Jury Gets Soap Opera-Like Benson Murder Case

Jury deliberations began Wednesday in the murder trial of Steven Wayne Benson, charged with setting off two pipe bombs that destroyed his wealthy family in a plume of orange fire.

“Look at Steven, look at him,” Benson’s attorney, Michael McDonnell, somberly urged the jury as he finished his closing arguments.

“He didn’t do it,” the lawyer whispered, patting his sad-faced client on the left shoulder. McDonnell told the jury that the state’s case relied primarily on circumstantial evidence, tying no one directly to the bombing.

Minutes before, Benson, 35, had wiped back tears with a handkerchief he had pulled from the pants pocket of his neatly pressed gray suit. His lips quivered.

Resembles a Banker

The predominantly elderly jury considered the case for six hours in an anteroom of Lee County’s modern courthouse but came to no verdict. The jurors will try again today.

Benson, a husky man with the clean-cut bearing of a banker, is charged with the most sensational crime to hit the retirement havens of southwest Florida in years.

On the steamy morning of July 9, 1985, in the serene Gulfside city of Naples, he allegedly hid two homemade bombs in the family’s heavy-duty wagon, connived to get his mother, brother and sister inside, then blew them up.

Margaret Benson, the 63-year-old heiress to a Pennsylvania tobacco fortune, was killed instantly. So was her adopted son, Scott, 21. Carol Lynn Benson Kendall, 40, was left burned and disfigured.

$8 Million at Stake

The motive, prosecutors say, was Margaret’s money--more than $8 million, according to probate records. The prosecutors contend that Steven was an inept businessman who got caught embezzling from his mother. She planned to disinherit him, they say, so he schemed to get it all.

“After the murder, I submit to you the defendant thought he had just made about $10 million,” state attorney Jerry Brock told the jury in his summation.

The case was tried in Fort Myers, because it had attracted intense publicity in Naples, 30 miles to the south. Every night, the proceedings have been the topic of an hourlong local TV show, “The Benson Chronicles.”

Even here, the trial, now in its fourth week, has been like a soap opera no one dares to miss. The courtroom fills early. For Wednesday’s climax, the line began forming at 5:30 a.m., three hours before the opening gavel.

Spoiled Rich Image

Trial testimony has made the Bensons out to be among the spoiled rich. Witnesses have described Carol Lynn as quarrelsome, Scott as a brat in love with drugs and his own good looks, Margaret as a domineering mother who tried to turn her children into puppets that hung from her purse strings.

One twist was the disclosure that Scott was blood kin as well as adopted. He was the love child Carol Lynn bore when she was 19.

In fact, McDonnell’s defense of Steven has depended partly on casting aspersions on the others, especially Scott, an aspiring tennis pro with an appetite for cocaine, marijuana and laughing gas.

Defense attorneys suggested that Scott might have been the bombing target of drug dealers, angry about unpaid bills.

Edward Malone, an acquaintance of Scott, testified that in 1985 the word on the street was that Scott owed money to Miami pushers.

“They were talking thousands of dollars,” Malone said. “If he didn’t pay it, he was going to lose his fanny.”

However, prosecutors presented evidence that Steven’s palm prints were on sales receipts for galvanized pipe, purchased days prior to the explosion. The pipe was the same type picked from debris of the demolished Chevrolet Suburban, federal firearms experts testified.

Steven Benson did not take the stand in his own defense.