Uncovering a Sociopath's Evil Deeds: The Richard Overton Case | Poisonous Liaisons | Real Crime

foreign [Music] [Music] is to determine the cause of death watch on mobile devices or the big screen all for free no subscription required download feely now [Music] in January 1988 the actions of one man would rock the comfortable neighborhood of Dana Point poison as a method of murder is pretty uncommon Richard's character was extremely secretive arrogant paranoid he also fit the character profile of a classic sociopath I think he really wanted it just just tear her apart for wronging him which is how he saw it evil little man the evil little man was Richard Overton [Music] while loading the family van in the driveway of their home seventeen-year-old Eric Overton could only watch on helpless as his mother Janet fell to the ground Richard helped her into the bathroom being the caring husband that he was Janet got violently ill in the bathroom While Janet was getting ill Richard called 9-1-1 and the paramedics were on their way I think Janet was in the ER maybe for less than one hour and that was when nurse Judy Claypool came out and said that Mr Overton yes Mr Overton I'm very sorry we did everything we could Janet's gone and Richard just turned his head away and started uh oh my God oh my God Eric's eyes filled with water he just heard that he lost his mother it was January 24. 46 year old Janet Overton died in hospital just a short time later a cause of death was recorded as unknown but her husband knew different poisoning is a cowardly kind of crime it's also sadistic you have a person who wants to commit murder but you also have a person who's willing to watch someone suffer and die and and usually for a protracted period of time to poison someone to death and live in the house with him and watch them die that is that's torture a stay-at-home mum who had recently re-entered the workforce Jared Overton was popular in the Dana Point Community she's very knowledgeable very likable very adaptable personality she got on the school board she ran for re-election and she got reelected and then from there she was rotated into being president of the school board which just irritated the heck out of Richard because he had a PhD in Psychology and his wife was mostly a housewife who was a high school graduate she was I mean in stark contrast to her husband she was very well liked in the community she was known as a caring woman hard worker and no one had a bad thing to say about her Janet's husband Richard was a computer consultant and a college lecturer although the couple had been married 19 years he and his wife seemed Polar Opposites where she was friendly and approachable he was aloof and even arrogant people who talk to him for any length of time often later described him as they got the feeling he always felt he was better than whoever he was talking to and that would that would be wearing just in casual conversation but if you lived with someone like that it had to have been awful [Music] the classic sociopath is a very intelligent person Richard's IQ was 180 with a red bullet they're very Charming I mean Richard was married four times very intellectual and he felt that because of his PhD and his level of intelligence it put him several Cuts above other people if you met him in a social situation and he felt that you were not on his intellectual level he would walk away from you in mid-sentence you weren't entitled to talk to him if he was the most important person in his Universe he couldn't understand why he wasn't the most important person in his lives and she had to pay for that and she did with her life [Music] leading up to her death Janet Overton was frequently ill one of my neighbors was a very good friend of hers and used to go over to the hospital to see Janet all the time she was in and out of San Clemente hospital numerous times with long illnesses irritations to the skin nausea vomiting and the blood tests couldn't determine anything each time Janet was hospitalized she seemed to take longer to recover internal bleeding violent nausea and skin irritations all over everywhere the ears down south and the fingertips and the toes time had happened it was because of the body not being able to repair itself in enough time began to weaken it over a period of time Janet's hospital stays became longer and confided to some of her friends that this situation with her sicknesses wasn't going to go away she just said that the sicknesses and the hospital stays were just becoming overwhelming for her obviously she had no idea what was being done to her body doctors and police Janet's death was at the very least strange although her autopsy then didn't reveal any lethal amounts of toxic substances tissue samples were stored Janet was cremated her police file put away eighteen months later Orange County Police investigator Tim Carney came across it Tim Carney got transferred from undercover narcotics to homicide on his first day in homicide he has shown the cold case files and the first file he pulls up is the Overton file he opens it up there are three or four newspaper clippings in there and then there's the latest death certificate that says pending Connie noticed another case that had been filed negated by retired police investigator Cliff Miller he had