The Contract Killer and the Millionaire's Wife
Maggie
skip the middle part, but be sure to read the end where the Houston case from
the first few paragraphs is discussed. From the Washington Post:
The Hit Maker
By Paul Duggan
HOUSTON -- They sat in a hotel room in the swankiest part of town, the
millionaire's wife and the contract killer, the wife rambling in disgust about
her husband, the hit man listening, ever patient.
He'd heard it all before. So many desperate or greedy spouses had poured out
their domestic frustrations to him over the years while soliciting his services
-- offering insurance money, jewelry, even sex, in exchange for widowhood --
that the hit man couldn't remember all their names.
"I want away from him," the wife said of her husband. "I just want to be with
Derek."
Derek was her new boyfriend. He was rich, too, or so she thought.
"I want to be free to marry him," said the woman. The husband she said she
wanted to be rid of, businessman William Smiley Kilroy Jr., 34, is heir to an
oil and gas fortune, the only son of Jeanie Kilroy, a Houston society grande
dame and one of the city's most prominent cultural benefactors.
That meeting last October now haunts 39-year-old Lynn Kilroy. Hours after her
parley with the hit man in a hotel suite secretly wired for sound and video,
she was charged with solicitation of capital murder, punishable by five years
to life in prison. She has pleaded not guilty and faces a trial here this week
in a case seemingly scripted for daytime television -- a soap opera of
adulterous trysts and back-stabbing paramours, set in Houston's finest
neighborhoods, featuring a family of great wealth torn by loathing and
suspicion.
Playing the part of the hit man was a 54-year-old undercover cop named Gary
Johnson. Investigating murder solicitation plots and posing as a killer for
hire is his full-time job, a busy specialty in Harris County, population 3.4
million. His beat is rife with big-money schemers and low-rent dreamers, many
of whom, to their regret, have made the hit man's acquaintance.
In the last dozen years, working for the Harris County district attorney's
office, Johnson has posed as a contract killer in about 100 meetings like the
one with Lynn Kilroy. About 55 of those meetings led to murder solicitation
charges against more than 60 people -- housewives, barflies, business owners,
burger flippers, pencil pushers, an Elvis impersonator, even a church pianist
who wanted the choir director dead.
His clients are a rogues' gallery of the homicidal harebrained living in and
around America's fourth-largest city.
An offshore oil worker, for example, hired Johnson to kill his wife for
insurance money by slitting her wrists in a phony suicide -- so he could later
sue a psychiatrist for malpractice.
"Sometimes I want to slap them," says Johnson. "I want to say, 'What are you
thinking?' "
His job has taught him many dismal lessons, including a lesson about trust that
he says is illustrated more vividly by the Kilroy affair than by any other case
in his strange career.
"I only trust dead people and my enemies, because I know where they stand,"
says Johnson, a lanky, unassuming fellow who is at once bemused by the world
and weary of it. Usually, he says, it's your friends, relatives, colleagues and
the people you sleep with "who'll sneak up and cut you."
Johnson, thrice divorced, says his off-duty world is "quiet and simple." He
enjoys gardening and classical music, has a master's degree in psychology,
teaches a night course in human sexuality at a community college and shares a
three-bedroom house with his cats, Id and Ego, in a suburb called Humble.
He describes his professional life, on the other hand, as "something right out
of a cheap novel, badly written" and says his meeting with Lynn Kilroy was just
another day at the office.
She was far wealthier than anyone Johnson had dealt with previously, his
clientele being mainly middle-income and blue-collar. And the web of treachery
in her case was thicker than any the hit man had encountered before. But
otherwise, he says, "it was the same old story. The rich want more, the poor
want more. We all want more. Too much is never enough."
They met in the sitting room of a 10th-floor Doubletree suite, above the power
restaurants and high-ticket fashion boutiques of Houston's Galleria district,
Johnson in workaday slacks and an oxford shirt, looking more like a balding
high school math teacher than Hollywood's notion of a contract killer. Early in
his career, the hit man often went with a denim-and-leather biker get-up, but
now he disdains elaborate disguises, considering them amateurish and
unnecessary.
