Transcript of Mary Orsini

An Arkansas housewife brutally murdered.

There is a white female in the closet. She was dead. And at her feet was an arrangement of flowers.

Police learn this wasn't the first attempt on her life.

They had enough explosives to blow her to kingdom come, but it didn't work. It was a miracle the kids weren't in the car.

The investigation reveals her husband might have been the real target.

He was definitely the top criminal attorney in the state of Arkansas.

Doing criminal law work, you anger a lot of people.

But when detectives uncover the truth, they find a mastermind who's obsessed.

She worshiped him, thinking that he was the greatest attorney ever.

She can keep 3 stories juggling at one time and hardly Miss a beat. She belonged to jail. Hell yeah, she belonged to jail for the rest of her life, for sure.

July 2nd, 1982. It's late afternoon in Little Rock, Arkansas, when police receive a 911 call from a prominent defense attorney saying saying he found his wife murdered.

The original call came through our communications center, and one of our officers responded to the call, which was the address of Alice and Bill McArthur.

As first responders arrive, they are met by the 911 caller, Bill McArthur. He tells officers he had just returned home from work when he found his wife Alice shot to death inside their bedroom closet.

I go to my officer to get what he's got, and he kind of walks me back through the hallway toward Alice's and Neil's bedroom. The closet is a walk-in, and it's probably 10 by 10, and there's a white female laying in the bottom of the closet. You had to move some clothes out of the way to kind of see her upper torso and face. There's blood, gunshot wound to the head. The officer that got there first, he said he had checked her pulse. I went ahead and checked her pulse too. She was dead.

There's little evidence to explain why Alice was shot. But on the floor, police find something bizarre.

At her feet was arranged in a bouquet of flowers. The flower bouquet had a note basically attached to it that said, have a nice day. Right next to the door facing is a bullet hole in the wall, and down underneath the bullet hole was fire petals. So it's telling you a story. I think that whoever shot Alex brought the flowers.

Investigators waste no time scouring the crime scene for more clues.

We did spit round from the wall. It was a .38. As we inventory everything out of the closet, we do find a handgun there, a pistol. And it was on one of the shelves covered up with folded clothes. Bill was there and he was asked, I mean, whose gun is it? He said it was Alice's. I didn't think it was the murder weapon because the way it was found. I believe she believes that she could get a hold of that gun and maybe defend herself.

With no quick answers from the scene, investigators focus on potential motives.

I wondered who in the hell would do this and why.

Bill was a, you know, high-profile attorney, so you knew this was going to be a high-profile case.

Alice had a small circle of friends. Friends. She kind of kept to herself, but Bill was kind of in the forefront. One might suspect that he would be a target because he was the top criminal attorney in the state of Arkansas. So the investigators and people that were trying to determine what took place, it was more circled around why would anybody be mad at Alice, you know, or want to do something harmful Why Alice?

Alice Miller was born in southern Louisiana in 1941.

She was from a small town called Golden Meadow, Louisiana. She had a couple of brothers. The mom and dad were still alive. Alice was a PE or gym teacher for the local high school. So she was very athletic.

In the mid-1960s, Alice met the love of her life, a young Arkansas lawyer named Bill McArthur.

They met through mutual friends at a wedding. My brother had got his undergraduate degree and then he went to the Army. Army and served 2 or 3 years. He had gone to law school, graduated, and was real early on his journey to be a criminal attorney.

I thought they fit together pretty well. Bill was real laid back, and Alice was— driven's not the word, but she was kind of, you know, front and center kind of person.

They were married probably in the late '60s. Bill's practice was just starting out. He was just getting a name for himself, building his practice up.

With Alice's support, Bill rose to prominence as a defense attorney in the Little Rock court system.

He had natural skills in the courtroom. He was excellent in closing argument because he just talked to people. He was just himself. He'd point out reasonable doubt.

It wasn't too long before his practice had really kicked in. They moved out towards the Pleasant Valley area and bought a house out there. They had 2 children. She stayed home with them. She cared for them. She's very strong, very opinionated. Some would say she probably might have worn the pants in the family.

Alice was about the most direct human being you'd ever meet. You didn't have to worry what was on Alice's mind. She was real direct with me about anything. Bill and Alice, they frequently had neighborhood parties and they always asked me out over there. I think the best couples I know, they're different just enough where they kind of pull and push each other where it needs to be done and fill in gaps and support each other. So I thought things were well over there.

She was a great mother. She was fiercely loyal to her family. And she and Bill, from what I ascertain and when I was around, were happily married.

Alice has been shot to death in their bedroom closet, and Bill has found himself on the other side of a murder investigation.