been approached by a lady named Dorothy Boyer Richards first wife Richard Overton and Dorothy Boyer had married in Texas before moving to California for Richard's work the couple had four children together and eventually moved into an affluent part of Orange County they bought a house in Capistrano Beach which Richard had in addition to he designed the addition and he felt that the house was going to be his for the rest of his life in the meantime he kept his freelance teaching assignments both at Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Fullerton and computer science and psychology his full-time job was at automatics and he had a very definitive scientific position which uh Dorothy Boyer knew nothing about and he also was alleging to do subcontract work for the Central Intelligence Agency down in Central America because he was fluent both in Russian and in Spanish while Richard Overton was fluent in both languages his claim to work for the CIA was a ruse he was a bigamist he'd been married to Dorothy Boyer for 17 years they raised four kids together but he met and had a child with another woman he met and married another woman The Other Woman was Caroline Draper whom Overton married in 1966 the pair had a daughter and shared a home in the city of Orange some 40 minutes from his home with Dorothy in Dana Point he had two separate households he was keeping and the way that he worked it was really kind of ingenious he married the second woman Carolyn using a co-worker's name co-worker's name to do it and he told both wives that he had to travel for his job and that sometimes he'd have to be gone for a week or a couple weeks yeah Dorothy Drive him to the Los Angeles International Airport and then he got out of the car he because Dorothy goodbye and went inside and waited for 20 minutes then Carolyn Draper pulled up in a car he got in Carolyn Draper's car and he spent two weeks with her as husband and wife and he pulled that off for uh I thought it was close to a year and a half Richard's deception was uncovered when Caroline called him at work after their daughter came down with a serious case of whooping cough in 1968 Caroline had their marriage annulled Dorothy filed for divorce and he blamed Dorothy for everything he felt that the issue of a bigamist marriage wasn't that big for one thing I don't think he liked the fact that a woman would leave him and secondly she got the house in Capistrano it was his dream home and he was angry and bitter about that and he had a plan for that too Richard just thought to himself being the sociopath that he was I'm going to get back at you and the way he got back at her was poisoning her food and doctoring her family milk with selenium is a trace element important for cell function it can be found in my nutrimance in every human body and is common in multivitamins and even baby formula but in high doses selenium is toxic it causes gastrointestinal disorders hair loss fatigue and neurological damage after her divorce from Richard Overton Dorothy Boyer began to experience a range of mystery symptoms she became quite ill usually only after she drunk coffee tea some beverage and she'd have abdominal cramps and and everything and she'd feel very ill and then all of a sudden she'd feel better and this went on literally for a couple of years these were small doses that over a period of time would cause a lot of irritation he not only did it with the milk he did it in her coffee can he did it with the wine that she had although Dorothy had custody of the children Richard had visitation rights a light bulb went on which he realized that Richard was coming into the house doctoring not her stuff that the kids were drinking but her mother was almost poisoned too Dorothy took her suspicions to the Orange County Sheriff's Department but they needed evidence she spoke to detective Cliff Miller he said what you need to do is on your way home get a can of your favorite coffee one pound can and take the lid off and put the plastic lid on and with a felt tip marker put a small mark from the plastic lid down to the seam of the coffee can just make it just a little Mark and then turn it around and put it on the counter where you always put it and just leave it there for several days after Richard comes into the house on the visitation when he leaves check to see if the two lines are lined up if they are not lined up that means Richard took off the plastic can and doctored the coffee at that point do not touch the can get a shopping bag move the can into the shopping bag and bring it back to us it will take four or five days in toxicology and if we come up with something first we have to come up with foreign substances in the coffee can and secondly we have to come up with Richard's fingerprints on it tests came up positive for both traces of selenium were in the coffee and Richard's fingerprints on the can Furious Dorothy confronted Richard and threatened to press charges and he just looked at her and said you're operating with a bunch of fantasies I haven't done anything and she said yes you have we have fingerprints on the coffee can we have toxic substances in the coffee plus the wine bottles plus the milk Richard it stacked against you I'm telling you the truth if this goes any further you're going to be doing time in