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Hello, everyone, and welcome back. I hope you guys are all having a good week. Genuinely, I really hope so. Real quick, if you are watching on YouTube, please subscribe and please give this video a thumbs up. It helps out so much. And if you are listening on audio, hi, I'm so happy to have you. And can you please review the podcast? Just give me a quick five star. If it's anything below that, it's okay. You can just skip the review process for this show.
Let's just jump right into it. I'm Peyton Moreland and this is BINGED. What would you do if you discovered your husband took out an $850,000 life insurance policy on you and never told you about it? What if his previous wife had died under suspicious circumstances? And what if that previous wife's death resulted in a $350,000 payout?
Well, that was the dilemma that faced the second wife of Llewellyn Edwin Amos, a man who, by the mid-1990s, had been married three times and widowed three times, which is the kind of bad luck that transcends mere coincidence.
Llewell Amos, whom everyone knew as Ed, was just your average, affluent, middle-aged executive. He'd had a facelift, kept his hair dyed, wore a Rolex and a diamond ring. He was what you might have called flashy.
He liked to buy drinks for everybody, to pick up the tab for large groups of people. He also liked fast cars, fancy houses, gambling. He liked his women and liked his cocaine. He was what you might call somewhat hedonistic.
Well, maybe a lot hedonistic. But Ed didn't let his fast lifestyle stop him from getting married. And it was in the marriage department that Ed's luck ran pretty bad. He had been widowed twice. He'd lost two wives in the span of just 10 years. And he was about to lose a third.
On the night of Saturday, December 10th, 1994, Ed and his wife, Roberta, his third wife, checked into the Anthonyum Hotel in Detroit. They were in town for a holiday party for company executives, which was held at a restaurant called Fishbones Rhythm Cafe, and it lasted well into the night. Afterwards, they returned to their hotel suite and entertained some colleagues, a Mr. and Mrs. Collins.
And then at around 2.30 in the morning, they went to the hotel suite of Ed's business partner, a guy named Norbert Crabtree. What a name, Norbert Crabtree. Ed and Roberta, or Bobby as everyone called her, stayed in Norbert Crabtree's room till around 4.30 in the AM, at which point they returned back to their suite. So
So if you're lost, Ed and Roberta are just at this holiday party for his company. They go back to a co-worker's suite and then around 4.30 in the a.m., they've partied out and they head back to their own. Roughly four hours later, Ed Amos phoned Norbert Crabtree, who was the guy's suite they were last in, and he was in a panic. "'Come quick,' he said. "'It's my wife.'"
Norbert Crabtree asked his colleague Daniel Porcassi to accompany him and the two men went to Ed's room.
It's around 9:30 in the morning at this point. The two men enter the room and there's Ed, bare chested, wearing his pants from the night before, looking scraggly and speaking breathlessly. And he tells the two men that he and his wife had been doing cocaine before they went to bed and when he woke up, she was dead from an overdose. And there was Bobby Amos lying motionless on the bed.
"You've got to help me," Ed told Norbert Crabtree and Daniel, the other man, and asked them to remove some items from the room. He gave them a leather case and told them, "Take this. I've been cleaning. I cleaned the whole room," he said. "I'll come and pick this up tonight." The two colleagues agreed to do Ed this questionable favor, and that's when Daniel, Norbert Crabtree, and Norbert Crabtree's girlfriend packed up their bags, checked out of the hotel, and got out as quickly as they could.
After he left, Norbert Crabtree looked inside the leather case to see what was in there. What had Ed given them?
What he found was a sport coat, a damp, foul-smelling washcloth, and a needleless syringe with a few droplets of liquid inside. Around 10:15 a.m., nearly two whole hours after he first summoned the man named Norbert Crabtree to his room, Ed called the front desk and asked for security, and a security officer was sent to the room to assess the situation before promptly calling the police.
