Pod Insights The Binge Cases: Doctor Billions Fatal Beauty | 2. An Open Secret About this episode In Dallas, Sandra Bridewell’s disturbing past is revealed and an eerie pattern begins to take shape.
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0:27 Speaker 01 Listen to all episodes of Fatal Beauty ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit Subscribe at the top of the page, or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. Feed your true crime obsession.
0:50 Speaker 01 Before we get started, I just want to let you know we do discuss suicide in this episode, so please, listen with care.
1:00 Speaker 01 It was the kind of afternoon that felt timeless, suspended in the golden haze of late summer. Highland Park stood pristine, a cocoon of manicured lawns and sprawling homes, a place as polished as its reputation.
1:13 Speaker 02 This is "The Bubble." That's the nickname of Highland Park. The ills and afflictions of most of humanity, they don't really happen here.
1:24 Speaker 01 Long before John Leake wrote The Meaning of Malice, his book about Sandra, he was her neighbor.
1:29 Speaker 02 I was friends with her daughter Catherine. Most of the time, there didn't seem to be much adult supervision, which made hanging out at the bride wall house kind of fun.
1:40 Speaker 01 It was the ideal spot for a teenage after-school hang.
1:43 Speaker 02 The thing I noticed about Sandra was, first and foremost, she just wasn't like other mothers. She drove a Mercedes 380SL convertible, which is a two-seater. And at the time, I just thought, how come other moms don't drive that car?
2:02 Speaker 01 He'd only ever caught glimpses of her, but one afternoon, she was actually home.
2:09 Speaker 01 Sandra entered the kitchen like a vision from another world. Perfectly coiffed, her dark hair glinting in the sunlight streaming through the windows. Her blouse shimmered as she moved. John froze for a moment, his adolescent brain struggling to comprehend the woman in front of him.
2:25 Speaker 02 The first time I met Sandra was 1983, so I would have been 13 years old.
2:33 Speaker 01 She would give even a teenager like him her undivided attention in a way that was disarming.
2:37 Speaker 02 Whatever I said, as I spoke, Sandra looked at me and she would sort of gaze upon me with these big brown eyes, as though what I was saying was fascinating.
2:49 Speaker 01 Sandra was sexy, alluring. He couldn't quite understand her power then, but he understood enough to see. She was the kind of woman whom men couldn't turn away from. She was something of a siren, if you will. Unfortunately, for a few unlucky people who got mixed up with Sandra, they underestimated how dangerous she could be. Until it was too late. Can't blame them, though. Even the police took a good, long while to suspect her of crimes, to see what she was truly capable of.
3:27 Speaker 01 From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Fatal Beauty. I'm Cooper Mall. Episode Two, An Open Secret.
3:42 Speaker 01 Sandra wasn't born into wealth, but from a young age, she aspired to fit into it. She had grown up in Oak Cliff, a world apart from Highland Park, but close enough to see the life she dreamed of. Just a river separated her hometown from the bubble. Sandra was the daughter of a man who sold cemetery plots for a living. By then, her mother had died in a car crash. Sandra wanted to catch herself a man who could provide the life she dreamed of. She went to Tyler Junior College in 1962, but less so to expand her mind or land a job. She aimed to perfect her allure.
4:19 Speaker 03 A lot of people, when they're in those college ages, they are not working on this glamorous, sophisticated persona.
4:28 Speaker 01 This is Glenna Whitley, an investigative reporter who's been tracking Sandra for the better part of decades. In 1963, Betty Friedan dared women to get out of the kitchen and into workplaces. Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, was a call to arms. Sandra wanted no part of it. She wanted to marry rich and rely on her man to get her the life she deserved.
4:52 Speaker 03 She had set her eyes from the very beginning on living a glamorous, expensive, almost aristocratic life. And when she married David Steagle, he was successful enough for her to begin living...
5:13 Speaker 01 David had piercing eyes and high cheekbones, and he was a doctor. But he started out as a real Texan cowboy. When David hung up his lasso, he pursued a career in dentistry, the same trade as his father before him. After graduating from a prestigious dental school in Dallas, he headed to California to study under a dentist of the stars. In Hollywood, David found, too, not only his craft, but found his target client base: wealthy and elite. So his next move, setting up shop in Highland Park, was a no-brainer.
