Maybe Darlie Didn't Do It

Five years after she was convicted of murdering two of her sons, Darlene Routier sits on death row in Gatesville, still maintaining her innocence. This month, as her lawyers prepare to head into court again, new information about her raises the possibility, however slim, that she's been telling the truth all along.

by Skip Hollandsworth

July 2002

(Page 4 of 4)

Polygraph tests are not admissible in court, so they proved of no value to Darlie's court-appointed appellate attorney, Stephen Cooper. But Darin intrigued him. Beginning in 1998, operating out of a cluttered office near downtown Dallas, Cooper gulped down coffee and smoked cigarettes as he worked nonstop on the case, eventually covering his floor with more than 25 boxes of Darlie-related files. Last year Cooper filed his first brief with the Court of Criminal Appeals to get Darlie a new trial. Among his many claims: conflict of interest by Doug Mulder. Cooper said Mulder should have raised questions before the jury about Darin's potential involvement in the murders but couldn't because, for a single day before taking on Darlie as a client, he had represented Darin and Darlie's mother at a pretrial hearing over a gag order. Cooper alleged that Mulder could have learned something from Darin about what had really happened that night but was unable to use it because of his loyalty to a former client. This is important, according to Cooper's brief, because Darin was a plausible suspect. He not only had a pecuniary motive to get rid of Darlie—her life insurance policy cashed out at $200,000 to $250,000—but he had the means and the opportunity to commit the crime. Darin, said Cooper, could have slashed the window screen and then carried the sock out to the alley without leaving a blood trail, because he had not been stabbed himself.

Mulder recently told me that he had represented Darin for less than an hour that day and that Darin told him nothing about the murders. Mulder said that he would have quickly and happily pointed the finger at Darin but that every time he asked Darlie if her attacker could possibly have been her husband, she said, "Absolutely not." I asked Mulder if he had ever heard a rumor, while preparing for trial, that Darin was looking for someone to burglarize the house before the murders. "Never," he said.

But according to the affidavit given to me by Darlie's stepfather, Bob Kee, Darin said in the spring of 1996 that he had a plan in which he and his family would be gone from the house and that a "burglar," hired by him, would pull up with a U-Haul truck, remove household items, and keep them hidden until the insurance company paid the claim. All that was needed, Darin said, was someone to do the job.

The soft-spoken Kee, who lives with Darlie's mother on a small farm east of Dallas, told me that when the murders first happened, his conversation with Darin "never crossed my mind." When I asked him why he didn't later get the information into the hands of Darlie's lawyers, he said, "I don't have a good answer other than 'I don't know.'" Maybe he didn't want to get Darin in trouble—or maybe, as implausible as it seems, he failed to make a connection between Darin's plan and the murders. Darlie's mother, Darlie Kee, told me that she had never wanted to consider the possibility that Darin was involved; she loved him like a son. But in March 2000, after Darin seemed to be getting increasingly upset over questions from Richard Reyna, Cooper's private investigator, she began to have second thoughts, and her husband told her for the first time the particulars of his long-ago conversation with Darin. She immediately called Stephen Cooper.

Could Darlie's husband, mother, and stepfather be making the whole thing up to help her get a new trial? Reyna grilled Darin repeatedly about the story and said he believes Darin was looking for someone to hire. He said he even got Darin to admit to him that he had worked out another scam a couple of years before the murders in which he had had his car stolen so he could collect the insurance money. Darin told me that he did not arrange for his Jaguar to be stolen, but he admitted saying to the person who he believed eventually stole the car, "It wouldn't bother me if it was gone."

Darin would not deny to me that the person who broke into his house and murdered his sons could have been someone who had heard him discuss his would-be insurance scam. But he said he had no idea who that person might be—and if such a crime did happen, it was without his assistance. "Why would I do that if I had my kids and my wife downstairs?" he said. "That's the craziest story I have ever heard." When I told him that the complete truth might help get his wife a new trial, he insisted that he wanted to do what he could for Darlie. "But I don't want to end up with some kind of bullshit charges brought against me either," he said. "I don't want to help her at the expense of my life."

