Arlington, Texas | October 23, 1987 | Still Unsolved
She set her alarm clock for the next morning.
That detail — small, ordinary, heartbreaking — is the one that investigators came back to again and again. Because it tells you everything about the state of mind of Patsy Bolton Wright on the last night of her life. She had somewhere to be. She had plans. She had a life she was actively, joyfully in the middle of building — and she intended to wake up and get back to it.
She never did.
Patsy Wright was forty-three years old when she died in the early hours of October 23rd, 1987, in her rented home in Arlington, Texas. The cause of her death would take eight days, one patrolman’s instinct, and a $100,000 machine to discover. And when it did — when the answer came back as a single word on a computer printout — it reframed everything. Every detail of her life, her relationships, her financial world, and the people closest to her suddenly looked different.
The murder of Patsy Bolton Wright remains unsolved. Nearly forty years later, no one has ever been charged. And the people who loved her are still waiting for an answer that has refused to come.
This is her story. And it deserves to be told completely.
Who Was Patsy Wright?
Patricia Virginia Bolton was born on February 24th, 1944, in Highland Park, Texas — one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Dallas, a small, manicured enclave where old money lived quietly and the social register was taken seriously. Her father, Tom Bolton, was an oil man with an autocratic streak and a deep, consuming passion for Texas history. Her family was comfortable, connected, and part of a legacy that ran deeper than most people knew.
Patsy Bolton was the grand-niece of Sam Rayburn — the longest-serving Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in American history. A Texas political titan whose influence shaped the country for decades. That lineage wasn’t something Patsy wore on her sleeve. But it tells you something about where she came from. This was a family of consequence. Of history. Of people who built things that lasted.
She grew up in Highland Park alongside her younger sister Sally. She attended Hillcrest High School — just outside the Highland Park School District boundary — and then enrolled at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Five hours west, into the flat, wind-scoured expanse of West Texas. It was there, in a math class, that she met her best friend Karen Beattie — who would later become her financial adviser and one of the most important people in her world — and it was there that she met a young man named Bill Wright. They started dating. In 1965, when Patsy was twenty-one, they married. She became Patsy Wright. They moved back to the Arlington area and had two children: a daughter named Leslie and a son named William Wayne.
In 1973, Patsy joined the family business. Her father Tom had founded the Southwestern Historical Wax Museum, originally opening in 1963 at Fair Park in Dallas during the State Fair, where it drew twelve to thirteen thousand visitors a day at peak season. He had since moved it to Grand Prairie — right in the entertainment corridor near Six Flags Over Texas — where it was a genuine regional institution drawing 250,000 visitors annually. Wyatt Earp. Bat Masterson. Billy the Kid. Mickey Mantle. A $4 million, 300-figure exhibit. A serious, thriving business. Patsy came aboard in public relations, a role that by all accounts was made for her.
Because Patsy was magnetic. That word comes up repeatedly, from everyone who knew her. Her sister Sally said she could still hear her laugh and still see her coming into a room smiling — that her death didn’t seem real at all. Her son Wayne, twenty years old when she died, told reporters three months later: “I know she didn’t commit suicide. I just know it. When I talked to her on the phone that night, she was fine. She sounded great.” Bill Phillips, the museum’s general manager, described her as outgoing, happy, independent — someone who could knock you off your feet with enthusiasm.
She was also formidable. Sharp about money, deliberate in her planning, and absolutely clear-eyed about the people in her life.
When Tom Bolton died in 1976, the comfortable life got complicated. A vicious inheritance battle erupted between Patsy and Sally on one side and their stepmother on the other. They fought. And they won — emerging as the controlling owners of the museum. But the battle left a mark. Patsy told Karen Beattie afterward that she would never leave her own affairs in disarray the way her father had. Her children would not have to fight for what was theirs. She was adamant about it. She would spend the next eleven years making sure of it.
Her marriage to Bill Wright — who remained the executor of her estate after their amicable 1980 divorce — eventually ended. She later married a man named Bob Cox, and that marriage proved to be a disaster she would spend years recovering from. By 1987, Patsy was single, thriving, and building the third act of her life with the same energy and precision she’d applied to everything else.