When the police arrived, Ed explained to them that he and his wife had been using cocaine the night before. He explained they had engaged in wild cocaine-fueled sex and Bobby kept taking cocaine long after he decided to go to sleep. And when he woke up in the morning, she was dead. He claimed that he panicked and, because he was afraid he'd be charged with possession, flushed the cocaine down the toilet and tried to clean up the room.
Though, the police do notice the bed sheets were soiled and smeared, despite Bobby's body looking very clean, as though she herself had been cleaned up. In fact, it looked like the pillowcase was smeared with makeup. It even had a lip print in lipstick, while Bobby's face had no lipstick on it at all.
And then here's the kicker. He told the police that while he had snorted the cocaine, Bobby had used a syringe to insert the cocaine into specific areas of her body.
She had sinus trouble, so she never snorted the stuff. This is what he explained. Although I should note here that Robert's doctor would later dispute this claim about sinus problems. Also, Ed then admitted that he'd thrown away the drug paraphernalia before contacting security.
These cops had dealt with overdose deaths in the past, heroin deaths, cocaine deaths, and they knew that cocaine overdoses caused violent convulsions. How could Ed have just slept through those? It just didn't add up. And when detectives eventually talked to Bobby's friends and family, the consensus was that Bobby would never have used cocaine.
That may have been Ed's lifestyle, but it definitely wasn't his wife's. In fact, Bobby was sick of Ed, according to her friends and family, and wanted him out of her life. We'll get more onto that later. Bobby's body was then taken away, as were the bed linens and other items from the room, and Ed Amos, at this point, was free to go.
Later that afternoon, Ed returned to the hotel to retrieve some personal items he had stored in the hotel safe. This was with the assistance of a security guard named Stanley Kan. Stanley handed over Bobby's jewelry and a woman's Rolex watch, and as this was taking place, Ed made the remark, this is the bulk of the money, which was, you know, odd, as if this wasn't already pretty weird, right? Like his wife just died in here, and now he's come back to get the stuff out of the safe.
And then that night, Ed made a couple of additional trips, one to Norbert Crabtree's house and the other to Daniel's house to retrieve the case with the sport coat, the smelly washcloth and needleless syringe he'd given them that morning. And that was the last anyone ever saw of those items. Bobby's body was then examined by the Wayne County Medical Examiner who noted an abrasion on her forehead and two small bruises on her body.
But what was really remarkable were the cocaine levels in Bobby's blood. The cocaine levels in Bobby's blood were about 15 times the average levels usually found in lethal cocaine overdoses. The medical examiner, in fact, had never seen anything like it before. And he estimated that such a dose would have killed her very quickly. And she had likely been dead for several hours by the time her body was removed from the hotel room.
His conclusion was that someone else had administered this dose of cocaine because she would have been dead before even half of the amount of cocaine had broken down.
Roberta Amos did not voluntarily consume all of that cocaine. And the medical examiner pronounced her death a homicide. Rectal and oral swabs showed no traces of cocaine. The vaginal swabs did reveal the presence of cocaine in trace amounts, which told them that the cocaine was probably administered vaginally. And the hotel bed sheets were analyzed and found to be completely covered with cocaine.
in a way that told investigators that the cocaine had been administered in liquid form, probably in multiple doses with a needleless syringe, and then spilled out onto the hotel bed and bedsheets. It also appeared as though the bedsheet had been washed before the police were summoned to the room.
And then the pillowcase from the Amos' hotel room had blood, makeup, and as the cops had observed at the scene, lipstick on it in the form of a lip print, as well as teeth marks. It was as though someone, I wonder who, had held a pillow over Bobby's face to make sure she died. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.
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Ed Amos, the executive who was now a three-time widower, was looking increasingly suspicious by this point. In fact, it was looking almost for sure like he had murdered his wife in a very bizarre way. But why? It was in digging into Ed Amos' background and the deaths of his two previous wives that investigators started to find their answer.
