Elizabeth Diane Downs was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 1984. This was her punishment for the shootings and attempted murders of her three children. One of them died as a result of her actions. At the time of the incident, Downs told authorities that there was an attempted carjack. Of course, this later proved to be a lie. In 1987, Downs escaped prison and was on the run for a short period of time before being recaptured.

In the spring of 1983, Diane Downs shot her three children, with all intentions of killing them. To make the story of the attempted carjacking more realistic, she went so far as to shoot herself in the arm. However, witnesses saw Downs’ car as she drove the children to hospital in an attempt to save them. She was so desperate for help that she drove a mere 5 miles per hour. Her calm demeanor at the hospital raised red flags. And it all came to a head when one of her surviving children, unable to speak after suffering a stroke, expressed fear and an increased heart rate when Downs came to visit her. Forensic evidence didn’t support Diane’s story either. She was arrested 9 months after the shooting.

Elizabeth Diane Frederickson Downs (born August 7, 1955) is an American convicted murderer. She shot her three children, killing one, and then told police a stranger had attempted to carjack her and had shot the children. She was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to life in prison.

Downs briefly escaped in 1987 and was recaptured. She is the subject of a book by Ann Rule and a made-for-TV movie based upon it, both called Small Sacrifices. She was denied parole in December 2008 and again in December 2010.

Early life

Elizabeth Diane Frederickson was born in Phoenix, Arizona to Wes and Willadene Frederickson on August 7, 1955. She alleges that her father molested her when she was a child. She graduated from Moon Valley High School in Phoenix where she met her future husband, Steve Downs. After high school, she enrolled at Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College in Orange, California, but after a year was expelled for promiscuity and returned to her parents’ home. On November 13, 1973, she married Steve Downs. They were divorced in 1980, about a year after the birth of Stephen “Danny” Downs.

Downs was employed by the United States Postal Service assigned to the mail routes in the city of Cottage Grove, Oregon before her 1983 arrest and trial.

By accounts of friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and eventually by the surviving daughter Christie, Diane Downs was an unfit parent who put everything before her children and was especially cruel to Cheryl, who told a neighbor of her grandparents shortly before her death that she was afraid of her mother.

Murder

On May 19, 1983, Downs shot her three children, Stephen Daniel (born 1979); Cheryl Lynn (born 1976); and Christie Ann (born 1974). Downs drove the children in a blood-spattered car to McKenzie-Willamette Hospital. There was blood spatter all over the inside of the car but none on Diane. On arrival at the hospital, Cheryl was already dead. Downs herself had been shot in the left forearm. Downs claimed she was carjacked on a rural road near Springfield, Oregon by a strange man who shot her and her three children. Investigators became suspicious because they decided her manner was too calm for a person who had experienced such a traumatic event.

Their suspicions heightened when Downs went for the first time to see Christie, who was unable to speak after suffering a stroke. Christie’s eyes glazed over with apparent fear and her heart rate jumped dramatically. They also discovered that immediately upon arriving at the hospital, Downs had called Robert Knickerbocker, a married man and former colleague in Arizona with whom she had been having an affair.

The forensic evidence did not match Downs’ story; there was no blood on the driver’s side of the car, nor was there any gunpowder residue on the driver’s panel. Knickerbocker also reported to police that Downs had stalked him and seemed willing to kill his wife if it meant that she could have him to herself; Knickerbocker stated that he was relieved that Downs had left for Oregon and he was able to reconcile with his wife. Downs did not tell police she owned a .22 caliber handgun, but both Steve Downs (her ex-husband) and Knickerbocker (her ex-lover) said she did own one.

Investigators later discovered she bought the handgun in Arizona, and although they were unable to find the actual weapon, they found unfired casings in her home with extractor markings from the same gun that shot the children. Most damaging, witnesses saw Downs’s car being driven very slowly toward the hospital at an estimated speed of five to seven mph, contradicting Downs’ claim that she drove to the hospital at a high speed after the shooting. Based on this and additional evidence, Downs was arrested nine months after the event, on February 28, 1984, and charged with murder and two counts each of attempted murder and criminal assault.

Prosecution

Prosecutors argued that Downs shot her children to be free of them so she could continue her affair with Knickerbocker, who let it be known that he did not want children in his life. Much of the case against Downs rested on the testimony of surviving daughter Christie, who, once she recovered her ability to speak, described how her mother shot all three children while parked at the side of the road and then shot herself in the arm. Christie was eight years old at the time of the murder and nine years old at the time of the trial.

Downs was found guilty on all charges on June 17, 1984, and sentenced to life in prison plus fifty years. Psychiatrists diagnosed Downs with narcissistic, histrionic and antisocial personality disorders. Most of her sentence is to be served consecutively. The judge made it clear that he did not wish Downs to ever regain her freedom.

Aftermath

The surviving children eventually went to live with one of the prosecutors of the case, Fred Hugi. He and his wife Joanne adopted them in 1984.

Prior to her arrest and trial, Downs became pregnant with a fourth child and gave birth a month after her 1984 trial to a girl she named Amy. Ten days before her sentencing, the baby was seized by the State of Oregon and adopted soon after. She was renamed Rebecca “Becky” Babcock.

Downs escaped from the Oregon Women’s Correctional Center of the Oregon Department of Corrections on July 11, 1987, and was recaptured in Salem, Oregon on July 21. She received a five-year sentence for the escape.

After her escape, she was housed in the New Jersey Department of Corrections Clinton Correctional Institution. In 1994, after serving ten years, Downs was transferred to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. While in prison, Downs has earned an associate’s college degree in general studies. As of 2010, she is located in the Valley State Prison for Women.

Author Ann Rule wrote the book Small Sacrifices in 1987, detailing the life of Downs. A made-for-TV movie called Small Sacrifices, starring Farrah Fawcett as Downs, was released in 1989.

Diane Downs’s last child, born shortly after her trial concluded, appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on October 22, 2010 and ’20/20 July 1, 2011.

Parole hearing

Downs’s sentence makes her eligible for parole consideration after serving 25 years. Under Oregon law, as a dangerous offender she will be eligible for a parole consideration hearing every two years until she is released or dies in prison.

In her first application for parole in 2008, Downs reaffirmed her innocence. “Over the years,” she said, “I have told you and the rest of the world that a man shot me and my children. I have never changed my story.” Downs’s first parole hearing was on December 9, 2008. Lane County District Attorney Douglas Harcleroad wrote to the parole board, “Downs continues to fail to demonstrate any honest insight into her criminal behavior…even after her convictions, she continues to fabricate new versions of events under which the crimes occurred.” She alternately refers to her assailants as a “bushy-haired stranger”, two men wearing ski masks or drug dealers and corrupt law enforcement officials.

Downs participated in the hearing from the Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, California. She was not permitted a statement, but answered questions from the parole board. After three hours of interviews and thirty minutes of deliberation, Diane Downs was denied parole. Downs was eligible to reapply for parole in 2010.

Downs faced her second parole hearing on December 10, 2010. She was denied parole, and under a new law will not be eligible for parole for another ten years. She will have to wait to apply for parole until 2020, when she will be 65 years old.

Mommy Murderess

She looks like a model out of the pages of Cosmopolitan or Vogue, a woman with a Cover Girl complexion and a Pepsodent smile.

But behind the attractive facade lies a cunning, sinister killer who according to court testimony shot and killed one of her daughters and seriously wounded her second daughter and her son.

