Fatal Beauty | 2. An Open Secret

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Before we get started, I just want to let you know we do discuss suicide in this episode.

So please, listen with care.

It was the kind of afternoon that felt timeless, suspended in the golden haze of late summer. Highland Park stood pristine, a cocoon of manicured lawns and sprawling homes, a place as polished as its reputation.
This is the bubble. That's the nickname of Highland Park.
The ills and afflictions of most of humanity, they don't really happen here. Long before John Lake wrote The Meaning of Malice, his book about Sandra, he was her neighbor.
I was friends with her daughter, Catherine. Most of the time, there didn't seem to be much adult supervision, which made hanging out at the Bridewell house kind of fun.
It was the ideal spot for a teenage after-school hang. The thing I noticed about Sandra was, first and foremost, she just wasn't like other mothers.
She drove a Mercedes 380 SL convertible, which is a two-seater. And at the time, I just thought, how come other moms don't drive that car?

He'd only ever caught glimpses of her,

but one afternoon, she was actually home.

Sandra entered the kitchen like a vision from another world.

Perfectly quaffed, her dark hair glinting in the sunlight streaming through the windows.

Her blouse shimmered as she moved.

John froze for a moment, his adolescent brain struggling to comprehend the woman in front of him. The first time I met Sandra was 1983, so I would have been 13 years old.
She would give even a teenager like him her undivided attention in a way that was disarming. Whatever I said as I spoke, Sandra looked at me and she would sort of gaze upon me with these big brown eyes as though what I was saying was fascinating.
Sandra was sexy, alluring. He couldn't quite understand her power then, but he understood enough to see.
She was the kind of woman who men couldn't turn away from.

She was something of a siren, if you will.

Unfortunately, for a few unlucky people who got mixed up with Sandra,

they underestimated how dangerous she could be.

Until it was too late.

Can't blame them, though.

Even the police took a good long while

to suspect her of crimes,

to see what she was truly capable of.

From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Fatal Beauty. I'm Cooper Mall.
Episode 2, An Open Secret. Sandra wasn't born into wealth, but from a young age, she aspired to fit into it.
She had grown up in Oak Cliff, a world apart from Highland Park, but close enough to see the life she dreamed of. Just a river separated her hometown from the bubble.
Sandra was the daughter of a man who sold cemetery plots for a living. By then, her mother had died in a car crash.
Sandra wanted to catch herself a man who could provide the life she dreamed of. She went to Tyler Junior College in 1962, but less so to expand her mind or land a job.
She aimed to perfect her allure. A lot of people when they're in those college ages, they are not working on this glamorous, sophisticated persona.
This is Glenna Whitley, an investigative reporter who's been tracking Sandra for the better part of decades. In 1963, Betty Friedan dared women to get out of the kitchen and into workplaces.
Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, was a call to arms. Sandra wanted no part of it.
She wanted to marry rich and rely on her man to get her the life she deserved. She had set her eyes from the very beginning on living a glamorous, expensive, almost aristocratic life.

And when she married David Stiegel,

he was successful enough for her to begin living.

David had piercing eyes and high cheekbones,

and he was a doctor.

But he started out as a real Texan cowboy.

When David hung up his lasso,

he pursued a career in dentistry,

the same trade as his father before him.

After graduating from a prestigious dental school in Dallas,

he headed to California to study under a dentist of the stars.

In Hollywood, David fine-tuned not only his craft,

but found his target client base,

wealthy and elite. So his next move, setting up shop in Highland Park, was a no-brainer.
The people that live there are wealthy people who live in gorgeous, huge, very expensive homes. And it's a very tight-knit society.
But before he could penetrate the bubble, he rented an apartment just east of it. That's where his paths cross with a neighbor who seemed to have stepped out of a southern fairy tale.
Sandra was David's first girlfriend, and also his last. David was just 24 when they met.