5:47 Speaker 03 The people that live there are wealthy, people who live in gorgeous, huge, very expensive homes. And it's a very tight-knit society.
6:05 Speaker 01 But before he could penetrate the bubble, he rented an apartment just east of it. That's where his paths crossed with a neighbor who seemed to have stepped out of a southern fairy tale.
6:16 Speaker 01 Sandra was David's first girlfriend, and also his last. David was just 24 when they met. Sandra was 23. David popped the question just six weeks into dating. In May 1967, Sandra Powers became Mrs. Sandra Steagle, a dentist's wife. Little did David know what he was in for.
6:41 Speaker 03 They got as close to Highland Park as they could by moving into Greenway Parks, which was a little slice of nice bungalows.
6:53 Speaker 01 They had to start somewhere.
6:55 Speaker 03 She's setting herself up to entertain people from the world in which they they want to rise. And so you had to have the right furnishings and the right linens and everything had to be the best.
7:12 Speaker 01 And she got a live-in maid. In short order, she gave birth to two children, Britt and Catherine. She had help raising the children, so she was still free to pursue her interests.
7:26 Speaker 01 She hired an interior decorator to the tune of $35,000. Back then, a perfectly good car went for about $4,000. She could have had eight cars for what she spent to make her house enviable.
7:39 Speaker 03 She's learning how to get her foot on that social ladder and began the climb.
7:46 Speaker 01 Their home became a showpiece, featured in interior design magazines. Sandra filled the house with antiques, fresh flowers, and an air of untouchable perfection. This lifestyle came at a cost.
8:00 Speaker 03 They couldn't afford it. She was spending her husband into the poorhouse. Even though he was making very good money, she was spending it faster than he could earn it.
8:12 Speaker 01 David was drowning. They'd only been living in their Greenway Parks home for a year when the IRS issued a lien. That's when the government claims your property if you can't pay your taxes.
8:24 Speaker 01 On top of that, a North Dallas bank was hounding them for 30K they owed.
8:28 Speaker 03 And she couldn't stop. So this began creating a pattern of whatever she had was never enough.
8:41 Speaker 01 And the more it wore on David, the more Sandra worried for him.
8:47 Speaker 02 That he seek psychiatric counseling because he was so stressed out. And she procured the psychiatrist and made the introduction to David.
9:02 Speaker 01 Was she being a helpful wife? Or was she playing some kind of long game? In 1974, about a year after he and Sandra welcomed their third child Emily, David turned to his dad for a considerable favor.
9:16 Speaker 03 David Stiegel had to borrow $100,000 from his father.
9:21 Speaker 01 The money problems were out of control. David kept a lid on it. He didn't let on to colleagues or friends how much he was struggling. Late one night in January 1975, his estate attorney, Jack Sides, got an alarming call from Sandra.
9:38 Speaker 02 And she said, I'm worried about what David might do. He's got a pistol. Could you come over here?
9:45 Speaker 01 Jack rushed over and marched right up to the master bedroom.
9:49 Speaker 02 David, what the hell do you think you're doing? He said, I can't take this anymore. And it was a weird kind of standoff. He was sitting in this closet in the master bedroom. And Sandra and a couple of the kids were perched on the edge of the bed.
10:05 Speaker 01 With his family and attorney as witnesses, David reiterated the threat. This is truly bizarre. Why hadn't Sandra ushered the kids away?
10:15 Speaker 02 I'm going to kill myself. And Jack Sides said, no, you're not. I'm going to walk in there and get that pistol.
10:23 Speaker 01 David had let someone into his inner world. In a society accustomed to keeping up appearances, this was almost a cardinal sin.
10:33 Speaker 02 He was then kind of mortified. He met Jack Sides for dinner a few nights later and said, I'm really sorry about the drama. I've gotten so lost in this thing. But I wanted to tell you I would never commit suicide. In fact, I've resolved to put this thing in order.
