Stephanie Kane & The Murder She Couldn't Forget

Brittany:
Hey everybody in serial killer country, my name is Brittany Ransom, and this is When Killers Get Caught, a podcast devoted to deep dives into the killers we love to learn about. And in season three, we're gonna talk one-on-one with people who've experienced crime or been deeply affected by the justice system in the United States, but don't fret, you're still gonna get your general deep dives into who killers were, how they grew up, how they killed and how they got caught. And before we jump into our first guest on the podcast, I wanna say thank you so much to everyone who contacted me. over the last six months, the 50,000 listeners who continued to play all of the old podcasts and the people who let me know that you love this. I just thank you a lot for listening and your passion for my passion helped me to kind of get back on my feet and get back to making the podcast. Now this week at True Crime, we're going to be talking about a case from a different angle. Our guest today was just a young woman, days away from her wedding day when her mother-in-law was brutally murdered. The crime haunted her for decades. And so she decided to write a fictional account of the murder called Quiet Time. Quiet Time allowed Stephanie a chance to get the justice for her mother-in-law, Betty, that just didn't come in real life. But what she had no idea was that her book would reopen the case and throw her under the turning wheels of the U S justice system. So I'd like to introduce you all to my guest today, our award winning author of seven crime novels, Stephanie Kane. And today on June 9th, it's the 50th anniversary of the murder. We're going to be talking about. I want to thank you for coming to the podcast Stephanie.

Stephanie:
Hey, thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Brittany:
This is really exciting, but I want to get our listeners up to task and really about, let's start with who your mother-in-law Betty was. When we first spoke, you told me that she was raised in Depression-era Kansas.

Stephanie:
Yes, actually she and her husband, Dwayne, both came from the same little northeastern part of the state of Kansas and they knew each other, you know, in high school. And anyway, it was a pretty rural area. And the two families were actually kind of like the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Brittany:
Wow.

Stephanie:
strict German Catholic wheat farming family. And the Frys, Dwayne's family, were Protestants who owned shops in the county seat. And the two families, by all accounts, had mutual contempt for each other. Betty's mother, Kunde, had been born in a sod-covered dugout in the side of a hill. And she raised 10 kids on that farm that she and her husband bought at the height of the depression.

Brittany:
Oh

Stephanie:
And

Brittany:
geez.

Stephanie:
eight of them were girls. And she organized her eight daughters into cooking and cleaning brigades. And

Brittany:
Wow.

Stephanie:
she raised them with the mantra, do nothing to shame your seven sisters. And I always thought that Betty, you know, Betty was special, clearly. And I thought it was because she was the youngest daughter, but it turns out she wasn't the youngest at all. She came in the middle of the family. And what older special was that she was the only blonde.

Brittany:
Oh!

Stephanie:
Yes, so

Brittany:
And...

Stephanie:
that caught

Brittany:
In...

Stephanie:
Wayne's eye.

Brittany:
Right. Because I mean, that was a thing that her husband, Dwayne was into.

Stephanie:
Yeah, right. And Dwayne's mother, Loita, who owned a little gift shop in town, was very, very cruel. And she,

Brittany:
Mm.

Stephanie:
after Betty and Dwayne hooked up, she made Betty's life hell. But even before that, she called the Ortons, Betty's family, bohunks, which is a slur for the Czechoslovakian farmers that, you know, farm in the valley. And so

Brittany:
Whoa.

Stephanie:
she was just, she was just, horrible to Betty. And by all accounts, she and Dwayne, her son, her only son, were inseparable. They were two of a kind.

Brittany:
So, wait a second here. So we've got a lot going against Betty and Dwayne before the be-even begin. Mom hates this new girlfriend. Then we also have the Catholic versus Protestant thing, which was a big deal in the past.

Stephanie:
Yes. And we also have city versus country.

Brittany:
Right!

Stephanie:
Money. So.

Brittany:
We have City versus Country, and then we also learn later on that, in your book, that both Dwayne and Betty's families have histories of mental illness.

Stephanie:
Yes, and I think that what really bound those families, although they would never ever cop to this, what really bound them was the sense of shame over mental illness. Because Dwayne's father, who ran this little automotive shop in the county seat, was a very gentle man, but he had clinical depression.

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
And Dwayne and Betty, of course, had bipolar disease. And both families were so ashamed of this streak of mental illness in their family that, you know, they never talked about it, they never told their children about it. You know, Betty's children didn't find out that she had bipolar disease until after she was killed.

Brittany:
Wow. Also that's interesting because there's a section in your book where you talk about a Dwayne talking to Betty's sister. And he said, I should have married you, you were stronger. And that was after Betty had already gone to seek out mental health care at different places.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Brittany:
How did they hide that from the kids?

Stephanie:
Well, they have this thing, this is where the title of my novel that opened the cold case comes from. They had this thing in the family that they called Quiet Time.

Brittany:
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Stephanie:
And it was when Betty was, you know, laying in a dark bedroom with a cloth over her head and the children could not make any noise.

Brittany:
Wow, okay.

Stephanie:
And that's where the title of my novel came from.

Brittany:
Oh wow, that's really interesting. So we've all these things happening here, but somehow the two of them decide to get married.

Stephanie:
Yes, I think Dwayne was Betty's knight in shining armor and I think Betty was Dwayne's physical ideal. She was blonde, she was very spelt, she was very fashionable. She was the perfect wife, except she wasn't.

Brittany:
except for the fact that she needed her quiet times,

Stephanie:
That's

Brittany:
which

Stephanie:
right.

Brittany:
upset

Stephanie:
And

Brittany:
him.

Stephanie:
that only surfaced after they were.

Brittany:
Oh, wow. So do we know if... No, we move forward through time. They obviously have their son, Doug, and eventually you and Doug meet and decide that you wanna get married. And it's almost like history repeats itself because Betty can't stand you.

Stephanie:
That's right.

Brittany:
It's exactly like Dwayne's mother treated her.

Stephanie:
Exactly. Except Betty, I have to say, Betty was never cruel to me.

Brittany:
That was

Stephanie:
Betty,

Brittany:
good.

Stephanie:
you know, when I met Betty, I had heard all the Doug describers, this very vivacious woman. And when I met her, I was very surprised that she was very quiet. She was a lovely hostess. She, you know, obviously put a lot into, you know, her cooking and her table and all of that. She was dressed in a beautiful dress. And I just couldn't put her together with this vivacious, you know, almost manic person in retrospect that Doug had described. And I, you know, so she was not cruel to me when I met her at all. She was, she became more distant to me as Doug and I became more serious,

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
but she didn't have it in her to be cruel the way Lolita was to her. She just disapproved

Brittany:
I

Stephanie:
of me.

Brittany:
guess that was a good thing for you.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Brittany:
Now, one of the things that you mentioned in your book was that Betty got wind of a pretty, I guess, serious and private decision that you and Doug made that upset her greatly because of her religion.

Stephanie:
Yes, and that was one of the very last encounters that we had with her. And in fact, but even aside from that, she was very upset that we were living together in Sid.

Brittany:
Ooh.

