[Veysey] Burning suspicions
Anne Warfield
convicted, BTW). Here's more about that case, and the detective
involved. From the Peoria [IL] Journal Star--
Burning suspicions
Finding clues among ashes and charred remains, a small-town detective
follows his instincts
November 11, 2002
By SHARON COHEN
of the Associated Press
CARY - The scent of charred wood hung in the frosty air as Detective
Ron Delelio stepped around pools of standing water and holes where
flames had eaten away the floor boards.
Burned furniture, clothing and toys were everywhere - a family's
worldly possessions fried into an amorphous mess. Somewhere a
generator was humming. A contractor was surveying the fire damage.
Near the foot of the basement stairs in what had been John Veysey's
home, Delelio spotted something that stopped him cold. A smoke
detector hung open without a battery.
Then nearby, mixed in a pile of clothing, he saw a 9-volt battery.
Delelio wasn't taking written notes. But an experienced cop always
makes mental notes, and the empty smoke detector got a page all to
itself.
It came on top of tips from callers to the police station only hours
after the fire the previous day.
Most were anonymous. People who knew John T. Veysey III didn't like
him and they told Delelio some very intriguing things:
His first wife died mysteriously.
He didn't seem to work, yet he lived comfortably.
He collected big insurance payouts.
In 15 years as a cop, Delelio had developed a theory about police
work: 98 percent is common sense. And common sense told him Veysey,
this seemingly respectable family man, was a fraud and a liar.
Maybe something even worse.
Proving it would be hard work. Delelio was used to that.
He'd grown up outside Chicago, one of 13 children in a family that
struggled to get by. Their three-bedroom home in rural Wonder Lake was
so crowded that some kids slept on the living room floor.
At 11, Delelio was washing dishes in a pizza parlor. He dropped out of
high school but later got a college degree. His dream was to be a
policeman, like his grandfather.
If you wanted something, he'd learned, there was one way to get it:
hard work. What he wanted now was to find out what really happened in
that fire.
---
When Deserie Veysey woke up in the hospital four days after the High
Road inferno, she had no memory of it, no sense of how close she had
come to dying.
As she looked around, she saw her mother, Irene Beetle; her husband,
John; her 8-month-old daughter, Sabrina; her sister, Denise; her
father-in-law, Tom Veysey.
And her stepson, Little John. He was there, too. He was OK.
Both had suffered smoke inhalation and were treated in hyperbaric
chambers, which increase oxygen levels and help the body eliminate
smoke-borne toxins.
Deserie was accustomed to hospitals, having undergone repeated
surgeries through childhood to correct a birth defect that left her
nose misshapen.
She was hoarse now from tubes inserted in her throat, and she hurt
from severe burns on her leg, hand and face. Her whole body felt taut
and stretched. Bits of melted carpet still clung to her fingertips.
But she was breathing. She was alive.
How had she gotten here? What had happened?
John was the hero, her father-in-law kept saying. It was John, he
said, who saved them all.
John told her she had discovered the fire when she got up in the
middle of the night, threw him a fire extinguisher - which turned out
not to work - and struggled in vain to crank open a window.
Then, he said, he took a running jump and plunged through the
double-glass window, landing in the snow nine feet below. He called it
a "Ninja roll."
He caught Sabrina when Deserie lowered her through the broken window,
he said, but then couldn't get back inside after running for help.
Deserie didn't remember any of this. Not a single detail.
She remembered coming home about 9:30 p.m., changing into pajamas,
spooning herself a bowl of Moose Tracks ice cream and getting
ensconced on the couch near the Christmas tree to watch TV.
John had asked if she wanted a glass of water - not the type of thing
he normally did. The last thing she remembered was drinking it.
Deserie spent five days in the hospital before being released.
They all moved in with John's parents. But instead of sharing a room
with her husband, Deserie found herself upstairs with her stepson.
Veysey explained he didn't want to risk hurting her if he thrashed
around in bed.
Since the blaze, John had changed. He was cool and distant. He never
asked how she felt, never kissed her. He never said he was happy she'd
survived. One morning, Deserie went downstairs, lay next to John on
the sofa bed and wrapped her arms around him. He remained rigid.
It was just one more sign something was terribly wrong. She would
never heal there, she thought. She wanted to be coddled, as her mother
had done when she was sick as a little girl.
Within a few days, Deserie moved out - it was the beginning of the end
of their marriage.