Speculation was that she became aware at some point that somebody was going to hurt her, and she ran. She was trying to get to the closet because that was how she was going to try to defend herself. There would have been no reason for her to run to the closet except for that gun. We're looking for fingerprints. If you get a fingerprint, if you got a suspect, then you can make a case. I'm in the closet, and of course, the bouquet is there on the floor. A fingerprint person had an opportunity to fingerprint some of the evidence. They come up with a fingerprint.

The print is sent to the crime lab to see if they can find a match. But as police speak with Bill about possible motives, they begin to suspect Alice might not have been the killer's intended target.

I can't think of any reason anybody'd want to kill Alice. But in doing criminal law work, you anger a lot of people.

In his line of work, You don't deal with the A-list of humanity, you know. So, you know, did he piss somebody off?

The officer's line of thinking proves correct when Bill brings up another recent attack on his family just 6 weeks earlier.

Alice was just jumping in her car and doing mom stuff. She started the car up. It wouldn't start. First, then she recranked it, and that's when it went off.

Coming up, shocking details of a previous murder attempt.

The mystery of it was, is why would they do that to Alice? Did they make a mistake?

But new questions arise when another mysterious shooting surfaces.

She said, something's wrong with my husband. He's bleeding.

Light bulb comes on. Oh, she's gonna kill somebody else.

Arkansas detectives are talking to defense attorney Bill McArthur in the aftermath of his wife's murder. The officers can't help but wonder if there is a link between Alice's shooting and another attack 6 weeks earlier.

We had had an attempted homicide with a pipe bomb under Bill McArthur's car. It was maybe a couple of weeks before the actual shooting. It was a pretty punk bomb. It took the floorboard and pushed it up all the way to the front of the seat. So, I mean, it hit her legs pretty good.

Even though the bomb failed to fully detonate, it was still destructive.

They had enough explosives to blow her to kingdom come, but it didn't work. It was a miracle the kids weren't in the car. The mystery of it was, is why would they do that to Alice? Did they make a mistake?

They were working that bombing. As if Bill was the actual target because it was his car. Could it be somebody that he's represented and maybe didn't represent to the liking of the individual?

Investigators questioned anyone with access to Bill's client list.

We questioned him. We questioned his staff. And I don't think— that there was anything discovered that indicated that that was somebody that he had represented.

Everybody thought it was an odd, crazy thing to happen. But she got back to her routine, you know. So life goes on, even though it was still an active investigation.

Though the bombing investigation hit a dead end, It's not long before a new lead in Alice's murder surfaces.

The Plaskett County Sheriff's Office received the information that there was supposed to be two bad guys in town from Chicago that was supposed to kill a high-value target.

The tipster says the name of one of the hitmen is Larry McClendon. While police are looking into the tip, the fingerprint results come in from the lab. However, they belong to a different man in their system.

The flowers are particularly important to the case because the fingerprints pulled off the bottom of the vase identified as Yankee Eugene Hall.

Yankee Eugene Hall Was a petty theft criminal who had never engaged in any violence prior to this.

We have warrants obtained from Reggie Hall, and he is arrested, brought to Little Rock Police Department, and he was interviewed.

When detectives put on the pressure in the interrogation room, he quickly crumbles.

He kind of spilled his guts. He started talking and did implicate his partner, Larry McClendon. He gave him information that Larry was the shooter.

Hall's claim lines up exactly with the anonymous tipster who also named Larry McClendon as the gunman.

He said Larry McClendon is just a— he's a jailhouse friend is what he is. Yankee and him, they got to know each other in the jail and penitentiary.

Neither Hall nor McClendon appear to be professional killers, but Hall claims the woman who hired them was offering too much money to turn down.

She supposedly, according to Yankee Yankee Hall was going to pay him $25,000. Yankee was going to pay Larry McClendon $10,000 to murder Alice McArthur.

They rented a van, bought some flowers, went to Bill and Alice's house in Pleasant Valley.

They planned a flower delivery ruse to get inside. However, Hall says things didn't go as smoothly as they'd hoped.

Yankee Hall and Larry McClendon rang the doorbell at Alice's house with— as if they're delivering flowers.

Alice opened the door. He had the gun, and she took off running and headed up the stairs.

She runs down the hallway and she's being pursued by Larry McLendon. She gets to the bedroom, and McLendon fires a shot at her. She runs to the closet, gets in the closet, closes the closet door.

She, I do not believe, was hiding in that closet. She was looking for her gun, which she kept— all her friends knew, everybody. That her gun, which she knew how to use, was in like a hat box or something.

