Poisoned Dreams

by A. W. Gray

  He went on to law school at the University of Texas in Austin, though he swears he never really wanted to be a lawyer, and passed his bar exam in 1974. Guthrie’s lack of legal ambition is borne out by his next endeavor, which was an earnest campaign to secure the Dallas franchise for Mr. Gatti’s pizza. After losing out to his competition by a nose, he looked for other business ventures but drew a total blank. Reluctantly Guthrie turned to the practice of law and went to work for Henry Wade at the DA’s office.

  In the trial court arena, Dan Guthrie ran faster than ever before. Handsome and athletic, with a prominent chin, chiseled features, and a wealth of coal black hair combed just so to wave jauntily above his forehead, he is quick of wit and thinks well on his feet. Before he was thirty years old he was chief prosecutor in one of Dallas County’s felony courts, and so fierce was his pursuit of lawbreakers that he headed up a special DA’s task force for the prosecution of habitual offenders. He represented the State of Texas in the first prosecution ever for welfare fraud.

  An ambitious lawyer can only run so fast and so far as one of the DA’s staff, and by 1978 Guthrie had gone about as far as a county man as he felt he was ever going. In that year he took his talents down the street to the United States Attorney’s office, where he specialized in the prosecution of white-collar crime. Other than meeting his second wife, also a staffer with the US Attorney (an earlier marriage to his high school sweetheart had floundered), Guthrie doesn’t have fond memories of his time as a federal man. Constantly at odds with the methods employed in the prosecution of federal cases, he finally resigned in anger over the granting of probation to a drug dealer in order to secure the man’s testimony against what Guthrie believed to be a lesser offender. At that point he joined a firm that defended the same bankers, doctors, and drug defendants whom Guthrie had formerly prosecuted, and it was in private practice that he found his niche. There are no limits to the distance a defense attorney can run.

  Even the most successful of men will acknowledge an element of luck in hitting it big, and Dan Guthrie couldn’t have picked a better time to go into criminal defense work. It was the early eighties, the time when the FBI was just beginning to let the hammer down on banks and savings and loan institutions on behalf of the FDIC and FSLIC, and the men who’d built empires from Reagan’s deregulation blunder were scrambling to stay out of jail. More than any other time in memory, white-collar criminal defendants had money to burn.

  The biggest of the big among savings and loan prosecutions, an intricate and exhausting case known as the I-30 Condo Scam, took place in Dallas. The defendants were members of a group headed by a semi-literate painting contractor named Danny Faulkner, who took control of Empire Savings & Loan—located in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite—increased the institution’s assets twenty-fold in one year by offering unrealistic interest rates on CD’s and savings accounts, then loaned the money to groups involved in the purchase of land from Faulkner and his associates. There were land flips involved, some parcels sold as many as five times in a single day with the nighttime price four to five hundred percent of what the land had brought only that morning. Also involved were inflated appraisals, falsified loan documents, and, eventually, the collapse of Empire Savings & Loan. At the time the federal investigation into the I-30 condo dealings commenced, Danny Faulkner’s personal worth was in excess of 100 million dollars.

  Guthrie didn’t represent Faulkner himself in the I-30 case, but was the lawyer for one of Faulkner’s chief lieutenants, a former high school football coach named Kenneth Cansler, who himself had earned millions in the sale of the property. Guthrie did a good job for Cansler—his sentence of five years is considered peanuts in comparison with the thirty and forty years handed out to other defendants in the case—and for his trouble received a fee that is mind-boggling. The fee itself wasn’t the main reward Guthrie reaped, however (Guthrie is, alas, himself somewhat of a gambler; he invested most of his I-30 fee in land, hoping to build a retirement nest egg, and, due to the collapse that continued through the eighties, instead guaranteed himself a lengthy career in the fervent practice of law); the publicity generated by the case placed the name of Dan Guthrie high on the list of Dallas’ most prominent defense attorneys.