Sandra was 23. David popped the question just six weeks into dating.
In May 1967, Sandra Powers became Mrs. Sandra Stiegel, a dentist's wife.
Little did David know what he was in for. They got as close to Highland Park as they could by moving into Greenway Parks, which was a little slice of nice bungalows.
They had to start somewhere. She's setting herself up to entertain people from the world in which they want to rise.
And so you had to have

the right furnishings and the right linens and everything had to be the best. And she got a

live-in maid. In short order, she gave birth to two children, Britt and Catherine.
She had help

raising the children, so she was still free to pursue her interests. She hired an interior decorator to the tune of $35,000.
Back then, a perfectly good car went for about $4,000. She could have had eight cars for what she spent to make her house enviable.
She's learning how to get her foot on that social ladder and begin the climb. Their home became a showpiece, featured in interior design magazines.
Sandra filled the house with antiques, fresh flowers, and an air of untouchable perfection. This lifestyle came at a cost.
They couldn't afford it. She was spending her husband into the poorhouse.
Even though he was making very good money, she was spending it faster than he could earn it. David was drowning.
They'd only been living in their Greenway Park's home for a year when the IRS issued a lien. That's when the government claims your property if you can't pay your taxes.
On top of that, a North Dallas bank was hounding them for $30,000 they owed. And she couldn't stop.
So this began creating a pattern of whatever she had was never enough. And the more it war on David, the more Sandra worried for him.
She proposed that he seek psychiatric counseling because he was so stressed out. And she procured the psychiatrist and made the introduction to David.
Was she being a helpful wife? Or was she playing

some kind of long game? In 1974, about a year after he and Sandra welcomed their third child,

Emily, David turned to his dad for a considerable favor. David Stiegel had to borrow $100,000

from his father. The money problems were out of control.
David kept a lid on it. He didn't let on to colleagues or friends how much he was struggling.
Late one night in January 1975, his estate attorney, Jack Sides, got an alarming call from Sandra. And she said, I'm worried about what David might do.
He's got a pistol. Could you come over here? Jack rushed over and marched right up to the master bedroom.
David, what the hell do you think you're doing? He said, I can't take this anymore. And it was a weird kind of standoff.
He was sitting in this closet in the master bedroom. And Sandra and a couple of the kids were perched on the edge of the bed.
With his family and attorney as witnesses, David reiterated the threat. This is truly bizarre.
Why hadn't Sandra ushered the kids away? I'm going to kill myself. And Jack's side said, no, you're not.
I'm going to walk in there and get that pistol. David had let someone into his inner world.
In a society accustomed to keeping up appearances, this was almost a cardinal sin. He was then kind of mortified.
He met Jack Sides for dinner a few nights later and said, I'm really sorry about the drama. I've gotten so lost in this thing.
But I wanted to tell you I would never commit suicide. In fact, I've resolved to put this thing in order.
Put things in order? What could that possibly mean? I'm going to divorce Sandra. Sandra and David never got that divorce.
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Mark was known as the Dog Whisperer of Anacortes. They soon discovered a story tangled in obsession.
Who was the hunter and who was the hunted? Follow and listen to Train to Kill, the dog trainer, the heiress, and the bodyguard on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. On the morning of February 25th, 1975, Sandra woke early, around 7 a.m., to a mysterious sound.
She felt uneasy. Something wasn't right, she'd later say.
So she telephoned one of David's colleagues, Dr. Paul Radman, to tell him, something terrible has happened to David.
In no time, Dr. Radman and his wife were on their way.
When they arrived, Sandra explained she'd been sleeping in one of her kids' bedrooms. I heard something really weird, and I haven't gone in there, but would you see if David's okay? What could all this fuss be about? Dr.
Radman went to see for himself. He opened the door of the master bedroom, and there was David.
In his king-sized bed with a gunshot wound in his head, he's dead. And his wrists have been slashed.
David's body lay lifeless. A .22 caliber pistol rested near his hand.
The sheets beneath him meticulously tucked around his body. I immediately have so many questions.
Luckily, this is Leak's wheelhouse. In fact, his painstaking efforts are how the photographs from the morning David was found were made public.
When a .22 caliber pistol is fired, it doesn't just make a mysterious noise. It comes in right around 160 decibels.
That's louder than a jet aircraft taking off. Another curious thing, there was no contact wound from the gun, meaning David shot himself from a distance.
Very hard to imagine how you could be lying on your right side, raise the pistol, hold it above the left side of your head. It's just extremely awkward to lie in bed and hold this pistol.