Stephanie:
We were sophomores in college and we lived in an apartment together on the hill in Boulder, which is the student section of town. And the very last time we saw her, she made us promise that we would never let... Doug's younger brother, he was 13 at the time, Greg, know that we were living together. And we made her that promise, you know, because we were trying to make it, you know, we hoped for her approval.

Brittany:
so she's unhappy about you breaking her religious views.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Brittany:
but you're still gonna move forward. And at this point, you and Doug have a karate studio that you both run, right?

Stephanie:
No, Doug was actually employed by, we met at a karate studio, but

Brittany:
Oh, okay, okay.

Stephanie:
it was not our, the one that he was working at was not our studio. But he was teaching at it.

Brittany:
Okay, so you're both teaching at the karate. You

Stephanie:
He

Brittany:
meet

Stephanie:
was.

Brittany:
at the karate studio and you decide you're going to get married.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Brittany:
Is Betty happy about it?

Stephanie:
No, Betty is not happy about it. And in fact, we had some questions as to whether she was gonna even attend the wedding.

Brittany:
Oh

Stephanie:
So

Brittany:
dear.

Stephanie:
that morning that she called, which was not days, it was actually two weeks before the wedding was scheduled, she actually called our apartment that morning and Doug was in the shower, showering before he went to teach his karate classes.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
And she called and it was a complete shock to me because she had never called our apartment. I didn't

Brittany:
Oh.

Stephanie:
realize she had our phone number because, you know, the fact that we were living together was so taboo. And

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
I picked up the phone, you know, and it was in a, she wanted us to get a message to one of his older sisters who was, were also living in Boulder. And it was a completely innocuous, you know, conversation. It was about eight 30 that morning and I was one of the last people to speak to her.

Brittany:
Wow.

Stephanie:
But you

Brittany:
And

Stephanie:
know,

Brittany:
we're talking about June 9th, 1973.

Stephanie:
Right. And you know, because I so wanted her approval and acceptance, you know, I, when Doug got out of the shower, I said, Oh, you know, your mom called and it was like, Oh, maybe she's coming around. You know,

Brittany:
Aww.

Stephanie:
yeah.

Brittany:
Now, a couple of other weird things happened that day, and a lot of that has to do with Dwayne.

Stephanie:
Well, yeah, so the next thing that happens is Doug goes down the hill to teach his karate classes, and his brother Greg was coming up from the fries and lived about 40 miles from Boulder. He lived in a suburb of Denver. So that morning, Doug's 13-year-old brother, Greg, was coming up to, he was supposed to take the bus from, you know, where they lived to to Boulder, and he was going to take his first karate class. from his big brother, Doug. So it was kind of a big day for us. Anyways,

Brittany:
Hehehe

Stephanie:
so after the classes, usually I walk down the hill to meet Doug at the end of the classes and then we would walk home together. And this was no different. I went down and I saw, it was almost the end of the second class. It was like 1.30 and I got there. And to my surprise, his father, Dwayne, was sitting on a bench watching the class. And I looked at him and it was a broiling hot day. It was like in the 90s, Balder has brutal son. So it was this blazing hot day and he was wearing this long sleeve dark shirt with a t-shirt under it. And then I saw that he had this big bruise on his forehead. And

Brittany:
Hmm.

Stephanie:
so I first I said to him, what are you doing here? Cause we weren't expecting him and Betty had not mentioned that he was coming. And I should tell you that Dwayne was an efficiency expert. He was an engineer at Martin Marietta.

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
And his children called him Mr. Work the Problem.

Brittany:
Oh

Stephanie:
And

Brittany:
wow.

Stephanie:
he never, yes, so he never did anything spontaneously. So a spontaneous 40 mile drive to Boulder was,

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
so I said, what are you doing here? And he said, oh, I thought I would come to watch the class and show, Greg, your apartment, the little boy. And that

Brittany:
The

Stephanie:
was.

Brittany:
one after you had promised Betty

Stephanie:
Yes.

Brittany:
not to show him the apartment.

Stephanie:
Exactly.

Brittany:
Hmm.

Stephanie:
And then he said, and I thought I would find a place for your wedding rehearsal dinner. And this is like the first time we had heard anything about a wedding rehearsal dinner, because

Brittany:
Also, your wedding's 10 days away. That would have been handled already.

Stephanie:
Well, yeah, and we didn't even know if they were coming. So, you know, all of it was very strange. And then I saw the bruise on his forehead, and I said, you know, what happened to you? And he said that he and Benny had been cleaning house that morning, and he had opened a closet, and a lawn chair had fallen on his head.

Brittany:
Not implausible, but

Stephanie:
Yes,

Brittany:
strange.

Stephanie:
right. So then the class ends and Doug and Greg come over and say, you know, what are you doing here, Dad?

Brittany:
HAHAHAHA

Stephanie:
You know, and then we drive up to our apartment, which I still felt really weird about since we had promised Betty,

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
and they go in. First, Dwayne hands us this, hands Doug, a six pack of beer that was warm from sitting in his car, and that was... also really weird because they didn't have that kind of relationship where, hey, hey, son, let's crack a beer together. And it was three, three tube beer was the only thing Doug could buy legally. So his father giving him a six pack of beer was very weird, but that later tied into Dwayne's alibi. I later

Brittany:
Hmm

Stephanie:
found out. Anyway, they go, we go up to the apartment, you know, it's a tiny apartment, so it takes them like two seconds to look at it, and Dwayne sits at the edge of our cat, the daybed in our living room with his head in his hands, and then after about 10 or 15 minutes he jumps up and says, we've got to go, we've got to go. So he takes Greg, you know, and they're going to look for some place for our wedding rehearsal dinner or something, and Doug says to me, I wonder what happened. I've never seen him behave that way. So then we go to, we drive to Denver, Doug and I, to buy his first suit ever, his wedding suit, at a mall. And then we come back and the phone is ringing and somebody's saying, you gotta get home fast, something terrible's happened. And then we find out that Betty, his mother, has been killed. and

Brittany:
So

Stephanie:
the way.

Brittany:
you two pick up, you head over there.

Stephanie:
Yep, and it appeared to be a burglary gone wrong. Her body

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
was bludgeoned to death. She was found face down in her garage. There was blood on the ceiling. It was very, very brutal. She had been hit from behind. And right near her were these two trash barrels, and they were filled with loot or something that appeared to have been taken from the house. And what was so strange about what was in the barrels was that they were cheap stuff that, you know, like cheap appliances. I think there was a broken stereo turntable. There was a blender from the kitchen, you know, and three clocks that had been pulled out of the wall from upstairs bedrooms and the kitchen.

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
And the clock, you know, so first of all, that was very weird because no burglar would steal that kind of stuff. You can't fence it. It's worthless. You know, so it

Brittany:
And

Stephanie:
looks

Brittany:
didn't

Stephanie:
like

Brittany:
Duane say that he thought the burglary had to do with his gun collection?

Stephanie:
Yes, yes.

Brittany:
But no guns were in the boxes.

Stephanie:
Exactly. Nothing of value was in the boxes. But

Brittany:
Wow!

