Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (20 page)

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the cells of the body from getting the oxygen they need to survive. The

victim basically suffocates even while gulping for air, like a fish out

of water, sometimes going into convulsions before the heart stops.

Reddening of the skin is one of the possible symptoms of cyanide

poisoning.

The coroner had not found any of the other classic signs of

cyanide poisoning, such as the bitter almond smell that often fills

the room during the autopsy of a cyanide victim, nor the distinctive

organ damage that typically occurs. Yet the results of two separate,

independently conducted tests provided unassailable proof that a

massive, fatal amount of the chemical was present in Diane Girts’s

body.

What the police and the coroner still needed to figure out was the

manner of death— that is, how did the cyanide get into Diane Girts’s

system? Was it possible that she purposely ingested the chemical as

a means of suicide? Not a single person who knew her thought that,

other than her husband. The homicide detectives investigating the

case thought it unlikely in the extreme that a woman would prepare

for the day ahead—laying out her dress, heating up her curling

iron—just before committing suicide. It also seemed highly unlikely

that she would use one of the least pleasant of all ways to achieve that

result. Besides, cyanide is not available through any retail means. It is

not impossible to obtain, but its sale is restricted.

Diane’s brother, Barry Jones, and his wife, Bettianne, are largely

responsible for tracking the source of that deadly chemical directly

to Robert Girts. The couple got hold of Girts’s phone bill and

spent months calling numbers, trying to find anyone who might

know how Robert could have obtained cyanide. They discovered that

Girts was enrolled in the Ohio National Guard, and spoke to the

commander of his unit. He knew nothing about Girts and cyanide

but happened to mention the conversation to Girts’s superior officer,

Susan Misconish, who blanched at the news. Shortly thereafter she

went to police with a very disturbing story.

In her civilian day job, Misconish worked as a chemist for a

company that supplied chemicals for industrial and commercial use.

Five months before the death of Diane Girts, Robert asked her if she

could supply him with a small amount of potassium cyanide, which

he said he needed to rid his property of groundhogs.

The chemist would testify at trial that she told Girts that cyanide

was a ‘‘terrible’’ way to kill pests and suggested he try something he

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could find at his local garden supply store. But Girts was adamant,

claiming that he had an infestation of groundhogs so nasty that they

were terrifying his St. Bernard—though, interestingly, no one else on

the funeral home property had noticed a problem with groundhogs.

Misconish was still hesitant to disseminate such a dangerous

chemical. A few days later, she received one of Girts’s business cards

in the mail. On the back he had written the words ‘‘Thank you for

your help!’’ and the letters KCN, the chemical symbol for potassium

cyanide. He seemed to Misconish like a solid citizen. After all, he

was a fellow National Guardsman, and someone who had enough

training in chemicals to know how to handle a toxin. So she relented,

sending him a few grams of cyanide in care of the funeral home, as

he requested.

Q

Three days after the chemist turned Girts’s business card over

to police, Girts was arrested and charged with aggravated murder.

Although when first confronted by police he told them he used

the cyanide on the groundhogs, he would later claim that he never

received it— would go so far as to assert that his wife intercepted

the package and used it to commit suicide. He told a coworker yet

another story. He said his wife probably obtained the chemical where

she worked because she came in contact ‘‘with a lot of lowlifes.’’

Would someone at a barber college or trade school, Diane’s two

part-time employers, have access to cyanide?

Barry Jones uncovered more unsettling information about his

brother-in-law. He knew that Girts had a previous wife who died

during their marriage, a young woman named Mary Theresa Morris,

whom everyone called Terrie. He and Bettianne researched family

names from the woman’s obituary, but they were reluctant to reach

out with such a terrible suspicion to people they had never met. Four

months after Diane’s death, they finally made contact with Morris’s

family.

Terrie was just twenty-five when she fell suddenly and precipitously

ill in 1977. Three days after being admitted to the hospital, she lapsed

into a coma from which she never awakened. According to her

brother, Thomas Morris, Girts visited his wife only a handful of times

while she was hospitalized, and went out shopping for a cemetery

plot before she died.

