The Christmas party for Preferred Personnel, the corporate consulting firm Lowell Amos ran, went on into the early morning of December 10, 1994, at the Atheneum Suite Hotel in Detroit, and Amos and his wife, Roberta Mowery Amos, went up to their suite at four or four-thirty. About four hours later he telephoned his business partner, Bert Crabtree, who had a room in the same hotel, and asked him to come. Crabtree arrived at nine-thirty with a Preferred Personnel employee, Daniel Porcasi. Amos told them that he and Roberta had been using cocaine and that she was dead, and he asked Porcasi to take three things out of the room: a syringe with no needle, a sport jacket and a washcloth. Porcasi did. He, Crabtree and Crabtree's girlfriend packed in a hurry and left the hotel.
Only then did Amos call the front desk. A security officer came up at about ten and notified the police. That afternoon Amos came back to collect what had been kept in the hotel safe, and the officer, Stanley Cann, later testified that when he handed over Roberta's jewelry, Amos held up her Rolex and said, "This is the bulk of the money." That evening Amos drove with Crabtree to Porcasi's house and took back the syringe, the jacket and the washcloth. They were never examined.
His account to the police was that the two of them had used cocaine through the night, that he had snorted it while Roberta had inserted it into her body herself, and that he woke to find her dead. He admitted flushing the cocaine and cleaning up the room before he called security; he said he had not wanted to be charged with possession.
The Wayne County chief medical examiner, Dr. Sawait Kanluen, found no injuries beyond an abrasion on her forehead and two small bruises, no needle marks and no sign that she had ever used drugs. Her blood cocaine level was 3.7, about fourteen or fifteen times the average in overdose deaths. He concluded that she had died of acute cocaine poisoning very soon after the drug entered her body, between four and eight hours before eleven that morning, and that someone else had put it there. Phyllis Good, a state police forensic chemist, found only traces of cocaine on a vaginal swab and none on rectal or oral swabs, but the bed sheet was covered in cocaine residue, most heavily where the body lay. She testified that the stain fit cocaine given in liquid form and an attempt afterward to clean it from the body, and that a needleless syringe could be used to inject a strong solution into the throat or the body. Another analyst, Amy Michaud, found blood, makeup and lip impressions on a pillowcase.
Lowell Edwin Amos, known around Anderson as Ed, born January 4, 1943, had been a General Motors executive in Anderson, Indiana, and briefly a Republican candidate for mayor there. Two days after Roberta died, according to evidence the trial court later admitted, he was in a bar trying to pick up women. Investigators also learned that she had found out shortly before her death about his affair with a woman named Mary Zellinger, that she had told her aunt she meant to divorce him, and that he had told Zellinger he was broke.
The history behind him began in 1979, in Anderson. His first wife, Saundra Heard Amos, 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. Connie Alexander, who lived next door, remembered a loud knocking at one in the morning: Saundra's two children were at her door, and an ambulance stood in the Amos driveway. Anderson police looked into the death, the cause was recorded as indeterminate, and he collected $350,000 in insurance, money that, Alexander said, went into remodeling the house. Within a year he had married Carolyn and moved to Middletown. Carolyn, friends said, fought with him over the policies he had taken out on her life, and in 1988, after she threw him out, he moved in with his mother, Mary Toles. A few weeks later his mother was rushed to the hospital in a stupor, was sent home without a diagnosis and died several days after. Because she was seventy-six there was no autopsy. He inherited more than a million dollars. When Carolyn arrived 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. Nine months later, in 1989, she too was found dead in a bathroom, at their home in Henry County. He said he had brought her a glass of wine while she dried her hair beside a full tub and later found her in the water, apparently electrocuted. The autopsy found traces of Valium and alcohol in her blood but no sign of electrocution. The glass he described turned up rinsed clean in the dishwasher, the coroner thought the body had been moved because she could not have fallen into the position she was found in, and the Indiana pathologist, Dr. Calvin Steussy, recorded intense congestion of the lungs and frothing at the mouth that suggested a blocked airway, though the signs of asphyxia were "minimal and inconclusive." Neither the Indiana coroner nor the Wayne County examiner who reviewed the autopsy could name a cause of death. She left no will, and the insurance paid him $800,000. No charge was brought over any of the three deaths.