By that point she was easily a millionaire. In 1987 she expected to clear $150,000 personally from the museum. Her salary for 1988 was set to jump to $250,000. As an investor, Karen Beattie described her as someone who prized security over growth — not flashy, not reckless, but serious and careful about protecting what she’d built.
She had a boyfriend named Larry Todd, who worked for a state agency in Austin. She was, by all accounts, in love again — genuinely, happily, after years of relationships that hadn’t worked. She had a social life that moved between the Crystal Charity Ball — Dallas’s most prestigious annual gala, which Patsy attended in a full Cinderella gown — and the cutting horse competition circuit, which couldn’t have been more different and which she loved just as much. She had purchased a twenty-six-thousand-dollar cutting horse named Dry Leo — powerful, aggressive, difficult to ride — and was training with horse trainer Bill Alexander out of Hico, an hour and a half southwest of Arlington. A few months earlier she had won a cutting horse contest at the Mesquite Rodeo, an accomplishment that thrilled her as much as any gala.
She had her eye on a thirty-acre ranch in Aledo. A property with a house she was already planning to renovate — at a cost of about $25,000 — and land where she could keep her horses and finally live the life she had been moving toward for years. Despite well-meaning friends who worried about her living alone in a rural area, Patsy wasn’t afraid. She had bought a Glock automatic pistol in preparation. Nothing — not fear, not convention, not other people’s expectations — was going to stand in her way.
And she was in love. Thinking about her future. Planning, building, designing.
She was so close to all of it.
The Last Day
Patsy had been back from a camping trip for several days by the time October 22nd, 1987 arrived. She and Leslie had gone away together the week before — just the two of them — to celebrate Leslie’s twenty-first birthday. When she came home, she didn’t coast. She threw herself straight back into her life.
She had been out to Hico three mornings in a row before sunrise, climbing up on Dry Leo, working through something she had genuinely gotten good at. October 22nd was the third morning.
After training that morning she made two significant financial moves. She put down a deposit on a mare she planned to breed — a horse she intended to keep at the Aledo property. And she had already asked Karen Beattie to liquidate assets and make $125,000 available for the ranch closing, which had been moved up two weeks. The life she had been designing was arriving ahead of schedule.
That evening was the kickoff of the museum’s most important event of the year — a dress rehearsal of the Halloween Show, a production that mixed wax monstrosities with costumed actors. A character named Dr. Blood presided over Dracula and Frankenstein and other creatures. Patsy was there. She was working. She was in her element. But she didn’t stay long. She was tired from the accumulated early mornings and left before it was over.
She stopped at a nearby hotel lounge on her way home, had a beer with a friend, and arrived back at her house around nine o’clock that evening.
What happened in the hours that followed has been reconstructed carefully from phone records, witness accounts, and the evidence found at the scene.
The lights went on. The television went on. She made and received several long-distance phone calls. Her son Wayne was among the people she spoke with that night — he would later tell reporters she sounded fine. Great, even. Nothing in any of those conversations suggested anything was wrong.
She put on her pink pajamas.
At some point that evening, she sat down for what appears to have been a late dinner. In her bedroom. On a tray — a tray with two plates. Her known boyfriend Larry Todd was in Austin, three hours away, his alibi established by his own phone call to Patsy that night. No official guest was recorded. No uninvited visitor was reported. And yet — two plates, in the bedroom, at that hour.
This detail would become one of the most debated in the entire investigation. And we will come back to it.
Sometime around midnight, Patsy made herself a snack. Scrambled eggs, washed down with half a beer. A completely human, ordinary, midnight-in-your-pajamas kind of thing. The kind of thing you do when you’re a little tired and a little hungry and you have somewhere to be in the morning.
She set her alarm clock.
For the following morning. Ready to go off. Investigators found it set when they arrived at the house. Dr. JoAnn Houts, the psychologist retained by the Tarrant County Medical Examiner to conduct a psychological autopsy of Patsy after her death, noted it specifically: the alarm clock going off the day after she died indicated she intended to wake up that morning. It fit none of the criteria for suicide risk. She was planning for the future. She was going somewhere.
And then, because she was having a little trouble settling down — because she was restless, perhaps thinking about Larry and all the changes she was about to make in her life — she did what she always did when she couldn’t sleep.
