when he was a child, and often laughed and joked with Lynn and treated her as an equal. Nancy, however, looked on things from a different perspective; the barrier between upper-class persons and their domestic help was, after all, ingrained in her genes. Once Richard moved out, Lynn felt that Nancy talked down to her and looked on her as a servant; that she would no longer be working for Nancy didn’t particularly bother Lynn. Her separation from the children, though, was a horse of a different color.
During the years that Lynn had worked in the Lyon home, she had come to love the little girls as if they were her own children. She took the Lyon kids with her everywhere; the girls loved her old beat-up car and called it the Zoomobile. In fact, even though she had access to one of the Lyons’ luxury cars while keeping the children, Lynn drove her own old wreck most of the time because it pleased Allison and Anna.
Though dismissed from her duties at the Lyon home, Lynn quickly found a job; she went to work for Big Daddy and Sue. Therefore, even though she was no longer working for Nancy, Lynn had the opportunity to drop by two or three times a week, primarily to check on Allison and Anna. Sometimes Nancy would let Lynn take the kids for a ride, sometimes Nancy wouldn’t. She often took advantage of Lynn’s drop-in visits by using her former nanny as an unpaid babysitter. So, during the year of Nancy’s terrible loneliness, Lynn was a constant visitor to the Shenandoah duplex, and what Lynn observed during Nancy’s final year of life would not bode well for the defense at Richard’s trial.