The Scottish Mail on Sunday

THE BEST LIAR I’VE EVER MET ...AND THE DEADLIEST

She was the perfect wife, with a perfect life. And, discovers our columnist, she almost got away with the perfect murder

- ByPIERS MORGAN Killer Women, with Piers Morgan, will be shown on ITV at 9pm on Thursday.

IT WAS, quite literally, the $1million question. ‘You see Rebecca,’ I said, staring straight into the tear-stained eyes of the strawberry-blonde killer sitting just 2ft from me in the maximum-security prison visitors’ room, ‘I don’t know whether you’re either the victim of an extraordin­ary miscarriag­e of justice, in which case your incarcerat­ion here for the rest of your life is unspeakabl­y unfair…’ She nodded. ‘That’s correct.’ ‘… Or,’ I continued, ‘you’re a cold, calculatin­g murderess and the best liar I’ve ever met in my life.’

‘I’ve heard people say that too,’ she nodded again.

Rebecca Fenton is serving a life sentence for the cold-blooded assassinat­ion of her handsome, Clint Eastwood-lookalike husband Larry, 57, in a bid to claim $1million from a life insurance policy and his estate.

She was convicted of methodical­ly planning his death and then pumping bullets into him at their luxury home in Clearwater, Florida, in 2008 as he watched sport on TV.

It was an inexplicab­le crime that took police six years to solve, because everyone thought that Rebecca and Larry had the perfect marriage.

To this day, there is absolutely no forensic evidence that proves she killed him.

I interviewe­d Rebecca for my new fivepart ITV series Killer Women, which starts on Thursday and features female murderers who have committed unspeakabl­e crimes.

Of all the women I met, she was the most fascinatin­g; a highly intelligen­t, eloquent, passionate and beguiling creature.

Towards the end of our extraordin­ary encounter, I asked Rebecca, now 49, to look directly into the camera and tell viewers why they should believe she is innocent.

She composed herself, turned to the lens and began to speak in slow, measured tones.

‘I was very much in love with my husband,’ she declared. ‘I had a lifestyle that was very grand. It would not have done me any good whatsoever to hurt him.

‘I would not have gained anything monetarily. I would have gained more by having him alive.

‘I’m not spirituall­y capable of hurting anybody. I’m not a murderer. I did not do this.’

It was a compelling performanc­e. Yet to the detectives who investigat­ed this case, that’s exactly what it was: a performanc­e. They believe that she grew bored with her ‘perfect life’ and brutally killed Larry to set up a new life with a man she had been secretly seeing on the side.

But doubts remain, and all the evidence against her is entirely circumstan­tial.

Rebecca’s defence lawyer told me: ‘I look at the evidence. Your gut can be right, but your gut can also be wrong. Somebody can be a sociopath and trick you.

‘So I go by evidence, and I believe that she’s innocent. I believe she’s been wrongly convicted.’

But Detective Mike Hasty, who was brought in years after the murder to re-examine the case, was insistent: ‘I am 100 per cent certain she shot and killed Larry. A circumstan­tial case doesn’t mean a bad case.’

Whatever the truth, what is indisputab­le is that, until the murder, Rebecca lived the kind of privileged life most women can only dream about.

She met Larry in a gym and married him a year after they started dating. They made a great couple; she was a dazzling, fun-loving beauty; he was a wealthy, successlie­s ful pharmaceut­ical rep. ‘He was very tall, a very good-looking man,’ she told me. ‘He looked like Clint Eastwood.

‘He was very refined, articulate, and he carried himself with a sense of class.’

I asked her what kind of lifestyle she had. ‘Very spoiled, very pampered,’ she replied. ‘Anything I wanted, I got.

‘I had a beautiful car and beautiful clothes, beautiful things in my home, a gorgeous house. I had the nail salon, the hair salon, the spa, the shopping. It was a very, very good lifestyle.

‘I love that man madly. He told me on a daily basis that I was his world. Everything Larry did was for me.

‘We had something very special. This man would have taken care of me in a very high-class lifestyle for the rest of my life.’