The other thing is if you're holding it in that position, you can't be sure about your aim.

So the natural thing to do is to rest the muzzle on your temple.

But he didn't do that.

He held the muzzle a couple of inches from his head.

And supposedly shot himself and kept his composure after.

Here's the thing that makes this suicide theory quite hard to believe.

The gun was found resting in David's hand with the covers pulled over it. You can hear it in

Leek's voice. He just doesn't buy that David would be able to do that after blowing a bullet

through his head. If he did this, he then retained sufficient nervous and muscular control

I don't know. He just doesn't buy that David would be able to do that after blowing a bullet through his head.
If he did this, he then retained sufficient nervous and muscular control to continue grasping the weapon, to lie the weapon down on the bed, and then to lay his hand on the weapon, and then to pull the covers up over it. Had David taken his own life? Or had the scene been carefully staged a point to suicide? If he had been killed, the murderer made a mistake.
It turned out David's forearm had been slashed, not his wrist. So a guy who knows his anatomy knows that you're not going to hit the radial artery with a knife or a razor blade if you slash away at the forearm.
Where you hit the radial artery is where you take a patient's pulse in their wrist. And, I mean, he would know that as a medical guy.
But if he was murdered, his killer might not have. We've got the benefit of hindsight looking at the pictures of this scene decades after the fact.
When the police finally arrived that morning and started processing what might have happened, they did not dwell on the bizarre way David Stiegel died. They went with a story that seemed most simple.
So when the investigating officer arrives, there's this inconsolable pretty young lady. And the immediate perception is that this guy had some debts that he was having a hard time paying and that he was apparently suffering from suicidal ideation.
To them, it seems straightforward. A man burdened by debt, crushed by the weight of his wife's expectations, had finally snapped.
The cops went with Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the best. David's own psychiatrist, the one Sandra set him up with, backed this narrative too.
The psychiatrist told the police, yeah, the guy was totally strung out and stressed out. The police found the testimony of the psychiatrist persuasive.
And the medical examiner sealed the deal. The indications were the guy had killed himself.
Leake told me the investigation only lasted five days, not even a week. And Sandra was barely questioned.
But what she did say was baffling. She didn't say that there was evidence of forced entry, that someone else came over that night.
It was by her own testimony, she was the only other person in the house. When a wife ends up dead in the home, the husband is almost always looked at.
But Sandra? She didn't raise suspicions. The overriding feeling was poor, poor Sandra.
Here she is with three children, very young children. She is now a widow at a very young age.
David's death was brushed aside as a tragedy, but I still had a lot of questions. David was, by all accounts, a private guy.
Yet when he did manage to confess his worries, Sandra had been instrumental in making sure witnesses heard them. She called up his attorney, Jack, the night he threatened suicide.
Here's Leek. I believe that when David said, I've had enough, I'm going to end it all, Sandra called Jack's sides not just to diffuse the situation, but she understood that he would serve as a witness or could serve as a witness.
Meaning? If David then is found shot of an apparent suicide, this previous incident will be interpreted or perceived to be evidence that he did, in fact, finally carry it out. And it wasn't just Jack she teed up.
She procured the psychiatrist, and I believe that the psychiatrist, his conception of David as being a troubled man at least initially began with Sandra's representations of it. Had she led the cops to believe exactly what she wanted them to? I think it's possible, if not likely.
For me, that crime scene had too many clues that David had been killed. The strange slashes on his forearm, not his wrist.

