An interview with Michelle Theer: 'On the lam'
Q. What caused you to go on the lam?
A. It wasn't sudden at all. After Marty died, my life was shattered–God, you have to remember, I met Marty right when I turned 16, and so basically, my whole adult life, everything had been planned with Marty, I mean, all the way up to retirement, the plans that we had made, everything we had talked about, even if we wouldn't have done half of it, or if we would have changed our minds about half of it, which I am sure we would have. Still, what we had talked about, and what we had planned, was together. And when Marty was gone, that all went down the hole. It was shattered; it was gone. I was living in a town where I had no one, where eventually I became a pariah. I was practicing in a career where my own state of mind was making it more difficult for me to continue in that career. You know, you have to be able to concentrate, to focus, to set aside your own life; you have to be fairly stable; I felt like I had no roots anywhere. I had nowhere that I could go. I didn't want to go back to Colorado because. . . I was afraid that there was too much there to remind me of Marty. Same with Florida, but at the same time, I didn't want to go somewhere where I didn't have anybody. Eventually, I did start off by going to Florida. I thought, you know, I know some people there, that's where I went to school, I have some connections, let me go down to Florida and practice. So, I left Fayetteville.
Q. When was that?
A. That would have been the end of April.
Q. 2001?
A. Yeah. By then, John was arrested, and charged in March. . . I moved down to [Vero Beach] Florida; I applied for my license to practice [psychology] down there. Actually, most of my stuff I put into storage, but I took a few things with me, moved down to Florida, was going to start looking for a job. . . . I was in a holding pattern waiting to see what would happen with John's trial, and at this point really not sure if he was guilty or not, but wanting to know and waiting to see what I could find out. . . . I didn't testify at his trial, based on the advice of my attorneys.
Q. They called you, and you took the fifth a lot?
A. Right, because I was named as a coconspirator. Had I not been specifically named, I might have [testified].
Q. Were you worried when you left Fayetteville in April that you would look guilty by leaving?
A. Well, you know I really wasn't worried about what the general public would think, but I really didn't see how people could expect me to stay there. . . . Why would I stay in Fayetteville when I had no family, no friends, no life, potentially no work. I am living in a four-bedroom house all by myself, alone, why wouldn't I leave? . . . After John was convicted, I was in just in a lot of emotional turmoil. . . I just felt so upset. I didn't know what to do. I decided I didn't want to stay in Florida anymore. . . . I felt a need at that point to be around family, so I decided to go to New Orleans, where my extended family is, so it would be kind of a fresh start, a new place, but I would have the comfort and the security of a very large extended family. So I went and stayed with my grandma and lived with her a couple months.
Q. In New Orleans?
A. Yeah, and actually, to be perfectly honest, I was waiting for them to come and arrest me. . . . I wasn't looking for a job. I was just hanging out waiting for them to come and arrest me. . . . I was waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, I was waiting for months. And that's very emotionally draining.
Q. How long did you stay down there with your grandma?
A. I lived with my grandma for three months. . . .
Q. That was on your dad's side, right?
A. Yeah, and then I moved into a condo [in New Orleans]. . . .
Q. How long did you stay there?
A. Until May [of 2002]. . . .
Q. And that's when you moved to Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Fla.?
A. Yes. . . .
Q. Why were you using different names?
A. Well, something had happened in [Vero Beach] Florida. I had met this guy in Florida in July, and had this little fling, I guess you could call it.
Q. July 2001?
A. Yeah, and this friend of his had looked up my name on the Internet and contacted the Fayetteville Police Department. . . This is Nelson King. This is a small town, he goes around telling everybody, that's the chick that killed her husband. . . he didn't want me with his friend. . . Darren Danielson, and he succeeded. It didn't last very long at all. Anyway, after that little fiasco, I decided I was gonna go back to my maiden name. So, when I moved to New Orleans, I legally changed my name back to my maiden name [Forcier]. . . It's so easy, it's so common for people to Google a name. I just didn't want to have to deal with that again.
Q. So when you, when you went back to Florida [in May 2002], is that when you started using the names like Liza Pendragon?
A. When I left New Orleans, that is when I went underground.
Q. What names did you use?
A. Well, I had this fake ID. . . under the name Elizabeth Pendragon. And, actually, a friend of mine who got another fake ID with the same last name is the one who had picked out the names.
Q. It has no signficance, Pendragon?
A. Pendragon, actually, he chose those names because those are the names from the King Arthur novels, and the prosecutor put somebody on the stand during the trial that said Pendragon was the name of some magician that makes people disappear. . . .
Q. What name did you get the Florida driver's license under?
A. Alexandra Solomon.
[She says she also prepared fake birth and baptismal certificates, using a software program.]
Q. Did you get a fake Social Security number, too?
A. I hadn't done that yet.
Q. Just a Florida driver's license?
A. Yeah.
Q. That would have been in 2002?
A. Yeah. . . June.
Q. You were living down there near the water, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea?
A. Yeah.
Q. Did you live in a cottage down there?
A. Yeah.
Q. Where did you get your money?
A. Marty and I, we had always invested, we had always invested a regular part of our income, and that is what I lived on after he died.
Q. How much do you think you had in terms of savings?
A. It would be really hard to say. I can tell you that the stock market crash ate up a lot of it because I had left it all where it was.. . . We had IRAs, too. I cashed out the IRAs. . . .
Q. So, you think you had as much as 100 grand?
A. Yeah. . . it was probably around that, with our IRAs. Of course, I was never planning on touching the IRAs, but I did.