She's rifling through the clothes on the shelf that's right there at her fingertips, basically. And he opens the door and shoots her.

If what Hall's saying is true, police Police now know the shooter, and they have his accomplice in custody. But investigators are also eager to speak to the woman Hall claims hired them.

He said it was a lady by the name of Mary Lee Orsini. When her name come up, I had never heard it before. I mean, you have to look at everything, and it's not hard to kind of take that step and say, What did she think she would gain from it? Why would she have anything to do with this? Why would she be involved in this at all?

After hearing Yankee Hall's confession, authorities run a background check on the woman he claims hired him, 34-year-old Mary Lee Orsini.

Mary Lee lived in Indian Hills, which is almost the border of North Little Rock. She grew up middle class. Our middle class, you're just like everybody else. Everybody went to the same school. She did not see the need to go to school, and she dropped out of high school and 10th grade. She was just a pretty girl, and she had the biggest eyelashes glued on that you've ever seen. She looked like Tammy Faye Baker.

Mary Lee had been married twice. Her first husband was in the Air Force, and they had a daughter together before splitting up. But her second marriage to a man named Ron Orsini ended in tragedy almost a year prior to Alice's death. On the morning of March 12, 1981, Mary Lee called 911 in a panic, asking for medical assistance.

She said, "Something's wrong with my husband. He's bleeding. It may be his nose. I'm not sure, but I need an ambulance." The first police officers got there, They go in the room, pull the sheet back, and then they saw half his head was blown away.

When officers asked Mary Lee what happened, she claimed Ron went to bed alone around 10 PM, and she found him that way in the morning.

Her story was her daughter was sick. So she slept in the bed with Tiffany across the hall from Ron's bedroom. They said, you sure you didn't hear any gunshots, like, in Ron's room? And she was, no, I didn't. And Tiffany didn't. She was just, well, I was just really tired. She said to the police, maybe he shot himself. But if he shot himself, then he managed to hide the gun somewhere, and they could not find it.

Mary Lee had a questionable story, but detectives needed more evidence to make an arrest.

When you fire a gun, there's blowout or blowback depending on how you're holding it. So the shooter gets some of the powder from the force of the bullet going out. She had nothing, which either meant she didn't fire a gun, or she did and she had taken a full-on shower or bath and scrubbed wiped everything off.

Investigators were stalled until they got a call from a private investigator named Fred Myers.

After Ron Orsini was killed, within a couple of days, I called the prosecutor and I told him about my involvement with Mary Lee Orsini. It was in the first week of November 1980. I was told there was a lady on the phone by the name of Mary Lee Orsini that wanted to talk with me. So I spoke with her. She told me she would like to see me about a personal matter.

Myers said Mary Lee showed up looking like a femme fatale.

Usually when When people set an appointment with me and came into the office, it might be a business attire. And she came in with a tight-fitting silk blouse open down the middle. She had on a skirt, and it was split on the side. She told me that, uh, her husband was Ron Orsini, and she had come to me to do what is commonly known as an activities check on her husband. She told me that she was virtually certain, she said, that Ron had become involved in the buying and selling and transporting drugs. I told her that we would have to do a surveillance. We watched him for the next week starting on Monday morning. We did that every day, Monday through Friday. And we saw nothing out of the ordinary.

But Myers told the prosecutor he did find something of note.

We determined that they were behind on their bills. The credit report told me that, and it had included delinquency on their home mortgage.

In fact, financial issues made it difficult for Mary Lee to to pay Myers for his services.

I was telling her that I cannot keep working unless you can pay me. She made the statement, "Well, perhaps we could barter." I said, "What do you have that you can give me that would compensate for the money that you owe me?" She told me, "Come to my house." Uncomfortable with Mary's insistence Insinuation, Fred quickly rejected the invite. She said, "I'll give you a time, or we can meet somewhere and we can discuss it." Well, I did not accept the invitation for either one.

After receiving the tip from Myers, prosecutors looked into the Orsinis' finances. And found a motive for murder.

They didn't have any money. She didn't have grounds for divorce. She would lose everything if they got a divorce. But at some point, they decided to get life insurance.

Meyers said after Ron's death, Mary Lee paid him another visit.

She asked me then if I would refer her to a good criminal lawyer. So I gave her the names of 3 criminal attorneys that I knew personally that I had done work for, and she chose Bill McArthur.

Detectives investigating the death of Alice McArthur have found the connection between her and Mary Lee Orsini. What's still unclear is why Mary Lee would have hired hitmen to kill her lawyer's wife.