She moved with Sabrina to her mother's house outside Rockford, where,
two days later, there was a knock at the door. It was Delelio, with
fellow Cary Detective Denise Bradstreet.
In the family room, where Deserie sat with her bandaged leg propped
up, Bradstreet asked about her burns. She asked about the children.
Then she got to the point:
"We're concerned about your safety, that's why we drove out here.
There are some things that lead us to believe this wasn't an
accident."
As Bradstreet spoke, Deserie thought about how aloof John had become.
Listening, she let an idea that would have once been unthinkable
slowly take hold: John had set the fire.
Bradstreet had expected Deserie to protest, "No, not my husband,
John." Instead, her response took the detective by surprise.
"OK," she said calmly. "What do you want me to do?"
The detectives needed information, they explained; then they carefully
broached a possible motive: insurance.
Yes, Deserie said, after their wedding, she and John had taken out
$500,000 life insurance policies on each other. There had been a
$50,000 policy on Little John; it had lapsed a month earlier when a
renewal notice was sent to the wrong address and never forwarded.
There was no policy on Sabrina.
Over the next few weeks, Deserie made daily visits to the small
investigations room on the second floor of the police department, and
her life story unfolded.
She had met John in 1996 through a personals ad in the paper. She was
on the rebound from a long relationship that had gone bad - and now,
she was ready to start a family.
She remembered what he wore the day they met: tight, white jeans, aqua
shirt and gray suede shoes. At first, she'd been put off by that, but
soon he won her over.
John would send her lush bouquets for no special reason. She felt
comfortable around him. He was intelligent, dependable, someone she
could count on.
As for work, he told her he dabbled in commodity futures trading.
They were married in 1997, a month before Sabrina's birth.
The detectives were amazed by Deserie's command of details. Though she
didn't remember the fire, there were some unsettling things she could
recall.
When they started dating in the summer of 1996, John was living in the
Galena home he'd shared with his first wife, who had died 15 months
earlier. In December 1996, fire damaged that house. And something he
said soon afterward struck Deserie as odd.
"They're going to arrest me," she remembers him telling her. "They're
going to think I did it."
But that fire was ruled accidental. And he collected $266,382 in
insurance.
Another strange thing happened later, Deserie told the detectives. It
was January 1998, two days before the fire on High Road in Cary.
She came home from work and Veysey told her not to read her mail. He
needed some fresh air. With the kids, they piled into her car and went
for a ride, skidding on icy streets.
That night, Deserie opened her bank statement and discovered that two
checks written by John - for $2,500 and $500 - had bounced. Just a
bookkeeping error, he said.
Deserie gave the detectives copies of insurance policies. She went to
the library and tracked down a copy of a personals ad Veysey had
placed with the headline: "SLEEPLESS IN GALENA."
Delelio started collecting everything in a three-ring binder and put
together a timeline. But it was becoming clear he needed help: This
case, which had moved far beyond the boundaries of Cary, was getting
too big for him.
He invited county, state and federal officials in and laid out what he
had learned, what he suspected, and what he felt was beyond his reach.
This would be a turning point. Federal involvement would mean the
power to subpoena crucial bank and insurance records in different
states. It would bring in arson and financial specialists that a
small-town police department couldn't match.
Even with the promised help, Delelio kept a hand in the case. He
returned to search the High Road house, again and again.
On one visit, he discovered the pieces of another melted smoke
detector, this one in the second-floor hallway. It had no battery,
just like one in the basement. That was strange, considering Deserie
had told him Veysey had tested it and found it working just a month
before the fire.
In the master bedroom, he found a package with a charred wrapper.
Inside was "The Anarchist's Cookbook," containing recipes for making
bombs.
And in the exercise room, there were two volumes of "The Poor Man's
James Bond" with instructions for setting fires and using exotic
poisons.
Another day, Delelio returned to the bedroom where Veysey claimed he
had jumped. Picking up shards of glass, he looked for dried blood or
pieces of cloth. Nothing. He scanned the window frame, just 2 feet
wide. Veysey was big - 6-feet-5, 220 pounds.
Again no torn cloth or blood.
Delelio went to work with a screwdriver. He removed the wooden frame
and put it in his squad car.
Some day, he thought, this would be important evidence.
---
To be continued
http://pjstar.com/news/topnews/g124159a.html
--
Anne Warfield
indigoace at goodsol period com
http://www.goodsol.com/cats/
Anne Warfield
Arson sleuth: Fires were not accidents
The probe expands
November 12, 2002
By SHARON COHEN
of the Associated Press
CARY, Ill. - Every fire scene has something to say, and Jack Malooly
does his best to hear it.