Oregon law enforcement authorities have never encountered anyone quite like Elizabeth Diane Downs. From the moment she was arrested on Feb. 28, 1984 to the moment she was convicted on June 19, Downs maintained she was innocent of the shooting, that a stranger or strangers trying to commandeer her car, shot her and her three children on the night of May 19, 1983, along a rural road near Springfield.

Yet, right from the start, Lane County authorities considered Downs a prime suspect in the shootings. They seriously doubted her story that a “shaggy- haired stranger” flagged her down and then demanded her car keys. Downs claimed that when she pretended to throw her keys into some bushes, the stranger became unglued, pulled out a gun and shot her and her three sleeping children in the car. The man fled on foot.

Downs suffered a bullet wound in her left arm, although authorities contended it was self-inflicted to throw suspicion off her. Her daughter Cheryl Lynn, 7, was fatally wounded, and her other two children — Christie Ann, 8, and Stephen Daniel, 3, sustained near paralizing injuries from the shootings.

Lane County Sheriff’s Deputies arrested Downs Feb. 28, 1984, as she entered the Cottage Grove post office where she worked as a part-time letter carder. A Lane County Grand Jury indicted Downs on one count of murder, two counts of attempted murder and two counts of first-degree assault.

Downs’ 31-day jury trial in Lane County Circuit Court in Eugene was one of the most widely-covered murder trials in Oregon history. Downs played to the cameras lined up outside the Lane County courthouse when she arrived and departed each day, forever smiling and waving to the assembled reporters, photographers, television cameramen and spectators. She seemed to bask in the spotlight outside the courtroom.

But inside the courtroom, Downs was taking a beating from some unrelentless prosecutors who had obviously done their homework and some key witnesses who shot holes through her story. The most damaging testimony came from her own surviving daughter, Christie Ann.

On the witness stand Christie Ann Downs testified her mother stopped the car off a rural road, got out of the car and went back to the trunk. The girl then testified her mother opened the trunk, shut it and returned to the car with something in her hand. Seconds later, she heard the first shot.

When asked by Frederick A. Hugi, Lane County Deputy District Attorney, how she knew her mother fatally shot her sister, Christie Ann replied in a quivering voice: “I watched her …..My mom did it.”

Then, under Hugi’s questioning, Christie Ann tearfully told the jury that her mother leaned over the back seat of the car and shot her brother, Danny, and her.

Despite some pointed cross-examination by Downs’ attorney James C. Jagger, Christie Ann denied anyone coached her or told her to lie about the shooting. Jagger had suggested in his opening remarks that others had told the girl what happened the night of the shooting and that she had been led to believe that her mother committed the acts.

Testifying in her own defense, Downs later denied she shot her children because they stood in the way of her and her former lover. The prosecution contended Downs shot her three children because her ex-boyfriend in Chandler, Ariz., didn’t want any part in a woman with three children.

She insisted she loved her three children, that she never cared enough about any man to want to harm her children.

The jury of nine women and three men deliberated 36 hours before returning its unanimous verdict: Guilty of murder for the shooting death of Cheryl Lynn Downs. Guilty of attempted murder in the shootings of Christie Ann Downs and Stephen Daniel Downs. Guilty of first-degree assault for the attack on her three children.

Downs, who was carrying her fourth child at the time, showed little emotion as the verdict was read by Circuit Judge Gregory G. Foote. She was later sentenced to life in prison plus 50 years.

But authorities hadn’t heard or seen the last of Elizabeth Diane Downs. On July 11, 1987 — three years after she was sentenced — Downs pulled off a daring escape from the Oregon Women’ s Correctional Center in Salem. Authorities said she scaled two, 18-foot fences surrounding the prison, climbed under a pick-up truck, and waited several minutes before calmly walking away. Prison officials later said they believe Downs wore several layers of clothing to avoid puncture wounds from the barbed wire atop the fences. A tattered striped shirt was found under the pick-up truck where Downs reportedly hid after scaling the prison fences.

An alarm hooked to the outside fence rang briefly at 8:40 a.m. that morning, but prison officials didn’t think anything of it, saying the sensitive alarm went off accidentally at least once a day due to anything from a strong wind to a bird. However, when a nurse arriving at the prison 15 minutes later reported seeing a suspicious woman climb out from under a pickup truck and walk away, saying she believed the woman was Diane Downs, prison guards did a quick emergency roll call and discovered Downs missing.

A massive search of the Salem area was launched. Ironically, Downs, wearing civilian-type clothing, was picked up hitchhiking, virtually right across the street from the women’s prison and adjacent to Division 2 headquarters of the Oregon State Police. The unwitting couple that picked up Downs drove her to the site of a restaurant at State and 24th streets, three blocks from the prison, where Downs got out.

The couple would later tell authorities Downs said she needed to get to a phone quickly because her boyfriend had just been injured in an automobile accident.

Downs’ escape triggered a multi-state search which surprisingly ended 10 days later back in Salem — less than a half mile from the prison. Indentations on a piece of paper found in Downs’ cell were analyzed by the FBI. Using an electrostatic process, the FBI was able to enhance the indentations on the paper, which included an address of a house and a map showing its location.

Oregon State Police conducted a driveby surveillance of the run-down house for two days. Then, state and local police served a search warrant on the house and found Downs and four men inside. The four men were charged with hindering prosecution.

In November, 1987, Downs was transferred to the Correctional Institution for Women, in Clinton, N.J., a maximum security prison. In exchange, Oregon prison officials agreed to take two New Jersey criminals.

Downs made news again in September, 1991, when Marion County Circuit Judge Duane R. Erstgaard denied her request for a new trial. Erstgaard wrote his decision in a letter to Downs’ attorneys, saying she was adequately represented by lawyers in her trial and appeal. The Oregon Court of Appeals upheld her convictions in February, 1987.

But Elizabeth Diane Downs, whose story was the subject of at least two novels and a made-for-television movie, continues to maintain her innocence in her never-ending efforts to overturn her 1984 convictions from her new home — the Washington State Women’s Correctional Institute in Gig Harbor, Wash.

Raynella Dossett Leath is a Knoxville, Tennessee woman serving a life sentence at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville for the 2003 murder of her husband David Leath. Prosecutors alleged that she shot her husband in the head, and then attempted to stage his murder as a suicide. Dossett Leath is also a suspect in the 1992 death of her first husband, Ed Dossett, who supposedly died from being trampled by a cattle stampede, but prosecutors now believe that he was killed with a lethal dose of morphine.

Early life

Raynella Large was born on October 25, 1948 and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She attended Oak Ridge High School and graduated in 1966. Raynella went on to become a registered nurse, and she married her first husband, Ed Dossett, the Knox County District Attorney, in 1970. The couple had three children, and the family lived on a farm west of Knoxville, Tennessee.

Death of first husband

In August 1992, Ed Dossett, who at that time was in the late stages on terminal cancer, was found dead in the couple’s corral, allegedly having been trampled by cattle. Despite the medical examiner’s suspicions about a double indemnity clause on Ed’s life insurance policy, his death was initially ruled to be an agricultural accident by the first medical examiner who autopsied him. Just six months after Ed’s death, Raynella married her second husband, a retired barber, David Leath. It was not until 2006 that the death of Ed Dossett would be re-investigated after David Leath’s death.