He was charged in Detroit Recorder's Court with Roberta's murder. The fight over the earlier deaths went up and down the appellate courts before the jury heard a word. The trial judge first excluded evidence about his mother and first wife and the testimony of a woman, Ruth Loftus, who said Amos had told her he killed Carolyn and would probably kill his next wife. The Michigan Supreme Court reversed the ruling on Loftus in 1996 and told the trial court to take a wait-and-see approach to the rest. A mistrial granted at one stage was reversed by the Court of Appeals. In the end the judge admitted the evidence about Carolyn's death, finding that Amos had made accident the issue and that the two deaths were strikingly alike: in each he was the last to see his wife alive, the woman had been in good health, he found the body, help was called late, the body was cold when it came, and the scene appeared to have been cleaned.
Roberta, unlike the others, left him no windfall, and the prosecution's case was that this time the motive was rejection and money trouble. Roberta had bought a house of her own and wanted him out. Prosecutors argued that he drugged her, put dissolved cocaine into her body once she was unconscious, and smothered her when she began to convulse. Amos testified that he had not killed her. A former Indiana sheriff's detective, Scott Robinett, called to question Loftus's credibility, told the jury that during a break the prosecutor and the officer in charge had tried to intimidate him into changing his testimony; he did not change it. When Amos said that a man who has just found his wife dead does not look at the clock, the prosecutor answered, "That's an experience you've already had once." The judge made her rephrase it as a question.
On October 24, 1996, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder on two theories, premeditation and poisoning, and on November 4 he was sentenced to life without parole. The judge called him a modern-day Bluebeard.
The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed on August 18, 1998, holding that the evidence about Carolyn had been properly admitted and that the evidence was enough for either theory. It agreed with Amos on two points: convicting him twice for one death violated double jeopardy, so the judgment was amended to a single count of first-degree murder on both theories, and the order that he pay thirteen thousand dollars in funeral costs was sent back for a hearing on his ability to pay. A federal court later denied his habeas petition. A Lifetime television film, Black Widower, dramatized the case in 2006. When it came out, his old neighbor Connie Alexander had her own count. "I think he killed more than three people," she said. He was held at the Lakeland Correctional Facility in Michigan and died there on January 5, 2022, the day after his seventy-ninth birthday.
January 4, 1943: Lowell Edwin Amos, known as Ed, is born.
1979: his first wife, Saundra Heard Amos, thirty-six, is found dead in the bathroom of their home in Anderson; the cause is recorded as indeterminate and he collects $350,000 in insurance.
1988: after his wife Carolyn throws him out he moves in with his mother, Mary Toles, who dies weeks later with no autopsy; he inherits more than a million dollars.
1989: Carolyn is found dead in a bathroom at their home in Henry County; no cause of death can be named and the insurance pays him $800,000.
December 10, 1994: Roberta Mowery Amos is found dead in their suite at the Atheneum Suite Hotel in Detroit; the medical examiner finds acute cocaine poisoning.
1996: the Michigan Supreme Court reverses the trial court's ruling excluding Ruth Loftus's testimony.
October 24, 1996: a jury convicts him of first-degree murder on two theories, premeditation and poisoning.
November 4, 1996: he is sentenced to life without parole.
August 18, 1998: the Michigan Court of Appeals affirms the conviction and amends the judgment to a single count of first-degree murder.
2006: the Lifetime television film Black Widower dramatizes the case.
January 5, 2022: he dies at the Lakeland Correctional Facility in Michigan, the day after his seventy-ninth birthday.