  Shortly after close of the I-30 case, Guthrie disassociated from his partners and entered practice on his own, setting up prestigious offices across the street from the living end of all Dallas locations, the Crescent Towers. With Guthrie’s reputation as a defender of businessmen accused of crimes, it isn’t surprising that the civil firm to which Richard Lyon went for advice steered the business Guthrie’s way. There is, however, an important thing to keep in mind regarding Richard’s choice of lawyers. In early March 1991, as a visibly shaken Richard entered Guthrie’s offices, the attorney’s practice heretofore had been limited exclusively to white-collar federal cases. High-profile as he had rapidly become, Guthrie had never before represented a client charged with murder.

  A crime is a crime, be the charges state or federal, but this statement is a truth that bears scrutiny. Effective defense strategy in the two arenas is entirely different, particularly in the procedure before the trial. This is especially true in cases that receive a lot of media attention.

  Veterans of courtroom battles believe that when a prospective juror states that he or she has no preconceived opinion of the case, in spite of the fact that the charges have been hashed and rehashed in the newspapers and on television for the several months preceding the trial, the prospective juror is usually lying. Media coverage is almost always slanted for the prosecution—the reason being that prosecutors are constant sources of information for reporters, but tend to clam up when questioned by the media person who has previously favored the defense—and the individual who isn’t influenced by newspaper stories is rare indeed. That prospective jurors come to the courthouse with a tendency to convict certainly isn’t the situation envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, but is nonetheless a fact of life when dealing with the justice system.

  State charges are specific: either John killed Mary or he didn’t; either Pete was the robber in the grocery store heist or he wasn’t. In a state case, no matter how much information the prosecution manages to leak to the newspapers in advance (and, generally, the weaker the case against the defendant, the more information the media will have), the district attorneys still have to bring hard evidence into the courtroom. Seasoned defense lawyers in state cases know this very well, so do not comment to the media beforehand and do their talking only after the starter’s gun sounds.

  Federal charges are general (or even nebulous, defense lawyers say, to the point of being laughable), and US attorneys actually have to prove very little to get their cases before the jury. Since the courtroom evidence presented in a federal case has little to do with what has actually caused the prosecution to begin with, the trial outcome often depends on which side has obtained the most favorable media coverage. The best defense strategy in federal cases is to give sufficient information to the media so that prospective jurors, when lying about whether they have preconceived notions concerning the case, will at least have heard both sides of the story. Since the attorneys understand that the judge’s inevitable gag order in a federal case comes long after both sides have popped off to the newspapers anyway, good federal defense lawyers give many interviews.

  Be the defense strategy in the Lyon case right or wrong, when Richard retained Dan Guthrie to defend him against charges of murdering his wife, Guthrie’s first move was to call a press conference of his own. The same reporters and TV newspeople who only days earlier had listened to Detectives Ortega and Brock outline their case now trooped into Guthrie’s quarters in a horde. In an elegantly furnished conference room Guthrie and his client, both dressed to the nines and barbered like actors in a courtroom drama, waited side by side. Each made a brief statement, then threw the session open to questions. The defense position was clear: Not only had Richard Lyo
n not poisoned Nancy, he was investigating the case on his own to uncover the real murderer, and currently had three suspects in mind. One was Nancy’s brother, Bill Dillard Jr., with whom Richard had learned his wife had had an incestuous relationship, and another was David Bagwell—whose brother John, in case the reporters didn’t remember, had been involved in the notorious Black Widow investigation—from whom Nancy had received a threat while she worked for Tramell Crow. For good measure, Richard gave the media a third suspect, Lynn Pease, the Lyons’ former nanny (Lynn’s inclusion in the finger-pointing was likely spite; Lynn had been supplying a great deal of information to the detectives, and it was Lynn who was named eventually as the state’s main informant on Richard’s arrest warrant). While newspeople gripped pencils tightly enough to cut off circulation in their fingers and threw incredulous glances at one another, Guthrie promised that the case would reveal nothing short of a Perry Mason whodunit.

