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Nancy Howard had no idea someone was following her that day. In the morning time, she headed to the Kickoff Baptist church building in Carrollton, not far from her home. In that location was a women's tea, and Nancy was hosting ii tables. Her husband Frank had helped her pack the decorations into her motorcar before he'd left on a business trip a few nights earlier. After tea, she went home before returning to church building for a baptism service of a family unit friend. By the time she left Offset Baptist once again, merely before seven:thirty in the evening, it was raining. A silver Nissan trailed her.

On her way habitation, Nancy stopped at Taco Bueno and picked upward a steak fajita dinner in the drive-through. Then the 53-year-old mother of three grown children drove to the family's immaculate ii-story brick house on Bluebonnet Way, where she expected to relax in front of the Tv set. She pulled into the garage and got out of her motorcar, carrying her purse and her Taco Bueno bag. That's when she felt someone take hold of her effectually the cervix and put a gun to her head.

She heard the young man demand her bag, but the words didn't annals. She wrestled away, turning to face him, and the seriousness of the moment caught up with her. A man she'd never seen before stood in front of her. He was in his 20s, with facial hair, wearing a black baseball cap, and holding a silver gun. He repeated himself, louder this time: "Requite me your purse!"

In a moment of panic, Nancy tried to requite him her purse but handed him the Taco Bueno pocketbook instead. She could see him getting aroused, and she shoved her handbag at him with both easily, pushing him back a step. So he lifted the gun and pointed it at her face up. Before he pulled the trigger, she cried out: "Jesus, save me!"

A .380 caliber bullet entered her left temple, traveled through her sinus cavity, down her throat, and stopped in her right lung. The man ran away with her purse, leaving the bag of nutrient on the rain-soaked driveway and Nancy bleeding on the garage floor.

•••

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They met at church in San Marcos. Frank Howard had a deep, gentle vox and piercing eyes. He had been married briefly in college—Nancy attended the ceremony—but it didn't work out. Nancy had a great voice, too, and violet eyes that drew comparisons to Elizabeth Taylor's. Frank'southward father, a Baptist preacher, married them in 1983. Their showtime girl, Ashley, came ii years later. The family moved to the suburbs of Dallas, somewhen settling in Carrollton, where they constitute a skillful schoolhouse district and a church they liked. They had 2 more kids, Jay and Brianna, and established a comfortable life together.

Frank was an accountant who shared his modest business firm with a business partner. They had offices in Addison—decorated by Nancy—and more than 500 clients. Nancy called herself a "domestic engineer." In addition to cooking and cleaning and keeping a schedule for her husband, for more than 20 years she made certain their three beautiful children made it to school on time and to their various activities. She also served in the PTA and volunteered on most of the school field trips. Together, Frank and Nancy hosted one of the church's youth groups, and they sang in the choir on Sundays. Their son Jay would after tell people, "If the doors to First Baptist were open, my parents were probably inside."

The wedlock wasn't perfect. Nancy struggled with low and the chronic pain of fibromyalgia, and at one point Frank battled prostate cancer. While the health bug were stressful, the couple seemed to come up through them with a stronger bond. They had salubrious discussions before whatsoever major concern moves or big purchases. (They worried Frank'due south new Lexus might be besides flashy.) They worked together to present a united front end to their children. Nancy told people that she'd raised her kids to "love, honour, and respect their dad." When their youngest, Brianna, graduated from high school a few years back, Nancy looked forward to their "empty nester years" and hoped she and Frank could rekindle the spark they'd had early in their relationship.

In May 2009, Frank told Nancy that he'd exist taking on a new client and that he'd probably demand to travel more than. She was surprised that he hadn't consulted her start. Frank told her that he hoped he'd nonetheless exist able to make her happy.

The new customer was Richard Raley, a Colleyville man of affairs who'd made millions on Defense Department contracts, supplying ice to troops in Iraq. His longtime accountant had recently died, and Raley needed help bringing more $30 million from Kuwait into the United States. He offered Frank function space in Grapevine and the use of his private jet, and he eventually made the accountant his chief fiscal officer.

That summer, Nancy went on a mission trip to Africa with Brianna. Information technology was a chance to spend some time together before her daughter headed out of land for higher. Merely when they got back and Frank picked them up from the airport, Nancy noticed that something nigh her husband had inverse—though she couldn't put her finger on it. Frank was rarely emotional, but on the way home, he broke down in tears. At the time, he chalked it upwardly to the death of a close family unit friend.