She reached for the NyQuil.
She kept a bottle of it in her bathroom. Had used it as a sleep aid for years — Karen Beattie said it had started when their children were small, when both young mothers discovered NyQuil was useful for teething babies, and Patsy had never quite stopped. “I used to tease her about being a NyQuil-head,” Beattie told D Magazine. It was a private, specific, intimate habit. The kind of thing only the people truly inside your life would know about.
She drank about an ounce from a plastic cup.
At approximately three in the morning, she picked up the phone and called her sister Sally. Sally’s husband Steve Horning answered. Patsy asked for Sally. Steve woke his wife. And when Sally got on the line, Patsy told her exactly what was happening in that quiet, frightened, this-doesn’t-make-sense way that is somehow so much worse than screaming.
She said: “I’ve taken some NyQuil and something’s really, really wrong.”
Then she collapsed.
Sally didn’t have a key to Patsy’s rental house — and, she would later remember, the spare keys Patsy kept over the double oven had disappeared sometime before that night. Steve had to crawl through a cracked bedroom window to open the front door. Both of them noticed immediately that Patsy’s burglar alarm had not been set.
Steve moved a table — a table with two plates on it, he told investigators — away from the bed and attempted CPR. He got green liquid in his mouth and had to spit it out. The paramedics arrived. Randy Jones, one of the Lifestar paramedics on duty that night, said there was little they could do. Patsy had no pulse, no blood pressure, her eyes beginning to dilate. She was rushed to Arlington Memorial Hospital.
Dr. Tim Williams declared her dead at 4:15 a.m.
Before patrolman Patrick Bridges left the scene, he walked into Patsy’s bathroom, picked up a bottle of NyQuil, and dropped it into an evidence bag. No one had ordered him to. There was no reason, at that point, to think there was anything wrong with a bottle of cold medicine. He just did it.
That instinct — that single unremarkable act by a patrolman on a night that looked like a tragedy rather than a crime — is the reason this case ever became a murder investigation at all.
The Discovery
The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s office performed an autopsy. A standard part of Tarrant County’s procedure was to run blood and tissue samples through a gas chromatographic mass spectrometer — a $100,000 machine that compared samples against the chemical fingerprints of more than 4,000 compounds. This was routine. Nobody was specifically looking for poison. The machine ran its process.
Eighteen to twenty minutes after Patsy’s blood samples went in — the computer readout spiked dramatically. When asked to identify the substance, the computer produced one word.
Strychnine.
Eight days after Patsy’s death, Sgt. Jay Gustafson of the Arlington Police Department received a phone call from Dr. Marc Krouse, the Tarrant County deputy medical examiner.
“Are you sitting down?” Krouse asked. “I haven’t seen anything like this in twenty years.”
Gustafson heard the word strychnine. And in that moment, he remembered something. The police report. It had mentioned a NyQuil bottle, bagged by a patrolman at the scene. He got up from his desk, went to the evidence room, retrieved the six-ounce bottle Patrolman Bridges had bagged eight days earlier, and had the remaining liquid tested.
Confirmed.
The day after the strychnine was identified, Gustafson convened a roundtable. He brought together the medical examiner’s office, representatives from the EPA, the FBI, the Dallas Police Department’s intelligence division, and a representative from Vick’s Corporation — which manufactures NyQuil. They checked the lot number on the bottle. No other poisoning cases had been reported from that production run. The FBI representative ruled out consumer product tampering officially and stepped back.
This was a targeted attack. Against one specific woman. In one specific bottle.
The form of strychnine used to kill Patsy was almost pure — obtained legally only through chemical outlets to authorized buyers. Approximately one hundred companies around the country used or sold strychnine at the time, according to an EPA spokesman. It was also available in some college chemistry labs, and occasionally surfaced on the black market. Someone with knowledge, access, and patience had obtained it and put it in a bottle in Patsy Wright’s bathroom. And then they had walked away and waited.
To understand what Patsy experienced in those hours, you need to understand what strychnine does. It works by attacking the central nervous system — blocking the receptors in the spinal cord responsible for stopping muscle contractions. The result is full-body convulsions of extraordinary violence. The head and feet are bent backward in tetanic spasms. The face turns blue. Throughout it all, the victim remains completely conscious — the mind entirely aware of what is happening to the body. Death is ultimately caused by paralysis of the respiratory muscles.
