Fatal Beauty | 1. Body in the Bronco

Scott Payne spent nearly two decades working undercover as a biker, a neo-Nazi, a drug dealer, and a killer. But his last big mission at the FBI was the wildest of all.
I have never had to burn bibles. I have never had to burn an American flag.
And I damn sure was never with a group of people that stole a goat, sacrificed it in a pagan ritual, and drank its blood. And I did all that in about three days with these guys.

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Oklahoma City was shrouded in a quiet chill that December night.

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas in 1985.

The hum of jet engines could be heard in the distance. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas in 1985.

The hum of jet engines could be heard in the distance.

Two Oklahoma City police officers were patrolling a secluded area,

not too far from the Will Rogers Airport.

His little Bronco was just sitting in the lot for this place, and it didn't fit.

Was someone in there?

It was hard to see.

Frost clung stubbornly to the vehicle's windows, obscuring the inside,

as if nature itself sought to shield the horrors within.

As the officers approached the Bronco, the cold air felt heavier, almost suffocating.

One officer gripped the passenger door handle, pulling hesitantly. It was locked, left with no choice but to pry it open.
Inside, the scene was chilling beyond the winter's cold. The partially decomposed body of a man in his prime wedged between the front seats, his head face down on the back floorboard.
He was young, 30-something. His lifeless form seemed to have been abandoned in a final, grotesque tableau.
Retired homicide detective Kyle Eastridge recalls the scene. His state of decomposition and his clothes were the first clues.

Bermuda shorts and a light sweater.

This was winter in Oklahoma City

and tonight, the temperature

was below freezing.

Oklahoma City was very

cold.

It starts making you think

this guy

probably from somewhere else. And it looked like someone else had last driven the Bronco.
The officers ran the license plate. The car belonged to Norman Alan Rarig.
He was 30 and lived in Dallas, Texas, about 200 miles away. The police rapidly concluded this guy was probably killed in Dallas.
Then the next clues. There was no weapon at the scene.
No wallet. And here's the strangest part.
No car keys. From the initial scene, I think it was pretty apparent that he came from somewhere a ways and that he'd been dumped there and staged to look like that.
Was this a robbery gone wrong? Still, something wasn't tracking. If he'd been robbed in Dallas...
Why would the culprit bother pushing him out of the driver's seat and then driving his dead body all the way to Oklahoma City? He had two gunshot wounds from a .38 caliber pistol. One to the head, precise and deliberate.
And the other to the body, leaving no doubt about the brutality of the crime. The faint odor of death intermingled with the frozen air.
The officers exchanged knowing looks. This, they knew, was murder.
But how this man was killed was something they wouldn't know for a long time. And the victim himself, wedged between the seats of his car in a parking lot in Oklahoma in the dead of winter, had no idea of the danger he was in moments before he died.
Alan Rarig was the kind of tall, broad-shouldered man that made people do a double

take. An athlete.
A hometown hero. The kind of man who would have aged gracefully.
Chiseled even

in middle age. Were he not face down on the back floorboard, his life ended.
He hadn't fully

appreciated that someone had it out for him. That someone wanted him dead.
From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Fatal Beauty. I'm Cooper Mall.
Episode 1, The Body and the Bronco. In all the millions of minutes that have gone by since his body was discovered that frigid December night, not a single one has passed that his mother hasn't thought of him.
Who he was. Who he could have been.
For decades, she's spoken out, told anyone who would listen, and kept Alan's name alive. That's what first struck me about this story.
Her refusal to let her son be forgotten. Her doggedness for the answers.
In a way, I believe this is what's kept her going. But now she's 95 and she's faced a lot of disappointment and countless dead ends.
She deserves a break from her quest for the truth. To spend the remainder of her golden years with her 12 great-grandchildren, I wanted her to pass the baton to me and let me help her get closer to the truth.
My name is Gloria Rarig, R-E-H-R-I-G-E. Nobody ever knows how to spell that.
Today, Gloria is almost 100 and is still sharp as a tack. She's got gray blonde hair and striking blue eyes.
Her face carries the gentle lines of age, adding depth to her dignified appearance. She lives at the Bradford Village Healthcare Center, a community for senior citizens in Edmond, Oklahoma, the same town she's lived for the last 50 years.
It's where she's raised her blended family, too. I married a man who had three children.
I had two boys. Phillip was my oldest, and he was more serious.
Al was my youngest, and he had a lot of personality, and everyone loved him. Two towering redheads who went on to set scoring records for Edmond Memorial High School's basketball team, the Bulldogs.
But of the two, Allen was the standout athlete. He was a football player too.
But his balling skills are what landed him a scholarship to Oklahoma State University. He played basketball there for four years, and he loved every bit of that.
Growing up, Allen had dreamt of becoming a professional athlete. He seemed like the kind of kid who saw his future in his physical talents.
But as his 20s droned on, he had to pivot and get a job like the rest of us. And his friend that he knew in college, Phil Askew, had a commercial business, real estate, and he invited Al to come and work for him.
And that's how he ended up in Dallas. And that's where he met Sandra.
The last time Gloria spoke with Alan, his wife Sandra happened to be the topic of conversation. They'd been married just shy of a year, when Gloria caught wind that their marriage was on the rocks.
His friend, Ron Barnes, at church told me that he had moved into Phil Askew's house and they were separated.