Q. That would keep you going?
A. I don't really remember all the details because I really didn't know what I was doing when I decided to leave. It was something that I had been thinking about for months because just the tension of having this over my head. . . I was under an incredible amount of stress. I had become pretty much agoraphobic. I never went out, certainly couldn't go out at night. I went out and got myself a gigantic dog to protect myself, I was paranoid. . . . I had gotten threatening letters from John [Diamond]. . . .There were a lot of reasons why I eventually decided that I had to just disappear, that I just had to leave, because my life was no longer a life. . . .
Q. What did he say in these letters?
A. That I was going to be sorry, that he had insurance, quote unquote, he always had a backup plan, and he had insurance to take care of me, that I better watch my back. . . .
Q. So, when you got to Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, is that when you took up with this young fellow, Dana Horton?
A. It was, yeah, not too long after I was there. . . .
Q. He thought you were Liza Pendragon?
A. Liza, yeah, yeah. I lived about two blocks away from the beach. There is a little kind of restaurant on the corner. . . two sides of it were open, open air. And in the corner. . . there was like a little bar area. And they had decent food. . . . Every now and then, I would walk up there and get something to eat. . . . They had a couple of regulars there, always sitting at the bar. . . . They had gotten to where they recognized me, and they would say, hello, and one day when I was walking up there, he [Dana Horton] was there with several of his friends, and I guess it was his birthday, or something, and they convinced me to stay and have a drink, and then you stay for a little while longer, and that's how that happened. . . . I had lived there a couple weeks before I met him.
Q. How big was your cottage there?
A. Well, it had one bedroom, and it had. . . a living room area, and then an office area, and then a little dinette and a kitchen. . . . It was completely furnished. It had dishes and silverware, towels and sheets, and everything–I think it [rented for] about $900 a month.
Q. One of the things that has come up in this case is that you had a way with men. Is that true?
A. I don't treat them like [expletive]. That's the problem. I'm too nice. I even remember Dana [Horton] making a comment. . . to me, he says, you know, I can tell you are not from Florida. I said, what do you mean? He says, most women in Florida, the only thing they are interested in is how much money you make.
Q. What did he do for a living?
A. He was some kind of customer service representative for a cruise line. . . .
Q. How did the U.S. marshals trace you?
A. I think what happened is, I gave him [Horton] my dad's phone number. The police and everybody think that my parents helped me, which they didn't. My dad definitely did not because my dad and I had a falling out before I left [New Orleans]. . . so he didn't even know that I had left. . . . And he certainly had not done anything–hadn't given me any money, hadn't, you know, driven me anywhere.
Q. This is when you were in New Orleans?
A. Yeah, and I can't remember something, my mom [in Colorado] had gotten a letter from a storage unit company [in New Orleans], the storage unit that was by my condo, where I had all my scrapbooks and my photo albums. See, originally when I left I had just said, forget it, I am cutting ties with all my past, and leaving behind all these letters. I must have had 100 photo albums and scrapbooks. I mean, every minute of my life with Marty was documented, and I had just left it all behind, and of course stopped paying the rent. Well, I had eventually gotten in touch with my mom on the telephone while I was down there [Lauderdale-by-the-Sea], and I had given her a mailing address at one of these Mail Boxes Plus. . . .
Q. This is one of those mail box outfits?
A. Right, so she could get in touch with me if it was an emergency. And she had written me that [the storage unit in New Orleans had contacted her]. . . about either coming to get these things, paying the rent, whatever. . . . When I started thinking about it, I was like, I don't want these photos to be thrown away. . . I didn't want to lose them. So, I wanted Dana to call my dad. . . to see if my dad would talk to me. I know this sounds complicated. I don't know why I didn't just call my dad to see if he would talk to me. Whatever, I think it was because Dana was in Nebraska at the time, and, stupid me, I somehow thought if Dana would call my dad from a pay phone, and just find out if my dad woud talk to me, they would never be able to track me from the pay phone, right? But, stupid Dana, even though I told him, call from the pay phone, he called from his mother's house. And, so, they tracked. . . from [her] dad's cellphone; they said, hmmm, what's this call from Nebraska?
Q. Were the marshals watching calls to your dad's phone?
A. I guess so.
Q. So, Dana called from his mother's house to your dad's, and the marshals realized that?
A. They checked out the mother's house and the people associated with his mother's house and then tracked him down to Florida. That's what they said at my trial.
Q. That makes sense, I think. I guess you were pretty shocked when Horton pointed you out to the marshals.
A. He pulled up in front of the complex of cottages and told them which one I was in. . . .
Q. Had you had some kind of plastic surgery?
A. Yeah. . . .
Q. Were you changing your nose?
A. I used to have a little bump here [pointing to her nose]. I had that little bump taken out. I had [the fat taken out from] under my eyes. . . .
Q. What were the skin peels for? Laser peels?
A. Well, laser, if you actually, if you look at my skin you can see a little bit where I have really uneven coloration here [she points to her right temple area] and along my jaw line here, and actually I wear sunscreen out so it doesn't get bad. But this gets really bad, and I have really bad acne scarring. So, they take the top layers off, and all it really does is smooth out your skin and it smooths out the color pigmentation. I had it done for the first time, actually, about 10 years ago, when Marty and I were living in Colorado Springs because I had really bad acne as a teenager, and it did help a lot. My skin is much smoother now. That is what I had done on the day that I was arrested. The marshal was very nasty about it.
Q.The laser deal?
A. Yeah. I guess part of it is a cultural thing. You know, in Florida, plastic surgery is a very common thing. You know they advertise on TV, finance your boob job, monthly payments, $29.99. . . .
Part 7: Michelle talks about the gun