Stephanie:
there was something of great value in these garbage cans. And that was the three clocks that had been unplugged from the wall in various parts of the house. And one, you know, back then, you know, these were electric clocks. I think two of them were alarm radios or something. But they had all been into a wall and when they were unplugged, the times that they were unplugged were frozen on the faces of the clocks.

Brittany:
I was gonna ask you about that, how interesting.

Stephanie:
So that gave the cops like sort of a GoPro-like video of where the burglar had been and when in the house. One clock,

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
one bedroom clock was unplugged at 11 22, another 11 23, and another 11 27. So they had a pretty good idea of when the burglar or whoever had staged the crime had been in the house. And then the next thing that happens that really should have cooked Dwayne was that the cops are going around, they're canvassing the neighborhood, has anybody seen anything? And a little boy who is little Greg's, 13 year old Greg's best friend says, well, I came to the Frye house that morning and I rang the doorbell and Dwayne answered the door and the cops said, well, they were very interested. They said, well, when was that? and the kid said 1135. So,

Brittany:
Wow

Stephanie:
you know, when the burglars are, you know, stealing stuff from the house, and it was a tiny house, there's no way you could miss burglars running through the house if you were answering the door. So the cops go to Dwayne and they say, well, you know, this kid says you were here at 1135, and Dwayne says, yeah, the kid came to the door, but it was like a 1030. So they go back to the kid and they say, well, when was it? You know, how can you prove, you say it was 1135, how can you prove that? And the kid says, well, that's easy because I had just finished watching The Monkees on TV.

Brittany:
Ahahaha!

Stephanie:
I had changed the channel for my brother to Sherlock Holmes. And then I went to Greg's house, which was like a two minute walk. It was on the next street. And so, you know, the cops. thinking, well how do we prove this? And they turned to TV Guide. And of course TV Guide says, yeah the monkeys were over at 1130 and Sherlock Holmes came on at 1135. So they had Dwayne answering the doorbell, and the kid said he had to ring twice, they had Dwayne answering the doorbell right when burglars were supposedly running through his house and killing his wife.

Brittany:
And

Stephanie:
So

Brittany:
he's saying, of course, he's not there.

Stephanie:
Yes, yes, and he concocted this incredibly complex alibi, which the crowning event was him driving 40 miles to Boulder for this surprise visit to the karate studio where nobody was expecting him. And one of the things, though, in his alibi, the cops asked him to write out a statement, tell us where you were this morning. And one thing he said was that he Safeway for a can of lighter fluid. And then he went, because he was going to have a barbecue later that afternoon, and a liquor store for a six pack of beer. And I did not know for like the next 20 years that that beer that he put in his alibi was the beer that he gave us. And if you were planning a barbecue that afternoon,

Brittany:
Wouldn't

Stephanie:
why

Brittany:
you

Stephanie:
would

Brittany:
buy

Stephanie:
you?

Brittany:
a couple more packs?

Stephanie:
And why would you give the beer away?

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
And they never found the lighter fluid. And the speculation is that on the drive from Dwayne's house to Boulder, there was like ditches and fields and stuff that he had stopped. And he'd thrown the murder weapon and the clothes that he had been wearing into a ditch. And

Brittany:
and set him on fire.

Stephanie:
exactly. Because the clothes that he was wearing, Another part of his alibi that morning was that he had gone to a Chevron station to check up on his wife's car and plus somebody else had come to the door much earlier and seen him and the clothes that they described him wearing were not the clothes that I saw him in after the murder and the clothes that they described him wearing were never found. So

Brittany:
Uh. Well, so this happens, and at this point, the police aren't looking at you for anything. You're just kind of there. They're

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Brittany:
treating you like the stupid little girlfriend.

Stephanie:
And they didn't even treat me like that. I was just invisible to them.

Brittany:
Mmm.

Stephanie:
I was just a girl shacking up with, you know, Dwayne and Betty's son, I guess. You know,

Brittany:
Right,

Stephanie:
because

Brittany:
so.

Stephanie:
they never interviewed me.

Brittany:
And the wedding's still going to go on. I remember distinctly in the book, you talking about this wedding photo with Doug and Dwayne, and Doug looks deflated, and Dwayne's just as happy as a clam.

Stephanie:
Yeah, yeah, well we put the wedding off for about two months.

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
In the interim, Dwayne was indicted for first degree murder and arrested and out on bail before our wedding occurred. And

Brittany:
So

Stephanie:
there

Brittany:
that

Stephanie:
is,

Brittany:
has to put a hamper on everything.

Stephanie:
yes, but you know the wedding photo that you're referring to has them standing in front of this little Unitarian church where we were married, which was supposed to be a, you know, a big concession to Betty. Not that us getting married in a Unitarian Church would have appeased her, but they're standing in front of the church and it's so odd because they're wearing almost identical suits,

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
light gray suits, very slim cut. And they look, if you put a piece of paper over their heads, you could not tell who was the 49-year-old or 48-year-old and who was the 19-year-old. They looked so much alike. physically.

Brittany:
Hmm.

Stephanie:
And then when you look at their faces, you got Dwayne and he's beaming. He's like got his whole world ahead of him. And Doug looks sullen and angry. It's a really a remarkable photo because of the contrast between them.

Brittany:
Now, do you feel like at this time, like that it's going to be all right? You put it off for a couple of months and you tried to move forward with, with your relationship.

Stephanie:
Well, there, I, you know, the one person I confided in back then was my mother. And, you know, she was in New York and, and the day that Betty was killed that evening, I walked out of, you know, we went back to that, that, that the house where she was killed. In fact, we spent the night in that house under the roof. And in fact, Doug's bedroom was directly under the garage. So.

Brittany:
Oh.

Stephanie:
Very, very weird. But anyway, I walked to a payphone and I called my mother and said, Mom, you know, please come out here. And she came out and, you know, a couple of days later and we talked and I told her what I had observed. And then I was afraid. I just had this sense that somehow our wedding and all the tension around it had been a catalyst, a trigger for what happened. And my

Brittany:
Oh.

Stephanie:
mother... My mother told me, she said, you know, you've got a choice here. If you're going to marry Doug, you know, you have to be a hundred percent behind him, you know, beside, first of all, you don't know what you saw, you know, it's probably, you know, it's nothing, you're not that important. You know, I

Brittany:
Hehehe

Stephanie:
mean, that's exactly what she said. And, um, and she said, and you have to make a choice. If you're going to have a life with Doug, you're going to have to, you know, forget what you saw, not say anything about it because you don't know anything anyway, and move forward.

Brittany:
Hmm.

Stephanie:
And that's the decision I made. So, you know, a lot of it, I think was this very naive kind of adolescent hope that, you know, if we just put it behind us, it would truly be behind us. That we could go forward into, you know, a wonderful life and marriage and all of that, and everything would be fine, you know? And then it also played along into what was happening in the Frye family, which is that nobody would, there was very much an attitude of, you're either with us or you're against us.

Brittany:
Mmm.