The dose placed in Patsy’s NyQuil was enough to kill eight or nine people. It was described by investigators as gross overkill — so saturated that the strychnine had begun to settle to the bottom of the bottle as sediment.
Sgt. Gustafson said it plainly: “With the strychnine, they don’t want to just poison somebody, they want it to be an excruciating death. This wasn’t a fleeting thought.”
And: “If Wright was killed, the culprit would have to be someone with a grudge against her — because she was killed with a vengeance.”
The Investigation: Three Clues
Gustafson — who went by Gus, a stocky man with sandy hair and a mustache, well-worn boots and Western-cut shirts with pearl-snap buttons, his pants held up by a championship rodeo belt buckle the size of a saucer — had eight years on the homicide squad when this case landed on his desk. The moment he read the initial police report, his instincts told him something was wrong. A healthy forty-three-year-old woman had simply keeled over dead — no signs of forced entry, no drug use, no suicide note, no apparent cause of death discovered at the hospital. People just don’t up and die like this, Gustafson thought.
Once the strychnine was confirmed, three specific details from the night of October 22nd stood out.
The burglar alarm.
Patsy had installed the system after someone had broken several of her windows — a targeted, frightening act of vandalism she had taken seriously. Setting the alarm every night was automatic. Her friends knew it. Her family knew it. The night she died, it was off. Either she forgot — deeply out of character — or she didn’t feel the need to set it. Because whoever was there, or had recently been there, was someone whose presence felt safe.
The missing spare keys.
When Sally and Steve arrived at Patsy’s house that night, Sally didn’t have a key. She later remembered that the spare keys Patsy kept over the double oven had disappeared sometime before her death. Steve had to crawl through a cracked bedroom window to let Sally in. Someone had those keys. Someone had been inside Patsy’s home — inside her domestic world, the small private geography of her daily life — and had not returned them.
The two dinner plates.
Steve Horning told investigators he had moved a table with two plates away from Patsy’s bed in order to perform CPR. Neither the firefighters nor the paramedics who were on scene that night independently recalled the table or the plates. Gustafson noted the discrepancy and never forgot it. Either there was a dinner guest that night — someone unknown who has never come forward in nearly forty years — or the detail was introduced by the one person who reported it.
Together, these three clues told Gustafson one thing with certainty: the killer was not a stranger. This was someone inside Patsy Wright’s life. Someone who knew her habits, had access to her home, and was close enough to her that none of it raised alarm.
He described the killer as a trapper. Someone who studies what path their prey walks down, sets the trap with patience and precision, and then walks away — already back in their ordinary life, miles from the scene, when the trap goes off. The NyQuil was the trap. Patsy’s habit was the path. And whoever set it had been gone long before she reached for that cup at midnight in her pink pajamas.
The Suspects
Steve Horning — Brother-in-Law
Steve Horning married Sally in 1981, after his landscaping maintenance company had done some work at the museum. Patsy was initially pleased for her sister. Her opinion of Steve changed quickly.
By 1987, Steve was running a small construction company that did very little business. His household income came almost entirely from Sally’s share of the wax museum — a business he had no ownership stake in. Patsy was infuriated by him. She told friends he was a phony, that he had spent Sally’s personal inheritance and gone into debt on top of it playing the commodities market and pursuing expensive hobbies. On the afternoon before her death she told a friend: “I don’t want Steve Horning anywhere around me.”
Patsy had been working with Karen Beattie and her lawyers to restructure the buy-sell agreement she had with Sally. Each sister held a $500,000 life insurance policy on the other — if one died, the survivor was required to use the payout to buy out the other’s share of the museum stock. The arrangement had seemed reasonable when they signed it in June 1985. But two things had changed. The museum stock had appreciated significantly. And in the fall of 1985, Sally had been diagnosed with cancer. Her prognosis, at first, was poor.
If Sally died with the agreement in place, Steve — under community property laws — would have claim to a controlling share of the museum stock. Exactly what Patsy was determined to prevent. She had scheduled a board meeting for early November 1987 to change the arrangement. She died two weeks before that meeting.
