The Killer Next Door
Through the wall of our duplex, Richard and Nancy Lyon sounded like a happy couple. Then she turned up dead—and he was accused of poisoning her.
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By itself, the theory seemed preposterous. Arsenic poisoning is a painful, prolonged, and agonizing way to kill oneself. What’s more, Nancy hadn’t acted one bit suicidal in the weeks before her death. She made her usual Christmas gifts and planned trips for the coming year. Her daughters seemed far too important to her. And why would she have cried out for help in the hospital if she had known, all the while, what was killing her?
Then Guthrie produced the receipt. It was dated September 6, 1990, from a company called Chemical Engineering in Dallas. It listed purchases of four chemicals: barium carbonate, lead nitrate, cyanogen bromide, and arsenic trioxide. It was signed “Nancy Lyon,” with her driver’s license number beneath her name.
As Richard stood before the jury, pointing to a blowup of the receipt, the change in the courtroom was physical. He testified that he had found it stashed in the same files with her private writings. For the first time during the trial, Rosemary leaned forward and tried to catch my eye. “Can you believe it?” she mouthed.
It was hard to know what to believe, particularly when the president of Chemical Engineering, Charles Couch, testified later that his firm specialized in recycling old carpeting. But Couch, a large man with a cocksure manner, also acknowledged he was “known in the business” as someone who could devise chemical formulas. In September 1990, he testified, a woman had called him to discuss fire ant poison. According to Couch, the woman never identified herself, but she told him that she and her husband were trying to inject poison into the mounds with a long drill. When Couch offered to look up a formula for her at the Southern Methodist University library, the woman asked if he could drop the notation by her house—which, she said, was right next to campus, as our duplex was.
Couch testified that he did look up a formula, which matched the items on the receipt. But he never dropped it off. Instead, the woman apparently came to his plant the next day to get it. He testified that that he never saw her: He was on the phone in a back office at the time. Through one of his employees, he passed on the formula, which he had jotted on notepaper with his company’s logo. But Couch called the receipt a forgery. It had no invoice number. It was typed, while all his are handwritten. And, oddly, it had a notation to call Keith or Charles on the bottom—names of contractors who transport huge quantities of chemicals for the company. Couch said he remembered inadvertently jotting their names on the bottom of the notepaper with the formula right before the woman came to pick it up.
Yet even if Richard had forged the receipt, it was hard to explain the call Couch had gotten. Equally puzzling were the results of additional forensic tests on Nancy’s hair, which the medical examiner’s office had requested in May. Bundles of the hair had been sent to Vincent Guinn, a chemist at the University of Maryland, who uses a technique called neutron activation analysis to detect various chemicals in hair. Before analyzing the hair, Guinn had sliced it into tiny segments, each representing roughly two weeks’ growth. The results showed that in addition to the lethal dose in early January, Nancy probably had ingested arsenic at least two other times before that: a sizable dose sometime between mid-December and New Year’s Eve, and a much smaller one in mid-November. Both were before Richard could have received the arsenic from General Labs.
There were theories to explain the evidence. Richard might have gotten arsenic elsewhere. Maybe Nancy’s hair grew faster than normal. Maybe shellfish or hair coloring caused the small November dose. Yet the autopsy also showed Nancy’s fingernails had at least five times more arsenic than her toenails—a result that suggested she might have handled the chemical, either by touching poisoned food or the arsenic itself.
Two days before the end of the trial, it seemed Guthrie had achieved reasonable doubt. That day, Shawn visited me at the courthouse for lunch, and Richard chatted easily with him in the hallway. As I watched, it seemed that more harm would come from a conviction than from an acquittal.
I lost all faith less than two hours later. On rebuttal, the state produced Hartford R. Kittel, a retired document examiner from the FBI. Unlike the defense’s handwriting analyst, Kittel compared all writings in evidence not just with Nancy’s known samples but also with Richard’s.