Stephanie:
Rallied behind their father. They were all witnesses in front of the grand jury that indicted him for first degree murder in 1973. And

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
they just rallied behind him. And it was taboo to talk about it. So we didn't talk about it. And

Brittany:
See you.

Stephanie:
then what happened is, you know, his trial was set for right around Thanksgiving of 1973.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
And right before the trial, we got a phone call from him saying the charges had been dropped.

Brittany:
Wow.

Stephanie:
You know, we didn't really know why. We didn't even know what the evidence was against him in the first place. So, he, within a year, he had remarried a woman who was a very close family friend and neighbor. whose husband also worked at Martin Marietta with Dwayne as an engineer. And she divorced her husband and she and Dwayne all of a sudden got married. And they

Brittany:
And

Stephanie:
moved away, you

Brittany:
she's

Stephanie:
know?

Brittany:
a weird one because she didn't originally have blonde hair or things like that. But after she marries Dwayne, she starts

Stephanie:
Yes!

Brittany:
mimicking his now dead ex-wife.

Stephanie:
I think he imposed that on her. I think what happened psychologically or psychodynamically is that Dwayne thought he was marrying the woman of his dreams. And she turned out to have a mental illness, but she was his physical ideal. And the woman he married was this very nice, from my perspective, woman named Barbara. And she was... Betty's complete physical and stylistic opposite.

Brittany:
Hmm

Stephanie:
She was very dowdy, she was kind of dumpy. It was not for lack of trying, you know, but she had heavy glasses, she had dark hair, she was kind of mousy and she was nothing like Betty.

Brittany:
She's

Stephanie:
And then,

Brittany:
not giving the Barbie vibes.

Stephanie:
no, not at all. And then I found out, you know, years later in the Cole case, I was talking to somebody who knew what Barb and Dwayne's life had ended up as 40 year, what it was like to be married to Dwayne after that. And this woman was shocked when I described the way Barb looked back in 1973, because by then, Barb was a slim, stylish blonde with wearing expensive pantsuits. And

Brittany:
Mmm.

Stephanie:
I think Dwayne basically remade her into Betty. but Betty without the mental illness. You know, he wanted a woman he could dominate and recreate into, you know, the image of his perfect mate. And

Brittany:
Hmm

Stephanie:
that's what he did to poor Barbara.

Brittany:
Poor Barb.

Stephanie:
Yeah, well I found out that her life was one of being intensely controlled by him. He chose, they ended up in Florida, and he chose, you know, she had an approved circle of friends, approved by him, that she could associate with. And she just kept him, he kept her under tight control. And this is jumping way ahead, but in the Cole case... After the cold case was over and I could interview the detectives, I said, who had gone to interview Dwayne, you know, once the cold case was activated, they did a surprise visit to all of the children who were all living in different states and to Dwayne in Florida. And when they, I said to them, you know, what's your most enduring memory of the interview of Dwayne in Florida in 2005? And they said two things. One of them said that when Barb answered the door and they said, we're cold case detectives from Arapahoe County in Colorado, she clapped her hands and she said, oh, you finally found out who did it. Another word,

Brittany:
Oh!

Stephanie:
she believed in him. And then the other cop's most enduring memory was that when they went into Dwayne's house in Florida, he sat them at this sort of dining room table and there was like an open breakfast bar. next to the dining room where you could look from the dining room table into the kitchen and Barb was in the kitchen with a local Florida cop that they had brought with them and You know because I wanted to separate Barb from Dwayne and she was just in the kitchen and Dwayne Situated himself at the end of the table so that he could watch Barb during the entire interview with the cold case cops and they

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
He never took his eyes off Barb the entire time. That's the kind of control he was exerting over her. So she paid a high price, you know, to be remade as the ideal woman.

Brittany:
Hmm. Now we'll dial it back a little bit. One of the things that I think was really poignant, and I don't know if this was something that your ex-husband would go to think about, but you said at that wedding dinner, it was at, it was a red lion.

Stephanie:
Ugh!

Brittany:
Dwayne goes off on this tangent about all the things he didn't like about Betty.

Stephanie:
Okay, so this is what happens. So in between the time he was, after he was arrested and released on bail,

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
he calls us up. This is, we had postponed our wedding. So this

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
is between the time he was arrested and the time of the wedding, that summer.

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
He calls us up and he says, "'Oh, I'd like to take you out to dinner "'and talk about some memories of Betty that...' Doug may not remember and he framed it as this, I wanna take you to dinner and talk with Doug about these wonderful memories of his mother. So we get to the restaurant and first of all, I noticed that he had already removed his wedding ring.

Brittany:
Oh.

Stephanie:
And then he just starts in this tirade about how miserable his life was with Betty, that she was mentally ill. that he had all the job opportunities, he had given up because he had to take care of her. And the capper was that she had, there were four fry kids. Doug had two older sisters and this little brother, Greg. He said that Betty had tricked him into conceiving Doug and his younger brother, and that if it was up to Dwayne, they would never have been born.

Brittany:
Oh my god!

Stephanie:
So this was his sharing memories of Betty with his son who had just lost his mother.

Brittany:
Right. And we're talking weeks have gone by.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Brittany:
I'm sure I've lost a parent and it's not something you get over quickly. I'm sure Doug is just depressed at this point and this happens.

Stephanie:
I think he was so shocked that he really shut down. I mean, he just completely shut down. And I just remember thinking, this was my mentality back then, by then I had just turned 20.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
I think Doug was still 19. Yeah, I was about three or four months older than him. And I was thinking, all I could think about was, will Doug ever smile again? Will

Brittany:
Oh.

Stephanie:
he ever laugh again? You know, will he ever be happy again?

Brittany:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
And so that's what we were trying to preserve, you know, going forward, some sort of sense that we can get through this, we can get past this, and then we can have this life that we always hoped we would have together. But you know, nothing ever works out that way.

Brittany:
No, it doesn't. And that's where I was moving to next. So Doug has his own karate studio now at this point, and you actually decide that you don't want to do that anymore.

Stephanie:
Well, this is so okay. So what happened

Brittany:
Future.

Stephanie:
is we got yes, this is jumping ahead a few years. We finished college we graduated,

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
we started our own karate school. And then Doug wanted to apply to medical school and I didn't want to run the karate school alone. So I applied to law school. So we got into professional school and we we sold our the karate studio. and you know we were moving to the life we always hoped we would have we thought

Brittany:
So

Stephanie:
and then

Brittany:
when does it change?