My brother represented Mary Lee Orsini in a murder trial. She was accused of murdering her husband, and he was able to get her off. He was able to point out investigators took shortcuts or didn't dot their i's and cross their t's. The grand jury returned a no true bill and did not indict her for her husband Ron's death.

That means the grand jury said, "Man, we don't know by the hard, true, beyond a reasonable doubt that she did this." So she's free. Just walk on out.

Clients usually want to get back at a lawyer a lawyer who loses their case, not one who wins it. But when police dig a little further, they discover Mary Lee had different intentions.

As a result of that representation, Mary Lee Orsini developed the idea that Bill McArthur had romantic interests in her. I mean, she worshiped him. Thinking that he was the greatest attorney ever.

I could tell she kind of had a thing for Bill. I didn't see that back the other way at all. Bill's this kind of dashing trial lawyer, and, man, she's not his type.

After the trial, it seems Mary Lee kept looking for opportunities to see Bill.

My brother and two other partners opened up BJ's Star-Studded Honky Tonk. It was a country western bar and it was huge at the time. I was there for a couple of shows and I knew that Mary Lee Orsini was there and came by the ownership table wanting to make an effort to come over and say hi to Bill. It made sense from her being infatuated with my brother. And in her mind, if Alice was out of the way, maybe, maybe she could have Bill. This was obviously was obsession.

Light bulb comes on. She thought that in the long run she would have Bill, and then she would have all the, the social ramifications and all his riches. And everything everything else that she was actually desiring. And that's why she went and found Yankee Hall.

With new understanding of Mary Lee's intent, detectives resume their questioning of the hitman she allegedly hired, Yankee Hall.

He says they met in like a bowling alley. You know, I think that she went there to meet not necessarily Yankee Hall, but somebody like Yankee Hall.

She did have an appeal, and she knew how to use that.

He said that they had sex and she was, you know, seductive. She kind of prompted him into a lot of things as she developed the relationship, and eventually really got off into this, what she wanted to do. At that point, they decided to try the bombing.

It'd be difficult, if not impossible, to trace it back to anybody, but it didn't work.

After the failed bombing, Hall says Mary Lee asked him to find a shooter, so he called up his old prison mate Larry McClendon.

The thing that stands out most in my mind is that he had no remorse, emotion whatsoever about killing Alice McArthur. And as a matter of fact, I remember him stating specifically, we killed that bitch.

Unfortunately, investigators know Hall's confession won't be enough to convict Mary Lee.

Yankee Hall was implicating Mary Lee Orsini and Larry McClendon, but he ain't got no evidence. You're not going to make a case on capital felony murder with a co-conspirator's testimony. You have to have something to backs it up. And I'll be honest with you, I mean, I was pouring over my case file trying to find something. I mean, anything.

Coming up, detectives get the break they've been looking for.

He said, she wrote everything she wanted me to say.

She'd given him a script to read, so the recording was completely bogus.

And the full story is finally finally revealed.

She said she wanted to come clean.

While looking for evidence that Mary Lee Orsini paid to have Alice MacArthur murdered, investigators subpoena her bank records. One transaction in immediately catches their eye.

She got her mother to sell her house. She had actually gotten $25,000 over what she owed on the house, so Mary Lee put that in her account.

It's the exact amount Yankee said she was going to pay for the hit, but detectives still need stronger evidence to make sure Mary can't dodge a another murder charge. They get a lead from the suspect herself when Mary brings them a tape with audio of a call she says she recorded while speaking with an anonymous tipster.

I'm sitting there going over stuff, and Assistant Chief of Police come in and he hands me an audio tape and he said, see if you can identify this guy on this audio audio tape. I get to listening to the tape, and during the conversation, he made a comment talking about his business, and I got the name from that.

The name they find is Larry Burge.

I eventually get him on the phone, and I tell him I need to talk to him. He said, well, I'll come in. And we get to talking.

Burge starts by explaining how he is more than just an anonymous tipster to Mary.

He said they met at bars and things like that a couple of times. That's how they ended up having a relationship.

Burge admits he was the one who called in the tip about the pair of hitmen just a few days into Alice's murder investigation.

He said that Mary Lee had instructed him to call Placer County Sheriff's Office and give the information.

The next day, he says Mary convinced him to recreate his previous anonymous tip with more detail so she could take the recording to police.

He, I think, gave it up pretty quick that she'd given him a script to read through on the phone. So the recording was completely bogus.

He said, she wrote everything she wanted me to say and how she wanted me to say it. I said, do you still have them? He said, yeah. He said, I'll go get them and bring them back to you. And sure enough, he had— I think there were 3 pages, yellow pages notebook paper.

