Man Watches as His Crime Is Re-Enacted : Murder-for-Hire Case Shown on TV

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”-- Leo Tolstoy in “Anna Karenina.”

Fredrick E. Penney dreaded seeing the lurid story of his shattered marriage dramatized on television. But he couldn’t take his eyes from the screen.

Watching himself portrayed by Ben Gazzara in “Downpayment on Murder,” an NBC movie that will air Sunday night, Penney stared like someone who had caught sight of himself in a distorting mirror.

“The real story will never be known,” he muttered, his eyes red-rimmed from weeping. “Not until they cut me open and take my heart out. I was madly in love with that woman. Here they have me beating her. Raping her. I never in my life did that. This is despicable.”

Gazarra’s face came on the screen, talking to an accomplice. “I want her dead,” he said, cold but urgent. “My wife. She’s trying to destroy me.”

The words are Penney’s own, taken from testimony in a sensational 1984 Orange County trial that made national headlines. Penney, 60, was convicted of hiring a would-be killer to murder his wife and make it look like an accident. She was supposed to be knocked over the head in the shower. His wife, though, was never killed.

Now, out on parole after doing 38 months of a six-year sentence, mainly in the California Institute for Men at Chino, he was sitting in his daughter’s El Toro home earlier this week watching an advance videotape copy of the movie.

“I can look you straight in the eye and say, yes, I was guilty,” he admitted, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief.

During the trial, Penney admitted paying $1,500 to an undercover sheriff’s investigator posing as the hit man. Penney and his wife, Susan, 38, were caught up at the time in a bitter divorce case after a stormy 10-year relationship and were fighting over custody of their son and division of their Laguna Niguel property.

The police told Penney’s wife of the murder plot and asked her to clinch the case against her husband by posing dead in the morgue. The police took the morgue pictures to Penney to convince him that the murder had taken place. Then they secretly tape-recorded his reaction to his wife’s “death” for trial evidence.

In the movie, Gazarra is taken to the morgue to identify the body of his wife, played by Connie Selleca. She is shown laying on a marble slab with a phony bullet hole in her forehead. The real Susan Penney was supposed to have sustained a broken neck.

The morgue scene, played for maximum effect, was among the hardest sequences for Fred Penney to watch.

“They came to me and tortured me with pictures of her for 45 minutes,” he recalled. “They never took me to the morgue. But I believed she was dead.”

Like Gazarra, Penney learned that his wife’s death had been faked only after his arrest. But the reality was more bizarre than the movie. Gazarra discovers what happened immediately. Penney didn’t.

“I was in jail for three days before I knew,” Penney said, shaking his head in disbelief. “The guy in the cell with me told me. He read about it in the paper. I was so shocked when they arrested me I didn’t even hear they were saying ‘solicitation to murder.’ All I heard was ‘murder.’ I tried to back out (of the plot) twice. But they had me brainwashed. The hit man and the informant wouldn’t let me. They berated me. Cursed me. Told me it was the only solution to my problem.”

“Look,” Bob Giles, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department investigator who posed as the hit man, said this week. “I was completely convinced he was going to try to kill her. He would go into a tirade about doing it. There was no doubt in my mind.”

“We were convinced he wasn’t just venting his frustrations,” agreed Lt. E. Steve Carroll, who ran the investigative team. “A lot of people say they’re going to kill someone. but it’s just words. He was beyond words. We were afraid he might do it himself.”

Both Giles and Carroll watched a videotape of the movie this week at their office in Santa Ana.

One of the points of the case that was not in the movie, Giles said, “is that (Penney) wanted to kill several people and his wife so it would look like she was just another victim.”

As to Penney’s claim of being manipulated, Carroll noted that Penney was too strong and too smart for that tactic.

“The way that guy (the actual informant in the case) is portrayed in the movie is close to what he was like--weak,” Carroll said. “But I can see why Penney’s upset. He’s confusing real life with television and he lived it.”

What disturbs Penney about the movie, among other things, is that he has served a sentence for his crime and now is being held up to ridicule in the court of public opinion.

“People will see me in the supermarket or at work and they’ll say, ‘There goes the guy who tried to kill his wife,’ ” Penney said. “I paid for my crime once. Isn’t that enough?”

Also, he said, the movie harms one of his daughters by a previous marriage, portraying her as a pot-smoking punk rocker and a petty thief who despises him.

“This is Susan’s revenge,” he said. “I have three wonderful daughters who have stood by me completely. Is that how she sees them? As dope addicts? She is slandering my family.”

Penney accused his former wife with exploiting their marital problems by selling the made-for-TV movie rights for $50,000. In a telephone interview this week, Susan Penney acknowledged being paid but said the amount was “less than half of that.”

“He’s just ticked off that 20th-Century Fox didn’t buy his story,” she countered. “It’s sour grapes. He ought to sit back and realize that if he hadn’t tried to have me killed, he wouldn’t have gone to jail and none of this would have happened.”

Asked how she felt posing for the morgue pictures and then seeing them portrayed on TV and in the press, she joked: “Well, they were unattractive. . . . Of course, I felt funny about it. I never was in a place like that before.”

What she said annoys her is that Penney is portraying himself as the victim. Worse, she added, he is painting her a villain.

“He’s making a big deal that I was such a terrible person,” she said. “In fact, I was the victim. And I don’t think three years in jail was enough for him.”