Dead of second husband

On March 13, 2003, Raynella found the body of her second husband David Leath in their bedroom. She called 9-1-1 and reported her husband’s death as a suicide. The physical evidence suggested that three shots were fired from a .38 caliber Colt revolver, but police argued that it was the second shot that killed David Leath.

Following his death, authorities re-investigated the death of Ed Dossett. A new medical examiner revealed that the morphine levels in Ed Dossett’s system were “so extraordinarily high it is unlikely that any human could function in an ambulatory manner or continue to live.” In 2006, Raynella was charged with administering an overdose of morphine. Two years later, in 2008, she was charged with first-degree murder in the death of David Leath.

Attempted murder charge

In 1995, after the death of her first husband, Raynella discovered that Ed Dossett had an affair with another woman that resulted in the birth of a child. Her late husband’s mistress was in the middle of a divorce with Steve Walker; the mistress revealed to Mr. Walker that she had an affair with Ed Dossett and that Dossett fathered one of her children. Soon after, Raynella lured Mr. Walker to her farm, where she allegedly opened fire on him until she ran out of bullets. She was charged with attempted murder, but plea bargained to a lesser charge. She served 6 years on probation and her criminal record was expunged.

Murder trial

In May 2009, Raynella Dossett Leath went on trial for the murder of her second husband David. She maintained that her husband’s death was a suicide. After hours of jury deliberation, there was no verdict and the judge declared a hung jury.

Raynella’s retrial began in January 2010. The prosecutor began his opening statement by playing Raynella’s 911 call, then explaining why David’s death was murder rather than suicide. The prosecutor said three shots were fired and the second shot killed David instantly. He also told the jury David was also drugged with a combination similar to what’s used for patients having surgery. In this trial, Raynella’s defense did not argue that David’s death was in fact a homicide, but that Raynella had an alibi.

After a day of deliberation, the jury had not reached a unanimous verdict. However, on January 25, 2010, Raynella Dossett Leath was convicted of first-degree murder and was automatically sentenced to 51 years to life in prison. Immediately following her conviction, the charges relating to her first husband’s death were dropped.

Aftermath

Following her conviction, Raynella appealed for a new trial on the basis of Judge Richard Baumgartner’s judicial misconduct for his drug use. She cited the murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom case, which resulted in all of the defendants’ convictions being overturned. Raynella’s appeal was denied.

In popular culture

True crime author Diane Fanning published Her Deadly Web in 2012 about the Raynella Dossett Leath case. Her case appeared on the Deadly Women episode, An Inconvenient Marriage. Snapped June 17, 2012.

Raynella Dossett Leath found guilty of 2nd husband’s murder

KNOXVILLE (WATE) — The jury in Raynella Dossett Leath’s re-trial found her guilty Monday of first degree murder in the shooting of her second husband, David Leath.

When the verdict was read, Dossett Leath’s mouth fell open in shock. She was granted a few minutes with her daughters before being taken into custody.

But David Leath’s daughter, Cindy Wilkerson, called the verdict “a burden off my shoulders.”

Wilkerson added, “Something needed to be done. He didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. They chose the right one today.”

The jury of nine women and six men announced the verdict Monday afternoon shortly after watching video again from the crime scene. It was also shown during the trial.

The jurors returned to the jury room Monday morning. They were not able to reach a verdict Sunday after deliberating for about six hours.

There is an automatic sentence of life with the possibility of parole for Dossett Leath.

This is the second time she was tried on accusations of shooting her husband, David Leath, on March 13, 2003 and then making it look like a suicide.

The first trial for his death ended with a hung jury in March 2009.

Judge Richard Baumgartner handed the case to the jury after hearing five days of witness testimony and arguments by defense and prosecution attorneys.

According to testimony by Knox Count Medical Examiner Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, David Leath was shot three times. She said the second shot killed him instantly.

A toxicology report showed he was drugged with a combination of drugs similar to what’s used for patients having surgery.

Dossett Leath’s attorney, Jim Bell, argued throughout the trial that no evidence directly connected her to the shooting.

She is also awaiting trial in August for the 1992 death of her first husband, former Knox County District Attorney Ed Dossett.

His death was initially believed to be accidental when he was trampled by cattle, but prosecutors are now trying to prove he died from an intentional overdose of morphine.

Tennessee Woman Accused in Trail of Death

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Few people here know that the ashes of David Leath, still in the cardboard box from the crematorium, are kept on a shelf above the clean towels in the Suburban Barber Shop where he cut hair at the middle chair for almost 40 years.

But almost everyone has an opinion on how he ended up there. Mr. Leath, 57, was found dead of a gunshot wound in his own bed in 2003. His wife, Raynella Dossett Leath, said it was a suicide, but she was ultimately charged with murder. Her dramatic trial last year gripped the city, but it ended in a hung jury. Last week, she went on trial again.

The trail of death in the case, however, does not begin and end with a beloved barber, but winds its way up to the highest levels of law enforcement in this city. There was a fatal car crash, a love child, a missing will and, strangest of all, the 1992 death, officially by cattle stampede, of the Knox County prosecutor, Ed Dossett, who happened to be Ms. Dossett Leath’s first husband at the time.

During the investigation of Mr. Leath’s death, prosecutors became convinced that the death of Mr. Dossett was also a homicide, and they have charged Ms. Dossett Leath, 61, in that case as well. That trial will begin in August.

In the meantime, Ms. Dossett Leath has become a notorious figure around town. Seventy percent of potential jurors responding to a court questionnaire for the second trial said she was probably guilty, according to a defense attorney.

Every quirk in her behavior has been parsed by Knoxville residents for motive, even the fact that she had Mr. Leath’s body cremated the day after he died. His body contained unprescribed sedatives and painkillers, according to an autopsy conducted hours earlier. Mr. Leath’s friends say he was opposed to cremation and owned a plot in the cemetery where his parents are buried.

On a recent morning at the Suburban Barber Shop, Mr. Leath’s former partner, Hoyt Vanosdale, told how Ms. Dossett Leath had asked him to deliver a package to Cynthia Wilkerson, Mr. Leath’s daughter from a previous marriage, who now cuts hair at her father’s old station. Mr. Vanosdale said she did not tell him that the small, heavy box contained Mr. Leath’s ashes.

“Isn’t that kind of creepy?” he asked.

For years, Raynella Dossett Leath enjoyed an elevated — some say protected — status in Knoxville. She was a respected nurse, married to the county prosecutor (in Tennessee, they are called district attorneys general). The couple, who married in 1970, lived with their three children on the Dossett family farm just west of town.

In 1992, Mr. Dossett was found dead in their corral. His wife said he had been trampled by cattle, and the death was ruled an agricultural accident. Mr. Dossett had been in the late stages of terminal cancer, and Ms. Dossett Leath told the authorities that she had helped him out to the barn to feed the cattle at his request.

Randall E. Pedigo, the medical examiner at the time, said the notion of a domestic cattle stampede raised suspicions, but about insurance fraud not murder.

“There was a lot of talk and speculation at the time that it was to make it look like an accidental death to collect double indemnity,” said Mr. Pedigo, who lost his medical license after being convicted of sedating and sexually molesting minors in 1995. “Some people even speculated that it might have been Ed Dossett’s idea.”

