The Killing of Alydar
Once upon a time he was one of the fastest thoroughbreds in the world. In 1990 he was put down after breaking his leg—an accident, it was assumed, until last year.
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Lundy had been subpoenaed by the defense to testify at Alton Stone's perjury trial, but U.S. marshals couldn't find him. Still, he was hardly ingnored during the trial. Outside the presence of the jury, Marsha Matthews, who was married to Lundy's chief financial officer at the time of the horse's death, took the stand to say that she had overheard Lundy say during a conversation at the Matthewses' home about Calumet's deep debts, "There are ways to get rid of the horse." The judge ruled the testimony was inadmissible. But he did allow writer Carol Flake to testify that Alton Stone, whom she went to see again in 1992 after her magazine story was completed, suddenly had become very emotional in her presence and blurted out that J. T. Lundy "knew something was going to happen to Alydar."
Yet Tomala didn't get what she really wanted from that trial. Stone didn't cooperate with her, and he didn't testify. He decided to take his lumps, which weren't that bad: He received only five months in prison and five months of home confinement.
By 1999, it seemed, Tomala's investigation had run out of gas. After more than two years of interrogations and grand jury hearings, she hadn't been able to prove Alydar had been murdered. She had been able to prove only that Alton Stone couldn't keep his stories straight.
But she still had one more card to play.
In March 1999 Tomala persuaded a Houston federal grand jury to indict Lundy, who was finally found in Florida, and Gary Matthews, who was working as a lawyer in Lexington since his resignation from Calumet, on charges of bank fraud, conspiracy, bribery, and lying about the $1.1 million bribe they had offered to Frank Cihak. When the trial finally got under way, in February 2000, the most interesting case for Lundy's innocence was made by Dan Cogdell, one of Houston's most colorful defense attorneys. During his closing argument, he told Lundy, who was sucking on candy, to stand up and face the jury. Cogdell then asked jurors if they thought this man looked smart enough to pull off a massive fraud. The jurors did. They took less than three hours to find Lundy and Matthews guilty. The story was barely covered by the press. By then the financial shenanigans involving Cihak, Calumet, and Lundy were old news. At Lundy's sentencing this past October, only a handful of spectators were in the courtroom gallery. But Tomala suddenly called FBI agent Foster to the stand to recount the questions and suspicious stories regarding Alydar's death. Then she called a surprise witness: a tall, silver-haired man with a deep Bostonian accent.
His name was George Pratt, and he was a full professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also was an avid horseman and the chairman of the National Association of Thoroughbred Owners Racetrack Safety Committee. Pratt testified that he had been contacted by Foster about a year earlier asking if he would analyze some evidence. Soon, a large box arrived at Pratt's cluttered MIT office. Inside was a section of concrete, about one square foot in size. It was a piece of the floor that had been cut out from the front of Alydar's stall.
Foster and Tomala had always been bothered by the busted roller story. There had been two bolts that had connected the roller to the floor, which a Calumet maintenance supervisor had told Foster were broken in half from the force of the kick. The supervisor said he threw the top half of the bolts away, then he had simply moved the roller over from its original location, drilled new holes in the floor and installed new bolts. He told Foster that the bottom portions of the broken bolts were still embedded in the floor.
Foster noticed later that Tom Dixon, the insurance adjuster, had taken a photo of that roller while it was still lying on the floor. Clearly visible in the photo were the top halves of the bolts. It occurred to Foster that the upper part of the bolts should match the bottom part of the bolts. If they didn't, then there was finally physical evidence that the bracket had been removed before Alydar's accident, with the intention that it later be found to serve as an explanation of how Alydar broke his leg. With other agents, Foster cut out the section of the floor that included the original bolts, and he sent it to Pratt along with Dixon's enlarged photograph.
Almost immediately, Pratt noticed that the bottom half of the bolts were cut off evenly at the same height, while one of the top bolts was a little long and the other a little short. Then he noticed that the top parts of the bolts in the photograph were rusty and heavily corroded, while the bottom parts of the bolts had little or no corrosion. There was no way the upper and bottom halves of those bolts matched. He also noticed that if the concrete block was put back in its proper place in the floor, the shear on the bottom part of the bolts was parallel not perpendicular to the stall door—which meant the force applied to them had to have come from somewhere outside the stall, not from inside.