Larry, in return, had the best catch in town.

‘Rebecca was one of those ladies who looked fantastica­lly super,’ said a neighbour. ‘Whenever she came outside, all the men on the block would come out to get their mail.’

So why would she want Larry dead? The truth almost certainly with those two most tempting of sins: greed and adultery.

Police believe that Fenton was pursuing a romantic relationsh­ip with a local man named David Chase, whom she had met at a local AA meeting (Rebecca suffered from alcohol issues throughout her marriage).

She angrily denied any affair to me, but her mother Karen confirmed it. ‘She told me she had eyes for this man, a long-haired biker kind of guy,’ said Karen.

‘I’m like, “Are you insane? What are you doing?” And she said, “Mum, I don’t know why I would pick a pauper when I have a prince.”’

Police then unearthed evidence that Rebecca had signed a prenup deal before her marriage to Larry that would pay out just $24,000 if they divorced. But he had also taken out a life insurance policy, and she stood to gain more than $1million if he died. ‘Rebecca thought that she was going to get the insurance money and continue to live this fairytale lifestyle with her new love interest,’ said another detective, Kerri Spaulding. But her defence lawyer offered a different explanatio­n: ‘If Rebecca was guilty, she would have left. The guilty person runs away. But she stayed.’ Everywhere you look in this murder case, there are giant clues that point to Rebecca Fenton being the killer, yet none is conclusive.

Police found the gun that killed Larry in her car, along with some of his jewellery. It was his gun, that he kept locked away in their bedroom.

Rebecca claimed she checked her husband’s pulse after finding him lying in a pool of blood, yet the blood around his body was completely undisturbe­d.

She said the house had been ransacked by burglars, yet there had been no attempt to take anything.

‘There is no way to explain some of this,’ she admitted.

However, her DNA wasn’t found

Why would I pick a pauper when I have my prince?

on the gun, nor was any gunshot residue found on her body.

Police put huge significan­ce on the evidence of a man she dated several years after the murder named Alfred Nolan, who told them that during a violent row at her home, she held a knife to his neck and snarled: ‘I will kill you like I killed Larry!’

But again, Rebecca emphatical­ly denies this and points out that Nolan is a seriously dodgy convicted criminal whose testimony is thus deeply flawed.

In the end, you’re left with your gut feeling about Rebecca Fenton’s guilt or innocence, rather than hard evidence. Even her mother now thinks she did it, after years of defending her. ‘I feel guilty saying this,’ said Karen. ‘Nobody wants to hear that their mother thinks you’re a murderer, but yes, I believe that she killed Larry.’

At the end of my interview with Rebecca, I relayed this bombshell news. She looked completely stunned. ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that. I’m not sure I believe you,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe that… I just don’t… Her support and undying love…

‘She has never led me to believe that she thought I was guilty. I just… don’t believe you.’

Then she stood and sobbed uncontroll­ably for five minutes.

It was either the reaction of a guilty woman who knew she’d now lost the support of her greatest advocate, her own mother, or the reaction of an innocent woman who’d just had another cruel nail driven into her heart.

She shuffled away, back to the cell where she will live for the rest of her life.

My gut tells me that Rebecca Fenton guilty and is the best liar I’ve ever met. But, as her defence lawyer rightly said, sometimes your gut is wrong.

Where my gut is incontrove­rtibly correct is in the case of Sheila Davalloo, the single most dangerous woman I have met in my entire life. To the outside world, Sheila was a nice, normal, attractive and successful health company executive, who, like Rebecca Fenton, had everything going for her in life. But beneath that squeakycle­an veneer lurked a monster who stalked and viciously murdered her lover’s girlfriend, then tried to kill her husband during a kinky sex game.

I realised how dangerous Sheila was when two heavily armed male guards escorted her into our prison interview room and then sat with us throughout the chat.

In all my other Killer Women interviews, there’s always just been one female guard. But Sheila is in a different league of sinister menace.

‘She’s one of the most dangerous people I have ever seen,’ said the detective who ran her case. ‘A woman capable of extreme violence on a horrific scale.’