When Patsy died, Steve inherited a significant stake in the museum. The paperwork that would have protected against this had not been signed. It never got signed.
Steve submitted to two polygraphs — the first came back inconclusive, the second he passed. He cooperated with investigators, suggested they hire a private detective, and performed CPR on Patsy that night, getting the strychnine mixture in his own mouth and having to spit it out. Police ultimately questioned whether he would have done that knowingly. But Gustafson also noted something troubling from the tape of the emergency phone call — Sally could be heard saying “you have to blow into her mouth” as if instructing Steve during CPR, suggesting his efforts may not have been what they appeared.
Steve had also, in 1970, been arrested and charged with assaulting a woman. The charges were later dropped. Patsy had run a background check on him and told a friend the report “wasn’t good.” She destroyed it.
Bob Cox — Ex-Husband
Bob Cox was Patsy’s second ex-husband. After selling a fabric chain to Pier 1 in 1970 for more than a million dollars, Cox became an investor and businessman — operating various companies and maintaining memberships in the highest circles of Dallas society, including the Dallas Country Club where he played gin and poker for high stakes most afternoons.
He and Patsy began dating after she was introduced to his social world. They married in April 1983. Almost immediately — she would later tell friends it began on their wedding day — Cox changed. He became verbally abusive. He lived off her earnings entirely, paying almost none of the household bills while she covered everything. The IRS attempted to attach her earnings to pay approximately $300,000 in his tax debts. A marriage therapist Cox had previously seen described him, Patsy told friends, as a “sociopath.” She got out of the marriage as quickly as she could.
He didn’t let her go quietly. After the divorce, Cox began surveilling Patsy — watching her home, following her, once borrowing an employee’s car to tail her, hiding his distinctive white hair under a disguise. He threatened to ruin her. And Patsy remembered something he had told her during their marriage: that he knew people who could get “anything done” — including having someone “snuffed out.” At the time she had taken it as bravado. After the surveillance started, she wasn’t so sure.
At the urging of her aunt and her sister she installed the security system. She also obtained a legal restraining order against Cox, prohibiting him from coming within one hundred feet of her. By the end of 1986, the surveillance appeared to have stopped.
Cox owned a competing wax museum. In February 1983 — the same month he and Patsy began moving toward marriage — fires were set in a Galveston building where Cox had stored his wax collection. Cox filed an insurance claim for $400,000 plus punitive damages with Hartford Lloyds Insurance Company. Hartford countered that Cox, in desperate financial straits, had arranged the arson himself.
Patsy was scheduled to be a key witness for Hartford in that civil trial. Hartford’s attorney had met with her eight to ten times in 1986 and 1987. And Patsy had specific knowledge that one of the most valuable pieces in Cox’s collection — an antique chest supposedly destroyed in the fire — had never been moved to Galveston at all. It was in Cox’s Garland office. She knew it. She was prepared to say so.
Cox reportedly began calling Patsy and urging her to change her testimony. She refused. “I’m going to tell the truth,” she told him simply.
The civil trial was scheduled for early November 1987. Patsy died approximately ten days before she was due to testify.
When Gustafson came to interview Cox, he said little beyond “I met her, I married her, I divorced her.” He refused to take a polygraph. He would not cooperate with investigators. He would not participate in the Unsolved Mysteries segment. Cox also owned a chemical company, which investigators noted as a potential source of access to strychnine.
The civil trial eventually went forward. Cox won. The jury awarded him $1.3 million. Hartford was unable to prove he had arranged the fire.
After the Unsolved Mysteries segment aired, Cox became the subject of renewed social scrutiny in Dallas. Friends noted he was rarely seen at the country club anymore. One acquaintance told D Magazine that after Patsy’s death, Cox had hosted a Murder Mystery party. At the party, Bob Cox was the only guest who guessed that the murderer had hired a hit man.
He was never charged.
Leo Fikes — Former Boyfriend
Leo Fikes was a previous boyfriend of Patsy’s — not the boyfriend at the time of her death, as has sometimes been reported. He and Patsy had dated on and off for several years, with Fikes introducing her to cutting horses — a shared passion that became one of the defining loves of her life. Their relationship ultimately ended because Fikes wanted to marry her and Patsy, after her experiences with Cox, had decided she would never marry again.