Soon Frank was traveling all the time. He was in Florida, then California, then Europe or State of kuwait. He'd phone call or email, but Nancy was lone for long stretches, and she wasn't happy. She'd never met Richard Raley, but she thought Frank'south new client was tearing their marriage apart.

•••

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Suzanne Leontieff is a dental hygienist in her early 50s from Santa Cruz, California. She has blond hair, a youthful face, and a perky, loftier-pitched voice. Her two daughters played competitive softball, and she traveled with them to tournaments all over California.

On the weekend of July 25, 2009—while Nancy was in Africa—Suzanne was at a tournament in Lake Tahoe. Killing time between games, she decided to hit the tables at a casino chosen Harveys. At one table, she met a human named Frank. He said he was in town for business, and he seemed nice, with a deep, gentle voice, and a head full of thick, black pilus. After drinking and talking for half an hour or so, she had to go, but she saw him later dinner at a dissimilar tabular array. They gambled together for a few hours that nighttime, and when she walked through the same surface area the next mean solar day, she found him once again. By that Sunday, they had exchanged telephone numbers, and he was request if she had any plans for the next weekend. Suzanne was married but separated, working on her divorce. She knew Frank was married, too, but he told her information technology wasn't going well.

"He said he just hadn't been happy," she says, "but non miserable either."

They talked on the phone and texted throughout the week, and the next weekend he invited her to run across him in Reno. They went to another casino and drank and talked every bit they walked around. She had her own room that weekend, but she spent a lot of time in his. They talked about the homo she was leaving, and they talked about Frank's married woman, Nancy. A week after they met, Suzanne says, Frank was talking almost a divorce "constantly." A few weeks later on, equally Frank was creating holding corporations to movement Richard Raley's money, he named 3 of the companies after Suzanne. 1 was called SLH, equally in Suzanne Leontieff-Howard, her name if they were married.

They kept talking, seeing each other every few weeks, only information technology went across that. He paid for softball tournaments. He helped pay for Suzanne's oldest daughter's college. He rented—then bought—a gunkhole for $30,000. In Jan 2010, he bought Suzanne a house in Santa Cruz worth $900,000, paying cash. He bought a condo in Tahoe worth nearly $380,000.

There were trips, too. He brought Suzanne to a suite at a Mavs game in 2010 and to a Steelers game in Pittsburgh. He brought her to the Super Basin the next twelvemonth. He took Suzanne and her daughters to a Giants game in San Francisco and to the Bahamas for seven days. (She told her kids he was already separated.) When he could, he flew her on the individual jet. When he couldn't, he paid for her commercial flights, and for their food and hotel rooms. And he ever stayed with her, even when she came to Dallas.

Frank also started an IRA for Suzanne. He sent her a cheque for $500,000 and a wire transfer for $200,000. When her divorce finally went through and she lost her health insurance, he put her on the payroll of Raley's company. He even kept a framed photo in his office from a helicopter trip they took.

Suzanne says they were in dearest. They rarely fought. And when they did, it was about Frank getting a divorce. She wanted information technology done and dreamed of a time when she could move to Texas to alive with him. He told her that he and Nancy slept in separate rooms, that he'd file for divorce shortly. Merely there was always something that got in the manner: a graduation, a matrimony, an affliction, what he said was Nancy'south fragile mental wellness. He always had an excuse.

•••

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Billie Earl Johnson is in his early 50s. He's thin and wiry, with a goatee and tattoos on his arms, chest, and cervix. He has an affinity for methamphetamine and motorcycles, and he has spent more than a quarter of his life behind bars. When he got out in February 2009, his younger brother Chris was waiting for him, set to bring him home to Eastward Texas, an surface area total of alpine pines and rusty truck-finish towns.

Chris and his wife set Billie upwards with a adult female who worked with them at Van Tone, a flavour manufacturing company in Terrell. When the woman broke up with Billie in July 2009, he didn't reply well. He phoned her at all hours, harassing her, threatening her in the middle of the night. She worried that Billie might testify up at her work, as he had in the past, and she told the people at Van Tone to be on alarm. Within a few weeks, though, he'd found a new lady friend and new troubles.