prison and she got up and walked away Richard sat there and ordered his lunch in the end Dorothy agreed not enormous the poisoning stopped and he sought help moving on with his life Richard married for a third time this time to Janet Dorothy had the guilt for not pressing charges for the rest of her life once they had Dorothy's story then it was like oh okay maybe this wasn't a natural death at all and they started looking at him hard for this re-examination of evolving International toxicologists revealed traces of cyanide Richard had been stealing vials of it from the garage of a business partner with mining interests [Music] Carney and his partner but relationship they soon learned the marriage was not what it seemed it was a troubled marriage separate bedrooms separate meals they were even arguing about who is going to fix the latest thing wrong with the refrigerator in and out back and forth a husband came in wife came in nobody was speaking to each other back and forth and the detention just Rose Eric grew up in that type of environment it looked superficially looked pretty good on the outside looking in but then they started hearing things like they they don't sleep together anymore they haven't you know they haven't been intimate in quite a while she was having an affair and then they start to look at jealousy as the motive one day Connie spoke with Janet and Richard's son Eric he had two or three uh introductory questions and finally what the fourth or fifth questions he said to Eric you know blood being thicker than water Eric do you think that your father killed your mother and Eric paused he looked away and he looked back at Tim and he said yeah he could have and right then and there Tim knew instinctively a son saying this about his own father he felt that he had something here well finally they feel like they have enough circumstantial evidence to get a warrant to search his house and that's when they hit the jackpot and at that point they went to Richard's house cold right in with the search warrant and confiscated 40 bound journals in Richard's minuscule handwriting and 132 Flappy discs that Richard was keeping over a period of years Richard thought he had deleted the compromising material but one of the discs contained a copy of Richard Overton's Personal Diary it became another key piece of evidence he didn't realize that in the Flappy disc days even though you can delete it it's still on the file and with that uh with the they had a data recovery company up in San Francisco who got in and were able not only to get into the various files but Richard sometimes he had his own encryption System since he was fluent in Russian and in Spanish what he would do he would put his initial thoughts down in Spanish then go over and encrypt that into Russian and then erase the English part of it that's how secretive and paranoia he was and in this diary was every single bit of animosity and Venom that he felt towards his deceased wife he went into great and gory detail about her alleged by him Affairs in meticulous detail he recorded everything he even recorded the deleterious effect that his crumbling marriage was having on his bowel movements which is way too much information for people but he did this on and this was just like a road map for detectives about how he felt you know and and how he would you know and why he killed her he was consumed with jealousy Richard's diary revealed that he had been slowly poisoning Janet with selenium long before he administered the lethal dose of cyanide he next selenium was cyanide to slow down the process of cyanide the purpose of cyanide is once it gets into your system in whatever dose it will slowly go up through the bloodstream to the brain and just like Lou Gehrig's disease ALS it will shut down the brain he didn't use a single poison he used them in combination and used them in different ways he put cyanide because usually when you think someone's poisoning you they're probably going to put it in your food or drink and he did that but then he also used selenium and he put it in her mascara the effects on her were devastating both of those are just awful awful poisons he was putting it in a cosmetic that his wife used to beautify herself presumably for another man she was having an affair So Not only was that a cowardly thing to do it was really an overt act like I'm going to sabotage this I'm going to sabotage your you know your looks that he chose to poison a cosmetic as well as anything she'd be ingesting really interesting and totally diabolical and I think he enjoyed it I think poisoners do he had to watch his wife suffer physically tormented daily sometimes her clothing because she was so sensitive from the poisons her clothing just the feel of it just the weight of it on her skin was excruciating for her he had to be willing to watch that Not only was he willing I think he was quite enjoying himself the whole time he was punishing her for her infidelity he was punishing her for that in his diary Overton listed 17 men with whom he suspected Janet of having an affair and made references to what he called her seduction gear that included condoms and sex AIDS he has 17 people in mind that she's having this is for dude no one has that much time in their day to conduct 17 Affairs she was having an affair