Poisoning Daddy
How a loving daughter and star student stole barium acetate from her high school chemistry lab, put it in her father’s refried beans, and almost got away with murder.
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In the only interview she has given about the events surrounding Marie’s life, Beth told me that she became disillusioned with Steven when he began having episodes of depression soon after their wedding. “Steven’s behavior had always been a little erratic, but I was a naive Catholic girl, caught up in this whirlwind teenage romance with this suave guy,” said Beth, an outgoing and remarkably frank woman. “But there came a point when I didn’t know how to act around him anymore. He became jealous. He had temper tantrums. He couldn’t hold onto a job. And then there were times when he would get so tired and feel everything was so bleak and dark and that nothing was worthwhile.”
By 1981 Beth was already remarried to a man named Frank Burroughs, a former Navy petty officer she had met when Steven was stationed in Florida. “There was nothing between Frank and me back then,” Beth said. “We were just friends.” Burroughs eventually found a job as a police officer in Granbury. Recently divorced and the father of a young son, he was a strong-willed, protective figure who liked the idea of being a father to Marie, who was only four years old when her mother remarried. As Burroughs said proudly on the stand at Marie’s trial, she called him Dad and Robards Steven-Dad.
Marie saw Steven only once or twice a month in Fort Worth, where he lived in a one-bedroom apartment. Ironically, however, the problems that began to appear in Marie’s adolescence did not concern her father at all. They involved her stepfather. “When Marie has described those days, I have sensed there was some jealousy or possessiveness about her mother’s relationship to Frank,” said J. Randall Price, a well-regarded Dallas psychologist who was hired by the defense lawyers to question Marie to develop a psychological portrait of her. (Although Marie would not talk to me, she did give permission for Price to be interviewed.) “Marie might have seen the marriage as a way of taking her mother away. By the same token, Frank was probably jealous of the mother-daughter relationship.”
It was obvious to anyone who met Marie and Beth that the two maintained a particularly close relationship. “When I saw them, they were quite affectionate in an overt fashion, hugging one another, finishing each other’s sentences,” said Price. “It wasn’t anything pathological, anything dark or disturbing. But they acted more like contemporaries than mother and daughter. They were like sisters who had grown up together.” When I asked Beth to describe Marie, she used the most glowing terms, telling me that Marie was so intelligent as a little girl that she was already writing words in cursive by the time she reached the first grade. “Marie had strong values in every aspect of her life,” said Beth. “She insisted that she was going to remain a virgin until she got married.”
Although not as extroverted as her mother—she had only a couple of close friends—Marie had a reputation at Granbury High School as a good-natured girl who stayed out of trouble. She played the clarinet in the school band and took art classes and dance lessons in her spare time. But in the summer of 1992, before the start of her junior year, her mother and stepfather nearly split up. “At the time,” Frank Burroughs admitted at Marie’s trial—his only public statement about the matter—“I failed my family as a father and as a husband. I caused grief. Marie had lost respect for me because of what I had done.” What that meant, Beth flatly told me, was that Frank was having an affair—and it was Marie who found out about it. “On the weekend before Marie turned sixteen years old,” Beth said, “she came home and found Frank with another woman.”
Beth was devastated by her daughter’s revelation, but she told Marie that she was going to stay with her husband. “I loved Frank, and I knew that he just didn’t have his head on right,” said Beth. “He felt neglected because of all the time I was spending with my own job [Beth was working in the emergency room at the local hospital], and this was his way of reacting.” Marie, however, couldn’t tolerate her stepfather. She talked back to him. She wouldn’t clean her room when he asked her to. “She withdrew from all of us,” Beth said. “And then one day she came to me and said, ‘I can’t stand being in this house. I think you should divorce him.’ And I said, ‘But, Marie, I love Frank. I know him. I know he’ll change.’ Marie looked at me and said, ‘I have to leave.’”
Beth arranged for Marie to live with Beth’s parents in Fort Worth, where she enrolled in a new high school. But five days later, using all the money she had—about $50—Marie took a cab back to Granbury, 45 minutes away. Frank, however, was a strict disciplinarian, and he had long ago established some rules around the house, one of which was that if Marie or his own son should ever move out to live with another parent, then they couldn’t move back. To him, as he later explained in court, the rule was an important tool for two divorced parents trying to meld two families. He said he didn’t want the kids to think they could go back and forth between parents whenever they wanted to get their way. When Frank’s son, in an earlier period of rebellion, moved out to live with his mother, Frank did not let him return. Likewise, when Marie showed up, he said he would not let her back inside the house.
“It was this terrible scene, all of us outside screaming and crying at one another,” Beth said. “Marie was crying for me to take her back, and Frank was shouting at me, ‘You know the rule, and you can’t break it. The same thing that applied to my son should apply to her.’ He was making sense, I know, but I felt like he was making me choose between him and her.”
In a decision that would come back to haunt her, Beth chose her husband, and she called Steven to take Marie. “I never thought I was pushing Marie away. I thought that her move to Steven’s apartment would only be temporary and that Frank would soon change his mind,” she said. But according to Price, Marie saw her move to Steven’s as abandonment. “She thought that Frank was relieved to have her gone,” Price said. “Marie’s constant presence and her friendship with her mother were hindering him from putting his marriage back together with Beth.”
For his part, Steven Robards was excited about the turn of events. By 1992 medication had largely cured him of his bouts with depression. He had a budding romantic relationship with Sandra Hudgins, a single mother he had met at a Parents Without Partners meeting. Most important, he had found a steady job carrying mail for the U.S. Postal Service. “For Steven, Marie’s coming back to him was like icing on the cake,” recalled his sister, Stephanie Elder. To accommodate Marie, Robards applied for a two-bedroom apartment in his complex.
According to Beth, Marie sent her letters in which she described how she hated her new school, Eastern Hills High School, which was much larger than Granbury High. She also wrote that her father was devoid of most homemaking skills. He had few kitchen utensils. He didn’t clean the apartment. Marie had to sleep in a rollaway bed in the dining room while they waited for a larger apartment to open up. Steven did not frighten or hurt Marie. “He was very anxious about pleasing her, and he did everything he could to make her feel comfortable,” said Sandra Hudgins, who lived in the same apartment complex. “He took Marie out to restaurants and movies. But I know that those first few weeks, Marie was constantly on the phone calling her mother. She was pleading to get back home.”
Beth made no promises to Marie about coming back to Granbury, even when Marie wrote her another letter saying she was suicidal. “I immediately called Marie and told her life was too precious for her to say things like that,” Beth said. “I really thought Marie was only being overdramatic in the way teenagers can be.”
After a few months, it looked like Beth was right. Marie’s grades began improving at Eastern Hills. She was making a 98 in French, a 91 in English, and a 95 in chemistry. “She was in the top two to three percent of my students,” said Tracie Arnold, the school’s chemistry teacher. “I do remember hearing her say that she wanted to move back in with her mother, but she was always a nice, bubbly girl.” Hudgins said that by Christmas, Marie was far more relaxed with her surroundings. “She never talked back to Steven. She was always cooperative. She even asked me if she could help me wrap Christmas presents,” Hudgins said. “In all honesty, she was what you wanted a teenager to be.”
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