Mr. Pedigo said that prosecutors in Mr. Dossett’s office resisted his performing an autopsy, that he felt pressured to rule the death an accident and that he had a “policy” of erring on the side of the family in cases where a judgment call was required. He persuaded Ms. Dossett that the insurance company would need an autopsy, and she consented. Mr. Pedigo said he found traumatic injuries consistent with trampling and a hoof print in the middle of the bib of Mr. Dossett’s overalls.

But when the current medical examiner, Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, reviewed the file as part of the Leath investigation, she found that those injuries were not life threatening. Instead, Dr. Mileusnic-Polchan said, Mr. Dossett’s morphine level was “so extraordinarily high it is unlikely that any human could function in an ambulatory manner or continue to live.” In 2006, Ms. Dossett Leath was indicted in his death, charged with administering an overdose of morphine.

Six months after Mr. Dossett’s death, his widow married his friend and neighbor, David Leath. Friends say the couple was happy — at least at first. He built her a greenhouse; she bought him a custom truck with a matching horse trailer.

Two years later, Ms. Dossett Leath’s 11-year-old son was killed in an auto accident; her 15-year-old daughter was the driver. Not long after that, according to court records and newspaper accounts, Ms. Dossett Leath learned that her dead husband might have had another son, with a woman who worked in his office. In the midst of a divorce, the woman told her husband, Steve Walker, that one of their two sons was actually fathered by Mr. Dossett, and he told Ms. Dossett Leath.

Ms. Dossett Leath soon lured Mr. Walker to a barn on her farm, telling him she had found some papers related to the child. Once there, she opened fire on him, according to his account, and chased him across the hayfields until she ran out of ammunition. According to Mr. Walker’s statement to the police, she said she would kill him and the child’s mother and raise the child herself.

Ms. Dossett Leath was charged with attempted murder, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and did six years of “diversion,” a form of probation. Then, the charge was expunged.

Friends say it was only months after Ms. Dossett Leath completed her sentence that Mr. Leath was found dead. He had signed deeds and a will, now missing, ensuring that Ms. Dossett Leath would inherit all the couple’s property. At the trial, her defense lawyers argued that the victim killed himself, offering evidence that he was depressed and that his health was declining. But a firearms expert for the prosecution said that of three shots fired from the gun that day, it had been the second one that killed Mr. Leath.

Ms. Dossett Leath’s lawyer, James A. H. Bell, said that his client had loved her husband and that there was no way she would have killed him.

“If you believe Miss Raynella murdered him,” Mr. Bell said, “you have to believe she is nothing but a serpent of Satan.”

Only one juror declined to convict her in the first trial.

On the outside Nannie Doss of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a friendly and happy neighbor, wife, and parent. On the inside lurked a cold-blooded murderess who nearly wiped out her entire family singlehandedly.

Her first victims her own children. Her first husband, George Frazer arrived home one day in 1920 and found the kids lying on the kitchen floor dead. Doss claimed it had been an accidental poisoning but evidently Frazer was not convinced. He left and never went back.

Relatives and husbands continued to die of “stomach problems” and other such ailments until Doss’ fifth husband, Samuel Doss sudenly passed away.

The doctor in the case was not as gullible as the previous ones were evidently and didn’t simply take Doss at her word. He ordered an autopsy be done, which revealed massive doses of arsenic in the man’s system.

The bodies of doss’ husbands, relatives, and children were exhumed and tested. It was found that Doss’ two infant children, four of her husbands, two of her sisters, her mother, and a nephew had all been killed by arsenic poisoning.

Armed with this information police soon convinced the poisoner to confess and she was sent to prison for life in 1964. She succumbed to Leukemia the following year.

Doss, Nanny Hazel

A daughter of Dixie, born in 1905, Nanny Doss had been molested by a string of local men before she reached her middle teens. At age 16, she married Charles Braggs, bearing him four children in rapid succession. Braggs was mystified when two of them died suddenly, a few months apart, but Nanny could offer no explanation. Each child had seemed healthy when Charles left for work, but they cried at his leaving and died in convulsions not long after breakfast.

Small insurance payments eased the pain, but Braggs became increasingly suspicious of his wife. One afternoon, he took their oldest living child and struck off for parts unknown, leaving Nanny behind with their daughter, Florine. Packing up their meager belongings, Nanny moved to Cedar Town, Georgia, where she met and subsequently married Frank Harrelson. Florine was barely two years old when Harrelson and Nanny hit the road, leaving the child alone in their abandoned house. Neighbors managed to track down Charles Braggs and he came for the child, but Nanny would not see her daughter again for nine years.

Their reunion evidently smoothed things over, and by 1945, Florine now married — felt secure enough to leave her infant son at Nanny’s home in Jacksonville, Alabama, while Florine took off to see her father. Baby Lee survived three days in Nanny’s care, his death producing anguished speculation that he accidentally “got hold of some rat poison.” Three months later, Frank Harrelson fell suddenly ill and died within the week. Nanny used the insurance money to buy ten acres of land and build a small house for herself outside Jacksonville.

The early 1950s were a lethal time for Nanny’s relatives. Her third husband, Arlie Lanning, died at Lexington, North Carolina, in 1952. A few months later, in January 1953, her mother died while Nanny nursed the woman for a broken hip. Two of her sisters died the same year, in different towns; each collapsed while Nanny was visiting, each with the same mysterious symptoms of stomach cramps and convulsions. In 1953, it was husband number four — Richard Morton — laid to rest at Emporia, Kansas.

Nanny married her fifth and last husband, Samuel Doss, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during July 1954. He died a month later, and the obligatory autopsy revealed enough arsenic to kill twenty men. Confronted with the evidence of guilt, Nanny Doss issued confessions spanning three decades and at least ten murders, drawing a term of life imprisonment for the Tulsa case in 1955. She served ten years before succumbing to leukemia in 1965.

Throughout her various confessions and the years in jail, Nanny insisted that money played no significant role in her crimes. Despite various insurance payments, her murders were actually motivated by marital boredom, a dream of discovering the ideal husband, as described in her favorite “True Romance” magazines. “That’s about it,” Nanny told her interrogators. “I was searching for the perfect mate, the real romance of life.”

Michael Newton – An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers – Hunting Humans

Nannie Doss (November 4, 1905 – June 2, 1965) was a serial killer responsible for the deaths of eleven people between the 1920s and 1954.

She finally confessed to the murders in October 1954, when her fifth husband had died in a small hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In all, it was revealed that she had killed four husbands, two children, her two sisters, her mother, a grandson and a nephew.

Early life

Doss was born in Blue Mountain, Alabama as Nancy Hazle, to James and Lou Hazle. Nannie was one of five children; she had one brother and three sisters. Both Nannie and her mother hated James, who was a strict, often controlling father and husband with a nasty streak. There is evidence that Doss was conceived illegitimately, as James and Lou married after 1905; census records also show that in 1905 she and her mother were living on their own.

She had an unhappy childhood. She was a poor student who never learned to read well; her education was erratic because her father forced his children to work on the family farm instead of attending school. When she was around seven years old, the family was taking a train to visit relatives in southern Alabama; when the train stopped suddenly, Nannie hit her head on the metal bar on the seat in front of her. For years after, she suffered severe headaches, blackouts and depression; she blamed these and her mental instability on that accident.

During childhood, her favorite hobby was reading her mother’s romance magazines and dreaming of her own romantic future. Later, her favorite part was the lonely hearts column. The Hazle sisters’ teenage years were restricted by their father; he forbade them to wear makeup and attractive clothing. He was trying to prevent them from being molested by men, which happened on several occasions. He also forbade them to go to dances and other social events.