The covers that had been pulled over the gun resting in his hand.

And there was something else I found truly eerie.

Someone had tucked him in.

The comforter on the right side of the bed

has been smoothed out,

and then the comforter has been tucked in

along the backside of his buttocks and the backside of his legs. Someone else had been there.
But it seems to me the biggest oversight wasn't any of these clues. A potential motive to kill was overlooked.
Sandra was the beneficiary of the will, like of everything he had. And a little something extra.
a life insurance policy for $160,000. And it does pay out in cases of suicide.
Which Sandra already knew. Because before David's death, Sandra didn't just rope in his psychiatrist and attorney.
She called his life insurance broker. She had one question.
Would she still get the money if David took his own life? This detail potentially points to premeditation. The cops? Incredibly, they never barked up that tree.
Between the $160,000 death benefit and the equity in their home,

Sandra walked away with far more than she would have in a divorce.

Well, there's people that had suspicions.

At the time, it was ruled a suicide.

They assume that the police know what they're doing.

And most people felt extreme sympathy for her.

After Sandra got the proceeds from the life insurance policy,

she paid off her debts, took the kids on vacation, and moved on with her life.

As the weeks turned into months following David's death,

Sandra's grief was eclipsed by a sense of urgency.

She no longer had a man to support her or her children.

A lot of the women in this community could put themselves in her shoes. And so they really tried to reach out to her to help her with her kids, just to treat her as they would want to be treated if such a tragedy had happened to them.
They also encouraged her to date available men. She wanted to find a wealthy man who could take care of her in the style that she had dreamed of being taken care of.
She understood the delicate balance of seduction independence, how to make a man believe that his success wasn't complete without a woman like her to reflect it back to him.

Sandra had mastered the art of admiration. The way to tilt her head just so, to let her eyes linger for a second longer.
To make a man feel as though he was the most important, most powerful person in the room. The hunt was on in Highland Park.
she researches men who are wealthy, whether they're married or not married, and goes after them.

It's not unlike how nowadays you'd peek around your Tinder Match's socials.

For example, one was a very prominent restaurateur, Norman Brinker.

Norman Brinker was the mastermind behind Fast Casual.

The restaurant he founded, Steak and Ale, is kind of like the godfather of spots like Chili's, which he also later bought. He was certifiably rich.
She managed to show up on the day that he was having his car washed at the same car wash and introduced herself and finagled a date out of it. In her research, it seems Sandra overlooked that Norman was in the midst of a divorce.
She begins regaling all of her friends with tales about the ex-wife, you know, trying to come after her, you know, writing threats and lipstick, even throwing a knife at her.