Billie says he was at dwelling house in the boondocks of Ben Wheeler, lying on the couch, when his telephone rang. His new girlfriend, a convenience-store clerk named Stacey Serenko, was in the kitchen. The homo on the phone introduced himself every bit John. He told Billie that he'd heard of him and that he was hoping he might help with a job. The man said he needed someone to kill his wife.

"I raised straight upwardly off the couch," Billie says.

Looking dorsum years later, wearing ankle cuffs and a canton-issued one-piece, Billie says he never intended to kill anyone. He but wanted to string this guy along for coin. Billie agreed to meet John outside a Sheplers Western Clothing store in Mesquite.

When Billie showed up, there was only one other machine at that place, a gray Lexus. Billie got out of his truck and into the passenger seat of the man's car. John handed Billie a brown envelope containing $60,000 cash, along with a photo of Nancy Howard. John told him to go far look like an accident.

Back in E Texas, Billie was generous with his windfall. Everywhere he went, he paid for drinks or bought dinner or handed out $100 bills. A lot of the coin went toward drugs. He and Stacey partied for several days directly, a period now stock-still in their memories equally a blur of shopping and meth-fueled sex. Soon he was arrested and charged with possession. What was left of the cash, the police confiscated. When Billie bonded out two days later, he called John and told him that he needed more coin. Stacey noticed how soft-spoken and well-mannered John seemed. "A very nice homo," she says. "Very kind." Still, the commencement chance she got, she sent a picture of the human in the Lexus to her confused female parent. "If something happened to me," Stacey says, "I wanted that photo to live on."

Their second meeting took identify at a Texaco off of Interstate 635, where Billie says John gave him an boosted $35,000. Billie spent this money the style he'd spent the first payment, and presently he was in jail and bankrupt again. He'south got a colorful way of describing how he burned through the cash.

"I would wipe—" he pauses. "I went through it the way a kid goes through diapers," he says.

•••

Charlie Louderman is a tall, intimidating homo, with wide shoulders and thick arms. He's the kind of guy who will tell y'all with authority, "I know what blood looks similar," and he can draw what information technology feels similar to become hit in the head with brass knuckles. He lives at the terminate of a dead-end road in Mineola, where he tin can see who'south coming from a long way abroad.

Charlie grew upward with a friend of Billie Earl Johnson'southward, but the first time he met Billie was a few years ago in his driveway. Billie rode up on a purple chopper, wearing black chaps and a bandanna tied around his cervix. He asked Charlie if he could help him get some guns. Billie also offered him $700 a week to be a babysitter and runner of sorts. So for months he was an up-close witness to the chaos and misadventures of Billie and his band of E Texas misfits.

Charlie says he often went with Billie to option upward big sums of cash, all from this mysterious John. They met exterior a Walmart and in a corporate parking garage and at a Grandy'southward. Charlie recalls counting out $83,000 on his bedroom floor once. He watched every bit Billie traded stacks of the money for bags of meth. He says that Billie told him early that he was a hitting homo but says that Billie claimed to be targeting a gang member who'd raped someone'southward girl. "When I institute out information technology was a woman, I said, 'I'grand non doing that,' " Charlie says.

When Billie eventually introduced Charlie and John over speakerphone, Charlie accused the benefactor—the man Billie called his customer—of existence an hugger-mugger officer, then of existence a drug dealer, and then of existence a "chickenshit."

He likewise heard John plot ways to impale Nancy. He and Billie both retrieve John telling them to make it expect like a home burglary. John told them there would be $forty,000 worth of jewelry, and they could set the house on fire later to encompass their tracks. John worried, though, nigh the fire perchance spreading to a neighbor's firm. John likewise said Nancy regularly met her friends for tiffin at a favorite spot. He suggested firing an automated weapon at the grouping, shooting the first few rounds at Nancy, then "spraying effectually" to confuse the issue. Or maybe they could do it during her book society or her scrapbooking retreat.

Every time they got a programme in identify, though, something went wrong. Stacey slowed them down. Or they got besides wasted to leave the hotel room. Or they were in jail. Each time, Billie had a new excuse for John, who seemed to abound increasingly frustrated.

At one point, Stacey remembers, someone asked John why he wanted his wife killed. He was asked: is it something legal, or is it something personal?

"A trivial bit of both," he said.