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Terrie’s mother had requested an autopsy. But Girts as next of

kin was able to block the procedure, as the death did not appear to

be connected to any criminal act. Instead, he had her embalmed and

buried. A heart condition was listed as the cause of death on the death

certificate, even though she had no history of heart trouble.

Two wives, each of whom died under mysterious circumstances.

For fifteen years the Morris family harbored suspicions that Robert

Girts may have had a hand in Terrie’s death. Now they were convinced

that he had poisoned her, too. The symptoms immediately preceding

her death closely matched those brought on by cyanide poisoning. But

those symptoms, and the rapid collapse that follows cyanide ingestion,

can be mistaken for other diseases—especially if neither doctors nor

other potential investigators have thorough clinical experience in

differentiating this particular kind of asphyxiation from other types

of death, such as heart failure.

Terrie’s body had been embalmed, then buried for a decade and a

half before it was exhumed and tested to determine whether or not she

had been poisoned. No trace of cyanide was found, but the coroner

said that cyanide, unlike other poisons, such as arsenic, would have

been destroyed not just by embalming but also by decomposition

and the body’s natural metabolism.

Terrie had been hospitalized for a full month leading up to her

death, enough time to have purged all trace of the poison from her

system. The coroner concluded that Terrie probably died from endo-carditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart. But she based that

determination primarily on the treatment records during her hospi-talization, as physical changes to the heart indicative of that disorder

could no longer be determined due to decomposition. Although the

findings were by no means conclusive that she had not been poisoned,

Robert Girts would not be charged with his first wife’s death.

There was yet another wife of Robert Girts who might easily have

become his victim, but she managed to escape with a divorce. His

second wife told police that he beat her and once threatened to kill

her with a gun. On another occasion, following a fight, he left a trail

of shotgun shells down the stairs of their home and into the kitchen,

where he had propped open the Bible to the Twenty-Third Psalm.

Was it a warning that she was walking in the ‘‘shadow of death,’’ that

he was godlike in his power over her? Even after their divorce, she

was so fearful of him that she wanted nothing to do with the criminal

case against him.

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Robert Girts presented one face to the world— conscientious,

serious, and dependable. But the three Mrs. Girts and their families

had seen through the mask, into his ice-cold interior. The real Robert

was a man who could refuse to let a mother discover how and why

her daughter had died even though he was supposedly a man of

practical science who dealt with physical facts of human death every

day, someone whose profession was dedicated to giving comfort to

those who grieved a loss.

He was an eraser killer, a hollow man living a secret existence,

plotting and planning, scheming to acquire poisons, triangulating a

path to avoid detection using all the science he had learned. He failed

a polygraph, although that information would never be presented to

a jury because lie detector tests are inadmissible in U.S. courts. His

first wife’s family said he shed no tears at Terrie’s funeral. He never

paid for Diane’s funeral, sticking her brother with the bill. Within

weeks of Diane’s death, he seemed to be crafting a swinging new

persona. He changed his hairstyle and started sporting an earring.

At trial the prosecution argued that Girts sprinkled the granulated

poison in a bowl of pasta salad in the couple’s refrigerator. Diane had

eaten from the bowl shortly before she died, as undigested pasta was

found in her stomach during autopsy. However, because the coroner

had not suspected foul play at the time she died, the stomach contents

were not saved for testing.

Girts was convicted, but the verdict was overturned. A state

appeals court ruled that the prosecution had erred by referring to

an incriminating statement it said Girts made to another inmate

while in custody, then failing to put that witness on the stand to

back up the contention. In the second trial, the defense changed tack

dramatically. Girts’s counsel no longer claimed that Diane had taken

her own life. Instead, they argued that the cyanide was the natural

result of the breakdown of blood in the body. Prosecution experts

disputed that argument, running further tests that controlled for that

phenomenon and still found fatal amounts of cyanide in her system.