The handwritten notes provided by Burge that matched the recorded call that Mary Lee brought in.

I logged it in evidence and then sent it to the state crime lab for handwriting analysis. It was 100%. I mean, it was 100% Mary Lee Orsini's handwriting. We'd already taken a statement from her, so we had her handwriting to compare it to.

For investigators, It's strange that Mary Lee provided the real names of her co-conspirators, but they suspect she thought it would make the hitmen's story less believable if they gave her up. Instead, her plan has backfired.

Had not it been for the Larry Bird's tape, we'd never made a case on Mary Lee Orsi. Soon as we kind of got the go-ahead on the handwriting analysis, they gave us the arrest warrant. And we went to arrest her. We transported her back to Little Rock Police Department. Her interview was— it wasn't that long of an interview because she was still denying everything. I mean, she was at the point when we first got her that she didn't know who Larry Burge was. She didn't know who Yankee Hall was. After taking a statement, she was charged with capital felony murder.

Mary Lee isn't the only one facing jail time.

Yankee Hall was arrested first, and I want to say that it was probably within 3 or 4 days we had Larry McClendon. He was charged, and I'm pretty sure it was a capital felony murder, same as Yankee Hall.

The 3 suspects were arrested, and they had a chance at them. That's kind of when things took a turn.

Now that the Pulaski County Sheriff has charged Mary Lee Orsini for Alice McArthur's murder, she wants to talk.

It was in her best interest to tell the sheriff anything he wanted to hear. What he wanted to hear was there was more to this, that Bill was involved with her in this plot. The sheriff didn't like my brother. In his department, there were lots of them that didn't like my brother because of simply my brother's tactics in defending clients. Because there's people, you know, well, did your brother and her have an affair? Because nobody could imagine— how can you build this fantasy up if there wasn't something going on? It didn't make sense for a normal person. There was very little other than he had enough to be able to raise the charge, get it in front of a judge. And arrest my brother.

Despite Mary Lee's claims that Bill was involved, it's a move investigators at the Little Rock Police Department don't agree with.

Little Rock City Police and the Sheriff's Office, Pulaski County Sheriff's Office, were at odds.

There's nothing. I mean, absolutely nothing. No physical evidence. Nobody's testimony except Marilyn Orsini's that ever indicated that Bill was involved having his wife killed.

There wasn't any evidence. And so the grand jury returns a no true bill.

If there's a no true bill, no true bill, meaning state did not put together enough evidence to convince them beyond a reasonable doubt.

But, you know, damage was already done at that point in time. Bill's psyche and quality of life was never the same after that.

Mary Lee Orsini's murder trial begins in September 1982. The star witness against her is confessed hitman Yankee Hall.

Especially in murder cases, the first thing that you want to do is avoid the death sentence, and the best way to do that is to turn yourself in, cooperate. And that's what we did with Yankee Hall.

Her defense is that Yankee Hall made all this stuff up and that, you know, Larry Bird and all the notes, they don't mean anything because she didn't write them. She denied it, basically. And that's kind of the way her defense attorney went with it, is that we don't have anything.

The jury sides with prosecutors, convicting Mary Lee of capital murder. Yankee Hall and Larry McClendon face justice as well.

Mary Lee Orsini and Yankee Hall both got life in prison without parole. Larry McClendon got 20 years.

She belonged to jail?

Hell yeah, she belonged to jail for the rest of her life, for sure.

In 1983, Mary Lee is also found guilty for the murder of her husband Ron Orsini, but the conviction is overturned.

I charged her with being an accessory to the homicide of her husband. But in the trial, they didn't show anybody else there but her.

It's not until 2003 that Mary Lee finally comes clean about her role with investigators.

She ended up dying in prison. And prior to her death, she gave a deathbed confession both to her involvement in Ron Orsini case and her involvement in the Alice McArthur case.

She contacted the prosecuting attorney and said she would like to talk to investigators from his office. He ultimately sent them down. She told them that she shot her husband and killed him. To quote her words in the interview, she found Jesus. She turned to religion. She said she confessed her sins and Jesus forgave her, and she wanted to clear the record.

I think it's very possible that people do things that are completely out of character and truly do snap. But I think for her, it was— she was evil.

She's manipulative. She's remorseless. She's smart. She can keep 3 stories juggling at one time and hardly ever miss a beat.

This is all just some deranged woman that had an obsession and decided to act on it. The person that was probably the most innocent out of everybody would have been Alice. She had nothing to do with— she didn't bring any of that on herself. She had nothing to do with Mary Lee Orsini.