Then Pratt flew to Calumet, studied the stall, took measurements, and went back to MIT to devise an equation to determine how much force would be required from a horse to kick that roller off its hinges. He determined that 6,600 pounds of force would have to hit the stall door exactly three feet off the floor. The strongest stallion, Pratt concluded, could generate only 1,000 to 2,000 pounds with a kick.
Alydar, Pratt said in his Houston testimony, had to have been killed. He speculated that someone had tied the end of a rope around Alydar's leg and attached the other end of the rope to a truck that could easily have been driven into the stallion barn. The truck then took off, pulling Alydar's leg from underneath him until it snapped.
There was a long, long silence when Pratt finished. At the defense table, Lundy, who was wearing a poor-fitting sports coat, a thin tie, and soft brown walking shoes, kept his head down, writing on a notepad. From the government's table, Tomala, in her black Prada pantsuit, gave Lundy a lingering look, her eyes squinting in disgust. She had presented the evidence hoping the federal judge would tack a much larger sentence to Lundy's bribery conviction. In her summation, she said that only Lundy had "the motive and opportunity" to have the horse killed. He wanted the horse dead, she said, to collect the insurance windfall to forestall First City's takeover of the farm. And his false statements to the insurance adjusters, as well as the lies told by Stone, only confirmed that Lundy was responsible for the injury. "To believe otherwise, one would have to accept a string of coincidences that defy common sense," she declared.
There were still many unanswered questions. If Lundy had wanted Alydar dead, then wouldn't he have made sure the horse was killed that first night? And didn't the fact that Lundy was apparently so distraught throughout that night, begging doctors to operate on the horse, suggest that Lundy wanted Alydar to live? Tomala later said, "What was he supposed to do at that point—cheer?" It could also be assumed that Lundy had to have known from the extent of that first injury that it was unlikely Alydar would survive. Thus, he could pretend to be distraught to mislead others.
Still, the death of Alydar didn't accomplish anything for him in the long run. Calumet still went under. Lundy still lost his job. Yet as Gary Matthews himself says, Lundy had to have been terrified of going down in racehorse history as the man who ruined Calumet. "I can't imagine him doing something so drastic as to kill his best horse," Matthews told me after his trial. "J.T. loved animals. But he was in a desperate situation. I remember we discussed that if the First City debt was cut in half, the Japanese would be far more interested in investing. Maybe he thought this was the thing to do. I just don't know."
The federal judge overseeing the case eventually decided he didn't know either. He said he wasn't comfortable about a whole new criminal case being introduced at a sentencing hearing, and in his final ruling he said, "Although there is evidence Mr. Lundy had the motive and opportunity to injure Alydar, and although there is some physical evidence, I am not able to conclude by the preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Lundy is responsible for the death of Alydar." The judge sentenced Lundy to four years in prison for the bribery; Matthews received 21 months.
For more than an hour after the hearing, Tomala and Foster hung around the courtroom, packing up their exhibits and their files filled with a decade's worth of notes about Alydar's death. Although they hadn't won, they said they felt some satisfaction in getting their allegations into open court so that everyone would know that Alydar's death was no accident. I asked Tomala if she felt a sense of sadness that her long obsession with Alydar had come to an end. The statute of limitations on an insurance fraud case is ten years, which would make it unlikely that she'd ever be able to bring charges again regarding the horse's demise.
Tomala gave me a confident smile. "Actually, there are ways to expand that statute and keep the case going for a little longer," she said. "Somehow, someday, the whole truth is going to come out."
Meanwhile, Lundy, who had been given a few months to get his affairs in order before reporting to prison, headed out of the federal courthouse, saying he needed to get back to Florida to take care of horses and visit his sick mother. I saw him standing at the curb, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. For a moment I thought about the young Lundy from the sixties, the rambunctious, hot rod-driving son of a tenant farmer, dreaming of the day he would run Calumet. Nearly forty years later, the dream had turned his life into a shambles. "That Tomala knows she's full of bull—," he said. "All she wants to do is get her name in the paper."
"You didn't have anything to do with that horse's death?" I asked him.
Lundy looked at me, his face turning red. I realized it was the first time he publicly was going to answer a question about his alleged involvement. "Hell, no," he said. "I loved that horse. Loved him." He paused and shook his head, as if he couldn't believe he would be living for the rest of his life with the reputation as Alydar's killer. "I tell you, I'd give anything if Alydar was still at Calumet, heading off to his breeding shed," Lundy said. And then he jumped into a cab, and he was gone.
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