Girts was convicted again and sentenced in 1995 to twenty years to

life in prison.

However, in September 2007 that conviction, too, was overturned.

A federal appeals court ruled that the prosecutor had committed

misconduct by commenting before the jury on Girts’s refusal to

speak to police during the investigation and to testify on his own

behalf at trial. The court ordered Cuyahoga County to either retry

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him within six months or set him free, but county officials hope

to appeal that decision. Girts, however, is apparently so confident

that he will soon be free that even before the U.S. District Court

made its ruling he applied to have his funeral director’s license

reinstated.

Q

Staging a murder to appear to be nothing but a tragic accident,

often a fatal fall in the home, is one of the most common ploys eraser

killers use to disguise a domestic homicide.

On December 9, 2001, Michael Peterson—novelist, editorial

writer, and former Durham, North Carolina, mayoral candidate—claimed that his forty-eight-year-old wife, Kathleen, fell down a flight

of stairs in their home after consuming alcohol and Valium. Her

autopsy revealed something more sinister: seven severe lacerations to

the top of the head indicating a vicious bludgeoning.

The fifty-nine-year-old novelist was a practiced deceiver who lied

about everything from war medals he claimed to have earned to

his secret sexual interest in men. Prosecutors believe that his wife’s

discovery of e-mails arranging a tryst with a male escort led to her

murder.

After he was charged with murdering Kathleen, prosecutors

exhumed the body of another woman to whom Peterson had become

very close while living in Germany in 1985, a woman who also died in

a seemingly accidental fall and whose children he had adopted after

her death. Like Kathleen Peterson, Elizabeth Ratliff was also found at

the bottom of a staircase with injuries to the head. Michael Peterson

had been the last person to see Ratliff alive, driving her home after

dinner at his house.

Authorities in Germany had accepted her death as an accident,

believing she had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and then fallen

to her death, but their counterparts in North Carolina wondered

if she too might have been the victim of a disguised homicide. A

second autopsy revealed numerous deep lacerations in Elizabeth’s

scalp consistent with blunt-force trauma—eerily the same number

of wounds in the exact same area of the head as Kathleen had suffered.

The medical examiner concluded that she too had been bludgeoned

to death.

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Although North Carolina prosecutors had no jurisdiction to

bring charges for the Ratliff murder, they were allowed to introduce

evidence of the similarities of the crimes, over the strenuous objec-tions of the defense at his trial for his wife’s murder. He was convicted

in 2006 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of

parole.

Q

Accidental falls are very commonplace, and because they appear

far more innocent than, say, a bullet to the temple, they may draw the

least amount of scrutiny of any of the types of staged eraser killings.

At least that is what David Mead was counting on when he came up

with what he considered to be a foolproof plan for explaining his

wife’s sudden death.

On the night of August 15, 1994, the twenty-seven-year-old Utah

man said he found his wife, Pamela, a twenty-nine-year-old flight

attendant, floating facedown in a homemade fishpond in the back-yard of their Salt Lake City home. His wails were so loud that

a neighbor called 911. When the first officers arrived, they found

Pamela lying on the ground next to the pond, unresponsive. David

was inside the pond, yanking and pounding at the rocks and bricks

that surrounded it.

His demonstration of grief was so exaggerated, so hysterical, that

one of the officers had to threaten to mace Mead to get him to calm

down enough to allow them to pull him out of the water. Outside

the pond he continued to thrash about so violently that the officers

were forced to handcuff him and set him in their police car. Even

then they couldn’t calm him down enough to get much information

out of him.

Paramedics confirmed that Pamela was dead. A bag of fish food

was near the pond. When authorities were able to elicit a statement

from Mead, he told them that when he left to go to work that night at

the Salt Lake City airport, where he cleaned out the inside of planes

after they returned from flights, he told his wife not to forget to feed

the fish.

Mead had completed the crudely constructed pond just four days

before his wife’s death. It was basically a six-foot-wide plastic-lined hole surrounded by piled-up brick and rocks, three feet

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