"Getting paid to kill people is just too easy," he says. "You don't need to
walk around with a long black coat and a silencer and a briefcase full of cash
and all that crap."
He says he succeeds despite his somewhat bookish appearance because, as a rule,
people who solicit his services are not overly gifted with common sense. Plus,
he says, their powers of perception are almost always narrowed by "tunnel
vision" about what they want done.
Lynn Kilroy, product of a middle-class upbringing, has a master's degree in
business. She met William Kilroy, who goes by Billy, while working for one of
his companies, an investment management firm. She had been married to him for
little more than a year when she took up with a new boyfriend, Derek
Hartsfield.
She told the hit man to decide how to dispose of her husband.
"I don't want to know about it," she said.
"Okay, I understand that," Johnson replied. But with hidden recorders running,
he wanted her voice on tape acknowledging that they were talking about murder.
"The only way you're going to be free is if he's dead," the hit man said. "I
just want you to understand how serious this is."
"Do what you need to do," she told him.
Johnson got the Kilroy job through a referral, which is how he gets nearly all
his work.
He says people who want other people dead but have no idea where to find a hit
man commonly make the mistake of asking for advice, turning to private eyes,
bail bondsmen, dive bartenders, an ex-con friend of a friend -- anyone who they
think may know someone who knows a contract killer. It's a classic blunder,
Johnson says, because private eyes, ex-cons, bartenders, bondsmen, bouncers,
strippers, hookers and others frequently tip the police about murder
solicitations and agree to cooperate in stings.
In Harris County, local police forces were told by prosecutors long ago not to
conduct murder-for-hire stings on their own but to refer such informants to the
district attorney's office, where there's a seasoned hit man standing by to
take their calls. Johnson says that since 1989, he has investigated about 300
reports of people seeking contract killers, and about 100 of the reports turned
out to be serious enough to warrant undercover meetings, in which informants
introduced him to the suspects.
"It's very much tied to the economy," says Johnson, who projects a steady
growth in murder solicitations in the months ahead. The ripple effect of
recession reaches his industry, too. Businesses falter, partners fight, incomes
vanish, marriages crumble, misery becomes madness, and Johnson has to work
overtime. He remembers a long period during the bull market when ordinary
consumer demand dried up and "all I was doing was killing witnesses." But now
his phone is ringing at all hours.
Before a meeting, the hit man concocts a "legend" for himself -- a cover story
fed to the suspect by the informant. The phony profile varies from case to
case, but Johnson generally is cast as an amoral loner with a misspent past who
has a legitimate job (a laborer, a truck driver) and does contract killings on
the side.
He'll meet you in the Galleria Doubletree or a fleabag motel near the county
line, in a bowling alley or the back booth of a honky-tonk; he'll join you on
the deck of your motorboat or on a bench outside your high school; he'll sit
beside you in your Cadillac or in the kitchenette of your double-wide. He'll
listen to your dreams or your problems and promise to make everything good.
And because you are fixated on what you want done, all he needs besides a
legend is a subtle note of menace in his voice, which he has perfected.
And because you are desperate to believe, you will believe: He'll kill your
abusive husband or your heavily insured wife or the ex-spouse who just left you
penniless in a divorce. He'll shoot, stab, strangle, bomb. He'll kill the
business partner you caught embezzling or the partner who caught you. He'll
make it an accident, a suicide, a disappearance, a mugging or burglary gone
awry. He'll kill the key witness in your pending murder trial or the boss who
refused you a raise or the jock who's dating the cheerleader you like.
The hit man is the light at the end of your tunnel vision.
The First Hit
Johnson, who grew up on a farm, joined the district attorney's office in 1982
after a decade as an undercover narcotics officer with small police forces in
Louisiana and Texas. At first he did mostly routine investigative work, helping
prosecutors prepare for trials. Then one day in 1989 a tip came in about a lab
technician at a Houston paper company who had married her boss a few months
earlier and wanted him dead. Johnson happened to be in the office and caught
the case.
"Kathy Scott," he says wistfully. "She was my first."