Fikes came onto investigators’ radar for several reasons. He had dated Patsy. He knew about her NyQuil habit — one of very few people who did. He ran Fikes Chemical, a restroom sanitizing service, giving him a professional connection to chemical products. And an anonymous caller tipped Gustafson that Fikes had also dated a woman named Linda Donahew — who had been found murdered in her bedroom, stabbed through the neck. Fikes’s business card was found among Donahew’s possessions.
Investigators also discovered that Fikes had made a purchase in summer 1987 at the only outlet in Dallas that sold strychnine. Strychnine was not on the receipt.
Fikes cooperated fully. He passed a polygraph. He participated in the Unsolved Mysteries reenactment. He was not under investigation for Donahew’s murder. Gustafson nonetheless maintained publicly that he had “not ruled out anybody” — including Leo Fikes.
The Ghost Behind the Second Plate
This is the suspect without a name. The person — if there was a person — who sat across from Patsy at that tray of two dinner plates in her bedroom on the last night of her life. Who has never come forward in nearly forty years. Who exists in this case only as an absence.
Tips submitted to the Unsolved Mysteries case file over the years have suggested Patsy may have been seeing a horse trainer from the Arlington area — someone connected to her horse purchases, someone she had asked mutual friends to keep quiet about. Someone who moved in the private, early-morning part of her life that was separate from the museum world and the Dallas charity circuit.
If that person exists — and if they were in that bedroom that night — they have spent forty years saying nothing. Whether that silence is protective or guilty, no one can say.
The Shadow Cases
Lori Ann Williams, 1984.
In September 1984 — three years before Patsy’s death — a twenty-three-year-old woman named Lori Ann Williams died. She had worked at Patsy’s wax museum since high school, working her way up from souvenir saleswoman to office manager and assistant to Patsy herself. She was an honors student, a lieutenant on her high school drill team, a girl whose family said she loved her job so much the entire Wright family attended her wedding.
A month before her death she developed severe abdominal pain and missed three days of work. Her family thought it was the flu. The pain returned. She was hospitalized. Doctors removed her appendix — which proved to be completely healthy. Eleven days later she died. Cause of death: viral pneumonia, a complication of the surgery.
When Patsy died of strychnine poisoning in 1987, Lori’s family and Dr. H. Reg McDaniel — the chief pathologist at Dallas-Fort Worth Medical Center who had treated Lori — immediately began pushing for answers. McDaniel had researched Lori’s symptoms and believed the culprit may have been arsenic. Before she died, Lori had called a family member to say she had taken some cold medicine and something was wrong — almost word for word what Patsy would say three years later.
In September 1989 Lori’s body was exhumed from Southland Memorial Park in Grand Prairie. Toxicology tests on about a dozen tissue samples found no arsenic — but the forensic pathologist performing the examination noted there is a vast spectrum of poisons that could have been ingested and already eliminated from the body years later. The investigation into whether Lori Williams was murdered was not closed.
A 1994 Fort Worth Star-Telegram report quietly noted that the examination of Lori’s exhumed body had found traces of strychnine — but the results were inconclusive. Not enough to act on. But present.
The Wax Museum Fire, 1988.
On September 9th, 1988 — less than a year after Patsy’s murder — the Southwestern Historical Wax Museum burned to the ground. Arson. A four-alarm blaze. The $4 million institution Patsy had devoted her professional life to building was gone.
On September 24th, 1988, private investigator Bill Dear — hired by Patsy’s family to work her still-unsolved murder — was at the ruins of the museum. He spotted a young man combing through the debris, grab a financial ledger from the rubble, throw it into nearby bushes, and run when he saw police watching.
His name was Stanley Lester Poynor.
Stanley Lester Poynor: The Most Tantalizing Thread
Stanley Lester Poynor was twenty-three years old. A drifter. He held jobs for a few months at a time — grocery clerk, pharmacy technician, custodian. He sometimes used a different name. He had at least three different Social Security numbers across his work history. He lived in an upscale Irving apartment complex with units renting for $430 to $635 a month, despite having no stable income. Two weeks before Dear spotted him at the museum ruins, he had enrolled at the Dallas Institute of Funeral Service in Irving and paid $1,125 for his first term.