The story actually began back in 1966 when Ed Amos married his first wife, Sondra. At the time, Sondra was 23 and Ed had just turned 22. They married in Anderson, Indiana, where Ed was born and raised. Sondra had graduated from Purdue in 1964 and was an English teacher at Anderson High School, where she also choreographed the school's majorettes.
And Ed had done a two-year stint in the Marines where he was awarded the American Spirit Honor Medal before going on to major in economics at Indiana University. Eventually, he went to work in quality control for General Motors and the couple moved into a cute little brick and clapboard house.
In 1969, their first son was born, Lowell Edwin Amos II, followed by twins in 1971 named Mary and Clifford. Sadly, only Mary survived. Clifford died a day after he was born. As the 70s wore on, the Amoses moved out of their modest home and into the 2,800 square foot, three bedroom house that Ed had grown up in.
All the while, Ed developed political ambitions, and in January of 1979, he announced he was running for mayor of Anderson, Indiana as a Republican candidate. But just weeks into Ed's race for mayor, tragedy struck. Sondra Amos, Ed's wife of 13 years, mother of their two children, died in what appeared to be a tragic accident.
Ed told the police that she had gone upstairs to do her nails, taking with her a glass of wine and some sedatives. A short time later, he heard a thud, which to him sounded like the dog jumping off the bed. But when he later went upstairs, he found Sondra lifeless on the floor of their bathroom.
He had surmised that she'd passed out and hit her head on the way down hard enough to kill her. At autopsy, Sandra's blood was found to contain a sedative as well as alcohol, which explained perhaps why she had passed out. And the only injury the pathologist found was a small bruise over her eye. Certainly not enough to cause her death.
What did cause her death though was pulmonary edema, fluid in the lungs, which generally is caused by one of two things, heart failure or poison. Now, the sedative found in Sandra's system and alcohol, even in small quantities, are generally not a safe combination and can be potentially deadly.
But there were enough ambiguities around Sondra's death that her manner of death was ruled undetermined. It was also determined that the sedative prescription had not been written for Sondra. It had been prescribed to Ed. And just two weeks before Sondra's death, Ed had borrowed a reference book called Physician's Desk Reference from the nurse's office at his workplace. His thumbprints were found on the pages that referred to this sedative.
Also suspicious was that an hour or so after Sandra was taken away in the ambulance, Ed's neighbor Connie walked into the Amos house and stumbled upon Ed burning something in the fireplace. He explained that he was burning Sandra's clothes because they'd gotten bloody when she fell and hit her head, and he didn't want them around. Yet, according to hospital records, Sandra was still wearing her clothes when she was transported to the funeral home.
So whatever Ed was burning mere hours after his wife was taken away dead would never be known. Another thing Connie, the neighbor, had observed was a slim, attractive blonde woman visiting Ed's house several hours after Sondra's death. The woman was driving a red Firebird, which Connie had reason to believe Ed had purchased for her. Despite all of this, whatever investigation there was in the beginning, it never went anywhere.
Maybe it was because Ed was tight with a lot of local politicians and law enforcement. But Ed's own political career was done. Maybe Sondra's death really was weighing heavy on Ed. Because within a week or so of Sondra's death, he withdrew from the mayor's race and also collected a $350,000 payout on a life insurance policy he had on Sondra. And he also remarried a little over a year after his first wife's death.
And his second wife, Carolyn, was someone he had known for a while. They'd worked together at General Motors, and in fact, they'd been having an affair for years during Ed's marriage to Sondra. She was the slim blonde that showed up the morning of Sondra's death, the one in the red Firebird.
Ed moved in with her and her two children while leaving his own children, who by this point were 9 and 11 years old, in the care of a nanny for nearly a year. What a caring dad.
And also, I can't help but wonder if it was in the back of Carolyn's mind that if her new husband Ed had been unfaithful before, what would stop him from doing it again this time on her? I also can't help but wonder if it was in the back of Carolyn's mind that the death of his first wife was a little sus with that $350,000 insurance payout and all. Did she even know about it? I believe she must have known about it because when Carolyn found out that Ed had taken out an even bigger life insurance policy on her...