I had always marveled at how similar Richard’s and Nancy’s handwriting was. In graduate school, I later learned, they had actually worked to make their writing look alike for design projects, giving it the same angular n’s, the same long loops below their g’s and their y’s. But Kittel pointed out their differences. Richard’s i’s were a straight line down; Nancy’s were framed by little cross lines. Richard’s f’s sometimes had a backward loop; Nancy’s never did. Nancy’s s’s were always serpentine; Richard’s were sometimes scripted.
And then I saw how, in the most powerful of Nancy’s personal writings—in the pen scratches that spelled out “bill violated me for years,” “sick sex” and “Richard … with his sincere heart”—in nearly every word that damned Nancy, there were Richard’s handwriting peculiarities. To my eyes, the call wasn’t even close. Kittel also questioned the authenticity of the signature on the insurance note and couldn’t identify the one on the receipt from Chemical Engineering.
The jury returned its verdict less than three hours later. As the courtroom doors opened, I saw an ashen Richard looking back at the crowd filing in. When the foreman read, “Guilty,” Richard’s eyes widened. Then he stared straight ahead, hung his head, and sighed.
“I can’t believe this has happened,” he told Guthrie minutes later, as they sat in a holding cell. “I’m innocent.” Outside, amid a flurry of television cameras, the Dillards were whisked away. In the emptiness that followed, journalists milled the halls, looking for someone who would comment on the case. I walked toward the elevators and left.
Soon I was driving up Central Expressway in a pouring rain. As I had done so often in the years before, I turned off at Mockingbird and zigzagged past SMU to the duplex. The shutters were drawn. The Christmas lights were hanging in the same loose way as the year before, when I had taken them down as Nancy lay dying. Sitting there in my car, it seemed absurd that after all these months, my doubt about who killed Nancy should have fallen apart based on the shape of an i, an f, and an s. But that was all it took. Mere markings of a pen had become, for me, the desperate imprints of a very convincing liar.
On new year’s day, I went to see Richard in jail. He wasn’t expecting me. I didn’t quite know how to alert him that I was coming, so I simply showed up. Richard entered on the other side of the bulletproof glass dressed in white jail overalls. An orange ID band encircled his wrist. He looked pale but lively. He sat down easily and picked up the phone. He looked as even-tempered and pleasant as I remembered him. There was no desperation in his voice or face.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Not great,” he said. “But we’re working on getting a new trial now …” His talk quickly moved into a litany of reasons why he should have been acquitted, especially with what the forensic evidence showed. “You tell me how I could have given her those prior exposures,” he said. “You tell me, and then I can sit in a jail cell and think about it. But you can’t tell me. That’s reasonable doubt.”
I was blunt with him. The handwriting analysis had hurt him. So did his apparent lies to the police. And it simply didn’t make sense that Nancy would beg for help in the hospital if she had killed herself. “I don’t understand it either,” he said. “I lived with her, and I don’t understand it. All I know is that she bought arsenic. That receipt is real… . Why would I forge that stuff?”
As he talked, he looked me straight in the eye, and I found myself searching his pale green irises for some hint of the truth. All I saw was calm, logical analysis. He had an answer for every question. The thought crossed my mind, at one point, that Richard is either delusional, thoroughly evil, or innocent. And at that moment I really could not tell which it was. “You know me,” he said. “You know I would never do anything to hurt the girls. I would never have taken away their mother. Why would I need to kill her? I would have walked away from the marriage.”
I was hoping my visit would give me some closure to the matter of my neighbor’s death. It did not. What was I expecting, after all? That Richard would suddenly break down, confess, set forth the story without ambiguity, allow me to walk away that night satisfied that at least I knew the whole wretched truth? Instead, as the guard came to get him, Richard left me with this: “I can only pray that the truth will come out someday,” he said, “because it didn’t at the trial.”
I cannot say Richard Lyon killed his wife beyond all possible doubt. Like the jury, I believe he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but my knowledge will always be in fragments, like the glimpses I had during the years I lived under his roof, like the pieces of evidence that became the court record.
Or, as I thought driving back from the jail that night, like the way I saw his eyes shift downward only twice during my visit with him.
The first time was when I asked about his daughters.
The second time was when I suggested that maybe Nancy got her poison in the Zovirax capsules she had been taking at the time.
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