First marriage

Doss was first married at age sixteen, to Charlie Braggs. They had met at the Linen Thread factory where they both worked, and with her father’s approval they married after dating for just four months. He was the only son of his unmarried mother, who insisted on living with them. Doss later wrote

I married, as my father wished, in 1921 to a boy I only knowed about four or five months who had no family, only a mother who was unwed and who had taken over my life completely when we were married. She never seen anything wrong with what he done, but she would take spells. She would not let my own mother stay all night…

Braggs’ mother took up a lot of his attention, and she often prevented Nannie from doing things she wanted to do. The marriage produced four daughters over a four-year period of 1923–1927. Under a lot of stress, Doss started drinking and her casual smoking habit became a heavy addiction. The marriage was an unhappy one, and both suspected each other, correctly, of infidelity. Braggs often disappeared for days on end. In early 1927, they lost their two middle daughters to suspected food poisoning. Suspecting she had killed them, he fled from her, taking eldest daughter Melvina with him and leaving newborn Florine behind. His mother also died around this time. Doss took a job in a cotton mill to support Florine and herself.

Braggs returned in the summer of 1928, with him and Melvina was another woman, a divorcée with her own child. Doss and Braggs soon divorced, and she returned to her mother’s home taking her two daughters with her. He always maintained he left her because he was frightened of her.

Second marriage

Living and working in Anniston, Doss soothed her loneliness by reading True Romance and other such reading matter. She also resumed poring over the lonely hearts column, and wrote to men advertising there. A particular advert that interested her was that of Robert (Frank) Harrelson, a 23-year-old factory worker from Jacksonville. He sent her romantic poetry, and she sent him a cake. They met and married in 1929, when she was 24, 2 years after her divorce from Braggs. They lived together in Jacksonville, with Doss’s two surviving daughters. After a few months, she discovered that he was alcoholic and had a criminal record for assault. Despite this, the marriage lasted sixteen years.

Grandchildren

Melvina, Doss’s oldest daughter, gave birth to Robert Lee Haynes in 1943. Doss came to help, and after a painful few hours a baby boy was born, but died soon after. Melvina, exhausted from labor and groggy from ether, thought she saw Doss stick a hatpin into the baby’s head, and later told Mosie and Florine. They told her how Nannie had said the baby was dead, and they noticed she was holding a pin. However, the doctors could not come up with an explanation for the death. After this, Melvina and Mosie drifted apart and Melvina began to date a soldier. Doss disapproved of him, and while Melvina was visiting her father after a particularly nasty fight with Doss, her son Robert died mysteriously under Doss’s care on July 7, 1945. The cause of the death was diagnosed as asphyxia from unknown causes, and two months later she collected the $500 life insurance she had taken out on Robert.

Death of Frank

In 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allied powers at the end of World War II, and Harrelson, Doss’ second husband, was one of the many people who celebrated rather robustly. After an evening of particularly heavy drinking, he raped Doss. The following day, as she was tending her rose garden, Doss discovered Harrelson’s corn whiskey jar buried in the ground. The rape had been the last straw for her, so she took the jar and topped it off with rat poison. Harrelson died a painful death that evening.

Third marriage

Doss met her third husband whilst travelling in Lexington, North Carolina. He was Arlie Lanning and she married him within three days of meeting him through another lonely hearts column. Lanning was in many ways like his predecessor, Harrelson: he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. However, in this marriage, it was Doss who often disappeared for months on end. When she was at home, however, she played a doting housewife, and when her husband died of what was said to be heart failure, the whole town turned up to his funeral in support of her.

Afterwards, the house the couple lived in burned to the ground. It had been left to Lanning’s sister, and had it survived it would have gone to her. As it happened, the insurance money went to Doss, and she quickly banked it. She soon left North Carolina, but only after Lanning’s elderly mother had died in her sleep. She ended up at her sister Dovie’s home. Dovie was bedridden and soon after Doss’s arrival she died.

Fourth marriage

Doss had joined the Diamond Circle Club, looking for another husband. She had met Richard L. Morton of Emporia, Kansas. While he did not have the drinking problem of his predecessors, he was a womanizer. Before she could poison him, she ended up poisoning her mother, Louisa, on January 1953 when she came to live with them. Morton met his death three months later.

Fifth marriage

Doss met and married Samuel Doss, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June 1953. A clean-cut, churchgoing man, he disapproved of the romance novels and stories that Nannie adored. In September, Samuel was admitted to the hospital with flu-like symptoms. The hospital diagnosed a severe digestive tract infection. He was treated and released on October 5. Nannie killed him that evening in her rush to collect the two life insurance policies she had taken out on him. This sudden death alerted his doctor, who ordered an autopsy. The autopsy revealed a huge amount of arsenic in his system. Nannie was promptly arrested.

Confession and conviction

Nannie confessed to killing four of her husbands, her mother, her sister Dovie, her grandson Robert and her mother-in-law, Arlie Lanning’s mother. The state of Oklahoma centered its case only on Samuel Doss. The prosecution found her mentally fit for trial. Nannie pleaded guilty on May 17, 1955, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The state did not pursue the death penalty due to her gender. Doss was never charged with the other deaths. She died of leukemia in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1965.

Kids These Days…

It’s easy with school shootings and rappers spewing profanities and video games promoting carjackings to pine for the good old days when juvenile delinquency meant vandalism or shoplifting.

Of course, we know those good old days never really existed. There have been bad kids for as long as there have been kids and today’s youths are pound-for-pound not much different than their great-grandparents. They only have more weapons and ways to get into trouble. Technology has changed, but morals and ethics really haven’t.

As evidence of this theory, The Malefactor’s Register presents the story of teenage femme fatale Ann Doser who was either a Siren who lured a gang of punks to their doom or a girl looking for adventure who found more than she could handle.

Ann was an 18-year-old girl from Oklahoma City who traveled to Austin Texas in 1944 where she got a job as a “psychopathic nurse” in the Austin State Hospital for a couple of weeks during the summer until she met up with Bill Slusser, 17. She left her job at the hospital and worked for Slusser’s family for the summer and later returned to Oklahoma City.

The following August, she returned to Austin and tried to find work, but a delay in getting the necessary paperwork resulted in Ann becoming a charity case.

At some point while on the public dole in Austin, Ann expressed her desire to head back to Oklahoma City while at the same time hooking up with Bill Slusser, and juvenile delinquents Oma Claunch, 15, and 14-year-old Ernie England.

All three of the boys had prior run-ins with the law, and Slusser had already spent almost a year in a reformatory before the crew burglarized a few houses around Austin.

With Ann eager to head back to Oklahoma City and the boys equally in favor of leaving Austin, where they were known as troublemakers, the gang stole a 1939 Oldsmobile and headed out of town.

Later on, Slusser maintained that he told everyone that stealing the car was a federal offense and could get each of them a five-year prison term and that no one objected.

During one of their burglaries, they had managed to steal a .45 pistol and a hunting knife, but they had to sell the hunting knife for gas.

Their general plan was to get to Oklahoma City, where Ann’s family (her father was cop) was waiting for her. They could sell the car there. They planned to tell her parents that she and Billie Slusser were married, Oma Claunch was his younger brother and Ernie England was a cousin.

Each of the boys would later testify that Ann was a willing participant and generally the leader of the bunch.