Two weeks after the house on High Road was swept by fire, he arrived
at the blackened shell as part of a new federal team called in to help
local investigators. A stocky, ruddy-faced ex-cop with a walrus
mustache and a gold ring bearing the initials of an elite task force,
the National Response Team, Malooly had prowled the scenes of hundreds
of disasters, from Oklahoma to Pakistan.
Two decades with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had
made him a master of an often fiendishly tricky science: ferreting out
the origins of fires.
Once, after a blaze in a U.S. Army building in South Korea, he
gathered the melted clocks to see when each had stopped. That created
a trail to the source.
"You have to be patient and methodical and curious," he says.
Now he was investigating John T. Veysey III - and the fire that had
almost killed Veysey's wife, Deserie, and his son, Little John.
From the start, Cary police detective Ron Delelio had suspected the
fire was no accident, and he had dug into Veysey's past - gathering
records, conducting interviews, trying to piece together a puzzle. But
he could only go so far. He was no fire expert.
Enter Jack Malooly.
Following his own special style, Malooly starts outside, circles the
ruins, examining scorch marks where flames have escaped, then works
his way inside, moving painstakingly from least damage to most, sizing
up a fire in a language all his own. Anything combustible is a "fuel
package." A quick-hit arson is a "splash and dash."
When he arrived in Cary, the preliminary fire marshal's report pointed
to the Christmas tree as the likely cause - possibly the string of
lights.
Right away, Malooly doubted that. Christmas trees don't burn as easily
or as long as people think.
There were other clues in the living room. It had reached flashover,
the instant when hot gases turn a room into a raging furnace. If the
fire had started in the tree, Malooly figured, that would not have
happened because the tree was next to windows, which would have
shattered quickly, allowing hot gases to escape.
Something else was to blame, he thought.
"What do we have here in this corner?" Malooly asked another agent.
An overstuffed chair had been there. All that remained were pieces of
charred frame, stacked outside.
Could it be that?
Malooly bought three of the same chairs. He shipped them to the
National Institute of Standards and Technology outside Washington,
where lab workers touched them off under a steel hood fitted with
equipment to measure the intensity of the fire. Each went up like a
torch.
For Malooly, that clinched it. The fire started in the chair - he'd
swear to it.
As he worked, other investigators were busy, too, retracing Veysey's
footsteps, interviewing former co-workers and ex-girlfriends, plowing
through yellowing financial records.
One afternoon, Delelio, still working the case, was thumbing through
Veysey's credit-card receipts when he came upon one with a name that
sounded like a chemical company in Florida.
He grabbed the phone. A Florida police officer soon confirmed that a
garage at the address had been raided and someone was selling GHB -
the so-called date-rape drug - over the Internet.
The hairs on Delelio's neck stood up.
Bodybuilders sometimes take GHB, and Veysey lifted weights. But it
also was a knockout drug. Delelio had interviewed women who had dated
Veysey and said they had passed out or had dizzy spells after he gave
them drinks.
It was too late to know, but he wondered: Had GHB been in the water
Veysey handed Deserie - her last memory before the fire?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another unanswered question, at least as troubling, nagged the
investigators: How had Veysey's first wife really died, three years
earlier?
Like Deserie, Patricia DeBruyne Kemp Veysey, divorced with two
children, met her future husband through a newspaper personals ad.
They settled in Twin Lakes, Wis., where disaster struck in September
1993, three months after the wedding. A gas explosion blew their house
to bits; no one was home at the time.
The blast came four days after Veysey increased his insurance. He
collected $363,587. (Just two years earlier, Veysey had had a serious
fire at the same house. He had collected $198,000 in insurance and
rebuilt it.)
By summer of 1994, when John IV, Little John, was born, most of that
insurance money was gone, mainly spent on cars, furniture and a home
in the scenic Mississippi River town of Galena, Ill.
The following spring, Veysey was unemployed, having just left a job as
a real estate agent. He had five mouths to feed, including Patricia's
two children from her first marriage. His bank balance was down to
$2,761.64.
On May 15, 1995, he drove the children home from school. There, they
found Patricia dead on the dining room floor. She was only 34, but a
pathologist ruled it cardiac arrhythmia, due to a congenital heart
problem. It seemed possible. At 5-foot-6, she weighed 260 pounds.
