Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (19 page)

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local hotel’s car rental desk. Like Scott Peterson and Amber Frey,

Barber and Kennedy had been seeing each other for only a few weeks

at the time Barber’s wife was murdered. He initially hid from her the

fact that he was married. When she did find out and wanted to stop

seeing him, he told her he loved her and couldn’t live without her.

In testimony to a grand jury convened to investigate his wife’s

killing, Barber admitted to four other affairs, two with coworkers and

two with women he met in bars. For the last year of his marriage, he

and his wife weren’t even living together, as he had taken a job out of

state and only saw April on weekends.

As Chris Francis, the assistant state’s prosecutor, put it at Barber’s

2006 trial, ‘‘He was living the life of a single man.’’

He had also run up more than $50,000 in debt through day

trading, recklessly buying and selling stocks. He financed his trading

by getting cash advances on his credit cards.

According to her best friend, April had confronted her husband

with suspicions that he and Kennedy were having an affair. Although

he denied it, the friend said April told him on the actual date of

their anniversary—two weeks before the murder—that she wanted

a divorce. Barber later admitted that his wife asked him if he was

having an affair, but denied that she said she would end the marriage.

He claimed that their relationship was still loving and amicable the

night of their belated anniversary dinner and shoreline stroll.

However, Barber’s plan to kill his wife seems to have been in the

works long before April found out about his cheating and threatened

to leave him. A little less than a year before his wife died, Barber took

out a $2 million life insurance policy on himself and April. It was an

extraordinarily high amount of insurance to carry on a spouse who

earned a relatively modest income as a radiation therapist.

Then, six months before she died, Barber did something that

appeared even more suspicious, in light of what happened that day

on the beach. Forensic analysis of his computer unearthed the fact

that on Valentine’s Day, no less, Barber did a Google search on

his computer using the search terms ‘‘trauma cases gunshot right

chest’’—the exact part of the body where, six months later, he

received his most potentially dangerous wound. Six days after that

search, he searched again, Googling ‘‘medical trauma gunshot chest.’’

Police also discovered that he had purchased a bulletproof vest on

eBay a few months before the killing, which he claimed he had done

simply out of curiosity.

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‘‘What are the odds of somebody researching gunshot wounds to

the right chest and getting a gunshot wound to the right chest six

months later?’’ fellow prosecutor Matthew Fox said in his closing

argument. ‘‘Those odds don’t exist.’’

Police interpreted other activity found on his computer as indi-cating he was considering faking his own death. But it could just

as easily be research he conducted to plan an eraser killing. He

researched no-body murders and cases of missing persons being

declared dead. He looked into how to get a death certificate in

Mexico and the ability to collect on life insurance in the event of a

homicide. He entered such specific queries as ‘‘How much blood is

in the human body?’’ and ‘‘How much blood loss is required to be

declared dead?’’

He also researched bail bonds and moving to Brazil, apparently

intent on doing whatever it took to get away with his crime. He never

got the chance to flee, however. His mother and grandparents had

put all their resources together, including title to the family farm, in

hopes of securing his release, but bail was denied. He admitted in

grand jury testimony that he knew Brazil did not have an extradition

treaty with the United States.

Justin Barber was such a cool customer, so detached from normal

human emotions, that on the day he carried out his grand plan, he

took time out to play around on the Internet. In the hours before the

murder, Barber downloaded sixteen songs to his computer, including

a 1988 Guns N’ Roses tune with the lyric ‘‘I used to love her but I had

to kill her. . . . And now I’m happier this way.’’

Q

As soon as he was released from the hospital, Barber seemed

ready to move on with his relationship with Shannon Kennedy, not

returning to his home, but instead going to stay at the hotel where

Kennedy worked and continuing to pursue her even though she

refused to see him. At the same time, he denied having a relationship

with Kennedy to police until detectives informed him that she was

there at the station giving her own statement. One particularly

disturbing thing Kennedy had told authorities was that right around

the time of the murder, Barber started putting up pictures of his wife

in his Jacksonville condo. He told her that relatives would be coming

to town, and he needed to keep up appearances.