At one point, when they ran out of gas, the crew was picked up by a farmer and his wife who bought them five gallons of gasoline and fed them. The boys insisted that Ann wanted to rob the couple despite their hospitality, but that the others refused.

Later, some 20 miles north of Childress, Texas, they stopped at a farmhouse with the intention of burglarizing it, but were interrupted by the owner. Claunch and England swore later than Ann wanted to rob the farmer because he had a good car.

At Sherman, Texas, according to Slusser, Ann wanted to forge a check. Somewhere else along the trip, Dixon and Slusser both testified, Ann wanted to rob a gas station attendant outside Denison.

After the gang arrived in Dennison, they drove around a bit and everyone agreed that Ann helped burglarize a house where they found a .38 pistol and some jewelry. That haul was nice, the group thought, but what they were really looking for was some food, which they did not find.

Driving on, a bad tire on the Olds blew out and the crew was forced to abandon it, having traded the spare for gas a while back on the road from Austin.

A later burglary got them some food and new clothes, but no new car was to be found. According to the boys, Ann said they should hitchhike, and “after getting in with the owner, they should rob him of his money and automobile, strip him naked of his clothes so he could not turn them in until they were four or five miles away.”

Near the Red River bridge, the four fugitives were picked up by former Merchant Marine McGraw Edward Streckenfinger in a rag-top Hudson. Streckenfinger was heading back home to Kansas when he picked up the gang.

When Streckenfinger stopped in Durant for gas, Ann and her gang quickly conferred and agreed on a plan. They decided that Slusser would tap England, who was riding in the front, when it was time to pull out the .45 and the .38 to rob their driver.

Apparently they drove on for some time and although Ann claimed to be asleep when the signal was given, the boys remember that after Claunch asked Streckenfinger to pull over so he could relieve himself and the driver agreed, Ann giggled and was “shushed” by one of the others.

At that point everyone’s testimony diverges and it’s impossible to tell what actually happened.

After Claunch and Streckenfinger returned to the car, “someone” said “a little further up the road,” indicating that the time had come to pull the stick-up. Ann was awake and giggled. Claunch turned sideways and said “now,” but no one did anything for at least a quarter-mile of driving. Claunch then told Streckenfinger to “Pull up. This is a stick up,” but the driver stepped on the accelerator, instead of the brake. “Someone” said “He’s going for a gun!” and Claunch fired twice at Streckenfinger.

Also shortly after “someone” shouted that Streckenfinger was going for his gun, Slusser, armed with the .45 discharged that pistol, shooting out a car window in what he claimed was an attempt to scare the driver.

As the car was traveling about 65 to 70 mph when Streckenfinger was hit, Claunch tried to grab the wheel, as did Ann Doser. England was thrown to the floor, and Slusser, from the back seat, tried to reach for the ignition to turn it off. However, he lost his footing and the .45 went off again, this time hitting Ann in the mouth. The car left the road, at which time Slusser was thrown from the vehicle, and the car came to rest in a field.

Streckenfinger was dead from Claunch’s two shots, Ann was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the face, but no one else was seriously hurt.

Slusser took Streckenfinger’s wallet and divided the cash between himself, England and Claunch — advising them to “get out of the country.” He then said he would take Ann to a hospital.

How Ann Doser survived was a miracle. The bullet entered her mouth, knocked out a couple of teeth, destroyed her upper palate and exited by her left temple.

Streckenfinger was hit by the .45 that passed through Ann’s head, but the shots that killed him apparently came from Claunch’s .38.

The arrests came quickly, for the juveniles had nowhere to flee and no way to get there. Slusser and Claunch pleaded guilty to murder and received life terms, and England was convicted of murder at trial.

Ann Doser went on trial in May 1946, with testimony from her former gang mates, but that trial resulted in a hung jury, for the simple reason that Ann Doser denied everything that the state and her co-conspirators had alleged.

According to her, Slusser proposed marriage, but she said she needed her mother’s permission first. She denied participating in any burglaries or even knowing that the car that took her from Austin was stolen. She admitted that she helped burglarize a home in Denison, but only because she was very hungry.

She claimed no knowledge of a plot to kill Streckenfinger and that she was asleep when the boys murdered him.

The State of Oklahoma retried her later that year and she was convicted. On appeal, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals discussed the “sharp conflict” in the the testimony of the two sides.

“Either the defendant’s accomplices told the truth or they perpetrated one of the most shameful cases of perjury to which a young woman was ever subjected. The record reveals they were vigorous in pressing the case against the defendant. No one can deny that. They asked no quarter and they gave none. …either the defendant told the truth or proved herself one of the most artful fabricators of fiction to confront a jury.”

But appellate courts are rarely, if ever, allowed to second-guess a jury and the Oklahoma appeals court was not about to in this case.

“To weigh the evidence is the responsibility of the jury in any trial,” the judges wrote. “Under such conditions the function of this court, within our power, is to see that the defendant who seeks appellate aid is accorded a fair and impartial trial.”

Ultimately, however, the appeals court reversed Ann’s conviction because the state put her character on trial as part of an effort to prove her willingness to act in conspiracy with the others.

Her accomplices were permitted to testify that “she liked guys with plenty of guts,” and that she wanted to go with Slussler to Houston, Texas, where together they would blackjack soldiers. She would contact them in honkey tonks, toll them outside, and he and Claunch would “highjack” them.

In addition, The state was permitted to offer proof she had been run out of Houston for peddling dope and wanted to organize “a dope gang” in Austin.

Worst of all, perhaps, England was allowed to testify that one time he went to her apartment where “Ann got up and put some clothes on and England saw a man lying across the bed asleep.”

Finally, Slusser testified that he “heard lots of cursing in honky tonks and that Ann was the worst he had ever heard.”

This information had no bearing on the crime spree that resulted in Streckenfinger’s death, and was only used to help shape a picture of her in the jury’s mind, the court held.

The case was sent back for a third trial, but sadly, records of whatever became of Ann Doser are buried in state archives somewhere beyond reach of any but the most hardy researcher.

A Family Torn Apart

To many, it seemed to be a perfect life. Jane and Bob Dorotik had been married for 30 years. But then it all turned sour. In February 2000, Bob disappeared. Early the next morning, his body was found by a mountain road near their home. He had been beaten and strangled.

Three days later police arrested Jane for murder. She claimed she was completely innocent, and said that she loved her husband. But police say she had ample motive. The couple, who had separated and reconciled once, were reportedly not getting along.

But the main motive was money. Police said that Jane worried that if the couple divorced, she would have to pay him almost $50,000 a year in alimony. They said that this would put a crimp in plans to expand her own business, raising and grooming horses.

Police also say there was also ample physical evidence against her. The prosecution claimed that Bob was actually killed in the couple’s house, and then dumped on the road. Detectives say they found “massive” amounts of blood in the couple’s bedroom.

But many people close to Jane, including her daughter Claire, insist Jane is innocent and believe the real killer remains at large. Jane’s attorneys came up with an unusual way to defend their client – and their strategy tears the family apart.

After deliberating for four days, the jury found Jane Dorotik guilty of first-degree murder.

As for Jane’s daughter – the verdict officially ended speculation that Claire, not her mom, killed Bob Dorotik. But it didn’t answer all the questions. Some, including the judge in the case, suggested that Claire may have been involved.

Jane was sentenced to serve 25 years to life in prison.