She got scared and she demanded that he drop it, but Ed refused. And that's when the marriage really began to sour because this was the basis of repeated arguments between the two of them. Carolyn kept insisting that Ed drop the life insurance policy he had on her and Ed just kept refusing. So Carolyn got fed up and threw him out and he chose to go live with his widowed mother, 77-year-old Mary, a woman Ed liked to refer to as the general.
Okay, that's a little weird, referring to his mother as the general. A woman with whom he had a rocky relationship and to whom he was already indebted. He owed her a great deal of money and she was threatening to cut him out of the will. Also by this time, it was 1988 and Ed was 45 years old. He was 45 years old living with his mother while his two children were living with the nanny.
something that was embarrassing for this high roller and his flashy lifestyle. And this was an arrangement that, fortunately for Ed, would be short-lived. Just three weeks after he moved back home, Ed's mother ended up in the hospital with some kind of illness that doctors couldn't pinpoint. She seemed to be in some kind of stupor. It was baffling. It came on quite suddenly, and the cause was a mystery. The attending physician suspected that the elderly woman had been drugged, but he couldn't identify with what.
But after she was admitted to the hospital, she seemed to recuperate swiftly. And following a short hospital stay, she was released and returned home with her son. And then, less than a week later, Mary passed away. And you know, she was 77 years old, a ripe old age, so no autopsy was performed, and Ed inherited $1 million. Wow.
Now throughout the period that Ed was living with his mother, Carolyn would call pretty much every day to check in on her mother-in-law, whom she really had a fondness for. But then the day that Mary died, Carolyn called and learned from Ed that she died earlier that morning. So Carolyn got into her car and drove to the house where Ed and his mother had been living. And when she got there, Carolyn was surprised to find Ed packing up all of his stuff into his car.
He explained to his estranged wife that he didn't want anyone to know he'd been living with his mother. And that's when Carolyn allowed Ed to return home to live with her and the kids. But then, eight months later, Ed became a widower again. Carolyn was found dead in the bathroom of their home. Just eight months after his mother had died.
This time, he told police that Carolyn was in the bathroom blow-drying her hair next to a bathtub full of water when he brought her a glass of wine, which by the way was not found anywhere in the bathroom when police arrived, curiously enough. Instead, it was found in the dishwasher, washed completely clean. Anyway, Ed said that after he brought Carolyn the wine, he went downstairs to smoke a cigarette when he suddenly heard a thud, which he assumed was the dog jumping off the bed. Does
Does this sound familiar? He really likes this line about the dog jumping off the bed. Anyway, he said that when he went back upstairs, he found his wife dead in the bathroom. He believed Carolyn had been electrocuted with a hairdryer. He pointed out to police an area of the hairdryer's electrical cord that was frayed, exposing the copper inside.
But the hairdryer was tested and found to be working perfectly fine. And the medical examiner found no indication that Carolyn had been electrocuted. He did find Valium and alcohol in her blood and no obvious cause of death.
Once again, the cause of death was ruled undetermined. And once again, Ed Amos collected a large chunk of money on a life insurance payout, this time $800,000. So by this point in time, death had proven very profitable for Ed Amos. In just 10 years time, he had pocketed over $2 million between the deaths of his two wives and the death of his mother.
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Killing his loved ones was the most lucrative source of income in Ed Amos' life.
so when he married roberta bobby wagner who became wife number three in 1993 you'd think she was probably in the dark about all of this right like about the circumstances around the deaths of his two previous wives the insurance payouts that maybe she had no idea what she was getting into
But love can be blind, and men like Ed Amos are convincing grifters. It was already well known around Anderson, Indiana that Ed's first two wives had died from unknown causes. Some even whispered that Ed had probably killed them. And although Bobby's mother, Marie, got along with Ed just fine, she was scared for her daughter when she learned she and Ed Amos were marrying. I mean, he's already had two wives die mysteriously.