10:50 Speaker 01 Put things in order? What could that possibly mean?
10:53 Speaker 02 I'm going to divorce Sandra.
10:56 Speaker 01 Sandra and David never got that divorce.
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11:59 Speaker 01 On the morning of February 25, 1975, Sandra woke early, around 7:00 a.m., to a mysterious sound. She felt uneasy. "Something wasn't right," she'd later say. So she telephoned one of David's colleagues, Dr. Paul Radman, to tell him something terrible has happened to David. In no time, Dr. Radman and his wife were on their way. When they arrived, Sandra explained she'd been sleeping in one of her kids' bedrooms.
12:29 Speaker 03 I heard something really weird, and I haven't gone in there, but would you see if David's okay?
12:36 Speaker 01 What could all this fuss be about? Dr. Radman went to see for himself. He opened the door of the master bedroom, and there was David.
12:45 Speaker 03 In his king-size bed, with a gunshot wound in his head. He's dead. And his wrists have been slashed.
12:56 Speaker 01 David's body lay lifeless. A 22-caliber pistol rested near his hand. The sheets beneath him meticulously tucked around his body.
13:07 Speaker 01 I immediately have so many questions. Luckily, this is Leek's wheelhouse. In fact, his painstaking efforts are how the photographs from the morning David was found were made public. When a 22 caliber pistol is fired, it doesn't just make a mysterious noise.
13:24 Speaker 02 It comes in right around 160 decibels. That's louder than a jet aircraft taking off.
13:31 Speaker 01 Another curious thing? There was no contact wound from the gun, meaning David shot himself from a distance.
13:39 Speaker 02 Very hard to imagine how you could be lying on your right side, raise the pistol, hold it above the left side of your head. It's just extremely awkward to lie in bed and hold this pistol. The other thing is if you're holding it in that position, you can't be sure about your aim. So the natural thing to do is to rest the muzzle on your temple.
14:04 Speaker 01 But he didn't do that. He held the muzzle a couple of inches from his head and supposedly shot himself and kept his composure after. Here's the thing that makes this suicide theory quite hard to believe. The gun was found resting in David's hand with the covers pulled over it. You can hear it in Leek's voice. He just doesn't buy that David would be able to do that after blowing a bullet through his head.
14:29 Speaker 02 If he did this, he then retained sufficient nervous and muscular control to continue grasping the weapon, to lie the weapon down on the bed, and then to lay his hand on the weapon, and then to pull the covers up over it.
14:46 Speaker 01 Had David taken his own life? Or had the scene been carefully staged to point to suicide? If he had been killed, the murderer made a mistake. It turned out David's forearm had been slashed, not his wrist.
15:02 Speaker 02 So a guy who knows his anatomy knows that you're not going to hit the radial artery with a knife or a razor blade if you slash away at the forearm. Where you hit the radial artery is where you take a patient's pulse in their wrist. And I mean, he would know that as a medical guy.
15:22 Speaker 01 But if he was murdered? His killer might not have.
15:27 Speaker 01 We've got the benefit of hindsight, looking at the pictures of this scene decades after the fact. When the police finally arrived that morning and started processing what might have happened, they did not dwell on the bizarre way David Steegel died. They went with the story that seemed most simple.
15:44 Speaker 02 So when the investigating officer arrives, there's this inconsolable, pretty young lady, and the immediate perception is that this guy had some debts that he was having a hard time paying and that he was apparently suffering from suicidal ideation.
16:02 Speaker 01 To them, it seemed straightforward. A man burdened by debt, crushed by the weight of his wife's expectations, had finally snapped. The cops went with Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the best. David's own psychiatrist, the one Sandra set him up with, backed this narrative too.
16:22 Speaker 02 The psychiatrist told the police, yeah, the guy was totally strung out and stressed out. The police found the testimony of the psychiatrist persuasive.
16:33 Speaker 01 And the medical examiner sealed the deal.
16:35 Speaker 02 The indications were the guy had killed himself.
16:38 Speaker 01 Leek told me the investigation only lasted five days, not even a week. And Sandra was barely questioned, but what she did say was baffling.