Before their meeting, the hit man rehearsed a snake-mean disposition to go with
his outlaw biker duds. But Scott, then 37, turned out to be nothing like the
cautious dope dealers he had done business with in his career. As they sat in
her car outside a bowling alley, she seemed utterly unwary, focused only on her
husband, who was worth a lot to her dead -- about $250,000 in insurance money,
real estate and other assets. She surprised the hit man by doing most of the
talking.
Scott proposed a slaying that looked like a common street crime. She gave
Johnson a $100 down payment on the $2,500 hit and got 80 years in prison.
He caught a few more cases. Then came a 1991 tabloid sensation that he had
nothing to do with -- the murder solicitation arrest of "Pompom Mom" Wanda
Holloway. Eager for her daughter to win a spot on the cheerleading squad at a
Houston area junior high school, Holloway allegedly plotted to distract her
daughter's rival by having the girl's mother killed. She eventually pleaded no
contest and spent six months behind bars in a case that was a nightmare for
prosecutors, largely because police mishandled the sting.
Casey O'Brien, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Holloway, recalls
that "after the cheerleader case, we put the word out" to all police forces in
Harris County: Henceforth, Gary Johnson would be the county's official contract
killer. All murder solicitation tips were to be referred to him.
O'Brien, who is prosecuting the Kilroy case, says there's a fine line between
overdoing and underplaying the role. Johnson manages it expertly, convincing
people he's a stone killer without frightening them. He is a gifted
conversationalist, O'Brien says, a patient listener skillful at channeling his
clients' often rambling discourses in the direction he wants them to go,
without violating entrapment law by cajoling or enticing them into deals.
Of the 60-plus people charged with soliciting the hit man's services, the vast
majority were convicted or pleaded guilty, and many got long prison terms.
"I tell people I work in human resources," says Johnson, who keeps a mental
list of some of his Greatest Hits, cases involving coldbloodedness so flagrant
that even Johnson was taken aback.
Bobby Wigley was charged in one such case. A drugstore clerk with a wife and a
9-month-old son, Wigley nursed a fantasy that grew to an obsession: He dreamed
of going to private-detective school; he longed to drive a Dodge Viper; he
yearned for exotic guns. The clerk wanted a future as a dashing man of mystery,
and for that he needed money.
"I'm just a greedy [expletive], that's all it boils down to," Wigley told the
hit man on Jan. 6, 2000, as they plotted the murders of his wife and baby.
Wigley, then 32, figured his ticket to a thrilling life was an insurance check:
$650,000 if his wife's death was ruled an accident. They decided on a
slip-and-fall sham in which Johnson would break the wife's neck and leave her
body in the family bathtub.
"But killing the kid, it's going to be hard for two accidents to happen," the
hit man told Wigley. The father thought it over for a minute, then told Johnson
to let the boy live -- and not to worry about him crying while his mother was
being murdered. "He'll sleep through the whole [expletive] thing," said Wigley,
who advanced Johnson $250 for the $5,000 hit. Now he's doing 15 years.
Before Wigley, Johnson couldn't recall a cash customer offering him as much as
$5,000. Once he was offered a $22,000 speedboat, but normally his fees run in
the low four figures. In 1993, a high school computer whiz named Shawn Quinn
told Johnson he wanted a romantic rival slain, and he gave the hit man three $1
bills and seven Atari video games for the job.
"You want a $3 killing?" said the hit man, nonplused.
Quinn handed him a fistful of coins, making it a $5.30 killing, and said to
look at the bright side.
"If you drive back on the toll road, you won't need to get change."
Frustration
In a windowless office down a back corridor in the 20-story Harris County
Criminal Justice Center, Johnson relaxes at his desk, sharing a hit man's take
on human nature.
"I'm not a cynic," he likes to say.
"It's just . . . people are . . .
"It's all about frustration," he says. Whether consumed by greed or anguish,
jealousy or rage, hatred or desire, "the people I meet have gone through
everything in their minds, trying to think of some way to solve their problems
or get what they want. They've gone over it and over it, and they're so
frustrated, their cognitive abilities are severely reduced. Because there's
just no damn answer."
Except murder.
