Retrial Set for Woman Jailed in Mate’s Death

Sometime around 2 a.m. on Sept. 16, 1987, Susan Mowbray was aroused by a noise.

She had stayed up watching Johnny Carson and David Letterman; her husband, Bill, had moved to her accustomed side of the bed so she could be closer to the television.

Finally, she went to sleep--but then the noise awakened her. She said she saw her husband’s elbow in the air, reached out to touch him and heard an explosion.

“I knew there was a gun,” she would tell sheriff’s deputies later that night. “I groped and grabbed the gun. . . . I had been living with this fear for three years.”

In the darkness, she said, she walked around to her husband’s side of the bed and knelt down. Blood seeped from his head onto the pillow and sheets. She placed the gun in the pool of blood, went downstairs and called Luke Fruia, the manager of her husband’s Cadillac dealership.

“Luke, he did it,” she cried. “He shot himself.”

*

Eight months later, Susie Mowbray was convicted of shooting her husband as he slept. The motive? To collect $1.8 million in insurance money. She was sentenced to life in prison.

In May, after nine years in prison, she was set free. An appeals court granted her a new trial, ruling that prosecutors suppressed blood evidence that contradicted their murder scenario.

But her freedom may be temporary.

On Monday, after her first Christmas outside prison since 1987, the 49-year-old Mowbray is scheduled to be tried once again in the slaying of her husband.

“I have to trust that at some point, everyone will see that this was a horrible family tragedy and a horrible mistake was made,” she said. “It’s time for us to put this behind us and everyone [to] go on with their lives. It’s been 10 years. That’s enough.”

But Bill Mowbray’s family and prosecutors want to prove once and for all that his widow is a coldblooded murderer.

“She belongs in jail, and she belongs there for the rest of her life,” said Kristin Mowbray, Bill Mowbray’s daughter from another marriage.

Susan Mowbray’s new attorneys plan to focus their case on blood evidence that prosecutors withheld the first time around. Their star witness will be blood-spatter expert Herbert MacDonell.

MacDonell was hired by prosecutors before the first trial to examine Mowbray’s nightgown. He told them that he found no blood and that it was “very unlikely” that the garment was near the wound at the time of the shooting, “or it was protected from spatter.”

But MacDonell never testified. Instead, the state hired another expert who testified that microscopic blood spatter was found on the gown. At a 1995 appeals hearing, that expert admitted his testimony was scientifically invalid because his findings were not confirmed.

After reviewing the crime scene, physical evidence and photographs, MacDonell has since said Mowbray most likely died from a suicide, not a homicide.

“The state’s problem is Herbert MacDonell,” said Susan Mowbray’s attorney, Robert Ford. “They hired him. He looked at their evidence and told them it wasn’t any good.”

But those who insist that Susan Mowbray is guilty say there is plenty of other evidence to convict her a second time.

“The nightgown has become a smoke screen to somehow convince people that she’s not guilty, but that nightgown to me was never that important to begin with,” said Jim Mowbray, Bill Mowbray’s brother.

Instead, he cites the testimony of the sheriff’s deputies who first arrived at the Mowbrays’ home in Los Fresnos, just west of Brownsville near the Mexico border.

They testified that Bill Mowbray’s right arm--what would have been his shooting arm--was under the covers when they found him and that once he was moved, they saw no blood on his right hand.

The doctor who performed the autopsy testified that it would have been “impossible” for Mowbray to shoot himself and not have blood and brain matter covering his right hand.

George Gavito, a former sheriff’s lieutenant who headed the Mowbray investigation, noted that a safety lock, installed improperly, was on the gun when investigators found it. Mowbray, a hunter, would have taken the lock off before shooting, Gavito insisted.

Lead prosecutor Bill Hagen, who was not involved in the first trial, is likely to emphasize differences in Susan Mowbray’s accounts of the shooting.

In her original statement to authorities, Susan Mowbray said her husband “never said a word” before killing himself. But in subsequent interviews, she has said they talked and cried, and that he counted down before shooting himself.

Ford said he’s not concerned about her story. He noted that authorities failed to take down her entire statement because their tape recorder malfunctioned.

Susan Mowbray’s supporters, including some of her husband’s friends and associates, maintain that Mowbray killed himself. They note that he had tried to commit suicide previously, his car dealership was in financial trouble, and the IRS was after him for tax fraud.

“He told me he would not spend any time in jail, that he would kill himself before he’d do anything like that,” said Luke Fruia, who bought the business after his boss’s death.

Others allege that evidence supporting Susan Mowbray’s story has disappeared, including the T-shirt Mowbray wore the night of the shooting and an electric blanket.

“I think they [prosecutors] created what they needed to convict her, or conveniently misplaced evidence that didn’t support their theory,” said Susan Mowbray’s son, Wade Burnett, who was 16 when his mother was sent to prison. Now a third-year law student, Burnett has spearheaded the effort to prove her innocence.

Susan Mowbray didn’t testify at the first trial, and Ford declined to say whether she would take the stand this time. If she does, Susan Mowbray said, her message will be simple.

“Bill committed suicide that night,” she said. “I was there, and I did not shoot him. End of statement.”