16:49 Speaker 02 She didn't say that there was evidence of forced entry, that someone else came over that night. It was by her own testimony, she was the only other person in the house.
17:00 Speaker 01 When a wife ends up dead in the home, the husband is almost always looked at. But Sandra, she didn't raise suspicions.
17:07 Speaker 03 The overriding feeling was, poor, poor Sandra. Here she is with three children, very young children. She is now a widow at a very young age.
17:24 Speaker 01 David's death was brushed aside as a tragedy, but I still had a lot of questions.
17:30 Speaker 01 David was, by all accounts, a private guy. Yet when he did manage to confess his worries, Sandra had been instrumental in making sure witnesses heard them. She called up his attorney, Jack, the night he threatened suicide. Here's Leek.
17:45 Speaker 02 I believe that when David said, "I've had enough, I'm gonna end it all," Sandra called Jack's sides, not just to diffuse the situation, but she understood that he would serve as a witness or could serve as a witness.
18:01 Speaker 01 Meaning?
18:03 Speaker 02 If David then is found shot of an apparent suicide, this previous incident will be interpreted or perceived to be evidence that he did, in fact, finally carry it out.
18:17 Speaker 01 And it wasn't just Jack she teed up.
18:19 Speaker 02 She procured the psychiatrist, and I believe that the psychiatrist, his conception of David as being a troubled man, at least initially began with Sandra's representations of it.
18:35 Speaker 01 Had she led the cops to believe exactly what she wanted them to? I think it's possible, if not likely. For me, that crime scene had too many clues that David had been killed. The strange slashes on his forearm, not his wrist. The covers that had been pulled over the gun resting in his hand. And there was something else I found truly eerie.
18:58 Speaker 02 Someone had tucked him in. The comforter on the right side of the bed has been smoothed out, and then the comforter has been tucked in along the backside of his buttocks and the backside of his legs.
19:12 Speaker 01 Someone else had been there. But it seems to me, the biggest oversight wasn't any of these clues. A potential motive to kill was overlooked.
19:22 Speaker 02 Sandra was the beneficiary of the will, like, of everything he had.
19:27 Speaker 01 And a little something extra. A life insurance policy for $160,000.
19:33 Speaker 03 And it does pay out in cases of suicide.
19:37 Speaker 01 Which Sandra already knew. Because before David's death, Sandra didn't just rope in his psychiatrist and attorney. She called his life insurance broker.
19:48 Speaker 01 She had one question. Would she still get the money if David took his own life? This detail potentially points to premeditation. The cops? Incredibly, they never barked up that tree.
20:05 Speaker 01 Between the $160,000 death benefit and the equity in their home, Sandra walked away with far more than she would have in a divorce.
20:14 Speaker 03 Well, there's people that had suspicions. At the time, it was ruled a suicide. They assumed that the police know what they're doing. And most people felt extreme sympathy for her.
20:28 Speaker 01 After Sandra got the proceeds from the life insurance policy, she paid off her debts, took the kids on vacation, and moved on with her life. As the weeks turned into months following David's death, Sandra's grief was eclipsed by a sense of urgency. She no longer had a man to support her or her children.
20:48 Speaker 03 A lot of the women in this community could put themselves in her shoes. And so they really tried to reach out to her, to help her with her kids, just to treat her as they would want to be treated if such a tragedy had happened to them.
21:08 Speaker 01 They also encouraged her to date available men.
21:11 Speaker 03 She wanted to find a wealthy man who could take care of her in the style that she had dreamed of being taken care of.
21:21 Speaker 01 She understood the delicate balance of seduction and dependence, how to make a man believe that his success wasn't complete without a woman like her to reflect it back to him. Sandra had mastered the art of admiration, the way to tilt her head just so, to let her eyes linger for a second longer, to make a man feel as though he was the most important, most powerful person in the room. The hunt was on in Highland Park.
21:47 Speaker 03 She researches men who are wealthy, whether they're married or not married, and goes after them.
21:55 Speaker 01 It's not unlike how nowadays you'd peek around your Tinder matches socials.
