The Boardwalk Murders

Kosta Fotopoulos ran Top Shots, a pool hall in Daytona Beach, Florida, and had married into a family whose Joyland Amusement Center sat on the boardwalk. He also ran a counterfeiting operation. When his wife, Lisa Paspalakis, learned about his affair with Deidre Hunt, a twenty-year-old waitress at his club, and raised the idea of divorce, Fotopoulos set out to have her killed for her inheritance and a life insurance policy.

On October 20, 1989, he and Hunt took Kevin Ramsey, a nineteen-year-old former employee threatening to expose the counterfeiting, to a remote firing range. They tied him to a tree, Hunt shot him three times in the chest and once in the head while Fotopoulos worked a video camera, and Fotopoulos fired a last shot. A string of hired men failed before eighteen-year-old Bryan Chase agreed to shoot Lisa for $5,000. On November 4, 1989, Chase came in through a door Fotopoulos had left unlocked and shot Lisa in the head. Fotopoulos shot Chase dead and reported a burglary.

Lisa survived with the bullet still lodged in her brain and testified against her husband. Investigators recovered the Ramsey videotape. Fotopoulos was convicted in 1990 of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Hunt was sentenced to death in September 1990; her guilty pleas were set aside and a 1998 retrial ended in a life sentence.