But as they reviewed Veysey's past following the Cary fire, federal
prosecutors Pat Layng and Lori Lightfoot were suspicious and reopened
the case of Patricia's death. They had noted a pattern: Veysey would
be low on cash, there would be a disaster, then a large insurance
payment, and a spending spree.
After Patricia's death, he had collected $200,000 from her life
insurance.
There was something else bothering prosecutors: In autopsy photos,
they noticed a large bruise over Patricia's left eye. The pathologist
said she got it when she collapsed. That didn't make sense. She hadn't
fallen on her face. She'd been found lying on her back.
Adding to that, prosecutors had a startling piece of evidence from an
ATF investigator's interview with a real estate agent who worked with
Veysey.
"I know how to kill somebody and it's totally untraceable...," Veysey
said about three months before Patricia's death, according to Lavonne
Deininger, the former co-worker. "I can just inject their vein with
something and if there is an autopsy ... it appears as though they had
a heart attack."
A single vial of Patricia's blood had sat for years in the
refrigerator in the Jo Daviess County sheriff's office, alongside
deputies' brown-bag lunches. Layng contacted a testing lab in
Pennsylvania.
"I think a guy killed somebody and poisoned her," he said.
"What kind of poison?" the toxicologist asked.
"That's what I'm asking you," Layng replied.
There was no single test to detect all poisons. So, Layng and
Lightfoot studied Veysey's books, got expert advice, and suggested
tests.
Cyanide came back negative. So did antifreeze. About 15 tests were
done before the last drop of blood was exhausted. No poisons were
found.
Prosecutors were sure they knew the motive - insurance - even if they
didn't know the means.
For more answers, they turned to Patricia's daughter, Cassie. One July
afternoon, Layng and Lightfoot sat at a table on a sunlit deck at
Cassie's grandmother's house, talking with the high school sophomore.
Cassie told them that when she left home the morning her mother died,
the windows were open and the door unlocked. That terrible afternoon,
though, the shades were drawn, the door bolted.
And Patricia's hands were almost clasped, peacefully - a seemingly
impossible position if she had collapsed. A glass of water also was
standing near her feet.
Prosecutors took Cassie further back - to the 1993 Twin Lakes, Wis.,
explosion at the family's home.
She told them that before leaving for a getaway weekend, John and
Patricia had loaded the car with prized possessions and pets, even the
fish. Veysey's explanation: They were flea-bombing the house.
Days before the blast, she recalled, Veysey had grumbled about
something being wrong with the clothes dryer and called a repairman.
The day before the family left, Cassie went to the basement for some
clothes. The washer and dryer were pulled out from the wall, and
Veysey, she said, was behind them.
He was working on some pipes - one was fat and spongy, the other
hose-like.
Suddenly, he spotted her, and his command was sharp:
"Get out."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Twin Lakes explosion had been ruled an accident and nothing
remained of the house, but a half-year after the interview with
Cassie, Jack Malooly was asked to take another look.
Prosecutors had turned up hundreds of photos taken by investigators
hired by the insurance company.
Malooly focused on a flex line - a stainless steel, hollow-ridged
tube, that linked the dryer to the gas supply line.
Photos he enlarged showed the tube was cracked - not just on one side,
but both. A metallurgist Malooly consulted blamed a high-stress,
low-cycle fracture. Someone had bent the tube back and forth until it
cracked.
Malooly bought several flex lines and took them to his basement
workshop. He placed one in a vise and bent it back and forth until it
cracked, exactly the way the one on Veysey's dryer had. He tried other
flex lines. Each cracked exactly the same way.
A cracked flex line would let gas leak until something - maybe an
appliance motor or thermostat - triggered an explosion.
The ATF agent also looked into Veysey's house fire in Galena, Ill., in
1996 - more than three years after Twin Lakes. A cord extending over
the top of a furnace had seemed the likely cause to local
investigators - but Malooly concluded the fire started in a futon in
the next room.
In each disaster, Malooly now believed, Veysey had left a false clue
that investigators could grab onto as they searched for a cause. The
cord in Galena. A problem dryer in Twin Lakes. A Christmas tree on
High Road in Cary.
Each case had been ruled accidental. But to Malooly, each one was an
arson.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More than a year had passed since the High Road fire, and federal
investigators were edging closer to proving Delelio's suspicions.
Veysey's methods of operation were becoming clear.
