1872
The city was settled in 1872, when the railroad built tracks about one mile southeast of old Austin.
about 0:04:45The story
The episode is set in Austin, Arkansas, a town of 3,486 people about half an hour outside Little Rock.
On 7 November 1979 J.W. was found dead in his home with a gunshot wound, and the death was ruled a suicide.
She moved in with him in the Austin area in late 1984 or early 1985. Two weeks before he disappeared he gave her power of attorney over his certificates of deposit and accounts.
In March 1986 Floyd's sister could not find him. Officer Gage of the state police found that their joint account, which had held about $64,000, had been drained to about $5,000 since late January. She had also collected $1,000 monthly interest payments on one of his certificates of deposit and traded his pickup for a new one. The state police later said she withdrew about $80,000 from his accounts and investments.
She repeated her story in April 1986. In May she produced a farewell note she said Floyd had left in her screen door. Neighbours said that from late January she had kept a fire burning in her yard day and night for more than a month, and that a shed had been built over the spot. A dump truck operator said she refused to let him remove old timbers from the hole, insisting it was an old septic tank. Another neighbour was told that a quilt she admired had been stolen.
In September 1986 police obtained a search warrant. In October she changed her story: Floyd had left on 14 January but returned the next day, threatened her with a gun and said he would kill her and himself if she would not marry him. She ran into the woods, heard a shot, returned and found him dead with a gun beside him. She wrapped him in the quilt, put him in the rubbish, then dragged him into the yard and buried him because she wanted him close.
The medical examiner found the wound was not consistent with suicide: the bullet entered between the eye and ear and travelled from the rear. The gun she handed over was not the murder weapon, and no other gun was found.
The second case began on 5 August 1994. David Lesal, 45, who lived in New Iberia and had worked in aviation and the offshore boat industry, was hiking with his cousin Henry Porter, 49, and Porter's 18-year-old daughter Molly on a forest trail near the Longpool recreation area in Pope County. A man on a six-wheeled ATV passed them at speed, then stopped, chatted and gave them directions to Longpool. He passed again looking agitated, then came back a fourth time.
Shots followed. Porter heard them and saw Lesal fall, then felt what he thought was a bee sting in his shoulder. He pulled Molly down and saw the ATV rider crouched with a semi-automatic pistol. Porter was hit in the face and then the forearm. Porter fled to a farm for help. Molly hid under a rock on a small cliff and later heard the ATV drive away. Lesal died of a single gunshot wound to the head.
He said he found the ATV later beside his truck, with blood on the keys and the pistol on the floor without its magazine. Police saw the ATV outside with a .22 on it. Ballistics matched his gun to a cartridge at the scene, and swimming trunks at his home matched the witnesses' description. Both witnesses picked him out of a lineup.
He had grown up in extreme poverty with an alcoholic, violent father, attended special education classes and worked as a maintenance man at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville. The defence argued that another man, his double, had done the shooting.