  There was, by the way, one outsider in the media group jammed into Guthrie’s conference room. Hard Copy, the nightly TV tabloid, had picked up on the stories of the previous police press conference, and had sent along a representative. Bulging at the seams with wealthy Texans as principal characters, and spiced with incest to add flavor, the story had all the ingredients necessary to send the tabloids into drooling fits. As Richard and Guthrie entertained reporters with the aplomb of a couple of seasoned talk-show hosts, the death of Nancy Dillard Lyon was about to become a national event. The circus was on.

  28

  Jerri Sims hit the ceiling as she watched the Richard and Dan Show on television the night after the news conference in Guthrie’s office. The hidden accusation in the conference was clear: the police and district attorney were carrying on a vendetta against Richard and ignoring the existence of other suspects. As Richard’s lawyer it was Guthrie’s job to make his client appear as pure as the driven snow, of course, but seeing Richard confidently tell reporters of his innocence made Jerri’s blood boil. She was in the midst of preparing an indictment against him for presentation to the grand jury, and she had some information about which the media—and, hopefully, Guthrie and his client—were not aware.

  The first solid bit of evidence the police had turned up, other than the Dillard family suspicions and Richard’s ill-advised statements to Detective Ortega, came from a general contractor named Thomas L. Saba. Saba makes his living doing make-ready work on vacated apartments. On January 20, 1991, he made a trip to 3616 Springbrook to check out the premises based on a move notice signed by the tenant, Richard Lyon, who was in the process of relocating back to the Shenandoah duplex. It is Saba’s practice to do a personal inspection of premises prior to engaging work crews to paint, clean, and replace carpet where necessary.

  Saba, a rawboned, all-business individual with a sharp eye and an amazing memory for details, was somewhat irritated to find quite a bit of clutter still lying around the condo; his information was that the tenant had already moved and that the coast was clear for the contractor to go to work. That wasn’t the case at all, however, as Saba discovered as he went over the premises inch by inch.

  There were clothes still on hangers in the closets, and in the bedroom were an easel, brushes, and watercolors. Leaning in a corner behind the bed was an over-and-under double-barreled shotgun; Saba carefully checked both barrels to be sure the gun wasn’t loaded. There were screwdrivers, pliers, and wrenches lying about in every room, and Saba wrinkled his nose when he opened the refrigerator to find some spoiled food. On the kitchen counter were some potted ferns and cactus, and in the cabinet under the sink was a cardboard box containing three different brands of pesticides. Beside the box was a jar containing what appeared to be vitamin capsules. In rummaging through the kitchen drawers, Saba came across a plastic baggie full of empty gelatin caps of the same general appearance as the filled capsules inside the jar. Back in the bedroom underneath a pile of dirty clothes was another baggie of empty gelatin caps. Saba remembers wondering what the tenant was doing with so many empty capsules. He decided that the tenant in fact hadn’t moved as yet, and finally left after making a notation on his schedule to check back on 3616 Springbrook at a later date.

  On the day after his interview with Richard and Denise Woods, Detective Ortega showed Thomas Saba the container of pills that Nancy had found on the porch at the Shenandoah duplex, and asked the contractor to compare them mentally to the capsules in the Springbrook apartment. According to Saba, the two groups of pills were identical.

  In addition to the information supplied by the make-ready contractor, Jerri had further jogged Lynn Pease’s memory in an interview at the DA’s office. Lynn now recalled a time in October or November when she’d dropped in on Nancy at the Shenandoah duplex to find Richard there. Richard and Nancy were in the living room, and it was Richard who responded to Lynn’s knock on the door. During Lynn’s visit, and in plain sight of the former nanny, Richard gave Nancy a baggie containing vitamin capsules. He said they were a special formula he’d discovered, and that he’d packed the pills himself in his Springbrook apartment. Nancy’s system needed cleansing, Richard said. His estranged wife hadn’t been looking well of late.