Reyna said he wonders if Darin is holding back even more secrets. After interviewing both Darin and Darlie, he got the idea that Darin might have hired someone to kill her. He said Darlie told him that she had been threatening to divorce Darin—a fact that has never been made public. He said Darin was once so upset over Darlie's threat of divorce that he had put a pistol to his head. Was it possible that Darin had decided that if he was going to lose Darlie, he wasn't going to let anyone else have her?

Darlie told me she was never serious about divorcing Darin. Only once, added Darin, did she pack a suitcase and spend the night with a girlfriend "because she thought I was working too much and not showing her enough attention." The pistol incident—which Darin characterized as "dramatic bullshit to get her attention, like she does to me all the time"—happened two full years before the murders. "Me and Darlie, we've had our spats, but it's never been serious," Darin said. "I've never hit her. I've never cheated on her." When I asked him about Reyna's suggestion that he would want Darlie killed, Darin replied in a disgusted tone of voice, "That's completely false and ridiculous."

Here's where the what-ifs come into play. What if Darin is lying and really did hire someone to kill Darlie? Once he realized Damon and Devon were sleeping downstairs a few feet from their mother, wouldn't he have called the thing off rather than risk the lives of his sons?

What if Darin hired someone to break in, with no intention of anyone getting killed, only the "burglar" showed up on the wrong night? When he encountered Darlie and the boys asleep downstairs, wouldn't he have turned tail and run? Would he really have panicked, picked up a sock from the utility room, wrapped it around his hand to avoid leaving fingerprints, grabbed the butcher knife, stabbed the boys, slit Darlie's throat, and run quickly out the back, along the way dropping the knife in the utility room and the bloody sock in the alley?

What if there never was an outside intruder after all? What if Darlie really did it and Darin was her accomplice in covering it up—a scenario that prosecutors say they have also considered? What if Darin came downstairs, saw what his wife had done to the boys, and then planted false clues to try to keep her from being arrested? Because he had no blood on him, he could have taken the sock down the alley without leaving a trail. He could have been the one who carefully cut Darlie's throat and inflicted her other wounds, after convincing her that the cops would be more likely to believe her story if she had also been stabbed.

Or maybe Darlie, who was in such a delicate emotional state only a month before, decided after one of her fights with Darin to murder the boys and then kill herself—only she couldn't quite bring herself to commit suicide. Perhaps Darin came downstairs, begged her to put the knife down, and then planted false clues and staged a crime scene before having her call 911.

Darin said all the speculation is outlandish and that he still believes an unknown assailant came into his house. "I love my wife and I loved my boys," he told me. "My God, I loved them."

"How did this ever happen?"

WHILE COOPER PREPARES THE APPEAL of Darlie's conviction—focusing not just on inconsistencies in evidence but on procedural problems in the first trial, including an amazing 33,000 errors made by the court reporter in the original trial transcript—she sits quietly in her cell on death row. According to prison officials, she is a well-behaved inmate. She discusses questions about her case in a calm, thoughtful manner. At Cooper's request, she does not talk about any of the latest revelations regarding Darin except to say that when Darin last visited her, she begged him to divulge everything he knows about what happened that night. When I ask her if her marriage is going to survive, she pauses, then says, "I don't know. I don't know what to think about Darin anymore."

She then tells me that rarely a minute goes by that she does not think about her children. She wonders what Damon and Devon would look like if they were still alive. She wonders what it would feel like to hug Drake. She wonders how it would feel to be strapped to a gurney in the death chamber at Huntsville. "Not too long ago," she says, "I was going through [photo] albums of my boys, and I looked up. I was sitting on this cement floor in my cell, and there was this stainless steel potty across from me and these dull, gray-looking sheets on the bed, and it's like, 'How did this ever happen?'"

For a moment, she raises her head the way people sometimes do to prevent tears from welling up in their eyes, then flashes a gentle smile. Perhaps she's trying to show me, as she shows all her visitors, that she's just as sweet as she was back in Rowlett. Perhaps she's trying to show me that even if she once did something very, very bad, she's still, deep down, capable of being good.

She smiles again and tells me about the pattern of a baby blanket she's cross-stitching. There are two angels nestled next to a teddy bear, and at the top it reads "Angels Are Watching Over You."

"It's going to be beautiful when it's finished," she says.

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