Word: chanslor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Three years ago, a stroke turned Susan Chanslor, then 39, from an athletic, vivacious woman into a wheelchair-bound cripple with some brain damage and recurring bouts of headaches and depression. Two years later Chanslor rented a post office box using a fake name and address, then placed his ads in Gung-Ho and Soldier of Fortune. He received several replies, but last fall the energetic attorney came across a promising five-volume set of books titled How to Kill, by John Minnery, a Canadian weapons expert. Chanslor telephoned Minnery, whom he refers to as Dr. Death, to ask about...
...Chanslor apparently abandoned the No-Pest idea but asked to meet with Minnery in Toronto last April to talk about another poison, ricin, which is derived from the castor bean and is difficult to trace even when a doctor knows to look for it. By this time, says Minnery, he had concluded that the discussions were perhaps not entirely academic, and he alerted Ontario police, who in turn contacted Houston authorities. A tape recording was made of the Toronto meeting at which Chanslor paid $500 to have a capsule of ricin brought to him in Houston. During the Houston meeting...
...carrying a maximum punishment of a $200 fine. Why did the poison have to be so undetectable? His lawyers contended that he was hoping to spare his nine-year-old son the stigma of a family suicide by making the death seem an inexplicable consequence of the stroke. Susan Chanslor took the stand to support her husband's story. "I discussed with Bill the possibility of ending my own life," she told the jury. "He was a typical husband. He wouldn't listen...
...asked Prosecutor Brad Beers on crossexamination, had not Mrs. Chanslor first told investigators that she did not ask her husband to get her poison and that she had no intention of committing suicide? She conceded that she had. A prosecution witness also testified that at the Toronto meeting Chanslor said, "This bitch is really getting to me." He denied it, and the tape was fuzzy. The tape, however, clearly caught him saying that suicide was an "impossibility. We talked about it, and then the person backed...
...like a mother who says, 'Oh, Johnny couldn't have done that!' when she learned about a crime he committed." It took the jurors just 2½ hours to agree with the prosecutor's version. But at trial's end, with Chanslor free on bond pending his appeal, little seemed to have changed. "I intend to take care of her as I always have," Chanslor said as he wheeled his wife out of the courtroom and she held his arm. And to her he added, "It's O.K., honey, I'm not going...