21:59 Speaker 03 For example, one was a very prominent restaurateur, Norman Brinker.
22:05 Speaker 01 Norman Brinker was the mastermind behind Fast Casual. The restaurant he founded, Steak and Ale, is kind of like the godfather of spots like Chili's, which he also later bought. He was certifiably rich.
22:19 Speaker 03 She managed to show up on the day that he was having his car washed at the same car wash and introduced herself and finagled a date out of it.
22:30 Speaker 01 In her research, it seems Sandra overlooked that Norman was in the midst of a divorce.
22:37 Speaker 03 She begins regaling all of her friends with tales about the ex-wife, you know, trying to come after her, you know, writing threats and lipstick, even throwing a knife at her.
22:52 Speaker 01 This sounds like some Real Housewives of Highland Park kind of shit. Let's just say their romance was short-lived, but it certainly got Sandra's name on the tip of everyone's tongue.
23:01 Speaker 03 There were people that started after this to, hmm, think, wow, that's kind of weird. But there were others who said, well,
23:14 Speaker 03 let's introduce her to another person who was quite beloved.
23:19 Speaker 01 Bobby Bridewell.
23:21 Speaker 02 He was born in Tyler, Texas, which is in the middle of the East Texas oil patch. His father was actually an independent oil guy for a while.
23:32 Speaker 01 By all accounts, Bobby was a work-hard, play-hard kind of guy. Here's Whitley again.
23:38 Speaker 03 He's the life of the party. Men like him and women like him. He's one of those guys who's fun to be around, just well-traveled, doing his own deals, and, you know, pretty hushed lion. He was quite a catch.
23:54 Speaker 01 This time, it was a bit more elaborate than a meet-cued at a car wash.
23:58 Speaker 03 It was a dinner party specifically held so that she could meet him. People were trying to get them. Together in an elaborate way, a fun way. And they arranged for her to pop out of this closet in the middle of this party.
24:14 Speaker 01 I don't know about you, this would be way too over the top for me. But Bobby found her charming.
24:20 Speaker 03 He was instantly smitten with Sandra.
24:29 Speaker 01 From that night in the fall of 1977 on, the two were an item. They married in June of 1978, not even a year after meeting. Sandra reveled in Bobby's reputation, his extravagant lifestyle, and most importantly, the way he adored her children, whom he adopted and gave his name. And Bobby had succeeded where her first husband hadn't. He bought her a palatial house smack dab in the middle of Highland Park.
24:56 Speaker 03 She did not realize, however, that Bridewell wasn't as wealthy as she had thought that he was.
25:05 Speaker 01 Bobby's most recent ventures in hospitality were tanking. He'd gone bankrupt and was in debt to the tune of $3 million. His debt, though, didn't drive him to despair. It lit a fire under him. Then an opportunity came knocking at the perfect time. A mansion in the center of Highland Park, once owned by a great cotton and oil baron, Shepherd King, had fallen into disrepair. Bobby didn't see a dilapidated building. He saw the Park City's hottest new social hub. Investors got on board. By 1980, his buzzy restaurant was open for business. Bobby was officially the comeback king.
25:45 Speaker 02 The mansion on Turtle Creek became the place to see and be seen.
25:51 Speaker 01 And Sandra, she got catapulted to queen of Highland Park.
25:56 Speaker 02 Sandra loved to hang out at the restaurant in the mansion. And you know, she sort of held court there.
26:03 Speaker 01 Not long after the mansion on Turtle Creek had become a fixture in the Park Cities, Sandra and Bobby joined friends at the Highland Park Village Theater to see all that jazz.
26:12 Speaker 02 In the midst of the picture, he broke out into the most violent sweat. Like, he's like, what's going on here? Like, my clothes are soaked.
26:22 Speaker 01 The sweat opened up the floodgates to a misfortune he could have never predicted.
26:27 Speaker 03 Bobby was diagnosed with lymphoma, and he became very sick.
26:35 Speaker 01 He was 40 years old.