"They couldn't imagine doing it themselves," he says. But that's not a problem.
"We live in a society where you can get anything done for you. You don't have
to mow your yard. You don't have to fix your car. You don't have to clean your
house. Whatever you want done, you pick up the phone and there's someone out
there who'll do it for you. That's the way we've learned to think."
And the Kilroy case?
"No different," says the hit man. "I got decent money for a change, that's
all."
At the Doubletree, he and Lynn Kilroy went over details of her husband's
routine, including the location of the cigar bar that Billy Kilroy liked to
frequent after work.
"I could just wait for him to leave there and follow him," Johnson suggested.
"Really?"
"That'll be the best way," he said.
She smiled. "That would be really neat."
Billy and Lynn Kilroy shared a 15-room home in the city's Tanglewood section,
two blocks from former president George Bush. Billy Kilroy's mother, Jeanie,
widow of an oil and gas tycoon and a fixture of the Houston Chronicle's society
column, lives in neighboring River Oaks, in a $5 million home not far from her
dear friend Robert A. Mosbacher, the former commerce secretary.
Lynn Kilroy told Johnson that her husband was driving her "nuts." But she said
she feared that in a divorce, he would use his family's wealth and influence to
win custody of their daughter, then 6 months old. She said she and Hartsfield,
31, planned to jet to Brazil for a lovers' getaway later that week. The hit man
said he'd do the job while she was gone.
"You're going to be a widow," he assured her.
Then she could marry Hartsfield, whom she had known for just four days. Their
affair had been a whirlwind of trysts, starting with sex in his limo on the
afternoon they first met.
Hartsfield's family was at least as wealthy as her husband's, or so Lynn Kilroy
had been led to believe. Unlike her husband, Hartsfield wasn't afflicted with
cerebral palsy. He didn't walk with forearm crutches, he wasn't forgetful, he
didn't need help with his hygiene. Hartsfield didn't drive her "wacky." He was
exciting to be with, not a chore to care for.
She had no idea that her new boyfriend, in truth, was an ex-cop from a Dallas
suburb hired by Jeanie Kilroy as a spy and paid well to kiss and tell.
In the weeks before she met Hartsfield, Lynn Kilroy had fumed bitterly about
her husband during evening strolls with a neighbor along Tanglewood Boulevard.
The neighbor, fearing that Lynn was on the verge of homicide, warned Jeanie
Kilroy that her only son was in danger. The 68-year-old socialite later said in
a deposition that she had a low opinion of her daughter-in-law, whom she
considered a gold digger, and that the neighbor's warning greatly alarmed her.
Hartsfield was introduced to Jeanie Kilroy by a mutual friend as someone with
law enforcement experience who could help her. The socialite paid him $73,310
for his four days of service, which Hartsfield described in a deposition. He
said he was instructed to get close to Lynn Kilroy "to determine whether or not
she was trying to kill her husband," and "if these discussions came up, report
it to the police."
He got very close to her very fast. The Tanglewood neighbor, helping with the
scheme, arranged a lunch at the Palm, where she introduced Hartsfield to Lynn
Kilroy as an old friend from Atlanta, a scion of a wealthy family who was
visiting Houston. The two hit it off. Within a few hours, they were in the back
seat of Hartsfield's rented limo, having sex as the chauffeur cruised aimlessly
through the city.
Jeanie Kilroy said she kept the scheme a secret from her son because "he
wouldn't have believed what was going on." He has since filed for divorce and
has custody of his daughter.
On the second night of the affair Hartsfield told a private eye who was posing
as his bodyguard to covertly videotape the couple's evening of hotel sex and
pillow talk, in which they discussed the possibility of arranging Billy
Kilroy's demise. Hartsfield lied, telling Lynn Kilroy that he knew someone who
handled such jobs, and she replied, "I'd go for it." After that chat and
similar ones, Hartsfield went to the district attorney's office, saying he knew
a woman who wanted to hire a killer.