•••

By tardily 2010, John was using a difficult-to– trace burner phone and delivering money to Billie via wire transfers. Billie and Stacey didn't accept bank accounts, though, and so he recruited family members—Billie'south children, Stacey'due south female parent—offering to let them proceed between 10 and xx percent of everything that went through their accounts. It was $75,000 to 1 of Billie'south sons, then $20,000 to Stacey's mom, over and over for 2 years. More than $750,000 total. That's in addition to what Billie estimates to exist about $1 million in cash and some other $one million in bail bonds.

Billie bought himself a decked-out Chevy Barrage and his daughter a Firebird. He bought each of his three kids motorcycles and bought get-karts for his grandkids. He talked near saving up plenty to open a shop. He bought a boat and a camper and endless motel rooms where they'd party. He bought Charlie a riding lawn mower and "numerous assail weapons."

Billie could also be as destructive as he was generous. During one meth- and coke-fueled fight with Stacey, Billie videotaped himself firing an AK-47 at a motorcycle until it caught fire. So he sent the video to Stacey's son, Dustin. Then he smashed his daughter'due south windshield and dragged his own $fourscore,000 chopper in circles behind his truck. Stacey says he too beat her on multiple occasions. When he got arrested—which was ofttimes—he had John wire the bond companies direct.

At ane point, Billie and Stacey were arrested in a Best Western in Wood County with more than $10,000 in cash and plenty meth to get felony trafficking charges. While she was in jail, Stacey told an FBI agent most the elaborate plot to kill Nancy. "Information technology was such an outlandish story," she says, "people didn't really believe it."

Charlie Louderman told authorities about the plot, too. During a stint in the Woods Canton jail, he described how Billie was milking John and how eager this rich guy was to have his wife murdered. Nobody believed him either.

Past the finish of 2011, Billie was back out of jail and offering to pay greenbacks for his older blood brother's funeral. When his sister and his nephews came in from California, they were impressed with how much money Billie had, despite his lack of employment. Past early 2012, his sister's son, Michael Speck, had moved to Texas to get in on whatever was happening.

Subsequently more than than ii years of mishaps and delays and payments, John was getting harder to put off. And by at present Billie had virtually a dozen people in his conduce of miscreants, most related through blood or marriage. "It started with just me and Stacey," Billie says. "It concluded up a whole nest of people."

In late May 2012, Billie arranged a meeting with John at the Bass Pro Shops in Grapevine. Much to Billie's chagrin, Stacey invited Michael and her son, Dustin. John concocted a program with Michael that involved tracking Nancy on a trip to San Marcos. He said he'd pay them the $100,000 life insurance policy and $5,000 a week for the rest of their lives. Billie was quiet for most of the meeting, seething because other people were getting admission to his money tree.

Merely before anyone could go to San Marcos, Billie and Stacey were arrested over again. This time, when Stacey chosen John from jail, he couldn't come upward with the money to get them out.

"I know I'k non going to last long in here," she told him, crying on the recorded jail line. "We can still brand it happen if I'chiliad out tomorrow. Everything is withal ready. Information technology will still go frontward."

•••

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After Billie and Stacey were arrested, her son, Dustin, moved in with Billie's nephew Michael, the 1 who'd moved from California to make it on the action. That'south when Dustin, and then xviii, tried meth for the get-go fourth dimension. He'due south a lanky kid, with a Southern drawl and a ninth-course education. Billie says, "He'south and then stupid, he doesn't know how to put antifreeze in a pickup truck."

With his mom and her boyfriend in jail, Dustin began contacting John straight, initially most bond money, just soon John was asking him to do the deed himself. On the Fourth of July, Dustin met with John and was given $24,000. John said that Nancy would be staying at the Gaylord Texan hotel before long for a Mothers of Preschoolers convention. John told Dustin he should utilize a baseball bat.

Dustin returned to E Texas and promptly spent the money the way Billie would take. He bought a big bag of meth and spent the dark sharing information technology with strangers. He too wished every person he saw a happy Independence Day with a handful of Ben Franklins and filled his Facebook contour with photos of himself belongings stacks of money. At one point, he says, several thousand dollars blew off the hood of his car in a church parking lot.