Stephanie:
well it changed pretty quick because I think it was in the second year or maybe it was a third year yeah yeah it was the third year law school is three years medical school is four years so it was Doug's third year my last year and we would are The vacations that overlap, because he was on quarters and I was on semesters,

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
Christmas was like the only vacation that overlapped. And each year we would drive to New York to visit my folks

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
or fly there. And that year we went and Doug said to me, one of his older sisters, Lynn, was living, because the family had just completely scattered after Betty was killed and

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
Dwayne was released. They just all went to different parts of the country. and his closest sister in age had become a nurse and she was living in Philadelphia. And so when we got to New York, Doug said to me, you know, I think I'd like to see Lynn. I think I'd like to talk to her about what happened in our family. This is like the first time he had brought it up to me. So he took, we got there and he took a bus to Philly. She lived out, I think she lived in New Jersey, but it was very close to Philadelphia

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
where she was. And he took the bus and then he comes back a few hours later and he was like, he was like shell-shocked I said well what happened? You know, what did Lynn say? And he said that Lynn said that she could not believe he had ever questioned whether their father had killed their mother because he so obviously had and That just completely rocked Doug and when we came back to to Boulder where we were living You know, he still had a little time left before classes started. And he went out one night for a job. This was like the winter. It was cold and snowy and he didn't come back. And then a couple of hours later, you know, our doorbell rings and there's this stranger like carrying Doug up the front walk. He's covered with vomit and like unable to walk on his own. And what had happened was he had taken every pill in the house, like asked

Brittany:
Oh jeez.

Stephanie:
everything. and run off to a drainage ditch and lay down to die. And then

Brittany:
Mmm.

Stephanie:
some kids, he'd been woken up by some kids throwing snowballs at him and he staggered onto the road and a motorist had brought him home. So he, you know, we put him in a hospital and he was seeing a psychiatrist. He took the next semester off from medical school because he couldn't function. He came with me to my law school classes and my afterschool job. And then one day he said, and he was seeing a psychiatrist. And then one day he said to me, you know, I'm feeling a little better. I don't think I have to go to school with you today. Yeah,

Brittany:
Oh

Stephanie:
great,

Brittany:
no.

Stephanie:
you know? And so I come home from my job, you know, in the evening. And there's, you know, a note on the table saying, Steph, I took all of our savings out of our bank account. I've gone to Florida.

Brittany:
WHAT?!

Stephanie:
Talk to my dad. So the next thing that happens is I get this sort of frantic phone call from Dwayne saying, you know, Doug talked to Barb and he said he was coming down here. Do I have to be here when he comes? And I said, well, Dwayne, you know, he's having a very hard time. He's going down there to talk to you. And Dwayne said, well, I've got a business trip, you know. And so when you get Doug gets down and then there's like silence. I can't reach any of them. for like the next couple of days. And

Brittany:
Oh,

Stephanie:
then,

Brittany:
so you're probably worried he's

Stephanie:
yes,

Brittany:
even alive?

Stephanie:
yes, yes. And then my mother of all people from Brooklyn calls me and says, do you know that Doug is in a psychiatric facility in Pennsylvania? And I said, no, you know, what happened? And she said that Doug had called her and she and my father were taking the train out there to visit him and see him and everything. And what had happened was that Doug got down there. Dwayne had taken his business trip, left Doug with Barb, and Doug had made a suicide attempt. And

Brittany:
Aww.

Stephanie:
then Dwayne had come back and flown Doug to, I think it was the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, with

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
medical school and they had a psychiatric facility, and he had like dumped Doug on them and said, he's a medical student, I have good insurance, take him. And then

Brittany:
Oh jeez.

Stephanie:
Doug had called my mother and my mother said, you know, can I give your phone number to his psychiatrist? And I said, of course. So that night they called me. They had not even realized Doug was married. And by this time we had been married like eight or nine years, you know?

Brittany:
That's so brutal.

Stephanie:
And they said, can you tell us, you know, what's wrong with Doug? And I said, well, what did Dwayne tell you? And they said that Dwayne had told them that Doug was suffering from this delusion that somehow Dwayne had played a role in Doug's mother's unfortunate death.

Brittany:
Wow

Stephanie:
Dwayne was indicted by a grand jury for first-degree murder of his wife. And you

Brittany:
That's

Stephanie:
know,

Brittany:
not a delusion.

Stephanie:
yeah, and you know what, I've thought about this so many times since then, you know what it's like out here in Colorado? Every year, some kid gets separated from his parents in the mountains, you

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
know, gets lost. And it's like, like Dwayne, and of course, the parents always tell the cops, that's the last place we saw him, go in that direction. This was like Dwayne saying, oh, go in the other direction, you know?

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
And anyway, after that, Doug was, came back to, to Boulder, we put him in a psychiatric of a couple of few months, and then he came out, but he was a different person. And Dwayne came up to visit him, and they had some kind of altercation at that hospital. And Doug said,

Brittany:
Oh.

Stephanie:
I told Dwayne, you're not, don't ever come back here again. Don't come back

Brittany:
Wow.

Stephanie:
here again. And my mother came to visit him, and she told me, she had some kind of connection with Doug. They had an emotional connection.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
And she said to me, Doug is very, very. angry. And he wouldn't participate in group therapy or anything, but eventually he got stable enough that he returned to medical school. He was able to graduate with his class. And

Brittany:
That's good.

Stephanie:
then we thought, oh, finally this is behind us. And then, you know, he came home and he said, I don't want to be married to you anymore. And he basically dumped me.

Brittany:
Wow.

Stephanie:
We got divorced. And then we had almost no contact for like the next, well, in fact, we had no contact after that. You know, I haven't had a conversation with Doug since the last time I saw him, which was in probably 1982. And that was it. The whole thing was over. And I was left with this feeling that somehow our wedding had been the catalyst for his mother's murder.

Brittany:
Well, it's interesting because there's a quote from the book, True Crime Redux, that stung out to me. And you said, more than a witness, but less than an active participant, I was a bit actor whose role in the crime shaped my life. Can you explain more about how this shapes your life from this point forward?

Stephanie:
Well, it haunted me, you know, and I was after Doug and I divorced, I was alone for 10 years. I mean, I was working as a lawyer, you know, and the more work they could throw at me, the better, because I didn't

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
want to have a life. Nobody that I worked with knew anything about what had happened. You know, they didn't really know anything about my past, and I didn't want them to know.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
And I just, you know, I work all day and at night, I would, you know, I would I would run through the day of Betty's murder in my head every night to try to fall asleep because something told me that I did not want to forget those details. You know, the way Dwayne was dressed, the bruise on his forehead, all those strange things. And it just, it tortured me. And then after about, you know, nine or 10 years, I met my wonderful second husband, John.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
And he asked me what had happened and I told him. And he said, well, why did they drop the charges against Wayne? It seems like they had a pretty strong case. I mean, I didn't even know then about the clocks or anything. All I had were my observations of that

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
day. And he said, why did they drop the case? And I said, I have no idea. Nobody talked about it. And that started me researching it. And it sent me to the. the courthouse, the Arapahoe County courthouse, and I ordered the old case file, and it was very thin file, but it did have the grand jury testimony attached to one of the defense motions of the lead cop who had investigated the case in 1973. And that's how I found out about the kid coming to the door and the clocks and all this other stuff that I had had no idea of. And to kind of get it out of me, I decided to just sit down and try to write about it. And my first draft of what would become Quiet Time, which was that fictionalized mystery that reopened the Cole case, I wrote it in like 10 alternating first-person voices. Like,

Brittany:
Mmm.