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He filed to collect on the $2 million insurance policy within weeks

of April’s death, yet asked April’s aunt to pay for his wife’s burial,

claiming he was broke. At her funeral, he avoided making eye contact

with April’s family and friends.

A few months after the murder, he transferred to a job all the

way across the country, in Oregon, and quickly took up with a new

woman. Two years passed before he was charged with killing April, as

it took prosecutors a long time to feel that they had amassed a strong

enough case. The fact that Justin was shot four times was one of the

things that worried prosecutors. It seemed hard to believe someone

would actually do that to himself.

The defense initially planned to point the finger at a convicted

rapist who was arrested a year after the murder for assaulting women

near the beach where April died. Barber’s attorney filed court papers

saying that his client saw a newspaper picture of the rapist and

identified him as looking similar to the man he claimed attacked him

and his wife. But cell phone and credit card records proved that this

man was in Connecticut, a thousand miles away from Florida, on the

night of the murder.

The jury was initially split, but after four days of deliberations

found Barber guilty of first-degree murder. Barber declined to testify

on his own behalf in both the guilt and penalty phases of his trial.

After their guilty verdict, Barber’s attorney announced to the stunned

jurors that ‘‘on principle’’ Barber had refused to let any other relatives

plead for his life.

‘‘He will not . . . seek mercy for a crime that he did not commit,’’

defense counsel Robert Willis explained. Willis simply entered into

the record that his client had no criminal record and spoke for three

minutes expressing incredulity at their verdict.

By a vote of eight to four, the jurors recommended a sentence of

death over life in prison. Unlike most states, Florida only requires

that a simple majority of jurors agree on the ultimate penalty.

Three aggravating factors made Barber eligible for execution: ‘‘cold,

calculated premeditation,’’ financial motive, and that the murder was

committed in an especially ‘‘heinous, atrocious and cruel fashion.’’

Although judges usually follow a jury’s recommendation, the trial

judge opted instead for life in prison, saying that the murder ‘‘was

not the most aggravated and unmitigated of crimes.’’

In an interview with the CBS news magazine
48 Hours
after his

trial, Barber defended the verdict even while planning to appeal it.

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‘‘I would have never asked for mercy for the person who killed

her,’’ he said, still proclaiming his innocence. ‘‘If the jury believes

that I’m that person, then they should send me to Death Row.’’ Like

L. Ewing Scott and so many other eraser killers, he was not about to

admit his crime and ask for mercy, even if his silence meant receiving

greater punishment.

Q

Of all the methods used to conceal a murder and erase any

connection to that death, poisoning is certainly the most time

honored. Poisons and their detection have presented problems for

the legal system for centuries. Today there are thousands of easily

obtainable substances that in theory can be used to kill someone,

ranging from prescription medicines, such as the benzodiazepine

family of tranquilizers, to household chemicals like antifreeze, to

toxic elements like mercury.

Most poisons can be detected in the body—that is, if someone

takes the initiative to look for them. A killer with a working knowl-edge of human biology, chemistry, and the medical aspects of death,

and, ideally, familiarity with how death is usually investigated, may

be able to poison someone and get away with murder without raising

any suspicions.

Robert Girts happened to have all those skills. The thirty-nine-year-old resident of Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, was a licensed

funeral director and embalmer. His job was to disguise the ugly

aspects of death, to make the dead appear lifelike, serene, accept-ing of their fate. He had also worked earlier in his career for the

county coroner’s office, where he was able to learn quite a bit about

‘‘real-world’’ death investigation.

In September 1992, Girts’s third wife, Diane, forty-two, was

looking forward to moving into the home she and her husband had

just purchased in a nearby town. Since shortly after their marriage

two years before, the couple had been living in a rental unit on the

grounds of one of the funeral homes where her husband worked.