And that's why a new discovery alarmed investigators.
In the late spring of 1999, as they studied Veysey's subpoenaed phone
and bank records, a name leapt out: Kathleen "Callie" Hilkin.
Veysey was now divorced from Deserie, and Callie was the new woman in
his life. She and Veysey, records showed, were getting a home equity
loan, which required homeowner's insurance.
An ATF agent, Tina Sherrow, called the insurance company listed on the
loan application.
"Good lord," she said, "look what we've found."
Veysey and Callie also had an appointment to take out life insurance
policies.
Callie's life was in danger, Layng said.
"We've got to stop him."
To be continued
http://pjstar.com/news/topnews/g132429a.html
Nitamargarita
"Anne Warfield" <indi...@aolxxx.com> wrote in message news:3dd6745c...@news.earthlink.net...
> From the Peoria [IL] Journal Star--
>
>
> An ATF agent, Tina Sherrow, called the insurance company listed on the
> loan application.
>
> "Good lord," she said, "look what we've found."
>
> Veysey and Callie also had an appointment to take out life insurance
> policies.
>
> Callie's life was in danger, Layng said.
>
> "We've got to stop him."
>
> To be continued
> http://pjstar.com/news/topnews/g132429a.html
>
> --
When will the rest of this story come out? Thanks for posting it.
Nita
Anne Warfield
<Nitama...@blahblahblah.cox.net> wrote:
>When will the rest of this story come out? Thanks for posting it.
Part 1 was published Monday (I didn't see it on their website until
this afternoon) & part 2 Tuesday, so part 3 should be Wednesday. I
probably won't have it posted until late afternoon, though (sorry!).
If you want to Google for past articles, you can go to
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search
& search on Veysey in alt.true-crime. I first posted about him at the
end of January, 2001, and the trial took place in February & March,
with the sentencing (he got 110 years) in December.
Or you can wait for part 3. :)
Thanks!
--
Anne Warfield
A crucial witness changes heart
Evidence mounts, police make a move
November 13, 2002
By SHARON COHEN
of the Associated Press
She folded her arms in cold defiance and glowered as she listened to
the painful words.
Two investigators were in Callie Hilkin's office, telling her that the
man she loved, John T. Veysey III, was dangerous.
"You are in jeopardy," said John Korth, a Jo Daviess County deputy
sheriff.
"I don't believe he'd hurt me," Callie insisted.
Tina Sherrow, a U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent,
persisted, her voice kind but firm.
"We wouldn't be here if we didn't think there was a real possibility
of something happening to you and the children," she said.
Did Callie know Veysey's first wife, Patricia, had died - and that
authorities were looking into it? the investigators asked.
And that Veysey had life insurance policies on his second wife,
Deserie, and his son, Little John - and they almost died in a fire?
"He got Little John out of the fire," Callie blurted.
"He did not," Sherrow quickly corrected her.
Callie sat disbelieving in the conference room of the Dubuque, Iowa,
financial services company where she worked. Tears welled in her eyes.
"It's a wonderful relationship," she protested. "He takes very, very
good care of me and my children."
Veysey took her two sons hiking. He picked them up after school. She
trusted him. Maybe he was a bit of a rogue sometimes, but he was good
to her.
Her train of thought was interrupted by a question from Sherrow: Why
were Callie and John visiting an insurance agent that very afternoon?
Car insurance, Callie replied.
Sherrow took the phone and called the insurance agent.
"Will you please tell her about the insurance she's coming in for?"
"Life insurance," the agent said - $100,000 each.
The words hit Callie like a fist. John had lied: She already had life
insurance, and he had said this appointment was for auto coverage. It
didn't make sense.
Only the day before she'd signed a will leaving everything - mostly
life insurance, but also her 401k retirement plan - to John. Her death
would fatten Veysey's wallet by $750,000.
Could John really be what they were saying, a time bomb?
It was all a shock. Not that she never had questions about John. She
had, many times. But he always had an explanation. John was so
charming, so convincing.
But this was different. He had betrayed her. The call seemed to prove
that. And there were other things the investigators had said. John's
story of the High Road fire in Cary also was a lie - he told her HE
had almost died.
The more she heard, the more her doubts grew - though there was one
thing she was immediately certain about. She had to deal with the
will. She would tear it up.
As she crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois on her way home
that warm spring afternoon, she wondered: Should she stand by the man
she loved? Or cooperate with the authorities?
