COUNTYWIDE : Overton Denied Guilt to Sheriff’s Deputies

Before he was indicted earlier this year for the cyanide poisoning death of his wife, Richard K. Overton once told homicide investigators that he would never have hurt his wife and suggested that they look for other culprits.

In a 1988 interview with Orange County sheriff’s deputies, Overton, now 63, said he would lie awake at night trying to figure out what happened to his wife, Janet L. Overton, 46, a well-known South County school board member who died in January, 1988.

“Was it terrorism? You know, did someone contaminate some medicine?” he said.

The interview was included in documents filed Monday in Superior Court to support defense motions to dismiss the murder charge against Overton.

Orange attorney Robert D. Chatterton said he is prepared to argue on Jan. 3, when the motions will be heard, that the charge should be dismissed for several reasons. For one, the county grand jury that indicted Overton received “inadmissible evidence” because the search warrant used by authorities to enter Overton’s home in Dana Point was overly broad, Chatterton alleges.

Also, he argues, the grand jury was misled by the district attorney into believing that Overton had poisoned his first wife, Dorothy Overton Boyer, between 1973 and 1977. Chatterton also maintains that jurors were misled when they were told that Janet Overton was systematically poisoned.

Richard Overton has been a mathematics and computer specialist and a part-time college professor. Janet Overton, his third wife, was a trustee of the Capistrano Unified School District.

Overton, who remains free on $250,000 bail, has not granted any interviews with reporters, but in his interview with investigators in 1988, he said his marriage was good but had the same “frictions” as most couples.

“I think we had a stronger foundation under (our) marriage than most people do because of what we could bring to each other,” he said. He told investigators that his wife had admitted to having an affair, but he told deputies that they were “rebuilding (their) relationship.”

Overton told sheriff’s investigators: “I lay up at night making up theories. I know what I didn’t do. I try to put myself in your position, and I can see how you could make up a theory about me.”

At one point, Overton raised the possibility that his first wife, Dorothy Boyer, might have had something to do with the poisoning: “Like I say, I lay in bed at night making up theories. You know--did Dorothy contaminate something . . . (or) did Jan commit suicide?” He said there was animosity between the two women.

He even suggested that Janet Overton’s former lover might have played a role in her death.

It was Dorothy Boyer who suggested to authorities in July, 1988, that Janet Overton’s death may have involved foul play, according to investigators. Richard Overton, Boyer said, had tried to poison her a decade earlier.