Soon after the wedding, the marriage quickly became troubled. Ed started a consulting firm with Norbert Crabtree, and the business lost over $200,000 in just the first year. He began leaning on his wife and her mother for support, and they did what they could, lending him close to $50,000 to help his ailing business and growing debt.
Meanwhile, Ed also began yet another affair, this time with a woman in Michigan named Mary Zellinger. Mary did not know that Ed was married. He lied and told her he was single and traveled to Indiana only on weekends to visit his children.
He told her his first wife had died of cancer and his second wife had been electrocuted. This played on Mary's sympathies and she soon fell in love with him. In the fall of 1994, she sold her condo and began preparing to move with Ed Amos to Las Vegas.
But then she happened to cross paths with a friend of Ed's who let slip that Ed was a married man. It was like the rug had been pulled out from under her. When she confronted Ed, he explained that Bobby, the woman she was told was his wife, was actually a business connection whom he owed money and he had just married her as a favor to help her retain custody of her son and that it was purely a practical thing and he'd file for divorce in just six months.
But Mary didn't believe him, and she reached out to Bobby Amos, calling her on the telephone to apologize for having had an affair with her husband, Ed, explaining that she didn't know Ed was married. That was on December 5th.
Mary then told Ed at this point to either leave her alone or get the divorce he had promised. "I'll be a free man by Christmas," he promised. And five days later, Bobby Amos was dead. So when Bobby died, leaving Ed a widower for the third time, Marie, Bobby's mother, knew her daughter had not died from a cocaine overdose. Knowing that Ed's previous two wives died under mysterious circumstances, she knew Ed Amos wasn't the world's unluckiest man.
Her daughter was murdered and Ed was the murderer. And having uncovered all this information about Ed Amos' past, police detectives in Waynes County, Michigan, were also now certain that Bobby Amos was murdered by her husband, Ed. And as Detective Michael Williams with the Anderson Police would later tell the main campus...
When you have one situation, you don't have a track record. When you have two, you start looking. When you have three, you get into a situation where you may have some kind of pattern. And the pattern seemed to establish that Lowell Edwin Amos was a serial killer. And his behavior in the wake of his third wife's suspicious death did absolutely nothing to make him look less guilty.
Just two days after Bobby's death, Ed spent over $1,000 whining and dining to women who he ultimately would have sex with. And then even more women began coming forward. Women who reported that they'd suspected Ed Amos had drugged them before engaging in sex with them.
Everything investigators learned about Ed was damning. Together with the forensic evidence showing that Bobby was murdered and only Ed could have been responsible as only Ed was in the hotel room with her, investigators had more than enough to arrest him. Also, a law in the state of Michigan had recently been passed that would allow prosecutors to introduce the deaths of his previous wives as evidence to illustrate a pattern. Though the question that remained in Bobby's death was, what was the motive?
Unlike with his previous wives, there were no known life insurance policies Amos had taken out on Bobby. So he stood to gain nothing financially.
As investigators talked to more and more of Bobby's friends and family, they learned that Bobby was already on her way out of the marriage. She'd even gone so far as buying a house and telling her loved ones she wanted Ed out of her life for good. She was fearful of him and was also aware he was having an affair, much as he'd done in his previous marriages. But for Ed, you see, divorce wasn't an option. Even if he had promised his mistress a divorce, he knew a divorce just meant he'd have to split up assets and pay alimony.
And especially with Bobby initiating the divorce, even though she hadn't yet filed at the time of her death, that to Ed represented rejection. It made him feel like he wasn't in control. And the only acceptable way out of a marriage with Ed was to die.
In November 1995, nearly a year after Bobby's death, a warrant was issued for Ed's arrest. By this time, authorities were having a hard time tracking him down and he was eventually located in Las Vegas, where he'd moved and relocated his business not long after he began feeling the heat after Bobby's death.