Stephanie:
what did my sister-in-law think? What did this guy see? What was it like? Might it have been like for this person? because I just wanted to get a larger perspective than the stuff I had been like mulling over in my head. And that was the beginning of getting it out of me. And then, you know, at a certain point, you know, I realized that I knew nothing about writing fiction. And so I started to learn, I got books, and I tried to apply the lessons to that manuscript. And it eventually became a completely fictional, fictionalized version

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
of what had happened. And I adopted my... second husband's last name as my pen name because I didn't want it to be connected to the Frye case.

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
I banned them, published it, and I told them, you know, what the origin was and they and it had to go through their legal department and they made me make dozens and dozens of changes so nobody could ever recognize it. They made me move the timeline up 10 years. They made which played havoc with the plot. They made me take any reference to Colorado out of it. So Colorado was an unnamed state north of New Mexico, which was,

Brittany:
Ha ha!

Stephanie:
you know, Boulder became Stanley and Denver became Widom or something. And, and, and, you know, the karate studio became a hockey rink and, you know, all these changes and, and it came out like right, like a week or two after 9-11. So the book had a very, very short shelf life. But

Brittany:
Right,

Stephanie:
one.

Brittany:
because immediately the whole world was talking about national tragedy.

Stephanie:
Right, so I just put it behind me and I had this contract with Bantam and then I got another one with Scribner and I was writing legal thrillers and the last thing I was thinking about was the Frye family. And then in just one of these strange twists of fate, one of the places that I had actually been interviewed and there were very few, was this local radio TV station that...

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
was like publicly funded and they did author interviews and they lost their funding, you know, very early on. So they would replay all of these old author interviews like at midnight. And they replayed my interview about quiet time. And one of the people who saw it, like late at night was Dwayne's younger sister,

Brittany:
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Stephanie:
who by then was 78 years old. And she recognized me. and she went out and bought quiet time. And in a crisis of conscience, she came forward with information that Dwayne had confessed to their mother, Lolita, who was

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
so cruel to Betty. And that opened the cold case. And the confession, as it turns out, the wedding was a trigger. I mean, the confession said that Betty had just gone. you know, went into hysterics and wouldn't stop crying and it was, you know, the wedding and, and he just, he just beat it to death.

Brittany:
Hmm. Now there was something. What the audience doesn't know is that we fast forward a little bit and now it's 2005. And this case is wide open. I mean, you talk in the True Crime Redux about how the feds tried to get all of the Fry children to talk to them independently at the same time. They did a lot of really elaborate stuff to try and get more information about this cold case. But what happens is, well, one... The defense decides that everything you have ever written up to this point is evident.

Stephanie:
That's right, and this is how it happened. I became a key witness,

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
and I became a key witness because I had seen Dwayne that day and nobody

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
ever interviewed me before. So when the cold case cops contacted me, I didn't even think twice about cooperating. I was happy to cooperate.

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
And I told them everything I remembered about that day. And then I sat down with the defense lawyers and told them everything I remembered about that day. So the- The defense lawyers had to concoct a so-called narrative. And the narrative that they concocted was that somehow I and Dwayne's sister Sherry had, you know, conspired to gin up a false confession so that I could sell books. And

Brittany:
Wow, okay.

Stephanie:
it's ridiculous because, you know, I hadn't seen Sherry in... 30 years, you know, it was crazy. And anyway, so I became a target and Quiet Time became a target. Because their theory was that Quiet Time was actually not fiction, it was actually fact. And that every draft I had done of Quiet Time was a separate factual statement that they could use to cross examine me and say that I was a liar. about what I remembered because, oh, draft five said this, and that's a factual statement, and draft seven said this, and that's different, and were you lying then or are you lying now? And it's ridiculous because all of those drafts were fiction, you know? So anyway, but that became the defense theory, and they subpoenaed all of my drafts and notes of poor little quiet time and put quiet time on trial, and we ended up, I had a very good lawyer of my own, and he ended up. suppressing the subpoena for all of the drafts. But we

Brittany:
I

Stephanie:
have.

Brittany:
mean, your attorney was, is kind of considered to be a big deal in Colorado. Didn't he defend the Ramsey family?

Stephanie:
Yes, and he's a great lawyer. He also

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
represented Hunter S. Thompson,

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
you know, the writer. He's a very intellectual, really, really deep-thinking, wonderful lawyer. But we had to have an expert witness who was a literature professor to educate

Brittany:
Oh wow.

Stephanie:
the court on the difference between fiction and nonfiction, you know, because the truth is that all fiction originates to some extent in fact.

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
and in the writer's experience, and you turn it into fiction because what else are you writing about? It's something in your background in some way, you know? And so, you know, we had to have this very effective literature professor explain to the court that just because something originated in fact, you know, doesn't make it, you know, nonfiction. You know, fiction is distinct from fact. And anyway, so the judge suppressed that. But for all those years, you know, I completely stopped writing because I was afraid that they would subpoena every single thing that I wrote and use it against me. I mean, that was the size of the target on my back. And the other person who had a target on her back was poor Sherry, who was like, you know, almost 80 years old. And she had had the guts to come forward with her brother's confession. And they just, you know, they just brutalized her on the stand. But she held up really, really well. But it was a horrific experience for her. And in the course of it, she completely lost her relationship with her nephews and nieces because they wouldn't speak to her again because she had betrayed Dwayne.

Brittany:
Mmm.

Stephanie:
And after the cold case was over, I interviewed her. She was in an assisted living home, not with dementia, but with congestive heart failure. And I remember like my last, I think my last conversation with her, she said, she asked me, is he still alive? She was so afraid of Dwayne, even that laid in her life, she was afraid of her brother.

Brittany:
Wow.

Stephanie:
And I came to learn that, you know, she had certain experiences with him earlier in life that gave her good reason to be afraid of him.

Brittany:
One of the things I kind of would like you to speak on, because I think a lot of people don't have this experience, but both you and Sherry endured this for quite some time, just being the punching bag of the courtroom. And you said they dragged her through the mud, through her depositions and things, but what about you? Have that feel for you to have them bring up every little awful thing or minor memory that you had from

Stephanie:
Well,

Brittany:
1973.

Stephanie:
one thing that was really painful for me was that they kept hammering me on, why didn't I come forward with what I knew in 1973? And they even called it a duty to come forward. And finally, the judge corrected them and said she had no duty to come forward. The cops had a duty to interview her. She didn't have a duty to come forward. But that just really. You know, it played into all of my sense of guilt about, you know, what I had known, what I had shut my eyes to, you know, this this really adolescent but very tender hope that things could be fine if I just kept my mouth shut, you know, and it was really all the basis for my guilt and the whole thing and they very skillfully played on that and you know, being a lawyer. It was an excruciating experience for me to be a witness because I understood the playbook. You know, I understood what they were trying to do to me, but I also knew that I had a duty to testify truthfully, even if it reflected badly on me.

Brittany:
Hmm.

Stephanie:
But so what you're constantly doing when you're in that situation and you know what they're trying, they're trying to push your buttons, you know, and you are angry that you've been attacked this way, you know?