And that's the first I knew about it.

And then on Monday evening, I called him.

And that was our last conversation.

The newlyweds had been living apart for a month.

When Gloria pressed Allen about what was behind the separation, he was vague.

He said that things were not as they're supposed to be. What did that mean? On the other end of the line, Gloria sensed a cautiousness in her son's voice, in that special way only moms can.
But she wasn't worried. He said he didn't want anything negative said, because if they got back together, he wanted people to be nice to her.
In other words, Alan didn't think the separation was the end of the line. He was still hopeful at that point that they might get back together.
But that's how he was. That glimmer of hope was fanned when the next day, Alan heard from Sandra.
Here's his mother again. She called him to ask him to meet her at this storage unit.
It was his storage unit when he first moved down there. And she had put some things in there of hers.
And she told him she needed to go to the storage unit and needed him to help look for something and move things around for her. The two planned to meet at the mini storage facility in nearby Garland on Saturday, the eve of their first wedding anniversary.
For Alan, the timing was auspicious. Could this be an opportunity for them to rekindle? Stranger things have happened.
That Saturday was unusually warm for December in Dallas. So mild that when Alan left his temporary residence, his pal Phil Eskew's home, he was wearing Bermuda shorts, a t-shirt, and a light sweater on top.
Lugging boxes in a musty storage unit was bound to break a sweat. That was around 4.50 p.m.
Alan didn't anticipate staying at the storage unit with Sandra for long.

He had dinner plans that night with Phil.

But Alan didn't make it back for their meal.

She called Phil, I asked you, about two hours later, and said he never showed up.

According to Sandra, she never saw Alan.

Phil was baffled.

Alan was a stand-up friend.

Reliable, courteous.

He got tangled up in his head. According to Sandra, she never saw Alan.
Phil was baffled. Alan was a stand-up friend.

Reliable, courteous.

If he got tangled up in some other plan,

he would have let his buddies know.

Not this time.

I'm not a parent,

but I know when my mom doesn't hear from me,

an adult,

she still worries.

It's hard to let go. And Alan had just set out on his own, just 18 months before, when Gloria got devastating news.
I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a meeting of education counselors. And my niece, Cynthia,

came to the door of our meeting place.

She came to tell me that Al was missing.

And on the ground in Dallas,

the rumor mill was already churning.

Everybody thought that Sandra

had something to do with it.

Gloria wasn't enamored with her son's new bride,

but she didn't think for a minute

that she would have anything to do with his disappearance.

It just shocked me.

And I said, oh, surely not.

So that's where my journey started.

What did everyone else seem to already know

about Alan's wife that Gloria didn't?

Why were the town gossips talking about Sandra behind her back?

Why her?

What had she done?

It had been roughly 24 hours since Alan's disappearance.

The sun was setting on Sunday, December 8th,

with no sign of him.

And here's what was strange.