Jane Marguerite Dorotik is an American-born woman who is serving a 25 year-to-life sentence at the California Institution for Women in Corona, California for the February 2000 murder of her husband, Bob. Many people however believe that Jane is innocent of the murder and that Jane’s daughter Claire, who was 24 at the time, was the actual culprit.

Background

At the time of Bob’s murder, he and his wife Jane Dorotik had been married for 30 years and had 3 children. Jane was a successful businesswoman and health care executive, and on her income, the Dorotik family had been able to purchase a ranch in Valley Center, California. However, the couple had been experiencing marital difficulties in the years leading up to Bob’s death. A large contributing factor to this was the amount of money Jane and her daughter Claire spent on their horses. Shortly before his death, Bob had filed for divorce from Jane, which meant that Jane, who made significantly more money than her husband, would have to pay Bob 40 percent of her salary in alimony, which was almost $50,000 per year. The couple had briefly separated, but later reconciled and moved into a new home. In addition, the couple had recently taken out life insurance policies on each other.

Crime and Investigation

On the afternoon of February 13, 2000, Jane Dorotik reported her husband Bob, 55, missing. She claimed to police that he had gone for a jog several hours earlier and had not returned. The next morning, Bob’s body was found beaten to death several miles away on the roadside. Police immediately began to suspect his estranged wife Jane of the crime.

Evidence in the case quickly amounted. At the scene, police noticed there were three different tire tracks, and they were able to match the tracks back to Jane’s Ford F-250. Also, in the couple’s bedroom, police found a staggering amount of blood which someone had attempted to clean up. Before the results of the blood evidence was even returned, Bob’s wife Jane was charged with first-degree murder and was placed in the San Diego County Jail, but she eventually made bail.

Pre-Trial

Jane Dorotik’s murder trial began in May 2001 one year after the murder of her husband. She had already pled not guilty to the crime, and had already made public appeals proclaiming her innocence.

Before the trial began, Jane’s adult daughter Claire had been incriminated in the crime. As a matter of fact, Jane’s own defense attorneys had pointed to her as the killer. At a pre-trial hearing, Claire decided to plead the fifth; she did not testify at her mother’s murder trial, asserting her right against self-incrimination. Jane’s sister Bonnie Long, and a ranch hand named Leonel Morales, also invoked their Fifth Amendment rights.

Verdict and Aftermath

Jane’s murder jury deliberated her fate for more than four days. On June 13, 2001, her jury announced that Jane was guilty of the charged crime of first-degree murder,

Jane has made several attempts to appeal her murder conviction on the bases of ineffective assistance of counsel and failure to do DNA testing. All of her appeals have been denied, and barring a successful appeal, she will be in prison until at least the year 2025.

Claire Dorotik, who was implicated in her father’s murder and according to a 2011 interview with Paula Zahn, still harbors public suspicion, is now a psychotherapist specializing in equine therapy. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado and writes to her mother in prison.

Jane Dorotik gets 25 to life for murder

VISTA — A Superior Court judge on Thursday sentenced Jane Dorotik, a Valley Center woman convicted of killing her husband, to 25 years to life in prison after denying a last-ditch effort by her attorney to secure a new trial.

Judge Joan Weber said testimony given last week by a new defense witness was fatally flawed and even if a jury believed the woman, it was not enough to overcome extensive evidence presented at trial.

The judge also denied a defense request to delay her ruling while attorneys pursued a new lead. Weber said the witnesses the defense was seeking could only point to other people having a role in the murder, not contradict evidence against Dorotik.

“We will probably never know all the parties who had a role in aiding and abetting before and after the fact of the murder,” Weber said. “The fact remains there is substantial circumstantial evidence tying the defendant to this crime beyond a reasonable doubt.

“How could she get her own husband’s blood on her hands if she was not involved in the homicide?” Weber asked.

A key piece of evidence in the trial was a syringe with Dorotik’s fingerprint in her husband’s blood.

Before she was sentenced, Dorotik maintained her innocence and asked the prosecution to have investigators continue to search for the true killer.

“I loved my husband,” she said. “I still love my husband. This has not been justice that’s served here.”

Dorotik, 54, was convicted in June for beating and strangling her husband, Robert Dorotik, in their bedroom, then dumping his body along his favorite running path a few miles away from the horse ranch they rented.

His body was found on Feb. 14, 2000, one day after Jane Dorotik reported him missing.

Prosecutors contend that Jane Dorotik murdered her husband to prevent him from receiving 40 percent of her income if the couple divorced. Robert Dorotik had filed for divorce in 1997, but the couple later reconciled.

After the sentencing, Jane Dorotik fought back tears as she hugged her defense attorneys, Kerry Steigerwalt and Cole Casey. Steigerwalt said he will file an appeal within the next two weeks.

Outside the courtroom, prosecutor Bonnie Howard-Regan said she was sure the right person was sentenced for the murder and she was frustrated by defense attempts to delay the sentencing.

“We’ve already found the truth. We have no doubts about that,” Howard-Regan said, adding she was anxious to call the Dorotiks’ two sons, who testified against their mother at trial.

“They want some closure,” she said. “They will always know their mother killed their father. I’m just glad it’s over.”

Steigerwalt said he will still try to track down two witnesses he believes can match testimony presented at trial.

A man called a homicide detective Wednesday to say he visited a Valley Center store the day Robert Dorotik’s body was found. There, he was told by a third person about two men who said that the day before, they saw two Latino men with a white man slumped in between them parked in a black truck near where the body was recovered.

Defense witness Lisa Marie Singh told jurors about a nearly identical sighting at the end of the trial.

Prosecutors argued that even if the two men could be found, their testimony was irrelevant because blood evidence ties Jane Dorotik to the murder scene in the house and a witness saw her driving the truck that is an exact match to tire prints found where the body was dumped.

The judge agreed. She called the search for the two men a “fishing expedition” and denied Steigerwalt’s request to have more time to check out the story.

Weber also dismissed the testimony of Sheri Newton, who said she saw the victim jogging near the area where his body was found the next day and only moments before she was nearly hit by a black truck.

Steigerwalt had based his motion for a new trial on Newton’s testimony, saying it backed up Singh’s testimony. Newton came forward after jurors were already in deliberation and the judge refused at the time to reopen the case.

“It’s unfortunate that it ends here,” said Steigerwalt. But, he called the judge’s discussion about other people possibly being involved in the murder a step forward.

“All along we’ve maintained there was more to this than Jane Dorotik being the killer,” he said.

Bonnie Long, who has steadfastly maintained her sister Jane Dorotik’s innocence, said the family was devastated by the sentencing.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “I know he wasn’t killed in the bedroom. I know we came out of there with a lot of questions unanswered.”

The UK was rocked when 45 year old Fiona Donnison showed up in front of local authorities to confess that she had killed her two small children and was turning herself in. Police in Heathfied, Sussex thought that the woman was intoxicated when she arrived at their offices. Suspicion was raised when they noticed the cuts on her wrists.

Fiona Donnison smothered her three year old son and two year old daughter, as a way to pay their father back for leaving her. When he began another relationship with an old school friend, Donnison showed up at the lover’s home to warn that he would never see the children again. She suffocated the children, placed them each in a duffel bag and placed them in the trunk of her car. She turned herself in later on that evening.