Within 2 weeks, all of the money was gone, and Dustin asked John for more. John said he'd leave some cash by a water meter backside a house he endemic. Dustin brought a friend named Jason Rendine with him on the ride from E Texas to Carrollton, merely they were both high and got hopelessly lost. They spent hours driving through Nancy'south neighborhood, stopping at several houses. Before long they were pulled over and asked to step out of the car.

She slipped in her own blood but managed to walk into the firm. In the laundry room, she stopped in front of a mirror and saw a horrific image staring back at her.

Dustin was nervous and stammered on about looking for his uncle's firm. Then he said it was his stepdad's firm. Then he said it was just a family friend that they all called John. Then he blurted out that he was a hit man who had been hired to kill a man's wife.

Dustin and Jason were taken to the Carrollton police station. There was a report filed, but officers figured the hit human being stuff was just the crazy ramblings of a meth caput. Dustin was permit out a day later.

His friend Jason believed him, though. When he got out of jail and back to his very aroused married woman, Stephanie, he told her what he'd heard and showed her a phone number he'd copied off a piece of paper. "You'll never believe where Dustin is getting his money," he said.

Soon Stephanie had a plan. They came upwardly with aliases—Wes and Tiffany—and called the number. They told John that they knew all nigh his scheme and that if he didn't pay them, they would become to the cops. John agreed to meet them at a Whataburger in Garland. He showed up in a dark Lexus and gave Jason (or Wes) an envelope with xxx $100 bills. Inside a twenty-four hours or two, they met again, and John gave them $12,000. A few days later, information technology was a wire transfer for $20,000.

But and so something happened that Jason and his wife hadn't predictable. John started calling them. He was persistent. He wanted to talk to Wes (Jason). He wanted to know if they knew anyone who could go this chore washed. Stephanie says John offered them a $l,000 finder's fee and $100,000 to whomever did the deed. So she dyed her hair black and told John that she was Tiffany's sister, Stephanie (using her real name). She got another $10,000 in cash. After, an attorney would enquire Stephanie about this interaction with skepticism.

"Do yous really think he's that stupid?" the lawyer asked.

She replied emphatically: "He is!"

•••

Misti Ford is 32 years old and lives in Hemet, California. Her pilus is dyed a nighttime shade of red, and she has piercings in her nose and lips. In 2012, she was engaged to a man named Michael Lorence. They'd met a few years earlier, earlier he'd gone to jail. When he got out, they moved in together. He told her most a cellmate he'd had, a homo named Michael Speck—2 Michaels in jail together, one of them Billie's nephew.

Telephone records bespeak that while John was in touch on with Dustin, Jason, and Stephanie, he was besides communicating with Michael Speck. When Billie called John from jail at the end of July looking for bail money, John told him that he had given the last of his money to Michael.

In the recording, Billie is quick to the point. "I need some money," he says.

"That'southward role of my trouble," John says. "I'one thousand nonetheless cut off from everything I've got going on. What happened to Michael? I gave him a agglomeration of money."

You lot can hear Billie getting upset as they go.

"How much you lot give him?"

"I don't even know anymore. Information technology's been so long."

"I own't heard nothing from him on nothing!"

"I told him—I said, 'This is the terminal I got.' And he said he'd get accept care of everything."

On August 14, Michael Speck sent $1,000 to his one-time cellmate, Michael Lorence, and told him and Misti to come to Eastward Texas. Misti thought the point of the trip was for her fiancé to ask Michael to be the best homo at their wedding. They drove Misti's Honda and made it in most 24 hours. Considering the Honda had a janky tire, they rented a car when they arrived. It was a silvery Nissan.

Misti says she and Lorence spent most of the trip at Michael'south house, hanging out with his extended family. On August 18, she says, Michael and Lorence left the house early. They told her they were taking the car to Dallas to practise some "sightseeing and side jobs"—merely 2 Michaels headed into the big metropolis together.

She spent the day fiddling around on Facebook and passing time talking to the strangers she felt stuck with. She remembers that it was nigh midnight when the boys got back. They had alcohol and started drinking. She says she noticed something different about her fiancé. Lorence wasn't normally a big drinker, but that dark he drank a lot. He was besides quiet. "Usually he doesn't shut up," she says.

When they were alone in a chamber afterward, she says, he told her that he'd murdered somebody. He said he'd shot a adult female in the face. She left the house and went for a walk alone. He stayed and kept drinking.

