The General Motors executives' Christmas party at the Atheneum Hotel in Detroit ran late into the night in December 1994, and Lowell and Roberta Amos went up to their suite at about 4:30 in the morning. Four hours later he telephoned Bert Crabtree, another executive from the party, in what sounded like a panic. When Crabtree arrived with another guest, Daniel Porcasi, Amos told them Roberta had died in an accident, said he needed to clean up before calling the police, and asked Porcasi to take his sport coat. Driving home, Porcasi looked in the breast pocket and found a small black leather case holding a syringe with no needle and a foul-smelling washcloth. Amos later took the coat back, and its contents were never seen again.
His account to the police was that he and Roberta had used cocaine during sex, that she could not snort it because of a sinus problem and took it internally instead, and that she was still taking it when he fell asleep. When he woke, he said, she was dead. Her body held more than fifteen times a lethal dose. The autopsy found cocaine inside her vagina but none on her skin; there was cocaine on the bed linen, even on the part tucked under the mattress. The forensic scientist Phyllis Goode found lipstick, toothmarks and other makeup on a pillowcase, though Roberta wore no makeup when the police arrived, and the sheets were soiled while her body was scrupulously clean. Detectives concluded that he had washed her before he called anyone.
Lowell Edwin Amos, born January 4, 1943, had risen to plant manager at General Motors and lived in Anderson, Indiana. Without enough to charge him, Detroit investigators put him under surveillance and went into his past. Two days after Roberta died, he spent more than $1,000 on dinner and drinks with two women and slept with them. Once the story was in the papers, several women came forward to say they believed he had drugged them before sex.
The history they found began in 1979. His first wife, Saundra, thirty-six, was found dead in the bathroom of their home; he said she had mixed wine with a sedative, collapsed and struck her head. The cause of death was recorded as indeterminate, and he collected $350,000 in insurance. He soon married Carolyn, who, friends said, fought with him over the large policies he had taken out on her life, and when he would not cancel them she threw him out in 1988.
He moved in with his mother, Mary Toles. A few weeks later she was rushed to the hospital in a stupor; no diagnosis was found and she was sent home, and several days after that she was dead. Because she was seventy-six, there was no autopsy, and the death was put down to natural causes. He inherited more than a million dollars. When Carolyn arrived at the house after he phoned her the news, he was loading his belongings into his car, and he told her he did not want people to know he had been living with his mother.
Carolyn let him move back in. Nine months later she too was found dead in her bathroom. He said he had brought her a glass of wine while she was blow-drying her hair beside a full bathtub, and later found her in the water, apparently electrocuted. No cause of death was ever settled. The glass he described was not in the bathroom; it turned up rinsed clean in the dishwasher. Carolyn left no will, and the insurance paid him $800,000.
He was arrested for Roberta's murder, and a 1994 change in Michigan law let the prosecution put the three earlier deaths before the jury. Roberta, unlike the others, left him no windfall, and prosecutors built their case on rejection instead. She had already bought a house of her own and had told friends and family she wanted him out of her life. Their theory was that he gave her wine laced with two crushed sedatives, injected dissolved cocaine into her vagina once she passed out, and smothered her with a pillow when she began to convulse.
On October 24, 1996, the jury convicted him of premeditated murder and murder by poison, treated as separate counts of first-degree murder, and on November 4 he was sentenced to life without parole. His appeal was rejected in 1998. No charge was ever brought over Saundra, Carolyn or his mother. A Lifetime television film, Black Widower, dramatized the case in 2006. He was held at the Lakeland Correctional Facility in Michigan and died there on January 5, 2022, the day after his seventy-ninth birthday.