After her incarceration, it came to light that Fiona may have also been the cause of the death of the couple’s first child, Mia, when the infant was nine months old. It was originally believed that the child died from what is known as “cot death”; the equivalent of America’s SIDS. After re-examination, Fiona Donnison was charged with the death of the infant, in addition to the other 2 deaths. It was alleged that to strike back at her lover for attending a function for his ex-wife, Fionna smothered the child. A judge later dismissed the additional charges. Donnison was convicted of 2 counts of murder and sentenced to 32 years in jail.

Woman who smothered her two toddlers in jealous rage may have killed her baby girl years earlier

Boy, three, and girl, two, were smothered to death to spite their father

A mother found guilty of murdering her two young children to get back at their father may have killed another child years earlier, it emerged yesterday.

Fiona Donnison, 45, was found guilty of suffocating Harry, three, and Elise, two, after a bitter split from their father Paul.

She used them as the ‘ultimate weapon’ to take revenge on her former partner for ‘rejecting’ her and starting a new relationship with an old school friend.

But yesterday as she was jailed for life for the murders, it emerged that police also believe she may have killed the couple’s first child, Mia, who died aged nine months.

When detectives found the bodies of Harry and Elise in the boot of her car, they re-examined the circumstances of Mia’s death in 2004.

At the time, a post-mortem examination determined that she had died from cot death, but Donnison was charged with her murder last year.

It was alleged the former City insurance manager smothered the baby because she was furious with her partner for attending his ex-wife’s birthday party.

In a distressing 999 call, she was heard screaming down the phone, before calmly saying: ‘She’s not moving at all. Her eyes are completely shut. Oh no. What have I done?’

A judge dismissed the charge because of a lack of evidence, and the jury trying Harry and Elise’s murders were never told she had been charged.

Whatever the truth of Mia’s death, it had the effect of keeping the couple together. Mr Donnison was sharing a house with his ex-wife Linda and two older children, but after Mia’s death he moved in with Donnison in 2005 because he wanted to help her with such an ‘extraordinary loss’.

Yesterday, as she was jailed for two life sentences, with a minimum of 32 years, Judge Mr Justice Nicol described the murders as ‘deliberate and wicked acts’.

He said: ‘The premature end of such young lives would have been a tragedy, but this was
no accident. You killed them – you, who were their mother.’

Donnison’s defence was always that she was mad, not bad. She went to great lengths to try to convince the police, her family, and the courts that she had lost her mind and had no memory of what she had done.

But at the heart of this case was a cold-blooded killer who, once she had lost control over the man she loved, was hell-bent on the ultimate revenge.

In an emotional address on the steps of the court, Mr Donnison, 48, called for the death penalty while criticising the criminal justice system, saying he had fewer rights than his children’s killer.

‘Taking a life is the most obscene act that anyone can commit, which in my view should receive an equal punishment,’ he said. ‘The pain and agony my family and I have suffered over the last year and a half over the murder of my beautiful children, Harry and Elise, has been almost unbearable.

‘The lives of these two beautiful, innocent and wonderful babies were taken from them in a most horrible and disgusting way. They did not stand a chance. The saddest thing today is that they will not grow older and enjoy their lives.’

Mr Donnison, who was questioned at length by defence counsel over his relationship with old schoolfriend Alison Shimmens, said he often felt that he was the one on trial, while Donnison was treated with ‘kid gloves’.

He said: ‘The horror of having to live with the murder of Harry and Elise was compounded by the clear ability of their murderer, despite admitting to the killings and being detained, to have more rights and considerations than I have.’

Paul Donnison was working as an insurance underwriter at a Lloyds syndicate in London when he met Fiona. Both were married at the time with two children each, but what started as a platonic friendship moved to something more.

Fiona Donnison, who left school at 18 and worked in Spain as a nanny for five years before landing her high-powered job as a credit manager, became pregnant in the first months of their relationship and gave birth to Mia in 2003.

The baby’s death less than a year later brought the couple closer together but by all accounts she pulled the strings in their relationship.

The couple never married, but Donnison changed her name by deed poll. By January last year, Mr Donnison had had enough of her jealousy and manipulative behaviour and broke off the relationship.

Lewes Crown Court was told that Donnison then used Harry and Elise as the ‘ultimate and final weapon’ to get back at him for starting a new relationship with Miss Shimmens.

After she smothered the toddlers at her rented house in Lightwater, Surrey, on January 26 last year, she put their bodies in two sports holdalls in the boot of their car. She then drove 90 miles to Heathfield, East Sussex, armed with two kitchen knives and stopped to buy sleeping pills on the way. She expected Mr Donnison to be at the marital home, but he was spending the night with Miss Shimmens.

Several hours later she walked into a police station saying she had murdered her children.

Mr Donnison’s brother, Mark, 46, said the family believed it was her original plan to either kill Paul and blame the children’s death on him, or frame him for the murders.

He added: ‘Paul will never get over this. He is absolutely devastated. Those children were his life and now he will never see them grow up. Everything has been taken away from him.’

BRIGHTEST’ LIGHTS IN FATHER’S LIFE

With their cute smiles and loving nature, little Harry and Elise Donnison were every inch the ‘brightest’ lights that their father described.

Paul Donnison said after the tragedy that he could not comprehend how their mother could have killed them, and told of how he had been looking forward to seeing them grow up.

In a statement issued after their deaths, he said: ‘Harry and Elise were the lights that shone the brightest in my life and I am unable to begin to comprehend why this has happened to them.

‘I love them with all my heart and they in turn gave me the unconditional love that only a child can give a parent.

‘Every day that I saw them was precious and wonderful but I had no idea just how precious.

‘They were only babies and I was looking forward to watching them grow up and, with their mum, help them to live their lives.’

During their mother Fiona Donnison’s trial, prosecutors said the pair were ‘described by everyone who knew them as delightful, well-mannered, affectionate children’.

During his own evidence, Mr Donnison told jurors he ‘couldn’t have been happier’ when Harry and Elise were born in 2006 and 2008 respectively.

He said Harry was a typical naughty toddler, describing him as a ‘pickle’.

When he was too much of a handful he would be made to sit on the ‘naughty step’ at the bottom of the stairs where he could be seen from most of the downstairs rooms of the house.

But he denied accusations made against him by the defendant that he had once grabbed Harry after he refused to eat his dinner and held his face by his chin in order to make him say the word sorry, and said he was never banished to his bedroom for long periods of time as their mother claimed.

Describing how he last saw the children in Meadowside, the family home, Mr Donnison’s voice broke as he told jurors: ‘Harry was in his pyjamas and he came over and wrapped his little arms around me and we hugged and I gave him the toy and I was kneeling down.

‘He had his arms around my shoulders and my neck and I was cuddling him.

‘And Fiona was standing two or three feet away with a look of absolute hatred and evil on her face. Harry was then shooed back into his bedroom.

‘That was the last time I saw him alive.

‘I then went to Elise’s bedroom and she was peacefully asleep. I gave her a peck on the cheek, she just wiggled her nose.

‘She didn’t wake. And that was the last time I saw Elise.’

Jenny Woodhouse, the director of Huffle Nursery in Heathfield, also became emotional as she spoke of the children.

Harry and Elise had attended the nursery school since they were both very young.

She said: ‘They were lovely children. They were very well-behaved children.

‘We had a huge input with him. We saw a lot of Harry in particular and in the end Elise as well so the staff were very involved with their early years.

‘Harry was a very, very quiet baby, but when he got a little older he was a much more open child.’