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
You just have to, I guess I called upon my discipline you know, of having practiced law to just remind myself you're just a witness, you're not an advocate, you're not here to you know, defend yourself, you're just here to testify as truthfully as you possibly can to what you remember. You know, and then the other thing is they would torture you about your memories, like, oh well you're the only one who saw that bruise on Dwayne's head. And then when I, you know, after the cold case was over, that bruise was all over the file. I wasn't the only person who saw it. But you know, when they attack you that way, or, oh, are you sure you saw it? Nobody else noticed that. You

Brittany:
Wow

Stephanie:
don't know if you're lying or not. So it plays all kinds of games with your head. And God, maybe I remembered, did I remember this right? Did I make this up? It just, all those mind games. And it's very, very difficult. But you know, my husband was a great support to me. We had a... I had a wonderful, wonderful lawyer. You know, but for those years, I just basically shut down and I just kept to, you know, look at this very narrow path of what my role was and stick to it.

Brittany:
And you are still working too, right?

Stephanie:
Well, I was, well, I had stopped practicing law

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
and then I had stopped writing books because I

Brittany:
Wow.

Stephanie:
didn't, so I didn't have any outlet.

Brittany:
You had nothing.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Brittany:
You couldn't focus on work like you did the last time,

Stephanie:
Exactly.

Brittany:
and you couldn't write, which is something you've been doing now for years that had

Stephanie:
Yes,

Brittany:
helped you.

Stephanie:
my two escapes were gone. Those escape routes were blocked.

Brittany:
That's so sad.

Stephanie:
So it was hellish.

Brittany:
Now we get to court, you know, they ask you, you know, how do you know your memory's okay? What makes your memory stick? You know, but you're in the, the trial is happening. Well, that's not a trial. It's all the pre-trial work

Stephanie:
Right.

Brittany:
happening. And when they're asking you questions, Dwayne stands up and yells, liar.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Brittany:
Like, how do you feel in that moment?

Stephanie:
You know, I was just so focused on not looking at him. I was

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
focused on looking at the DA when she was questioning me. And

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
it's interesting, you know, when he screamed liar at me, you know what I had just testified to?

Brittany:
What?

Stephanie:
Well, Betty and Dwayne had been planning to go on a cruise that fall of 1973.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
And Dwayne ended, or maybe it was the following winter, but we knew about it. They had planned it well in advance.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
After she was killed, he wanted to take Barb on the cruise with him.

Brittany:
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Stephanie:
And his friends that they were going with said they didn't think that was a good idea.

Brittany:
No, it feels kind of creepy.

Stephanie:
Well, I think what that did was my testifying to that, and I only knew it secondhand, you know?

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
But I remembered that. And I think that humiliated him because it reflected on how his friends looked at him. And that's what was unbearable to him coming out in the courtroom. So that's when he jumped up and he half rose from a seat. And I wasn't even sure what happened. And I looked at the transcript later and you know, I mean, that's what happened. That was the exact context and the judge had to admonish him and admonish his lawyer and say, you know, control your client, I'm not going to put up with that kind of outburst. So, you know, I was sort of numb at the moment because I was, you know, trying to. testify as honestly as I could and be careful about my words and not overreach.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
So this was happening almost in a parallel universe, in this small courtroom.

Brittany:
but the case doesn't actually go anywhere that you want it to go.

Stephanie:
Well, it got, well, the playbook for the defense in a cold case is always to run the clock and hope that witnesses die. And that's indeed what happened, because these cold, the cold case pre-trial hearings, you know, which included the grand jury and, you know, all of these hearings on motions to dismiss. I mean, they threw everything they could against the wall. And predictably, witnesses did die. And then

Brittany:
Wow.

Stephanie:
it came up right to the point of the trial. And a new judge was all of a sudden assigned to the case, so had no background in it, because in that county, they would rotate judges off the case after certain.

Brittany:
Oh, okay.

Stephanie:
And the DA who had handled it from the grand jury on, had to leave the case to try a death penalty case. So

Brittany:
Oh.

Stephanie:
there was a new DA, there was a new judge, the only people who had institutional memory. of like how Sherry had testified, how she withstood it on the stand and all of that, was the defense. And they just started re-arguing everything. And this new judge, so finally the issue came up, the only real legal issue in the pre-trial stuff was the admissibility of Lolita's confession, I mean of Dwayne confessing to Lolita and then Lolita telling Sherry about it.

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
And- I don't want to get too much into the weeds about the legal stuff, but the defense argued that that was hearsay upon hearsay.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
And so that had to, that was the judge ruled that it was hearsay. And then the prosecution appealed that first to the court of state court of appeals, then to the Colorado Supreme Court, then it went back down to the state court of appeals. And by the time it got back to the trial court, you know, most of the witnesses were dead. I mean, Sherry was in a nursing home. other witnesses had actually died. And frankly, the prosecutors had no stomach to take it further. So the case was just dropped.

Brittany:
and

Stephanie:
But the good news was that I was finally able to get ahold of all the records. I made an official records request and I got all of the records from 1973 and 2005. And for the first time, I saw what all the evidence was. And that became the basis for writing my book, True Crime Redux.

Brittany:
And one of the things that we talked about in our pre-interview that I thought was really beautiful was you said that Howard Morton helped you realize that you had a right to care. That even though Betty wasn't your mom and she didn't really like you and you weren't with her son anymore, it was okay that you felt such a connection to this case and you wanted to tell the story.

Stephanie:
Yes, now Howard Morton, I interviewed a few sort of forensic experts as I was pulling together True Crime Redux and one of them was this guy named Howard Morton who had founded this advocacy group for the families of cold case victims called Faux Vamp, families of homicide victims and missing persons. And the reason I contacted him was because oddly What happened when Sherry came forward with the confession was she called Betty's closest sister, a woman named Jean Brichel,

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
and Jean Brichel contacted Howard Morton. Because one of the things that Morton did was he would contact, and his group, they would contact the families of cold case victims and say, would you like us to try to get these cases reopened? And they had contacted... Dwayne's kids who had no interest in reopening the case. They

Brittany:
Mmm.

Stephanie:
had also contacted Betty's family. So Jean had happened to have Morton's name, and he was the one she gave the confession to, and Morton was the intermediary who brought it to the cold case cops. So when I was writing the book, I thought, I ought to talk to this Howard Morton. I had no expectations that he would even talk to me.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
I found him on LinkedIn and I didn't even belonged to LinkedIn and I composed this two page letter explaining who I was and then I get in the LinkedIn thing and they give you like 40 characters.

Brittany:
Hahaha!

Stephanie:
So I just introduced myself and to my shock, he got back to me like within an hour by email. He knew who I was, he had read Quiet Time

Brittany:
Wow!

Stephanie:
and he wanted to talk. And so we got on the phone and we talked for hours. And first of all, he told me a very touching story about why he and his wife had founded Faux Vamp and it was because their eldest son Guy had been murdered in Arizona in 1986

Brittany:
Dang.

Stephanie:
and the murder was never solved. And so he founded this advocacy group and we just had a really, really long conversation. And one thing I asked him was, what are the families of cold case victims looking for? I was asking him, this is a reporter, thinking how it might affect me. And I said, are they looking for justice? Are they looking for vengeance? Are they looking for retribution? He said, nope, they're not looking for that. And he was speaking for himself and his wife, but also for most of the people he had worked with, which were hundreds of families. I said, so what are they looking for? And he said, they're looking for something much simpler, which is just to know what happened.