  Jerri still couldn’t proceed with the indictment because the medical examiner’s report was lacking, but within minutes after she’d watched Richard and Guthrie on the TV news, she was writing furiously. She prepared a motion to disqualify Dan Guthrie as Richard’s lawyer, her theory being that Guthrie had made himself a witness in the case. His statement to the press regarding additional suspects, Jerri reasoned, was apart from the attorney-client relationship, and she included in her motion that she intended to call Richard’s lawyer before the grand jury to testify. She knew at the time that her motion was, so to speak, in from left field and had little chance of winning approval from the court, but the elaborately staged TV interview had her in an uproar. She would later file the motion and bring the matter before the court in a hearing, and the furor over the DA’s attempt to disqualify Richard’s lawyer would heap more coals on an already raging fire.

  There is a small group of people in various parts of the country who religiously tune in to Hard Copy and its clones, A Current Affair, et cetera, with more than a passing interest. These people are profiteers, independent television movie producers and quickie paperback writers who know from experience that any story worthy of national Hard Copy exposure is a relatively easy sell to networks and New York publishing houses. The reading and viewing public will soon benefit from a slowing down of the practice, as the glut of bad true-crime television movies and even worse true-crime paperbacks lowers Nielsen ratings and diminishes publishers’ profits, but at the time the Dan and Richard Hour first aired on Hard Copy, true-crime productions were the rage. A case involving both wealth and lewd incest practically guaranteed at least one book contract and TV movie production in the making, so within twenty-four hours of the original Hard Copy segment, district attorney and police department phones rang incessantly as profiteers scrambled to be firstest with the mostest. Though she eventually turned out not to have the mostest, a comely young lady named Yvette Ferris was the firstest and definitely the most memorable of the bunch.

  Yvette Ferris is, for want of any better description, a cute trick. She is pretty, perky, peppy, and all the other adjectives so abhorred by feminists, and she certainly wasn’t wanting for enthusiasm. An acquaintance of Bruce and Mary Ann Will, Richard’s downstairs neighbors at the Springbrook condo, Yvette set out early on to “tie up” all the principals in the case. The “tying up” of principals is a rather questionable, albeit common, practice of offering money to persons for the exclusive rights to their knowledge of the case, the assumption being that competitors for movie and book rights, denied access to intricate details, will simply dry up and blow away. Whether Yvette’s bank account was equal to her ambition is up for grabs.

  Within days after the Lyon case became national news, Yvette, identifying herself as an associa
te of the California independent producer Carolco Productions, had made cash offers to the police, the DA, Big Daddy (who got probably his only legitimate laugh of the entire year from the proposal), Bill Jr., Richard, Denise Woods, and anyone else who had seen anything, heard anything, or who happened to live in the neighborhood. A failure to put money where her well-formed mouth happened to be eventually ended Yvette’s pursuit of the matter, but for a time she was quite visible. One of her offers for information went to Mary Ann Will.

  Sometime in March, shortly after Richard had moved his belongings from the Springbrook apartment to the Shenandoah duplex, Mary Ann looked out her window one day and watched an army-green United Parcel Service truck pull up to the curb. As Mary Ann pushed drapes aside for a clearer view, the UPS man carried a package up a flight of steps to leave it in front of the door to the now vacant upstairs condo. As soon as the truck had rounded the corner and disappeared from view, Mary Ann left her apartment and went up for a look. The UPS label on the package bore Richard’s name and Springbrook address, and the sender was General Laboratory Supply in Houston, Texas. The ominous parcel bore every semblance of a real break in the case.

  Detective Ortega had already questioned Mary Ann and her husband at length, and had asked that they give the police a call should anything new develop that they thought might be important, so civic duty dictated that Mary Ann phone police headquarters to report the suspicious delivery. Possible profit was her motive for her second call, the one to Yvette Ferris.

  The result was a double stakeout. Police set up surveillance via an unmarked car across the street while Yvette made trips by the apartment several times a day to make certain that the package hadn’t escaped, both endeavors to no avail. For days on end, through rain, wind and sun, there the parcel lay. If Richard knew or cared about the package he gave no indication; additional plainclothes detectives assigned to shadow the suspect reported that he hadn’t gone within miles of the Richardson condo. The policemen charged with watching the package felt as if they’d go bananas from sheer boredom.