WHEN GOOD SPOUSES GO BAD

by Leigh Lundin

While wannabee spectators arrive between 2:30 and 4am for tickets to the Casey Anthony cirque du soleil, Florida crimes and crime-busters haven’t paused, but not all misdeeds take place in Florida. I promise you the last two stories will be worth reading, but first, the headlines:

Black-hearted Dalia

Boynton Beach, Florida.  Last month, Dalia Dippolito was convicted in a murder-for-hire plot of her husband, but she deserves credit for an imaginative defense. She claims the planned murder wasn’t real, but a stunt she wished to sell to reality TV. Just one small setback– her husband denied knowing any such scheme.

When you plan these made-for-TV murder plots, you should tell your husband. And a producer. Maybe. Just sayin’.

1st Mate

Tampa, Florida.  Four years ago, tugboat first mate Thomas Lee Sehorne was shot to death in the carport of his home. Insurance money, of course, and no mention of reality TV. Last month, federal authorities filed murder-for-hire charges against his wife Christie and two other men.

The seaman’s own first mate was the death of him.

Another Reason to Hate Facebook

Beachwood, Ohio.  At first, ex-Army Ranger Patrick Sabo didn’t take his old high school friend Christine Metter seriously when she told him she hated her husband so much she could kill him. However, she took him seriously when he joked about a Facebook hit and she offered him the job. He turned the job over to undercover investigators.

I think her high school yearbook reads "The girl most likely to…"

And now the news …

Facebook Again (You won’t believe this!)

South Bend, Indiana.  Angela Voelkert was an ill-tempered wife in a nasty divorce. She created a Facebook page featuring a fake 17-year-old Lolita, ‘Jessica Studebaker’, to manipulate her husband and set him up sexually to obtain the upper hand in divorce proceedings. Fortunately (or not), she learned more than she ever imagined– he revealed he intended to kill his soon-to-be ex-wife.

Here’s what happened: ‘Jessica’ ‘friended’ David Voelkert who opened up to the teen. Instead of falling for the sexual tidbits, Davy in a tender mood expressed concerns about losing his children and spoke of the stress regarding his ex–to-be. He revealed he planted a GPS tracking unit in her car so he could track her to decide where the best location might be to have her killed. On 31 May, David told the teen he didn’t want her to “get arrested as an accessory to all this,” but asked if she knew any gang-bangers who might bust “a cap in her ass for $10,000.”

Tch, tch, such negative talk. But wait, there’s more!

Hardly believing her luck, the giddy Angela produced the eMails and had David arrested. He spent four days in jail before federal prosecutors abruptly dropped all charges and Magistrate Judge Christopher Nuechterlein signed an order dismissing the case against Voelkert.

Why?

Early on, David guessed his wife’s intentions. He wrote a notarized letter saying in part,

He lied to his wife about wanting her dead! Some days a girl just can’t get a decent husband to whack her.

When Bad Men go Good (aka Where’s Waldo?)

Lake Monroe, Florida.  While Florida probably doesn’t have many more than the average number of homicidal spouses, we seem to have more than our share of homicidal preachers (including a guy named Preacher). One of those was George Crossley, an ultra-conservative evangelist with his own fiery radio station and television shows self-described as "the Jerry Falwell of Central Florida." This was a man who formed Citizens for Decency and successfully campaigned to keep such films as The Last Temptation of Christ and a biography of Charles Darwin out of central Florida theatres.

The problem was the married minister fornicated. He fornicated with his church receptionist, the wife of another fundamentalist pastor, Butch Waldo. They fornicated so much, it put his church, radio, and television franchise at risk and he decided to kill the Right Reverend Butch Waldo.

With that in mind, he asked his best friend to find a hit-man to kill Waldo. (Crossley later denied he also planned to kill his wife.) Instead of an assassin, his friend brought in an undercover ATF agent. Crossley gave the putative triggerman money and a pistol, and said, "I’d be just thrilled to put a bullet between his eyes."

In fear of his life and wearing a bulletproof vest, Crossley’ friend went into hiding. The ATF arrested Crossley. Even though Florida loves to execute, it’s not easy to convict a preacher, even one hellbent on killing another man of the cloth. A judge sentenced Crossley to four years.

Maybe that was about right. Witnessing beatings, rapes, and abuses, Crossley discovered prison was hell. Once he’d railed against liberal leniency and argued for stiffer penalties, but now he was one of the condemned.

For the first time, Crossley underwent a truly religious transformation. He prayed like he’d never prayed before. His wife stuck with him. His first and true love became his "source of inspiration and activism."

He became empathetic, a pacifist, advocate of human rights, a man who shied away from former extreme causes and truly cared for those with fewer blessings. One might argue he became a liberal, but certainly he became a civil libertarian, turning his back on the religious right when it turned its back on him. He joined the ACLU as an unpaid volunteer and became the leader of its Florida chapter. Moving beyond Citizens for Decency, he formed such groups as CopWatch to monitor suspects’ rights.

The good Reverend became a man the corrupt feared and everyone else respected. He left the days of six to eight figure salaries far behind. Taking no wages, Rev. Crossley helped the poor and the homeless, often eating in soup kitchens himself. It’s impossible to say if he considered himself a man redeemed, but most central Floridians decided so.

Either he found God or God found him.

None of us can ask more of a man’s story.