At a service station, she abruptly pulled over and called the county
sheriff's office.
"We need to talk," she said.
Agents had heard stories like Callie's before as they followed
Veysey's path from woman to woman, and fire to fire.
A single mom on the rebound from a nasty divorce, she'd hooked up with
Veysey through a personals ad in 1998. She had met him two years
earlier in the same way and thought he looked like "a Greek god," tall
and blond with rippling muscles.
Callie was naive, she admitted. She never questioned things Veysey
said, even his claim that he didn't need to work because he had so
much money. He dazzled her by flashing wads of $50s and $100s.
Gradually, his bankrolls thinned and the bills were $5s and $10s.
Veysey was running short of cash.
One night in January 1999, she found him crying. He said he had a
premonition she would be killed in an automobile accident, that she
wouldn't see her boys grow up.
Callie, who had been in a serious head-on collision two years earlier,
believed him.
It was time, John said, to get her affairs in order.
He urged her to get two life insurance policies, each paying $250,000.
That way the boys could go to college and he could fight her
ex-husband for custody. She obediently got the insurance.
But Veysey wasn't satisfied.
Soon he was speaking feverishly of an elaborate insurance hoax. They
would fake her death in a boating explosion.
The cops and insurance companies were dumb enough to buy it if she
were willing to make a small sacrifice.
"A finger or two," he said. They wouldn't bother to look for the rest
of her.
"You're nuts," she thought.
John tried a new tack.
What she really needed, he said, was a will. It should specify she
wanted to be cremated. Somehow, he claimed, that would help him leave
town with the boys before her ex-husband could get custody.
It sounded ghoulish. But again Callie went along.
One night, John came home with a draft of the will. They sat on the
sofa in the family room and he put his arm around her as he explained
the fine print.
By the time she finished reviewing all of this with investigators,
Callie had made her decision: She wanted out.
The morning of May 20, 1999 - 16 months after the Cary fire that got
the investigation rolling - she gathered clothes in a basket and told
Veysey, still in bed, she was going to the cleaners.
"I just want you to know that I love you," she said. "Goodbye."
That afternoon, ATF agents escorted Callie and her sons to a hotel
room. She planned to leave town in a few days - and chose her new home
by studying a map of the United States in a phone book. For now, it
was just a matter of waiting a few hours.
Veysey was driving along Longhollow Road outside Galena that afternoon
with Little John when police curbed his van.
"This is outrageous!" he thundered as the handcuffs were slapped on.
When Callie got home that night, agents had searched the house and
found Patricia's engagement ring, artwork and other possessions Veysey
had claimed as lost on insurance reports.
She spotted Veysey's reading glasses on a nightstand.
"I've got to go see him," she sobbed. "He needs his glasses."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She did not see Veysey again until two years later - in federal court
in Chicago when he went on trial for arson and fraud.
His insurance claims had netted nearly $1 million, prosecutors
calculated.
They called nearly 100 witnesses, including medical and fire experts.
They hauled out that narrow window frame the 6-foot-5 Veysey claimed
he'd leapt through during the High Road fire.
And they presented jurors some telling numbers:
Some 74 percent of Veysey's income, going back nine years, had come
from insurance; just 4 percent came from paychecks.
And another number: An insurance actuary was asked what the odds were
that four homes at random would have serious fires in nine years. On a
pad projected for jurors to see, he began writing digits, 13 in all,
running down the side of the pad - 1.7 trillion to 1.
After a six-week trial, the jury deliberated just one day before
returning the verdict: Guilty on 18 counts of insurance fraud and
arson.
He was sentenced in November 2001 to 110 years - the extraordinary
length due, in large part, to the jury's conclusion that Veysey was
responsible for Patricia's death as part of an insurance scam. (He was
not charged with homicide.)
Veysey is appealing.
The ordeal finally over, Deserie Beetle, who had almost died in the
fire on High Road, hugged Ron Delelio, the Cary detective whose
suspicions had sparked the investigation.
Afterward, she took the courthouse elevator down with her mother and
sister. "He got what he deserved, only not enough," she said as they
descended. Then, under her breath, she muttered: "He's still alive."
As Delelio walked outside, he carried a commendation plaque ATF agents
had given him that day.
Heading home, he remembered the promise he had made years earlier to
Patricia Veysey's parents. "It may not be today or tomorrow, or next
month," he had vowed, "but justice will prevail."
Delelio smiled. That day had come.
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