This sounds like some real Housewives of Highland Park kind of shit. Let's just say their romance was short-lived, but it certainly got Sandra's name on the tip of everyone's tongue.
There were people that started after this to think, wow, that's kind of weird. But there were others who said, well, let's introduce her to another person who was quite beloved.
Bobby Bridewell. He was born in Tyler, Texas, which is in the middle of the East Texas oil patch.
His father was actually an independent oil guy for a while. By all accounts, Bobby was a work hard, play hard kind of guy.
Here's Whitley again. He's the life of the party.
Men like him and women like him. He's one of those guys who's fun to be around, just well-traveled, doing his own deals, and, you know, pretty high-flying.
He was quite a catch. This time, it was a bit more elaborate than a meet-cute at a car wash.
It was a dinner party specifically held so that she could meet him. People were trying to get them together in an elaborate way, a fun way, and they arranged for her to pop out of this closet in the middle of this party.
I don't know about you, but this would be way too over the top for me. But Bobby found her charming.
He was instantly smitten with Sandra. From that night in the fall of 1977 on, the two were an item.
They married in June of 1978, not even a year after meeting. Sandra reveled in Bobby's reputation, his extravagant lifestyle, and most importantly, the way he adored her children, whom he adopted and gave his name.
And Bobby had succeeded where her first husband hadn't. He bought her a palatial house smack dab in the middle of Highland Park.
She did not realize, however, that Bridewell wasn't as wealthy as she had thought that he was. Bobby's most recent ventures in hospitality were tanking.
He'd gone bankrupt and was in debt to the tune of $3 million. His debt, though, didn't drive him to despair.
It lit a fire under him. Then an opportunity came knocking at the perfect time.
A mansion in the center of Highland Park once owned by a great cotton and oil baron, Shepard King, had fallen into disrepair. Bobby didn't see a dilapidated building.
He saw the park city's hottest new social hub. Investors got on board.
By 1980, his buzzy restaurant was open for business. Bobby was officially the comeback king.
The mansion on Turtle Creek became the place to see and be seen. And Sandra, she got catapulted to Queen of Highland Park.
Sandra loved to hang out at the restaurant in the mansion and, you know, she sort of held court there. Not long after the mansion on Turtle Creek had become a fixture in the park cities, Sandra and Bobby joined friends at the Highland Park Village Theater to see all that jazz.
In the midst of the picture, he broke out into the most violent sweat. Like, he's like, what's going on here? Like, my clothes are soaked.
The sweat opened up the floodgates to a misfortune he could have never predicted. Bobby was diagnosed with lymphoma and he became very sick.

He was 40 years old.

Even though he was treated with chemotherapy

by the premier oncologist

in Highland Park at the time,

John Bagwell,

he got sicker and sicker.

While Dr. Bagwell took care of Bobby, Sandra glommed on to his better half.
He and his family lived just a few blocks away. Sandra took a fancy or took an interest in Dr.
Bagwell's wife, Betsy. Betsy was known to be a very open-hearted, generous, kind of giving, empathetic lady.

But her generosity would soon be tested. And she had two children of her own.
But one of the things that Sandra did was constantly seek Betsy's assistance in looking after her three kids. Then Sandra does something somewhat inexplicable.
She moves Bobby out of the house into a hotel and announces that she's remodeling. She prioritized a remodel over spending her husband's final days by his side? That was cold.
She parks her kids with various friends who also have children and sometimes doesn't come back for a day or so. Imagine the kind of sympathy Sandra was garnering at this point.
To be able to leave three kids with other families for 24 hours at a time, they probably figured she was shuttling Bobby to chemo. She wasn't.
Bobby was dying, and she was trying to find her next husband. The hotel Bobby had built became her hunting ground.
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Visit Washington.org to plan your trip. So it was really during this period that Bobby was dying that Sandra, in a very aggressive way, began to constantly seek the company and the care and the assistance of the Bagwells.
Sandra's gauche behavior in the wake of Bobby's illness had ostracized her from pretty much everyone but the Bagwells. And it wasn't like they could really cut ties while Dr.
Bagwell was still treating her husband. Bobby died Mother's Day of 1982 at Baylor University Medical Center.
He was buried in the Garden of Eternity at Sparkman Hillcrest Cemetery. The prefix engraved before his name on his headstone read, Our Beloved.
After his death, Sandra leaned on the Bagwells even more than before. She's starting to feel some desperation.
Like she couldn't stand to be alone. Like she expected others to help her.
She needed them, and she wasn't going to take no for an answer, it seemed. The constant request and the constant leaving of her kids at Betsy's, it just starts to get suffocating.
But by now, Sandra's a widow two times over, no income coming in, and three children depending on her. It must have been a scary time.
Betsy is sympathetic, but enough is enough. I can't take this.
And John was feeling it too, I'm sure. But I think that Betsy was just trying to extricate herself as delicately as she could, but Sandra wasn't taking the hints.
She just kept insinuating herself into their lives to the point of just making Betsy resent her. Then Fourth of July weekend rolled around.
The Bagwells went away to their second home in Santa Fe, and Sandra showed up there, uninvited. For Betsy, that was the last straw.
She told Dr. Bagwell, we have to extricate ourselves from this woman.
We have to disentangle from this strange woman. Sandra wasn't just eccentric.
She was dangerous. And it was about 10 days after that fateful last straw in Santa Fe, New Mexico,

that Betsy's found shot to death in her car at Love Field.