When investigators eventually arrested Poynor in September 1989 on a burglary charge related to the ledger theft, they found something remarkable. Numerous photographs of Poynor himself, taken at the wax museum — before and after the fire. Evidence of multiple visits, documented in his own personal photos. And hidden in a red laundry basket in his room: a carefully kept collection of newspaper clippings about the chain of events at the wax museum. Patsy’s murder. Lori Williams’ death. The fire. The investigations. All of it. Cut out and saved. Alongside airline tickets to multiple unexplained locations.
Bill Dear characterized Poynor directly as a suspect in all of it — the fire, Patsy’s murder, Lori Williams’ death. He told reporters: “I think anyone who ducks under police lines at 7 o’clock on a Saturday night, takes financial ledgers from a credenza, and then runs when he sees police is someone you might be suspicious of.”
Poynor maintained his innocence. He said the ledger was a souvenir — his favorite exhibit, a depiction of Christ’s Last Supper. He denied any connection to the deaths or the fire. He passed a polygraph test. Gustafson confirmed interest in Poynor’s link to the case but said directly: “As far as the link to Patsy Wright’s death and my investigation of this case, I have nothing concrete.”
The burglary charge was reduced to criminal mischief. A plea agreement was reached. Poynor was released.
Bill Dear never closed his file on Poynor. He kept tracking him. Then, on April 13th, 1991 — a Saturday — Poynor was in Dallas, on Oak Lawn near Rawlins and Throckmorton. A traffic officer was working crowd control for the Azalea Run. Poynor’s car struck the officer, who landed on the hood. Poynor began swerving — apparently attempting to throw the officer off the windshield. The officer fired several shots through the windshield. Stanley Lester Poynor died of gunshot wounds to the head, trunk, and extremities. He was twenty-five years old.
It emerged that he had been wanted in Austin on a felony arson warrant in connection with a church fire.
Bill Dear, who had followed the case for two years, said simply: “I was hoping he wasn’t going to die. I was hoping he was going to live long enough to tell us what we wanted to hear.”
Whatever Poynor knew — or didn’t know — he took it with him.
The Case Goes Cold
Two years after Patsy’s death, in September 1989, the Tarrant County Medical Examiner officially changed the ruling on her death certificate from undetermined to homicide. Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Marc Krouse filed documents stating that a review of the psychological evaluation showed no significant risk of suicide — and that the circumstances, taken together, pointed in one direction. Gustafson’s response was characteristic: “It’s the way I have felt all along. I have always considered it a homicide.”
Patsy’s daughter Leslie, then twenty-three, told reporters: “I’ve always known in my heart it was a homicide. I’m glad they finally said it was.”
In April 1989, the case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries. Tips came in. The phones rang. None of it led to an arrest. Bill Dear wrote himself a letter describing his hunch about who the murderer was and how it could be proved — to be opened once the case was solved. That letter, as far as anyone publicly knows, has never been opened.
The rebuilt museum — reopened in 1990 as the Palace of Wax and Ripley’s Believe It or Not — eventually drew 900,000 visitors a year. The building was new. The business ran. The case, as one 1990 headline put it, was melting into the background.
The file on Patsy Wright has never been officially closed. Arlington Police Department’s cold case unit still maintains it as an open investigation. Modern touch DNA analysis — capable of identifying a person from the skin cells left by simply handling an object — could potentially find something on that NyQuil bottle that 1987 technology could not detect. If the evidence has been properly preserved, the gap between what was possible then and what is possible now is enormous.
Whoever did this has been protected for nearly forty years by the limits of the technology available at the time. Those limits no longer exist.
What This Case Means
Karen Beattie, Patsy’s best friend, told D Magazine: “I feel like she’s sitting up there saying, ‘God, Karen, I’m giving you clues, can’t you figure it out?'”
Patsy Wright was formidable. She was funny. She rode a difficult horse before sunrise and wore a Cinderella gown to charity galas and fought her stepmother in court and won and spent eleven years making sure her children would never have to do the same. She saw through the people who weren’t right and she loved fiercely the ones who were. She bought a Glock because she wasn’t afraid of living alone on thirty acres. She made scrambled eggs at midnight in pink pajamas because she was hungry and tired and had somewhere to be in the morning and there was nobody she needed to perform anything for.
