Word: bartons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...days later, Debra Barton went to Alabama to spend Labor Day weekend with her mother in a lakeside trailer. Barton stayed home with their children Mychelle and Matthew--or at least that was what he told the authorities. By the end of the weekend, the bodies of Debra Barton and her mother Eloise Spivey were found in a trailer, hacked to death by an axlike tool that police never recovered...
Less than an hour after his wife's funeral, police showed up at Barton's home looking for evidence. He played a cat-and-mouse game with the investigators, who searched his possessions and sprayed the house with Luminol, a chemical that causes blood to glow in the dark. Although he was a chemist, Barton claimed never to have heard of it but then added, "I had seen it on one episode of Columbo." The police got a positive reaction in Barton's car, on the ignition switch and a seat belt. Barton had no explanation for why there might...
...Barton later made a trip to Alabama to offer a reason for the blood in his car. It had occurred to him, he told police there, that he had cut his finger to the bone during the summer before his wife's murder. If there was any blood in the car, he insisted, it was his own. But Barton refused to give blood or saliva samples for DNA testing or take a lie-detector test. In the end, the authorities had strong feelings Barton was guilty, but there were no witnesses to place him at the campground, no fingerprints...
Within a week of Debra's death, Leigh Ann was spending nights at the house with Barton and his kids. The month after Debra's murder, Leigh Ann's divorce was final, and six months later, the two moved in together. By then Barton was living in Morrow, Ga., where neighbors knew nothing about his first wife's murder--until last week. His second marriage, however, gave little promise of a happily-ever-after life. Leigh Ann would often pick up and leave, and neighbors would gossip about problems at home. There had been family trouble in February 1994, when...
Then, in 1997, the insurance company decided to settle for $450,000, figuring a jury would have sympathized with the plight of Barton's kids if the case went to court. The company stipulated, however, that $150,000 go into a trust for Mychelle and Matthew. With the insurance windfall, Barton soon allowed himself to be swept into the risk-loving fraternity of day traders who try to make a living hunched over a computer terminal, betting on the daily gyrations of individual stocks (see accompanying story). By this year Barton was a full-time day trader. But things turned...