When an informant tips police about somebody shopping for a hit man, Johnson
acts quickly, before the person winds up finding a real murderer. Hours after
being briefed on the Kilroy family machinations by Hartsfield and others,
Johnson met Lynn Kilroy at the Doubletree. He posed as a shadowy fixer out of
Dallas who did dirty work for Hartsfield's supposedly rich and powerful father.
Lynn Kilroy's attorneys acknowledge that she fumed about her husband to the
Tanglewood neighbor, that she and Hartsfield had a sexual affair and that she
solicited the hit man's services. And they say Johnson acted properly during
the meeting.
The lawyers, Michael Ramsey and Chip Lewis, say they'll base their client's
defense on the "outrageous" duplicity by Hartsfield that occurred before she
got to the Doubletree. They say she should be spared criminal liability because
Hartsfield unfairly beguiled and manipulated her.
Kilroy, who is free on $100,000 bail and living far from Houston, was so
miserable in her 13-month marriage, and so desperate to end it without losing
custody of her baby, that she often couldn't think straight, the attorneys say.
As a result, they say, she gave in to the idea of having her husband murdered
after Hartsfield proposed the plan and made it sound easy.
But Hartsfield, in his deposition, said Lynn Kilroy needed no urging: "Oh, she
made it plainly obvious to me that she wanted Billy dead."
When the defense lawyers got copies of the prosecution's videotape of the
Doubletree sting, they were almost certain whom they would see on the TV screen
with their client.
"The man's been on more video than Bill Cosby," Ramsey says of Johnson.
Lewis had been an assistant district attorney and prosecuted some of Johnson's
cases. "Anyone who knows him will tell you he's as nice a guy as you'll ever
meet," Lewis says. "I mean, I would trust Gary with my loved ones in any
situation. And yet he'll meet someone for the first time, and within 10 minutes
they're absolutely convinced he'll commit a capital crime for them in [Texas],
the death penalty haven of the world."
Show Me the Money
Eased back on a couch in the hotel suite, the hit man ran his game to the end.
"All right," he told Lynn Kilroy, "I want the money."
Though Johnson usually insists on being paid, he doesn't care how much. Any
payment is evidence, so he'll take whatever you're willing to give.
"This will knock your lights off," Lynn Kilroy said. She reached into a diaper
bag and pulled out jewelry worth about $200,000 retail, including a large
diamond ring and a necklace of platinum and pearls. She promised to give the
hit man $50,000 more in cash before she left for Brazil later in the week.
Johnson was impressed.
"You don't really like your husband," said the hit man.
"No, I don't."
He inspected the jewelry and knew his work was done, but he stayed in character
as the meeting wound down. Johnson rarely carries a gun, and from his earliest
days in law enforcement, he has felt awkward arresting people. In a
murder-for-hire case, backup officers take care of the handcuffing and
rights-reading part of the sting after he is gone.
And he was in a hurry to leave that night -- he was running late for the
college class he teaches.
He urged Lynn Kilroy to be cautious. Once her husband was in the ground and
their business finished, he said, "I don't ever want to see you again."
"I don't know you," she replied.
"And don't tell anybody," the hit man warned.
She thought that was funny.
"Duhhh! I'm not going to talk."
Maggie
"The same people always urging us to not blame the victim in rape cases are now
saying Uncle Sam wore a short skirt and asked for it." -- Jonathan Alter
KBELL12345
DedNdogYrs
suburb called Humble.>
A man living in a three bedroom house all by himself? I can't help wonder if
his ex-wives share a one bedroom apartment with two or three kids. (I wonder if
each of his two cats have their own bedrooms.)
Dogs & children first.
DedNdogYrs
attempted murderers got.
Dogs & children first.
crosem
I only skimmed the article, but I didn't see anything about his having
any children at all. Did I miss that?
Policemen have a very high rate of divorce.
Humble is not the fanciest town in the world.
With his experience, he would make a pretty good salary.
Perhaps his ex-wives are quite capable of supporting themselves; Texas
is a no-alimony, community property state, so whatever he was due to
pay, he has paid and/or is paying. Didn't see a mention of child
support.
>
>
>
> Dogs & children first.
Anne Warfield
--
Anne Warfield
indigoace at goodsol period com
http://www.goodsol.com/cats/