‘‘All Diane wanted to do since she was five years old was to get

married and have the little white house with the picket fence,’’ said

her best friend since childhood, Barbara Madden, who was planning

to fly in from her home in California in mid-September so that Diane

could show her the new home.

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Two days before Madden was to depart for her visit, when she

called to confirm her plans, Diane’s husband told her matter-of-factly

that his wife had died two weeks earlier.

‘‘Do you have any questions?’’ he asked abruptly, after providing

just the most cursory of facts.

On the afternoon of September 2, Diane’s boss called to see why

she hadn’t shown up that day; an employee from the funeral home

went to look for her and found Diane’s body floating in her bathtub.

Mrs. Girts, a bookkeeper and office manager, appeared to have been

getting ready for work when she died. Her dress was laid out on the

bed, her curling iron turned on and ready for use.

Police who responded to the scene found no signs of foul play and

no obvious cause for the woman’s death.

Robert Girts had gone to Chicago the day before to help his brother

move. When he heard the news, he rushed back, arriving before his

wife’s body was taken away. Robert tried to talk the paramedics into

taking his wife to a local hospital instead of the coroner’s office. They

found the request odd, as Mrs. Girts was clearly dead and beyond

hope of resuscitation.

Perhaps Girts was banking on his knowledge that in the case

of an apparently natural death the decedent’s spouse could request

an in-hospital autopsy, and that those autopsies were typically not

conducted by people specially trained to look for death by homicide.

However, hospital autopsies are for those who die in the hospital.

People who die mysteriously elsewhere go to the coroner. Girts had

actually asked the ambulance crew to take her to a specific hospital,

a small community facility that does not perform autopsies. Maybe

he thought he could finagle things so that no autopsy would be

conducted at all. He had done that once before, it would later be

discovered.

The autopsy revealed no explanation for Diane’s death. The

coroner did note reddening of the skin that might indicate car-bon monoxide poisoning, but tests revealed no significant levels

of the gas in her bloodstream. Knowing that the police had found

nothing indicative of a crime, accident, or suicide at the home, the

coroner listed the cause of death as undetermined. Although key

fluids from the body were retained for possible future examination,

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Diane’s grieving family and friends were forced to bury her without

having any idea why she died.

Q

For the next few weeks very little happened in the case, and it might

easily have slipped into the netherworld of successful eraser killings

without resolution. Unfortunately for Robert Girts, the woman with

whom he had been secretly having an on-again, off-again affair for

more than a decade began talking to the police.

Elizabeth Bethea said she was stunned when she heard about the

sudden death of Girts’s wife because just a couple of weeks prior, he

had promised her that he was finally going to be getting a divorce. In

fact, he told Bethea he would be free when he returned from his brief

trip to Chicago.

Girts told Bethea that Diane died of an aneurysm, but by

mid-September he began telling the authorities that he believed

she had committed suicide. On September 20, he gave police a

handwritten note he claimed to have found tucked in his briefcase.

The undated note in his wife’s handwriting read, ‘‘I hate Cleveland.

I hate my job. I hate myself.’’ He said his wife had suffered three

miscarriages and was despondent over the thought that she might

not be able to have children. He said she was also depressed over

her weight and her inability to find a satisfying job. No one else who

knew her had seen any signs that Diane was depressed or suicidal,

including a friend who spoke with her on the phone for forty minutes

on the morning that she died.

Around this time, the coroner’s office decided to run a screening

for the most widely used poisons, including cyanide. Unlike in the

flawless world of
CSI
, the test for cyanide came back negative. But it

was discovered that the reagents used for testing had been somehow

compromised. Another test was run, and as a backup, a sample of fluid

was sent to another laboratory, which ran an independent screening

using a different methodology. Both tests came back positive. Diane

Girts was found to have twice the minimum lethal threshold of

cyanide in her system.

At last the cause of death was determined to be acute cyanide

poisoning, a particularly hellish way to die. The chemical prevents

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