There, he was arrested as a fugitive from justice and extradited back to Wayne County, Michigan, which is not where he lived, but that's where Bobby died, so that's where the trial would be taking place.
He was indicted on one count of first-degree murder and one count of murder by poisoning, and he faced a mandatory life sentence if convicted. At his trial, which began in 1996, much of the testimony revolved around Ed Amos' character. The fact that he cheated on his wives, that he visited strippers and paid sex workers for sex. The discovery that he'd embellished his military record, having repeatedly made the false claim that he served in Vietnam.
Testimony was also introduced at trial from the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Carolyn Amos. This would be Ed's second wife, who was supposedly electrocuted in the bathtub with a hairdryer. He said that his findings pointed toward, though did not conclusively prove, that Carolyn Amos had been smothered to death.
And obviously, he was not on trial for Carolyn's death, but again, there was that law that had been passed in 1994 which allowed prosecutors to introduce this evidence. Among the key evidence that was presented to the jury during the trial was the fact that while cocaine was found on the bedsheets around Bobby's body, none was actually found on her, which suggested she had been washed after death and before police arrived at the scene.
which was also indicated by the lack of makeup on Bobby's face, makeup she was seen wearing at the party earlier that night, which several witnesses testified having observed, and the fact that makeup was found smeared all over the pillowcase.
The state's toxicology expert testified that Bobby would have been so incapacitated and near death after absorbing such a large amount of cocaine into her system that she wouldn't have been able to get out of bed, wash the syringe she used to supposedly inject cocaine with, and then return it to its leather carrying case, which is where Ed claimed he had found it, packed up the following morning. Technically, if things had gone the way Ed claimed, if Bobby had injected all that cocaine herself,
The syringe would likely have been lying next to her body in bed the next morning. Prosecutors believed Ed had crushed up some sedatives and mixed it in with the wine, the way he'd likely incapacitated his second wife, Carolyn, before he probably smothered her.
And once Bobby was knocked out, he mixed a large amount of cocaine with water, placed it in the syringe, and injected it into Bobby before returning to the cocaine mixture and repeating this process once or twice again. But once she went into shock and began to convulse, prosecutors theorized to the jury that he then placed the pillow over her head to smother her.
which was why there was makeup and lip prints and teeth marks found on the pillowcase. The case against Ed Amos was a pretty strong one, and on October 24th, 1996, a jury found him guilty on both counts, and he was sentenced to the mandatory life term. He was never charged in the deaths of his first and second wives, nor in the death of his mother.
He filed an appeal in 1998, but that appeal was rejected. Ed was 55 years old at that point, and he spent the next 24 years of his life in prison until his death on January 5th, 2022, one day after his 79th birthday.
Back in 2006, there was a Lifetime movie made about Ed Amos called Black Widower, which is how some have referred to Ed Amos. But it was the judge who sentenced him who referred to Amos as a modern day blue beard.
Now, some of you commented on the last episode that you haven't heard the phrase "bluebeard" before, so before I sign off, I want to give you some background. Maybe you'll find it interesting. I certainly do. The origin of the term "bluebeard" is a French folktale that dates back to the end of the 17th century. Bluebeard was a wealthy nobleman whose first six wives vanished without a trace, whose bodies his seventh wife discovered in a secret underground chamber, much to her terror.
The character of Bluebeard has appeared in countless books, films, songs, and other media, and it became a word to describe men who serially kill their wives. But it's fallen into disuse over the last few decades, maybe because it sounds old-fashioned and sort of theatrical, but you know, I like it and I'm going to keep using it. Bluebeard.
Maybe it'll stick. Anyway, that's it for this week. Next week, instead of bluebeards, we'll be diving into the Green River. That is the case of the Green River Killer, one of America's most notorious and prolific serial murders who, believe it or not, we've never covered in either Murder With My Husband or Binged. So join me then. I'll see you next week.