not 17. [Music] Richard Overton was indicted on October 1st 1991 and charged with the first degree murder of his wife Janet Overton his trial began on June 9 the following year seven weeks later it was declared a mistrial on July 23 1992 Overton was taken to hospital [Music] chest pains nausea but he was only in the hospital overnight they released him the trial runs into another major snag his lawyer says that he has depression and not just depression like it's a bad day or no no no no no he had like clinical depression and he went in and his psychiatrist said there's no way that you can handle this trial for at least another six months the judge finally has to pull the plug on it and declare a mistrial there's no way that a jury in a murder case like this can retain everything and they just can't pick it up you know again it wasn't fair to anyone was it fair to the jurors not you know not to anyone three years later on March 28 1995 Overton's retrial began his new lawyer argued that Janet Overton had died of natural causes citing her protracted illness as evidence of this people do not generally go to the doctor 60 times in a year that to me says she was being poisoned she said the doctor 60 times but no that's not how the defense played it they played it that she had another ailment then that her death was ultimately caused by some of the medication she was taking no she was taking poison administered by her husband that's what killed her and that's ultimately the conclusion that jury came to as well but the prosecution had their star Witness Dorothy Boyer Tim always felt that if there was a real hero in this case he was Dorothy Boyer her testimony was damning [Music] on May 8 1995 the jury deliberated for just six hours before delivering their verdict Richard Overton was guilty of first-degree murder he was sentenced to life without parole it had a profound effect on the Dana Point Community [Music] Dorothy Boyd 1999 of lymphoma likely caused by her prolonged exposure to selenium a decade later Richard Overton died in a prison hospice from diabetes and advanced dementia he was 81. to me it's kind of ironic that this man who placed so much importance on his intellect and was so arrogant about it I think it's the arrogance that is is so appalling but it's ironic to me that what he died of or uh he had dementia so his his Brilliance his brain was it wasn't worth anything to him at the end Janet's son Eric meanwhile has quietly moved on with his life determined to put those Sinister events behind him [Music] when friends of North Carolina turkey farmer Dorian Lanier discovered the truth of his agonizing death they couldn't believe it had taken his wife Pamela 10 weeks to call 9-1-1 [Music] 56-year-old Dorian Lanier was a farmer from Duplin County North Carolina [Music] relatives had established themselves in the area Generations ago so you have all types of Agriculture that goes on there people grow tobacco some cotton but there's also a bit of farming relative to cattle turkeys this sort of thing is they've been married three times by the time she met Dorian her fourth husband's passing had left her a widow for the second time in December 1993 Dorian and Pamela tied the knot and settled down in rural chinkapin he marries Pamela Lanier she moves in the farm with him they get along fine for a couple three years everything's Cruise along hunky dory but three years into their marriage the couple were hit by a terrible event on December 10 1996 Dorian was working on the property of his longtime friend Jackie Hatcher when Pamela called unfortunately a few years into the marriage dorian's house actually caught a fire and burned down taking everything that Pamela and Dorian had worked hard to build together [Music] although the loss of their home was a shocking blow the insurance payout enabled Dorian and Pamela to start afresh he recovered about 125 thousand dollars in property insurance from the fire as a result of this event they were actually able through tragedy to realize a dream that Dorian had had for years and years and that was to start his own turkey farm he grew turkeys for one of the big turkey processing production companies that operates down in that part of the state multiple agents were administered to these turkeys to make them grow one in particular that's called Nitro three the problem with Nitro 3 is that it contains arsenic arsenic makes up part of the active ingredient in Nitro III called roxazone it's mixed along with their drinking water so if they have little troughs that the turkeys come in and ingest water out of it's absorbed and Trace Amounts directly into their system and processed and again this goes to the end product which you want large plump turkey breasts in order to facilitate sail the Arsenic can actually interact with a hormone production and it triggers this hormone production thus as the turkeys take it on in their drinking water it causes them to grow exponentially the couple seemed content as they worked on turning their fortunes around but less than a year later their happiness would be blighted again by another freak accident this time involving a bulldozer Dorian had to remain busy all the time in the field adjacent to the area where the turkeys were and he sustained a pretty nasty injury to his leg along