How? Who? Why? - questions asked whenever a deplorable death occurred.
Open Secrets (1994) is a true story of love and jealousy, a tangled story of an unthinkable murder for hire, a far-reaching plot set in motion by an unlikely killer and expanded to include a remarkable cast of characters, which inevitably made international headlines.
In 1983, Rozanne Gailiunas was thirty-three years old, a registered nurse, and had lived at her rented Loganwood Drive home in Dallas, Texas, with her then four-year-old son, Peter III, since her June separation from her husband, Dr Peter Gailiunas.
A few months later, on 4 October 1983, Rozanne was found stripped, bound to her bed, and shot twice through the skull. Her four-year-old son had been napping peacefully in the next room when she was killed.
From the start, the police thought that the crime scene did not make sense. On the one hand, there had been no evidence of a break-in or a burglary. On the other, the classic elements of a passion crime - a love triangle - were in place. However, the fact that the victim was bound and gagged suggested the kind of planning that seldom accompanied a scorned lover's sudden rage. Also, there was the fact that young Peter was in the house during the attack.
Almost immediately, two men fell under suspicion - Rozanne's estranged husband, Dr Peter Gailiunas and her lover, Larry Aylor - until in 1987, nearly five years after Rozanne's murder, a surprise informant (Joy's older sister, Carol), identified the mastermind behind the murder as Aylor's own wife, Joy, a woman so driven by jealousy and greed that she put out a contract on both Rozanne and later her own husband, Larry.
On 19 September 1988, Joy Aylor was indicted on five felony counts - capital murder, conspiracy to commit capital murder, and solicitation of capital murder - related to the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas and the attempted murder of Larry Aylor and was arrested. The following afternoon, she went home after paying her bond money of $140 000.
Two years later, sometime in May 1990, several days before her pretrial hearing, she fled to Canada and Mexico.
On the run and managing to elude investigations for eight years, the two-year search for the socialite would eventually end in the south of France in the spring of 1991. An anonymous tip resulting from a minor car accident led French authorities to a rented villa near Nice, France, where the elusive femme fatale was arrested on 16 March 1991.
On the evening of 4 November 1993, Joy Aylor aka "Devil Woman of Dallas" finally landed back at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport following her long-delayed extradition back to the United States.
Her long-awaited trial got underway in August 1994.
Eighteen days later, the guilty verdict was read. Judge Pat McDowell sentenced Joy Aylor to life in prison with eligibility of parole in March 2011 which was denied. She remains incarcerated at the Mountain View women's prison in Gatesville, Texas. She will turn sixty-five-years old in 2014.
The hitman, George "Andy" Anderson Hopper was convicted for the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas in March 1992 and sentenced to death by lethal injection on 8 March 2005 in Huntsville, Texas. Witnesses at his execution claimed he was extremely remorseful for his actions.
Thus ended a hire-for-murder plot that took eleven years to bring to justice.
About the author: Carlton Stowers is the author of more than two dozen non-fiction books, including the Edgar award-winning and Opie award-winning (in the Reporting category) Careless Whispers (1986), the Pulitzer prize nominated Innocence Lost (1990), and Open Secrets. Among his many accolades, he was named Dallas' Best Writer by the Dallas Observer and in 1997 was honoured as "Author of the Year" by the friends of the Duncanville Library. He received a National Community Network Media Award for Exceptional Merit for an article he wrote on the deadly use of heroin by teens in Plano, Texas. He has also written two books for children - A Hero Named George (1991) and Hard Lessons (1994) - which are being used by elementary schools as part of their drug and gang prevention program.
No comments:
Post a Comment