26:37 Speaker 03 Even though he was treated with chemotherapy by the premier oncologist in Highland Park at the time, John Bagwell, he got sicker and sicker.
26:49 Speaker 01 While Dr. Bagwell took care of Bobby, Sandra glommed onto his better half.
26:54 Speaker 02 He and his family lived just a few blocks away. Sandra took a fancy or took an interest in Dr. Bagwell's wife, Betsy. Betsy was known to be a very open-hearted, generous, kind of giving, empathetic lady.
27:11 Speaker 01 But her generosity would soon be tested.
27:14 Speaker 02 And she had two children of her own. But one of the things that Sandra did was constantly seek Betsy's assistance in looking after her three kids.
27:25 Speaker 03 Then Sandra does something somewhat inexplicable. She moves Bobby out of the house into a hotel and announces that she's remodeling.
27:40 Speaker 01 She prioritized a remodel over spending her husband's final days by his side? That was cold.
27:47 Speaker 03 She parks her kids with various friends who also have children and sometimes doesn't come back for a day or so.
27:57 Speaker 01 Imagine the kind of sympathy Sandra was garnering at this point. To be able to leave three kids without their families for 24 hours at a time? They probably figured she was shuttling Bobby to chemo. She wasn't.
28:10 Speaker 03 Bobby was dying, and she was trying to find her next husband.
28:18 Speaker 01 The hotel Bobby had built became her hunting ground.
28:22 Speaker 03 People start to think this is somewhat callous.
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29:27 Speaker 02 So it was really during this period that Bobby was dying that Sandra, in a very aggressive way, began to constantly seek the company and the care and the assistance of the Bagwells.
29:41 Speaker 01 Sandra's gauche behavior in the wake of Bobby's illness had ostracized her from pretty much everyone but the Bagwells. And it wasn't like they could really cut ties while Dr. Bagwell was still treating her husband. Bobby died Mother's Day of 1982 at Baylor University Medical Center. He was buried in the Garden of Eternity at Sparkman Hillcrest Cemetery. The prefix engraved before his name on his headstone read, "Our Beloved." After his death, Sandra leaned on the Bagwells even more than before.
30:13 Speaker 03 She's starting to feel some desperation.
30:16 Speaker 01 Like she couldn't stand to be alone. Like she expected others to help her. She needed them, and she wasn't going to take no for an answer, it seemed.
30:26 Speaker 03 The constant request and the constant leaving of her kids at Betsy's, it just starts to get suffocating.
30:37 Speaker 01 But by now, Sandra's a widow two times over. No income coming in and three children depending on her. It must have been a scary time.
30:46 Speaker 03 Betsy is sympathetic, but enough is enough. I can't take this. And John was feeling it too, I'm sure. But I think that Betsy was just trying to extricate herself as delicately as she could. But Sandra wasn't taking the hints. She just kept insinuating herself into their lives to the point of just making Betsy resent her.
31:16 Speaker 01 Then 4th of July weekend rolled around. The Bagwells went away to their second home in Santa Fe. And Sandra showed up there, uninvited.
31:25 Speaker 01 For Betsy, that was the last straw.
31:28 Speaker 02 She told Dr. Bagwell, "We have to extricate ourselves from this woman. We have to disentangle from this strange woman."
31:38 Speaker 01 Sandra wasn't just eccentric. She was dangerous.
31:43 Speaker 02 And it was about 10 days after that fateful last straw in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that Betsy's found shot to death in her car at Love Field.
31:58 Speaker 01 It began with a favor, a small, seemingly innocent request. Sandra Bridewell needed help getting to Love Field Airport. Her car had broken down, again. And she called Betsy. Their friendship was tenuous at this point. And even though Sandra must have sensed Betsy was pulling away, she bet that her friends still wouldn't be able to say no. Here's Whitley again, recounting this fateful moment.
32:22 Speaker 03 Can you take me to Love Field? I need to rent a car, because mine won't start.
32:28 Speaker 01 Despite everything that had gone down in Santa Fe, Betsy agreed to drive Sandra.
