Man Gets Life in Fatal Poisoning of Wife : Courts: Orange County computer consultant proclaims innocence. He has no chance for parole.

Proclaiming his innocence to the end, computer consultant Richard K. Overton was sentenced Friday to life in prison for the 1988 cyanide poisoning of his wife in one of Orange County’s most celebrated murder cases.

Overton, 67, has no chance for parole because the murder involved the special circumstance of poisoning, a type of slaying almost unheard of in the United States.

Although the mandated sentence was a foregone conclusion, the hearing took on the charged air of a drama’s final act. The courtroom in Orange County Superior Court was jammed with reporters, Overton’s current wife and a handful of supporters and two jurors who voted for conviction in May after an unusual six-week retrial.

“Believing somebody was that evil was hard for me. Here is this older, scholarly looking guy who looks like your grandfather,” said Michael Lyman, a Fullerton reserve police officer who served as jury foreman.

Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald imposed the life sentence after Overton declared himself the innocent victim of “a tragedy laid on top of a tragedy.”

He has maintained that his wife, Janet L. Overton, 46, a trustee of the Capistrano Unified School District, died of heart failure.

“The truth is I am innocent. The truth is . . . I never poisoned Jan Overton with anything, at any time, in any manner. Ever,” said Overton, of Dana Point. He appeared pale and gaunt as he sat at the defense table in a jail jumpsuit.

As rare as the crime was--there were only nine slayings by poison in the United States in 1993, the latest year for which data was available--the case was sprinkled from its outset by touches of the bizarre.

A first trial ended abruptly in 1992 when Overton’s previous lawyer suffered severe depression and could not go on with the case. Richard Overton unwittingly played a hand in his own conviction by leaving behind a long string of diary entries--coded in Spanish and Russian--that documented his wife’s suspected sexual affairs and hinted darkly, prosecutors said, at a slow poisoning campaign.

In a sentencing report, Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher Evans called Overton “the single most blatant, arrogant, yet curiously effective liar and manipulator of the truth I have ever seen.”

Overton’s current wife, Carol Overton, insisted that her husband was innocent.

The death of Janet Overton might have remained a mystery if not for a chance phone call.

Six months after she collapsed in the driveway of the family’s home in 1988, Dorothy Boyer, an ex-wife of Richard Overton, called Sheriff’s Department investigators to report that he had tried to poison her 15 years earlier by spiking her coffee and milk with a heavy metal called selenium. Overton admitted to adulterating her food at the time of the 1973 incident but was not charged.

After the ex-wife’s call, coroner’s specialists re-examined stomach contents and blood kept from Janet Overton’s autopsy and determined that she died of cyanide poisoning.

Prosecutors portrayed Overton, a mathematician with a doctorate in psychology, as an obsessive diarist who killed out of jealousy over his wife’s affairs. Using passages from Overton’s handwritten journals and other writings, Evans depicted a marriage marred by escalating hatred as it unraveled.