It was nigh ii months before she broke off their appointment, and she didn't talk to the Carrollton police until January 2013. A friend whom she'd told had tipped them off. Misti says she was afraid. "I was scared of the same affair happening to me."

John wanted his wife dead, so he chosen Billie. Billie had a nephew named Michael who did fourth dimension with some other Michael, last name Lorence. It appears it was the 2nd Michael who at long final did John'south bidding.

•••

Nancy isn't sure how long she lay un witting in her garage. She says she heard God's voice calling to her. "Become upwards!" she heard. "Go up!"

She pulled herself up using a metal table but roughshod back down. So she decided to crawl.

"Kind of similar you might see Regular army men crawling," she says.

Her telephone was in her purse, which was gone, so she crawled toward her automobile, hoping to utilise her OnStar push button. She opened the door and hoisted herself upward, putting bloody handprints on everything she touched. She finally got close enough to push the button, but without the keys—also in her purse—it didn't work.

She slipped in her own claret but managed to walk into the house. In the laundry room, she stopped in front of a mirror and saw a horrific epitome staring back at her. Her face was covered in claret and $.25 of torn flesh. Her sparkly purple blouse was beginning to turn brownish. And where she expected to run across her left eye, she instead saw a gaping, gushing wound.

She managed to punch 911 and howled into the phone: "Lord Jesus, assist me! Oh my God, help me!"

She said she'd been shot. She gave her accost and begged the operator to stay on the line with her. She was however witting, waiting at the door, when the police force and ambulance arrived.

A law officeholder who knew the family through church called Nancy's children. Ashley called her father, who was at a Reno casino with Suzanne. She was gambling and he was at the bar, watching a Cowboys preseason game. When Ashley told him that Nancy had been shot, Frank began to weep. He collapsed by the casino door and needed Suzanne's help to walk. She drove him to the airport, but in that location were no more flights to Dallas that dark. He called Richard Raley, explained the situation, and asked if he could use the private jet. But Raley's pilots were already back in Texas.

Eventually, Suzanne drove him four hours to the San Jose airport, where he caught the first flight out in the morning. When he landed, he rushed to his wife's bedside.

He didn't tell police almost his paramour, but when they looked at his phone, they knew. Over the next week, he had a serial of painful talks with his children and with Nancy, who was all the same in the hospital. He told them that he'd been having an matter and that it had been going on for more than three years. But he maintained that he had nothing to do with the shooting.

Nancy, still heartbroken by the news of the affair, believed him. When law showed up at the business firm and arrested her hubby, she insisted that in that location had been a terrible mistake.

•••

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None of Nancy'south neighbors had seen or heard annihilation that night, so it took fourth dimension to unravel the Coen brothers-esque tale of greed and ineptitude. With surveillance footage from the church, police could meet the silver Nissan follow Nancy out of the parking lot.

Carrollton detectives were eventually given the police force report from the dark that Dustin was pulled over in Nancy's neighborhood and claimed to be a hit man. They brought him down to the station, and, over three days of interrogation, he shared everything he knew almost the twisted murder-for-rent plot. Police also got word from the jail that an inmate named Billie Earl Johnson was claiming to have information most the shooting.

Detectives were shown the pic of the money man everyone knew only as John, the photo Stacey had sent to her mother as insurance. Of grade, detectives recognized the man in the gray Lexus as Frank—full proper name John Franklin Howard.

Turns out, the season company, Van Tone, was 1 of Frank's longtime clients. He'd bulldoze out every few weeks to do the books, oft working directly with the woman Billie had been scaring. At some point that twelvemonth, Frank had asked around for Billie's number, promising that he'd be able to stop the harassment.

Finally, when Misti Ford told detectives what she knew, police force could connect the argent Nissan to Michael Speck and Michael Lorence, who are both in the Denton County jail. The duo were originally charged with aggravated robbery and conspiracy to commit capital letter murder, merely Lorence has since been re-indicted for aggravated assault just.

The accusations shocked people who knew Frank. He'd always seemed so trustworthy. "Nosotros idea he was the paradigm of a expert Christian man," is the way Nancy's aunt puts it. During his bail hearing, the courtroom was packed with supporters.