Sheila is very bright, so much so that she even conducted her own defence at her trial.

‘She’s calculatin­g, self-serving, conniving and truly thinks she’s going to fool us all,’ said another detective, Alison Carpentier.

In the flesh, Sheila seemed innocuous enough, friendly even. Yet I was mindful of the unbelievab­le savagery with which she had committed her crimes, and that, coupled with the armed guards, made me unusually nervous.

Her descent into depravity came after she fell in love with work colleague Nelson Sessler and they entered into a torrid affair.

Nelson was seeing another woman at the time, a stunning beauty named Anna Lisa Raymundo, who also worked at the firm.

After a summer of two-timing both women, Nelson broke things off with Sheila so that he could marry Anna Lisa.

Demented with jealousy, Sheila plotted to murder her love rival so that she could have Nelson to herself.

She stalked her prey for weeks, then calmly left work one morning when she knew Anna Lisa was at her expensive waterside home, and knocked on the door.

When Anna Lisa opened it, Sheila launched a frenzied knife attack, including stabbing her in the face until she was dead.

She then cleaned herself up and returned to work as if nothing had happened.

At first, police were clueless as to who had killed Anna Lisa.

Sheila, meanwhile, offered herself as a comforting shoulder for Nelson to cry on – one that he readily accepted.

They even went on holiday together just months after the murder.

But to be with him permanentl­y, she knew she’d have to get rid of her unsuspecti­ng husband, Paul.

So Sheila devised a shocking plan: a sex game at their home in upstate New York in which they would both wear blindfolds and touch each other with objects.

When Paul put his blindfold on, Sheila plunged a knife into his chest. Then did it again. Paul screamed in horror and asked what the hell was happening. Sheila said she had made a terrible mistake and had accidental­ly cut him, then drove him to the local hospital.

Once there, she attacked him again in the car park, stabbing him to try to finish him off.

But her husband, realising to his horror that she was trying to kill him, fought back and eventually she fled. This is when her story unravelled.

Detective Carpentier found Sheila’s mobile and noticed that her last phone call was to someone called Nelson. Curious, she drove to see him. ‘Are you here about the murder?’ asked a neighbour when she arrived at his house.

‘No, he didn’t die. I’m here about the assault,’ the detective replied.

‘No,’ the neighbour persisted, ‘SHE died.’

Smelling a humongous rat, Detective Carpentier raced to see the local police, who explained that Nelson’s fiancee had been murdered months before – stabbed just like Paul in a ferocious attack.

They also played her a mysterious 911 emergency call made by a female witness on the day of Anna Lisa’s murder, reporting an ‘incident’ at her house.

‘That’s Sheila Davalloo’s voice!’ exclaimed Detective Carpentier.

It was, but proving that and the fact that Sheila had killed Anna Lisa was not easy.

Several years passed before the crucial breakthrou­gh came.

A tiny speck of blood had been found on a downstairs bathroom tap at Anna Lisa’s home.

Heavily delayed DNA testing, in its infancy at the time, revealed it almost certainly belonged to Sheila Davalloo. That, and the phone call, nailed her.

During our interview, Sheila lied through her back teeth about everything. ‘I am very misunderst­ood,’ she insisted.

No, she’s not. She’s an astonishin­gly selfish, greedy, obsessive, devious and dishonest lunatic.

I felt relieved to leave the prison that day. It had been a very unsettling experience.

I wanted to interview Sheila’s former husband Paul, who has since remarried and become a father, but he is still too traumatise­d by what happened to discuss it on camera – and too frightened of possible retributio­n from his ex-wife.

‘If she was ever let out,’ said another detective, Tom McGinty, ‘she would probably find somebody else and kill again.’

Sheila is capable of violence on a horrific scale

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 ??  ?? MEETING A MONSTER: Sheila Davalloo stalked and killed a love rival in a jealous rage and then attempted to murder her husband
MEETING A MONSTER: Sheila Davalloo stalked and killed a love rival in a jealous rage and then attempted to murder her husband

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