His wife still hadn't filed a missing persons report. Philip, my other son, called her and said she needed to report it and declare him a missing person.
And she said, well, you can do it. And she never did.
Why hadn't she reported him gone? Sure, the two were separated. But how do you just not tell the cops that your spouse vanished? Of course, then Phil Askew verified that he hadn't shown up for work that Monday.
Law enforcement in Dallas was now on the case. Back in Oklahoma, Gloria's pacing around her home feeling helpless.
So she did all she knew to do. I called the detectives in Dallas and asked Sergeant Murdoch, explained to him who I was and why I was calling, and that my son was missing, and would he please go to their home.
If she'd been in Dallas, she would have gone herself. Instead, she had someone else go do kind of a wellness check.
Gloria had already been in touch with friends of Allen and Sandra, who assuaged some of her anxiety. Everybody that knew Sandra down in Dallas, when they heard that he was missing, they said, well, fortunately, we think he's still alive.
She hoped the local detectives could confirm he was all right. And I gave her address.
I said, their garages are on their alleys behind their houses. And I said, in my mind, I can just see that his car might be parked back there.
And would you please go and see what you can find out? And he said, yes. And then he called me back and he said she was very gracious and showed him in the house and showed him in the garage and all.
But still no Alan. And that graciousness Sandra extended to the detectives didn't exactly reach Gloria.
But then she railed at me for suggesting, you know, that she had something to do with it. Sandra was pissed.
How dare her mother-in-law point the finger at her? That wasn't what Gloria intended to get at, at all. She wasn't suspicious of Sandra.
But this confrontation planted a seed. One that quickly grew into something dark and unsettling.
Gloria's mind flashed back to a conversation she'd had with Sandra, not long after she and Alan tied the knot. After they got married, then she started in on having him get an insurance policy.

And then she asked me if I didn't think he should do that.

And I said, of course, a man with a family should have insurance.

At the time, it had seemed like a practical, even responsible next step in building a life together.

But now, it felt like something else entirely. Part of a plan.
Because if something happened to Alan, it turned out, Sandra stood to cash in. I wanted to know just how much Sandra would get.
So I called up investigative reporter John Leake, who's long been enmeshed in this story. She had a life insurance policy with a $220,000 death benefit.
And that was a lot of money in 1985. Sounds like a lot of money to me now, too.
But that's not the point. Could Sandra have been out for Alan's money? Lori entertained the thought, but didn't dwell on it.
But get this. On the same day that things came to a head with her mother-in-law, Sandra did something curious.
Sandra hires a private investigator who's very well-known in Texas, Bill Deer. That's Glenna Whitley, a veteran investigative reporter in Dallas, who took a special interest in Sandra back in the day.
So the private eye Sandra hired, Bill Deer, he had a reputation for taking on strange cases. And when he took high-profile cases, he had an unconventional approach, like the exhumation of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1981.
The guy went on to do things like investigate aliens, run for Texas governor, and write a book on how he could prove O.J. Simpson's innocence.
He was both eccentric and controversial. Anyway, this is who Sandra retained that Monday after her husband had officially been reported missing.
Here's Whitley again. She tells Bill, I didn't do this.
I want you to find out who really did this. Did what? At this point, Alan had been gone not even 48 hours.
It was concerning, but he wasn't a child. Alan might have decided to leave town, blow off some steam.
It was the early 80s. We weren't updating our friends with our every move.
No one knew Alan was dead in his bronco yet. So why was Sandra asking a private investigator to build her defense at this point? In her initial meeting with William Deere, she spun a yarn about her husband.
And talked to him about all the allegedly crazy things that Alan was involved with, like drugs and gambling, etc., etc.

It sounded like Sandra was insinuating Alan kept some shady company,

the kind of criminals who knew how to make people disappear.

A wife often knows what her husband's gotten up to, even if strangers don't.

Sandra probably knew Alan like no one else.

Or was she covering her tracks?