Because the more you know what happened, the more you know what happened. you can't move on. And at that point, and then I realized that he was describing why I had not been able to move on. Because until I knew that, you know, for sure that Dwayne had killed her and what the circumstances had been, I just, I was stuck in a limbo of blaming myself. And you know, where I've come out on the other end of all this is, yes, you know, the wedding did play a role. I was... in some sense, a catalyst. But I was a piece of a much bigger picture of what was going on in that family, what was going on between Dwayne and Betty. And I now see myself in the person. What my mother said, you know, you're not that important, was actually true. It was true

Brittany:
Okay.

Stephanie:
and not true, but it had more truth than not. And, you know, you get to see the bigger picture and then you can accept what your role was. because you understand that it was just a piece of something much larger that you had no control over. And so he gave that to me and as you said I mean he validated me because I always felt a little guilty you know being obsessed about this not being able to get it out of my head you know. Am I ghoulish? Am I you know what's wrong with me that I can't get this out of my head you know and and he validated my right to care. And that was tremendous for me. And that, more than anything else, he helped me move on from the story. And just a little side thing, since you and I had the pre-interview and the book has come out, I've gotten two emails that have made the whole thing worth it. The first was from Jean Burkell's son, Reed. That was Betty's closest sister. And he thanked me on behalf of his family for writing the book. because

Brittany:
Oh.

Stephanie:
now they know what happened. He thanked me for providing answers they had been looking for for 50 years.

Brittany:
Yes.

Stephanie:
The other email I got just like last week was from Barb, the second wife's grandson.

Brittany:
No way!

Stephanie:
Yes, and he thanked me for writing the book because I think, you know, not only did it give him answers but... It resurrected his grandmother in a way that dignified her.

Brittany:
Right.

Stephanie:
So those things have just, you know, no matter what else happens, if the book sells, doesn't sell, it doesn't matter to me because that just matters much more than anything else ever.

Brittany:
Well, it's so interesting that ties into really the last kind of question for you. And I think I know what you're going to say here, because we did talk about this a little bit, but we're at the 50th anniversary. You know, do you feel satisfied with everything, especially now that you've helped give members of the family, some clarity, some, some

Stephanie:
You know,

Brittany:
closure.

Stephanie:
I not just feel satisfied, I feel like I can set my pen down because

Brittany:
Mmm.

Stephanie:
the story that drove me to write in the first place was this story and Quiet Time emerged from that. That was the first book I ever wrote and True Crime Redux bookends that. And I feel

Brittany:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
like my purpose as a writer and as in some sense as a human being. has been fulfilled because I've provided these answers not just for me, but for other people who were also stuck in a limbo when these cases never went to the full extent of the justice system. So I feel fulfilled in a very personal emotional sense and in the sense of a writer too.

Brittany:
And how do we feel about the way that Dwayne decided to leave things?

Stephanie:
Well, I will spoil a bit of the ending. Dwayne ended up committing suicide. And what immediately happened before, what he did was he blew his brains out with a shotgun on almost the 40th anniversary of the murder of his wife. You know, his wife was bludgeoned to death, she was beaten in the head, and Dwayne blew his brains out. So there's an interesting sort of, you know, parallel there.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
But the reason, you know, when I told Jean, I found out from a family friend of Barb's who contacted me and said, who I'd never met, you know, did you know that Dwayne Frye committed suicide? And I'd, no, you know, and so I called the Cole Case Cops and they gave me an introduction to the detective who had responded to the suicide scene. which was

Brittany:
Mmm.

Stephanie:
at their fancy house off a golf course in a gated community in Florida. And he said that Dwayne had left a suicide note, but he had never mentioned Betty.

Brittany:
Oh!

Stephanie:
Not a thing about Betty and no remorse. And what had happened

Brittany:
Wow

Stephanie:
immediately before he did this was that Barb had started suffering from dementia and she had been put in an assisted living facility.

Brittany:
So he

Stephanie:
So

Brittany:
was alone.

Stephanie:
he was alone. He no longer had the wife who would clap her hands and say, oh, you finally found who did it. He no longer had a person to dominate, who in turn was completely dependent on and controlled by him. He no longer had the adoring face of his idealized woman staring back at him every day. He didn't have that. So when he looked in the mirror, all he saw was himself. And I think that's why he killed himself. Because he mentioned Barb in the suicide note, but not Betty. And I think, you know, once he had, you know, one of the, I think as far as I can understand his psychology, you know, he had to have this idealized wife that he controlled. And when he lost control of her, as he lost control of Betty through her mental illness. He had to destroy her, but then he had to get another one. And he controlled Barb. He remade her into Betty's kind of physical and stylistic ideal. And he completely dominated and controlled her. And when Barb left him through illness, he couldn't handle being alone. He couldn't

Brittany:
Wow.

Stephanie:
handle being alone in the world without one person who believed in him. smiling back and clapping her hands. So to me, you know, I mean, people have said, oh, well, you know, suicide is an evasion of justice. But to me, it was a perfect ending of his hideous, violent life.

Brittany:
Mmm.

Stephanie:
It's just that it was a perfect ending for me.

Brittany:
So I think that brings our general interview to a close. I liked your book. I was very happy when people reached out to me to do this interview with you. Like I said, after we had our first conversation, I was like, oh, this is gonna go great. But how can people reach you if they would like to learn more about you, buy more books from you? Obviously, True Crime Redux came out a few weeks ago.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Brittany:
and it's available everywhere books can be purchased.

Stephanie:
Yes. And

Brittany:
But.

Stephanie:
I have a website called writercain.com. That's with Cain with a K, K-A-N-E.

Brittany:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
And I've got a Facebook page at author Stephanie Cain.

Brittany:
There you go.

Stephanie:
And I always get scammed, you know. So if you email me like those two wonderful guys did through my website, I will respond to you. And I love to communicate with you.

Brittany:
You know, I think your story is, it was long, the path it took you to get to your sense of satisfaction, but it's awesome that it happened. And I hope that, well, honestly, I hope as we move forward as a country too, we can find a way to be a little bit kinder to the people who are trying to do the right thing, which is what you were trying to do. You were offering up. everything you could remember to try and give closure for this case. It didn't work out the way that you would have wanted, but at least people know through reading True Crime Redux what really happened. And well, I think we all kinda came to the conclusion that Dwayne did it.

Stephanie:
Yeah, well there's a lot to be said for the truth, you know? However much it might hurt.

Brittany:
Well, thank you so much for spending this time with me and being a part of my first interview in season three of the podcast, Stephanie.

Stephanie:
Thanks a million for having me, Brittany.

Brittany:
I had a wonderful time and say anybody listening, let me know how you felt. I will pass comments on to Stephanie. You can also email her directly if you like her story and would like to talk with her about her experiences here. And we're looking forward to seeing what you write now that you are separate from the case of Betty Fry. and have a good weekend everybody.