Tennessee Woman Accused in Trail of Death
SHAILA DEWAN January 23, 2010
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Few people here know that the ashes of David Leath, still in the cardboard box from the crematorium, are kept on a shelf above the clean towels in the Suburban Barber Shop where he cut hair at the middle chair for almost 40 years.
Raynella Dossett Leath, above, at her 2007 trial in the death of her husband, David Leath. Ms. Dossett Leath also will be tried in the death of her first husband, Ed Dossett.
But almost everyone has an opinion about how Mr. Leath's ashes ended up on the shelf of the barbershop. Mr. Leath, 57, was found dead of a gunshot wound in his own bed in 2003. His wife, Raynella Dossett Leath, said it was a suicide, but she was ultimately charged with murder. Her dramatic trial last year gripped the city, but it ended in a hung jury. Last week, she went on trial again.
The trail of death in the case, however, does not begin and end with a beloved barber, but winds its way up to the highest levels of law enforcement in this city. There was a fatal car crash, a love child, a missing will and, strangest of all, the 1992 death, officially by cattle stampede, of the Knox County prosecutor, Ed Dossett, who happened to be Ms. Dossett Leath’s first husband at the time.
During the investigation of Mr. Leath’s death, prosecutors became convinced that the death of Mr. Dossett was also a homicide, and they aldo have charged Ms. Dossett Leath,61, in that case as well. That trial will begin in August.
In the meantime, Ms. Dossett Leath has become a notorious figure around town. Seventy percent of potential jurors responding to a court questionnaire for the second trial said she was probably guilty, according to a defense attorney.
Every quirk in her behavior has been parsed by Knoxville residents for motive, even the fact that she had Mr. Leath’s body cremated the day after he died. His body contained unprescribed sedatives and painkillers, according to an autopsy conducted hours earlier. Mr. Leath’s friends say he was opposed to cremation and owned a plot in the cemetery where his parents are buried.
On a recent morning at the Suburban Barber Shop, Mr. Leath’s former partner, Hoyt Vanosdale, told how Ms. Dossett Leath had asked him to deliver a package to Cynthia Wilkerson, Mr. Leath’s daughter from a previous marriage, who now cuts hair at her father’s old station. Mr. Vanosdale said she did not tell him that the small, heavy box contained Mr. Leath’s ashes.
“Isn’t that kind of creepy?” he asked.
For years, Raynella Dossett Leath enjoyed an elevated — some say protected — status in Knoxville. She was a respected nurse, married to the county prosecutor (in Tennessee, they are called district attorneys general). The couple, who married in 1970, lived with their three children on the Dossett family farm just west of town.
In 1992, Mr. Dossett was found dead in their corral. His wife said he had been trampled by cattle, and the death was ruled an agricultural accident. Mr. Dossett had been in the late stages of terminal cancer, and Ms. Dossett Leath told the authorities that she had helped him out to the barn to feed the cattle at his request.
Randall E. Pedigo, the medical examiner at the time, said the notion of a domestic cattle stampede raised suspicions, but about insurance fraud not murder.
“There was a lot of talk and speculation at the time that it was to make it look like an accidental death to collect double indemnity,” said Mr. Pedigo, who lost his medical license after being convicted of sedating and sexually molesting minors in 1995. “Some people even speculated that it might have been Ed Dossett’s idea.”
Mr. Pedigo said that prosecutors in Mr. Dossett’s office resisted his performing an autopsy, that he felt pressured to rule the death an accident and that he had a “policy” of erring on the side of the family in cases where a judgment call was required. He persuaded Ms. Dossett that the insurance company would need an autopsy, and she consented. Mr. Pedigo said he found traumatic injuries consistent with trampling and a hoof print in the middle of the bib of Mr. Dossett’s overalls.
But when the current medical examiner, Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, reviewed the file as part of the Leath investigation, she found that those injuries were not life threatening. Instead, Dr. Mileusnic-Polchan said, Mr. Dossett’s morphine level was “so extraordinarily high it is unlikely that any human could function in an ambulatory manner or continue to live.” In 2006, Ms. Dossett Leath was indicted in his death, charged with administering an overdose of morphine.
Six months after Mr. Dossett’s death, his widow married his friend and neighbor, David Leath. Friends say the couple was happy — at least at first. He built her a greenhouse; she bought him a custom truck with a matching horse trailer.
Two years later, Ms. Dossett Leath’s 11-year-old son was killed in an auto accident; her 15-year-old daughter was the driver. Not long after that, according to court records and newspaper accounts, Ms. Dossett Leath learned that her dead husband might have had another son, with a woman who worked in his office. In the midst of a divorce, the woman told her husband, Steve Walker, that one of their two sons was actually fathered by Mr. Dossett, and he told Ms. Dossett Leath.
Ms. Dossett Leath soon lured Mr. Walker to a barn on her farm, telling him she had found some papers related to the child. Once there, she opened fire on him, according to his account, and chased him across the hayfields until she ran out of ammunition. According to Mr. Walker’s statement to the police, she said she would kill him and the child’s mother and raise the child herself.
Ms. Dossett Leath was charged with attempted murder, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and did six years of “diversion,” a form of probation. Then, the charge was expunged.
Friends say it was only months after Ms. Dossett Leath completed her sentence that Mr. Leath was found dead. He had signed deeds and a will, now missing, ensuring that Ms. Dossett Leath would inherit all the couple’s property. At the trial, her defense lawyers argued that the victim killed himself, offering evidence that he was depressed and that his health was declining. But a firearms expert for the prosecution said that of three shots fired from the gun that day, it had been the second one that killed Mr. Leath.
Ms. Dossett Leath’s lawyer, James A. H. Bell, said that his client had loved her husband and that there was no way she would have killed him.
“If you believe Miss Raynella murdered him,” Mr. Bell said, “you have to believe she is nothing but a serpent of Satan.”
Only one juror declined to convict her in the first trial.
No comments:
Post a Comment