When someone goes missing, you try not to think the worst. But eventually, there's a knock at the door.
The answer came for Gloria at the crack of dawn on December 12th, 1985. It was like six o'clock in the morning.
My sister and Ron Barnes and his wife and my minister and his wife came into my house. Ron, one of Alan's best friends, was in her doorway, along with some of Gloria's nearest and dearest.
Their faces were stricken with sorrow. And they said they had found Alan.
And I said, was he all right? And they said no. And I just went to pieces.
I couldn't believe it. It was just awful.
Alan was discovered, partially decomposed, four days after he'd last been seen. When the Oklahoma City patrol officers found him between the front seats of his Bronco and traced the registration back to Norman Allen Rarig, they phoned the Dallas PD, wondering if a man by that name had been reported missing.
Thank God someone had filed a report. But Allen didn't have an ID on him.
Someone could have stolen his car. Detectives still couldn't be 100% sure that the dead man was him.
Why they didn't fingerprint the body and try to figure out his identity that way isn't clear. The Dallas officer had to get creative, so he called up Allen's next of kin, Sandra.
And they asked her, did he have on such and such? And she said, yes. Said, the last time you saw him, did he have on Bermuda shorts and all? And she said, yes.
That's what he was found wearing in Oklahoma City. It was Alan.
It was time to break the news. But before the officer could get a word in, Sandra stopped him.
Is it bad news? And they said yes and said, well, then call Ron Barnes. And she hung up.
Ron Barnes was one of Allen's oldest pals in Edmond. The police obliged Sandra's request.
They figured she'd prefer hearing the horrifying details from a loved one rather than a complete stranger. By morning, the news of Alan's death hadn't just reached Gloria, but his neighbors in Dallas, too.
Then, the phone rang at the police department in Oklahoma City. A anonymous person who police called Deep Throat called the Oklahoma police.
Not that Deep Throat, another informant. Turns out, this woman said Sandra had a reputation that preceded her.
There was more to this striking brunette than it might seem. In fact, it was an open secret in her little corner of Dallas that she was trouble.
Dangerous, even. Get too close and your days might be numbered.
Sandra became heavily ostracized already in 1982. And Alan Rarig, her third husband, was not aware of this because he'd only just moved to Dallas from Oklahoma the day before he met her.
They'd gotten together quickly after a chance meeting. So he was not aware of her ostracism.
But by the time Alan turns up shot, most of the community was frightened of her. The cops in Oklahoma City didn't know how seriously to take this anonymous caller.
One thing was sure, they needed to get Sandra in for questioning. They had contacted Sandra and told her that when she came up to the funeral, they wanted to talk to her.
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We decided that Saturday would be a good time to have the funeral. So that Friday, Sandra packed a bag and made her way to Oklahoma City.
She flew up and Ron met her and took her to the police department. And that's when she met Bacheco and Mitchell.
Sandra wasn't alone when she met with detectives Steve Pacheco and Ron Mitchell. She had a lawyer when she came to Oklahoma City to his funeral in case they arrested her.
And this wasn't just any lawyer. Sandra came with one of Dallas's most notorious criminal defense attorneys at the time, Vincent Perrini.
The widow made quite the impression. Here's Whitley again.
She goes in full regalia with her widow's fur coat and her gloves and never takes her gloves off. She's something out of a Tennessee Williams play.
Part smoldering beauty, part troubled soul. She plays the poor little me.
She plays the, isn't this awful officer? It's just so tragic. And bats her eyes and plays damsel in distress.
And they're looking at her going, huh, I'm not so sure about the damsel in distress, but that made them even more suspicious, of course, because they've gotten some prior knowledge. But the detectives never brought up any of what they had been told about her past in Dallas.
They kept the interview to the circumstances leading up to Alan's death. What kind of stuff he was up to, what kind of people he hung around.
She said, I think he was involved in gambling debts. I think he might have owed a bookie money.
And she said, I think he was dabbling in cocaine. And so she dangles out all of this incriminating stuff about how he was hanging around with dangerous men.
Sounds a lot like what she told her P.I. Then there was the question, how in the hell Alan, a man living in Dallas, got to Oklahoma City? Sandra had an answer for that.
Sandra said to the Oklahoma City police, you know, I think that Alan was involved in cocaine and that his old high school and college chump who lived in Edmond was his dealer. But Alan was found in Oklahoma City, not Edmond, roughly 20 miles away.
The police did not perceive that as plausible at all. It looked like she was trying to offer a red herring.
And then they caught Sandra in a lie. When Dallas PD called to identify Allen the night he was found, Sandra confirmed she'd last seen him in the Bermuda shorts and the blue sweater, what he'd been wearing when he left to meet her at the storage unit.
But the Oklahoma City detectives already knew she'd told one of Allen's friends the opposite. When she called Phil Askew, she said,

he didn't show up.

I haven't seen him.

So she had seen him.

She had seen him.

The cops had caught her lying.

Maybe she didn't expect them to hear about her call to Phil.

Maybe she didn't grasp just how damning it was to be the last person who'd seen Alan.

Is that why she let it slip up to police?

Panic or miscalculation?

That lie didn't do her any favors.

But she didn't say anything that day incriminating enough to pin her down.

And they didn't have any new evidence.

