Luminol and Lies

Bill Mowbray sold Cadillacs in Brownsville, Texas, and was known locally for his lakeside home and his television commercials. Behind that image he was deep in debt. On September 16, 1987, he died of a gunshot wound to the head in the bedroom he shared with his wife, Susie. She told police he had shot himself.

Prosecutors argued that Susie shot him as he slept to collect about $1.8 million in life insurance. Their key witness, Sgt. Dusty Hesskew, had sprayed luminol on her nightgown and testified that tiny stains showed she fired the gun. In June 1988 a jury convicted her of murder, and she was sentenced to life in prison. The prosecution’s own blood-spatter expert, Herbert MacDonell, had found no such spatter pattern months earlier, but his report reached the defense only days before trial and he was never called to testify.

Susie’s son, Wade Burnett, enrolled in law school to fight her conviction. At a later hearing, Hesskew admitted his testimony lacked scientific support, since no confirmatory blood tests were done. On December 18, 1996, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals set the conviction aside over the withheld report. Released on bond in 1997 after about nine years in prison, she was retried. There the defense presented evidence that Bill had threatened suicide days before his death, and on January 23, 1998, a Brownsville jury acquitted her.