32:33 Speaker 03 She puts a frozen package of pasta sauce in the sink to thaw, tells her kids not to pick out, they're going to have a big pasta dinner. And that's the last she's heard of by anybody.
32:52 Speaker 03 Sandra is the last person to see her alive.
32:57 Speaker 01 Hours later, at 8:20 PM, way past when she was meant to be home, eating pasta with her children, Betsy Bagwell's body was discovered. She was found in her Baby Bloom Mercedes-Benz station wagon in the airport parking lot. Betsy had been shot in the head with a small handgun, a cheap .22 caliber known as a Saturday Night Special. Here's the homicide detective who arrived first.
33:22 Speaker 02 At the crime scene, my first impression was pretty much that it was a suicide. The gun was in her hand. She had what appeared to be a contact wound to the head.
33:33 Speaker 01 Detective J.J. Coughlin was early in his long career with the Dallas PD. He didn't see any signs of foul play.
33:40 Speaker 02 There was no appearance of being robbed or there being any other violence other than the gunshot wound to the head. So it's like she pulled up in there, you know, in her car and put the gun to her head and shot herself.
33:55 Speaker 01 Soon after, Detective Coughlin went to notify Betsy's husband.
33:59 Speaker 02 We told him what we had found, and that's probably the first time we heard Sandra Bridewell's name. As the process went on, they had more suspicions about her involvement.
34:13 Speaker 01 The logical next step was a medical examiner's report and an interview with Sandra.
34:19 Speaker 02 She came to our office, which was down on Harwood Street.
34:24 Speaker 01 Detective Coughlin remembered Sandra as well spoken, pleasant even, but her interview, completely unremarkable.
34:31 Speaker 02 She didn't provide us any information that would implicate her.
34:36 Speaker 01 Coughlin told the Bagwell family he had nothing on Sandra. It was looking like Betsy had taken her own life.
34:42 Speaker 02 The gun was in her hand, contact wound to the temple, blood spatter on her hand, you know. I was pretty sure it's going to get ruled a suicide. Suicide.
34:53 Speaker 01 And the next day it was. The chief medical examiner, Charles Petty, determined from the autopsy that the gun residue found on right-handed Betsy indicated a self-inflicted end. Detective Coughlin told Dr. Bagwell.
35:07 Speaker 02 The only way I could overturn it would be to come up with evidence showing that it wasn't a suicide.
35:15 Speaker 01 And they didn't have that evidence.
35:17 Speaker 02 The family didn't want to accept any of that. I mean, it really all comes down to evidence.
35:28 Speaker 01 Here's the baffling thing. People close to Sandra Bridewell kept dying. Their deaths would be ruled a suicide, and yet the cops didn't find that suspicious or even strange. Sandra was the only person in the house with her husband, David, the last person seen with Betsy Bagwell. Detective Coughlin was a homicide detective, and yet he felt Betsy's shooting was an open and shut suicide case and nothing more.
35:56 Speaker 01 But to Glenna Whitley, that journalist who has long been tracking Sandra Bridewell, some clues pointed to murder.
36:02 Speaker 03 The fact that she's shot with a Saturday Night Special doesn't make any sense. This is a wealthy woman. If she wanted to have a gun, she's not going to buy a Saturday Night Special at a pawn store or something like that.
36:15 Speaker 01 Where the hell did this thing come from then?
36:18 Speaker 03 This gun was traced back to somebody who lived in Oak Cliff. And they said, oh, we haven't seen that gun in years. It's stolen. We never reported it.
36:31 Speaker 01 Detective Coughlin brought in agents from the ATF to look further. That's the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
36:39 Speaker 02 We tried to take our time and look longer and see if we could ever tie anything up on.
36:44 Speaker 01 That never could.
36:51 Speaker 01 Then, one month after Betsy was found, Dr. Bagwell got some good news. The Dallas County Medical Examiner issued a memo welcoming any additional information that could be obtained about her death. And in that memo, he admitted that he told Betsy's widower he was not sure she died by her own hand. Not sure at all. Here's Leek summing up what the medical examiner said.
37:13 Speaker 02 I could be no more certain of my manner of death, suicide, conclusion than he could be certain of a particular clinical diagnosis.