the way literally lacerating it on the side of a piece of equipment it's at this point in time that Pamela took upon herself to treat Dorian in her own way Dorian had a notorious reticence of doctor visits and staved off an appointment for days after his incident Dorian who was never too fond of going to doctors starts being exclusively attended to by his loving wife Pamela Amir she took him to the home propped him up in bed and began to dress his injuries and feed him there dorian's recovery was very slow dorian's recovery wasn't just slow it was noticeably secluded very few people have contact with him at this point she keeps them away and when people contact her and reach out to her to want to inquire about dorian's condition she'll say that he doesn't want to be bothered he's sick and he's in bed and we're taking care of him the problem is is that Dorian was not healing as well as one might think over a period of time all of a sudden Dory and Lanier starts coming down with the classic symptoms of poisoning I mean he's got flu-like symptoms all the time the poison in question was arsenic cases like this keep cropping up in North Carolina particularly arsenic poisoning well number one there's a lot of arsenic around here or there used to be arsenic is endemic to rural activities farming food production of all kinds all kinds of stuff that involve rural or agrarian societies I mean you got to get rid of pests you got to get rid of Berman and arsenic very effective at doing all that so it's readily available Witnesses including I think close relatives had witnessed Dorian drinking directly from the water supply system that fed the turkey's hydration system that contained the Nitro III Dorian saw his doctor on September 14th and complained of a bitter taste in his mouth in a follow-up consultation two weeks later the doctor found him delirious and sick Dorian was bedridden for an extended period of time and during this period of time he experienced hallucinations slipping in and out of coma along with his jaundice condition stemming from a hepatic failure or liver failure his life was absolutely miserable pain Pamela resorted to giving Dorian a painkiller she was well acquainted with diagnosed with a migraine headaches she developed also some sores on her body as well Hamlet had developed quite the addiction to pain medication as a matter of fact it was determined later that Pamela had run up a debt of almost ten thousand dollars so that she could acquire prescriptions for painkiller with a glaring Bill escalating at the local Kenansville drugstore and with no medical insurance to cover the costs Pamela was under pressure to pay up em all began to have to doctor sharp to go about trying to get more of these drugs right Pamela's attempt dorian's condition was getting worse he covers his bed in a tarp like you get from a hardware store so that when Dorian throws up when he has explosive diarrhea when he gets in really bad way she can just kind of take the mattress outside and hose it off he was laying in a state of Filth and so this tarp had been placed beneath his body to contain all of this waste product that was being produced by him at this point in time again this is another indication of the impact that being administered this Nitro 3 compound into a system that contained arsenic I was having on his body enduring terrible pain and now cognitively impaired Dorian didn't see his own doctor for another two months on November 17 1997 he was back in hospital with nausea diarrhea and vomiting it's got gastrointestinal distress he's got you know heart problems with his heart because the Arsenic is literally processed through the liver it has a tremendous effect on the chemical balance within the digestive tract as say we're for instance processing food as waste products as it's going through because of this imbalance relative to the Arsenic present in the liver and that's transferred over into the gastrointestinal tract you'll have things like chronic diarrhea you'll have bloody stool and then on the other end you will have highly irritated esophageal problems where you will literally have individuals vomiting blood condition Pamela taurian back on November 19th family friend Jackie hancher paid a visit Dorian skin literally began to change color starting in the abdominal area he became yellow in color and this is tied back to what we refer to as a condition jaundice alarmed at his friend's condition hacha told Lanier to call for an ambulance immediately soon after Dorian arrived at the hospital at 6 25 that evening he was violently vomiting bringing up undigested food and red fluid one of the reasons that you'll have this horrible outcome with arsenic is that it is literally a caustic substance it could be compared say for instance a cost of congestion something like an acid for instance because the imbalance at a chemical level it creates an imbalance within the gastrointestinal lining where the actual lining itself becomes highly irritated and individuals in incapable of processing food appropriately by 11 o'clock that night 56 year old Dorian Lanier was dead in most locations if an individual arrives at a hospital unconscious and dies within 24 hours of admission automatically this case is reportable to the medical examiner or the coroner and in dorian's