That was the end of that meeting.

Sandra was let go to prepare for Alan's funeral the next day. But detectives made her promise to return before going home to Dallas.
They wanted to pick up the interrogation where they'd left off. Then there was the funeral.
On the morning of December 14th, nearly 400 people gathered in Edmond to pay their respects to a hometown hero. The once promising athlete,

friend to everyone, loving brother, doting son, Alan Rarig. Of course, she was late getting to the funeral.
She could have been on time as she opted to ride with the rest of the Rarig family to the First Christian Church, but she insisted on arriving separately. We were all sitting there waiting.
And she comes parading in in a full-length mink coat. And of course, they had everybody down the aisle because she was the wife.
Sandra was acting off. She was distant when she got here.
And she didn't have the means to pay for the proceedings. She never carried a purse or a checkbook or a credit card.
So when it came time for the cemetery to open the grave, they wouldn't do anything until she paid for something. Well, she didn't pay for nothing.
And Ron had to pay for that. This tragic day was about to get more uncomfortable for everyone, but especially Gloria.
Sandra made a spectacle of herself in front of the very detectives that interviewed her just the day before. They were in attendance too.
And she sat down at the table with detectives, Pacheco and Mitchell, and she said, don't you find me attractive? Can you imagine not only a widow behaving this way mere days after the death of her husband, but in front of his mother? At her son's funeral? You know, how can you be that callous? And by the time Alan was laid to rest at Memorial Park Cemetery, I'd imagine most of those 400 people who came to pay their respects were curious about his mysterious widow. But she didn't give anyone in attendance that day much time to figure her out.
As soon as the funeral ended, Sandra hopped on a plane. And went right back to Dallas.
She never returned to speak with the Oklahoma City detectives again. And flying home, she hardly behaved.
Friends of ours that had come up from Dallas on that plane and went back, they said she was flirting with men up and down the aisle, going back to Dallas. And that's just how she acted.
Something's just so unsettling here. By now, Gloria was miles past embarrassment.
She had left behind the benefit of the doubt she'd given Alan's wife too. Gloria started to suspect Sandra.
Gloria begins to get a sense that there's something terribly wrong with Sandra. She starts to hear from people who tell her these other stories, which she has never heard before.
In the days after Alan was put to rest, her phone kept on ringing. I got a phone call from a lady in Highland Park, and she started telling me that they had feared for his life when she started dating him.
Then when he was killed, they all got together and said, well, we're not surprised. What did she mean? Not surprised.
That's when they started telling me about her. And I was just stunned.
The woman on the phone revealed that in Dallas, Sandra was known as the Black Widow. She had a habit of destroying the men who fell for her.
She had leeched them dry.

And if they tried to leave her, things would turn ugly.

In fact, Alan wasn't the first husband of Sandra's who had died under mysterious circumstances.

If Alan and Sandra's marriage had been on the rocks,

Gloria thought,

that could only mean one thing.

We suspected that she was the culprit

and that she definitely had known where he was. And what happened to him? She did this.
on the next episode of Fatal Beauty, we go back to Dallas, where Sandra used her devilish charm to land husbands and get what she wanted. As people close to her died, one after the other, Sandra managed to remain free.
At the time it was ruled a suicide, they assumed that the police know what they're doing. And most people felt extreme sympathy for her.
Multiple persons who were privy to these events are very close to what was going on in real time. They've just chosen to remain silent about it.
Sandra is the last person to see her alive. She was either the Black Widow or bad luck.
I don't know which. Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to.
Unlock all episodes of Fatal Beauty ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge podcast channel. Search the Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page.
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Check out the Binge channel page on Apple Podcasts or getthebinge.com to learn more. and Epidemic Sound.
Our associate producer is Zoe Kolkin. Our fact checker is Naomi Barr.

Our production managers are Sammy Allison

and Tamika Balanz-Kolosny.

Our lawyer is Rachel Goldberg.

Special thanks to Steve Ackerman,

Emily Rosick, Jamie Myers,

Eric Miller, Skip Hollinsworth,

and Glenna Whitley,

whose reporting for D Magazine

and the Dallas Observer

is an essential piece of the story

of Sandra Bridewell.

If you'd like to read more about Sandra's life, grab a copy of John Leake's The Meaning of Malice On the Trail of the Black Widow of Highland Park. Please rate and review Fatal Beauty.
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