While Frank was out on bond, his girl Brianna got married. Because she wanted her daughter to have the wedding of her dreams, Nancy wrote to the courtroom, asking if they could relax the conditions of Frank'south bail for one weekend, so he could attend.

"It was hard," Nancy says. "But it was a joyous time."

•••

Frank's trial took place in August 2014. Information technology was a family unit affair. Frank'southward kin packed one side of the court, and Nancy'south packed the other side. In that location were at least ten attorneys involved and dozens of witnesses: investigators, phone experts, cabin managers, the 911 operator who took Nancy'due south telephone call the nighttime she was shot. Nancy took the stand to talk about how their marriage had soured. Suzanne Leontieff testified almost her three-yr affair with Frank. It was their offset time in the same room since she'd driven him to the airport two years earlier. As she perched in the witness chair and giggled nervously, Nancy'south family shook their heads.

Billie Johnson and Stacey Serenko—both brought over from the jail—talked nearly getting that first call and stringing the defendant forth for more than two years and millions of dollars. Charlie Louderman, the human being Billie had hired as a bodyguard, told the jury most listening to a human repeatedly plot his ain wife's murder. Dustin, Stephanie, and Jason all testified about their bizarre interactions earlier the shooting, their protracted cons and double cons, and the misery that money eventually brought them. And Misti Ford talked near driving from California to Texas with her fiancé and hearing the confession that inverse the trajectory of her life.

The defense attorneys claimed Frank had been blackmailed and that the credibility of the prosecution'south witnesses left something to be desired. Ashley, Jay, and Brianna each testified for their father, telling the jury what a kind and compassionate man they'd always known him to be. They weren't in the room for the presentation of most of the testify, but when they were, they sat backside Frank.

The trial lasted almost three weeks, but the jury needed just 2 hours to convict. During Frank's sentencing, Richard Raley took the stand. Wearing chains and orangish scrubs—he's in jail on a prescription pill-related charge—Raley told the jury that over a three-yr period, Frank had systematically embezzled more than $xxx million from him. There was a representative from Van Tone in the court, too, telling anyone who would heed most how Frank had stolen money from them likewise. Prosecutors ended that in add-on to a building disdain for his wife of nearly 30 years, Frank must have known that a divorce would have exposed his financial misdeeds.

The jury sentenced Frank to life in prison. All three children were aroused, leaving the courtroom without proverb adieu to their female parent.

•••

Nancy now has a prosthesis painted to match her cute, violet right eye. It still gets dry and sticks—and that hurts. Every morning, she has to become upwardly and wash her center to ease the pain. And the prosthesis still falls out occasionally, considering her eyelid doesn't have any muscle to hold information technology in place. She used to be very touchy-feely, but nerve damage in her arm makes hugging painful. Considering the bullet went through her sinuses, she has lost her sense of odour and virtually of her taste. She was in the hospital for more 2 weeks. She has had multiple reconstructive procedures, and she can't assist but feel insecure nigh her advent. Her family was worried she might lose her singing phonation—she had a collapsed lung and was coughing up $.25 of tissue from her throat when the police arrived. But she has returned to sing in the church choir.

At 53, she'southward living solitary for the first fourth dimension. She does some part-time nanny work, but she's looking for a full-fourth dimension job. It's not what she expected to be doing at this point in her life.

Nancy could exist bitter. But she'due south non. She tin can separate Frank, the man she knew and loved for all those years—the man she knows loved her at one point—from John, "the alter ego" who cared simply about himself. A lot of days still feel like a surreal dream she might wake upward from. Her faith is stiff, though, and information technology helps her to forgive. It besides helps her to stay patient.

"I'yard trying to detect my style," she says. "I was a homemaker for over xx years. That'south what I did. That'due south who I am. At present my kids are all over the state. It'south a struggle."

Her relationship with the kids is strained these days. They've been in close contact with their father the whole way through, and they believe him when he maintains his innocence. She understands why her kids feel the way they practise. Frank is still their dad.

Nancy hopes that the kids volition come up home for Christmas this year. She misses the warmth of a total house. She misses having and so many smiling faces effectually her. She isn't sure if that will happen, though. They had to surrender a lot of fourth dimension to attend the trial.

"Information technology'southward very complicated," she says. "I raised them to love, honour, and respect their dad. And they do."

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Author

Michael J. Mooney

hueydreir1961.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/december/how-not-to-get-away-with-murder/