It began with a favor.

A small, seemingly innocent request.

Sandra Bridewell needed help getting to Love Field Airport. Her car had broken down, again.
And she called Betsy. Their friendship was tenuous at this point.
And even though Sandra must have sensed Betsy was pulling away, she bet that her friends still wouldn't be able to say no. Here's Whitley again, recounting this fateful moment.
Can you take me to Love Field? I need to rent a car because mine won't start. Despite everything that had gone down in Santa Fe, Betsy agreed to drive Sandra.
She puts a frozen package of pasta sauce in the sink to thaw, tells her kids not to pig out, they're going to have a big pasta dinner, and that's the last she's heard of by anybody. Sandra is the last person to see her alive.
Hours later, at 8.20 p.m., way past when she was meant to be home, eating pasta with her children, Betsy Bagwell's body was discovered. She was found in her baby bloom Rosady's Benz station wagon in the airport parking lot.
Betsy had been shot in the head with a small handgun, a cheap .22 caliber known as a Saturday night special. Here's the homicide detective who arrived first.
At the crime scene, my first impression was pretty much that it was a suicide. The gun was in her hand.
She had what appeared to be a contact wound to the head. Detective J.J.
Coughlin was early in his long career with the Dallas PD. He didn't see any signs of foul play.
There was no appearance of being robbed or there being any other violence other than the gunshot wound to the head. So it's like she pulled up in there, you know, in her car and put the gun to her head and shot herself.
Soon after, Detective Coughlin went to notify Betsy's husband. We told him what we had found.
And that's probably the first time we heard Sandra Bridewell's name. As the process went on, they had more suspicions about her involvement.
The logical next step was a medical examiner's report and an interview with Sandra. She came to our office, which was down on Harwood Street.
Detective Coughlin remembered Sandra as well-spoken, pleasant even. But her interview? Completely unremarkable.
She didn't provide us any information that would implicate her. Coughlin told the Bagwell family he had nothing on Sandra.
It was looking like Betsy had taken her own life. The gun was in her hand, contact wound to the temple, blood spatter on her hand, you know.
I was pretty sure it's going to get ruled a suicide. And the next day it was.
The chief medical examiner, Charles Petty, determined from the autopsy that the gun residue found on right-handed Betsy indicated a self-inflicted end. Detective Coughlin told Dr.
Bagwell,

The only way I could overturn it would be to come up with evidence

showing that it wasn't a suicide.

And they didn't have that evidence.

The family didn't want to accept any of that.

I mean, it really all comes down to evidence.

Here's the baffling thing. People close to Sandra Bridewell kept dying.
Their deaths would be ruled a suicide, and yet, the cops didn't find that suspicious, or even strange. Sandra was the only person in the house with her husband, David, the last person seen with Betsy Bagwell.
Detective Coughlin was a homicide detective. And yet, he felt Betsy's shooting was an open and shut suicide case and nothing more.
But to Glenna Whitley, that journalist who has long been tracking Sandra Bagwell, some clues pointed to murder. The fact that she's shot with a Saturday night special doesn't make any sense.
This is a wealthy woman. If she wanted to have a gun, she's not going to buy a Saturday night special at a pawn store or something like that.
Where the hell did this thing come from then? This gun was traced back to somebody who lived in Oak Cliff. And they said, oh, we haven't seen that gun in years.

It was stolen.

We never reported it.

Detective Coughlin brought in agents from the ATF to look further.

That's the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

We tried to take our time and look longer and see if we could ever tie anything up on that.