She was, in the truest sense, completely alive.
And someone — who had been inside her life, inside her home, inside the small private details of who she was — decided she wasn’t going to get to where she was going.
The alarm clock went off the next morning. In an empty house. With nobody there to hear it.
The Open Question
Patsy Bolton Wright’s murder remains officially unsolved. If you have any information about this case — anything at all, however small, however long you have been carrying it — the Arlington Police Department cold case unit is still active.
Patsy’s daughter Leslie is out there. Her son Wayne is out there. Her family has been waiting for nearly forty years for someone to decide that what’s right matters more than whatever they’ve been protecting.
It is never too late.
Justice for Patsy Wright.
This case was covered on Crime Clueless in our special two-part episode “The Wax Museum Murder” Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Start with Part 1 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts!
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See you in the next episode of Crime Clueless!
Resources:
Whitley, G. (1989, August 1). The wax museum murder mystery. D Magazine.T H E WAX MUSEUM MURDER MYSTERY – D Magazine
Johnston, J. (1988, January 16). Friends question suicide theory. The Galveston Daily News, p. 14. https://www.newspapers.com/image/10656544/
Johnston, J. (1988, November 6). A vibrant woman, a poisoned nightcap and a lingering ‘why?’ Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pp. 1, 24. https://www.newspapers.com/image/640976317/ & https://www.newspapers.com/image/640944829/
Johnston, J. (1989, August 25). Poisoning link pursued in 1984 death. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pp. 1, 9. https://www.newspapers.com/image/640955521/ & https://www.newspapers.com/image/640955548/
Johnston, J. (1989, October 1). Museum suspect out of jail. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pp. 21, 23. https://www.newspapers.com/image/641555927/ & https://www.newspapers.com/image/641555966/
Johnston, J. (1989, October 5). No poisons found in wax museum secretary’s body. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pp. 15, 16. https://www.newspapers.com/image/640980436/ & https://www.newspapers.com/image/640980453/
Doclar, M. (1991, April 15). Dallas killing complicates museum case. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pp. 19, 21. https://www.newspapers.com/image/642698632/ & https://www.newspapers.com/image/642698669/
Doclar, M., Gauthier, L., & Weist, J. (1989, September 27). Arrest called breakthrough in mysterious wax museum fire. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pp. 18, 22. https://www.newspapers.com/image/640987293/ & https://www.newspapers.com/image/641571879/
Doclar, M. (1989, September 28). More mysteries emerging in wax museum inquiry. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pp. 28, 30. https://www.newspapers.com/image/640989479/ & https://www.newspapers.com/image/640989514/
Nishimura, S. (1989, October 3). Burglary charge ties Lewisville man to three strange incidents connected to museum. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, p. 20. https://www.newspapers.com/image/640977031/
The Midland Reporter-Telegram. (1989, September 28). Museum owner’s death in 1987 ruled murder, p. 3. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1294803807/
The Courier-Gazette (McKinney, TX). (1989, September 13). Body of wax museum worker exhumed, p. 2. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1023088556/
Wieland, R. G. (1991, July 21). Wax museum houses mystery. The Houston Chronicle, p. 136. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1220667728/
Fort Worth Star-Telegram. (1994, October 16). Secretary did show signs of strychnine, p. 302. https://www.newspapers.com/image/644813448/
Fort Worth Star-Telegram. (1997, June 9). Palace of Wax brings the rich, famous close enough to give tourists a thrill, pp. 106–107. https://www.newspapers.com/image/646771715/ & https://www.newspapers.com/image/646771726/
Unsolved Mysteries. (1989, April). Patsy Wright [Television broadcast]. NBC.
Unsolved Mysteries Wiki. (n.d.). Patsy Wright. Fandom. Patsy Wright | Unsolved Mysteries Wiki
Unsolved Mysteries Wiki. (n.d.). Lori Ann Williams. Fandom. Lori Ann Williams | Unsolved Mysteries Wiki
Unsolved.com. (n.d.). The mysterious murder of Patsy Wright [Case gallery and community tips]. Patsy Wright – Unsolved Mysteries