37:25 Speaker 01 He encouraged Dr. Bagwell to take action.
37:28 Speaker 03 Dr. Bagwell had enough concern to hire a private investigator.
37:33 Speaker 01 The P.I. he hired was Al Teal, a former detective and postal inspector for the military.
37:39 Speaker 03 He came to believe that it was a staged suicide.
37:44 Speaker 01 And he was pulling out all the stops to prove it. Teal contacted an esteemed forensic scientist in California named Dr. John Thornton. Gunshot residue analysis was one of his specialties. That gunpowder residue on Betsy's right hand could have ended up there because she was close to the weapon, not as a direct result of shooting herself. Dr. Thornton provided John Bagwell with a report that challenged the local medical examiner's findings. This was evidence that refuted Betsy had died by her own hand, that she might have been murdered. And here's where things get strange. Leek explains.
38:22 Speaker 02 There's no indication that Dr. Bagwell forwarded the report to the Dallas County Medical Examiner's.
38:30 Speaker 01 This was a report that could potentially reopen Betsy's case, maybe even overturn the suicide ruling. And her husband just never got it in front of the right people who could do something about it? Dr. Bagwell declined to speak to me and pretty much any reporter who has ever reached out to him about his wife's death. Why would he stop pursuing justice now? Who was he afraid of? Was it the same strange woman his wife had wanted out of their lives?
38:58 Speaker 03 Now, this begins to get very, very weird.
39:04 Speaker 01 By this point, in 1982, more than one person in Highland Park thought Sandra Bridewell, mother of three, former queen bee of the bubble, was a killer. Betsy's death was the tipping point. And yet, people who had their suspicions didn't talk to detectives.
39:23 Speaker 02 There were two women that had lunch with her at the country club right before she set off on this misadventure. They had no doubt that Sandra murdered Betsy Bagwell. None. Zero. So, one of the most intriguing aspects of the story is, well, you believe that Sandra murdered your friend. Why didn't you contact the police?
39:48 Speaker 01 The two women didn't think it was their place.
39:50 Speaker 02 They assumed that the proper person to discuss this matter with the police was Betsy's husband.
39:58 Speaker 01 He talked to the cops, but never about overturning the suicide ruling. Recently, I asked Detective Coughlin if he ever pursued the idea that Sandra might have been involved with Dr. Bagwell. He doubled down on his original theory. I still feel strongly the evidence says Betsy killed herself. I don't know what's going on in people's lives a lot of times, but did Sandra do something that sent Betsy over the edge? Maybe. She was either the black widow or in bad luck. I don't know which.
40:30 Speaker 01 Up until Betsy's death, the good people of Highland Park had thought of Sandra as a nuisance, not the kind of woman you'd want your husband around. But after Betsy died, all bets were off.
40:41 Speaker 03 There was a ripple under the surface, particularly among the women, that this woman may be dangerous. Not only dangerous to us in terms of having an affair with our husbands, but in terms of being dangerous to our wives.
41:03 Speaker 01 Sandra, the single mother, twice widowed, was no longer a magnet for misfortune. She was a temptress, a calculating woman who was far more intelligent than people had given her credit for. She might have even been a woman capable of getting away with murder. Not that anyone told the cops that. After Betsy's death, it was an open secret in Highland Park that anyone who gets in Sandra's way will pay. And she was not to be trusted.
41:32 Speaker 02 Here is this lady who's viewed with grave suspicion, and I would say even fear. But nobody says anything to this young fellow who's just arrived from Oklahoma. He just has no warning about this. So he has no idea what he's getting himself into when he commences this romance with this lady.
41:54 Speaker 01 And Alan Rarig would be dead just 12 months after meeting Sandra.
42:07 Speaker 01 Next time on Fatal Beauty.
42:09 Speaker 03 You know, you're going to take this polygraph test.
42:12 Speaker 01 If she passed.
42:13 Speaker 03 Then you're going to be able to show the police, "Look, I had nothing to do with this." She comes out and she's crying and she says, "I failed it. I failed it."
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