Never could. Then one month after Betsy was found, Dr.
Bagwell got some good news. The Dallas County Medical Examiner issued a memo welcoming any additional information that could be obtained about her death.
And in that memo, he admitted that he told Betsy's widower he was not sure she died by her own hand. Not sure at all.
Here's Leek summing up what the medical examiner said. I could be no more certain of my manner of death suicide conclusion than he could be certain of a particular clinical diagnosis.
He encouraged Dr. Bagwell to take action.
Dr. Bagwell had enough concern to hire a private investigator.
The PI he hired was Al Thiel, a former detective and postal inspector for the military. He came to believe that it was a staged suicide.
And he was pulling out all the stops to prove it. Thiel contacted an esteemed forensic scientist in California named Dr.
John Thornton. Gunshot residue analysis was one of his specialties.
That gunpowder residue on Betsy's right hand could have ended up there because she was close to the weapon, not as a direct result of shooting herself. Dr.
Thornton provided John Bagwell

with a report that challenged

the local medical examiner's findings.

This was evidence that refuted

Betsy had died by her own hand,

that she might have been murdered.

And here's where things get strange.

Leek explains.

There's no indication that Dr. Bagwell forwarded the report to the Dallas County Medical Examiners.
This was a report that could potentially reopen Betsy's case. Maybe even overturn the suicide ruling.
And her husband just never got it in front of the right people who could do something about it? Dr. Bagwell declined to speak to me, and pretty much any reporter who has ever reached out to him about his wife's death.
Why would he stop pursuing justice now? Who was he afraid of? Was it the same strange woman his wife had wanted out of their lives? Now this begins to get very, very weird. By this point, in 1982,

more than one person in Highland Park thought Sandra Bridewell,

mother of three, former Queen Bee of the Bubble,

was a killer.

Betsy's death was the tipping point.

And yet, people who had their suspicions

didn't talk to detectives.

There were two women that had lunch with her

at the country club right before she set off

on this misadventure.

They had no doubt that Sandra murdered Betsy Bagwell.

None. Zero.

So one of the most intriguing aspects of the story is,

well, you believe that Sandra murdered your friend.

Why didn't you contact the police? The two women didn't think it was their place. They assumed that the proper person to discuss this matter with the police was Betsy's husband.
He talked to the cops, but never about overturning the suicide ruling. Recently, I asked Detective Coughlin if he ever pursued the idea that Sandra might have been involved with Dr.
Bagwell. He doubled down on his original theory.
I still feel strongly the evidence says Betsy killed herself. I don't know what's going on in people's lives a lot of times, but did Sandra do something that sent Betsy over the edge? Maybe.
She was either the black widow or bad luck. I don't know which.
Up until Betsy's death, the good people of Highland Park had thought of Sandra as a nuisance. Not the kind of woman you'd want your husband around.
But after Betsy died, all bets were off. There was a ripple under the surface, particularly among the women, that this woman may be dangerous.
Not only dangerous to us in terms of having an affair with our husbands, but in terms of being dangerous to our lives. Sandra, the single mother twice widowed, was no longer a magnet for misfortune.
She was a temptress, a calculating woman who was far more intelligent than people had given her credit for. She might have even been a woman capable of getting away with murder.
Not that anyone told the cops that. After Betsy's death, it was an open secret in Highland Park that anyone who gets in Sandra's way will pay.
And she was not to be trusted. Here is this lady who's viewed with grave suspicion, and I would say even fear, but nobody says anything to this young fellow who's just arrived from Oklahoma.
He just has no warning about this.

So he has no idea what he's getting himself into when he commences this romance with this lady. And Alan Rarig would be dead just 12 months after meeting Sandra.
Next time on Fatal Beauty. You know, you're going to take this polygraph test.
If she passed. Then you're going to be able to show the police, look, I had nothing to do with this.
She comes out and she's crying and she says, I failed it. I failed it.
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