case it was further investigation along with the autopsy results indicated that he had heavy metal poisoning specifically arsenic in his system the police in the state Bureau of Investigation started investigating mainly the hist of dorian's family because they you know they don't understand what's happened to them in particular dorian's family wanted to understand how so much arsenic had ended up in his body a clue was right there on the farm so if you were to administer pure Nitro 3 to a human being say for instance if you just completely laced their food with a massive dosage of it death would be very sudden but if the nitro3 is administered over a long protracted period of time you'll see the individual becoming progressively more and more ill you'll have things that will occur like skin color changes jaundice because it begins to affect the liver hallucinations and terrible gastrointestinal problems as well visitors to the Lanier's Farm had seen Dorian sipping from the turkey's water supply some people put forth a theory that Dorian was not dosed by Pamela but by himself over a protracted period of time the Dorian have been unwittingly poisoning himself by drinking from the Arsenic dose water hose it was plausible but when police began digging into Pamela's past they became doubtful during the process the investigation they discovered that Pamela had actually been involved in an earlier case in an earlier relationship had drowned down the North Carolina coast and sound that relationship was with Johnny Ray Williams 1989 Pamela and Johnny Ray married and settled in Surf City on Topsail Island by North Carolina's Coast while Pamela manned a surf shop Johnny Ray worked at a fishing tackle store Keen fisherman himself he had crab pots in the Intercoastal Waterway behind their mobile home on August 20 1991 Johnny Ray a heavy drinker and smoker was admitted to hospital feeling confused and unable to speak clearly two weeks later on September 4th he received medications after a follow-up visit late that night before turning in he decided to check on his crab pots outside their trailer [Music] but he didn't come back Pamela and Johnny didn't own a phone so she ran to her neighbor's home begging them to call 9-1-1 when Johnny Williams was found deceased he was found floating in only three or four feet of water Pamela had put forth that he had drank copious mess of alcohol that night in addition to have taken Benadryl his death was initially thought to be an accidental drowning no autopsy was performed is often the case with drownings no autopsy usually because there's not one needed I mean drowning is pretty evident as far as the cause of death they were in deep financial trouble as a matter of fact they had a rather large piece of property that was about to be foreclosed on when Johnny died that property was left in entirety to Pamela in addition Pamela got almost twenty four thousand dollars in insurance policy money Duplin County investigators thought two husbands dying from two accidental deaths was too much of a coincidence what's particularly interesting about Johnny's death is that Johnny had worked and lived around the water for his entire life he was found immediately adjacent to the dock in only three to four feet of water it's been said that Johnny was an excellent swimmer so this gave an indication to the D.A at that point in time that maybe there was more to Johnny's death Duplin investigators noticed another parallel in the end she stood to gain quite a bit of money as a result of the death of Dorian Maureen's bulldozer and attractors a crew and he won a thousand dollars while an option to purchase dorian's Farm in Duplin County earned her nearly a quarter of a million dollars in addition to an addiction that Pamela had developed for prescription medication it would appear at the Pamela developed an addiction to money as well [Music] Duplin County investigators thought as much and in January 1999 charges were filed against Pamela for first degree murder [Music] almost three years after dorian's passing the trial went to court in a rare decision the court allowed the prosecution to present the circumstances of Johnny Ray Williams's death to support their murder charge against Pamela it was a motion known as the doctrine of chances she had the means the motive and the opportunity to ply him with this nitro3 compound which contained Arsenic and not just the water he drank but potentially in the food that he consumed as well the prosecution's use of the doctrine of chances helped to seal Pamela's fate and on November 29 2001 the jury found her guilty [Music] she was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole she's sitting in prison doing life in prison North Carolina Correctional assist meanwhile rests in Duplin County among his ancestors in the Family Cemetery

Channel: Real Crime

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Keywords: true crime, real crime, true crime documentary, true crime stories, full length documentary 2023, true crime stories 2023, documentary movies - topic, true crime documentary 2023, murder, poisoning, sociopath, Janet Overton, Richard Overton, Dana Point, Orange County, police investigation

Id: XaDz4Hava1A

Length: 46min 29sec (2789 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023