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The Other Woman
Dec. 31, 2005
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Dr. David Stephens was having an affair with a
nurse named Stephanie, who later became his
second wife. (CBS/48 Hours) |
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Quote
"She knew when she married my father he was sick. I
don't think that he died quick enough for her, is what
the problem was.”
Kristen Stephens
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(CBS) For Kristen Stephens, voices of her father, Dr.
David Stephens, bring back a lifetime of memories and
voices from the past.
But Kristen could never have imagined how it all would
end.
“How can this happen to an everyday apple-pie family,”
she says. “There are the kind of things you read about
in the headlines or see on TV. These types of things
don't happen to you. And I just can't fathom how one
person can have such a huge impact on an entire family.”
She’s talking about Stephanie Stephens, her stepmother,
whom Kristen says tore her family apart and murdered her
father.
“I hate her. I wish her nothing but ill will,” says
Kristen. “I think she is an evil person.”
“I’m a good person. I care a lot about other people, and
those people that are closest to me know it,” says
Stephanie. “It’s just, unfortunately, the bad decisions
that I’ve made have been public folly.”
But in the sleepy town of Hattiesburg, Miss., what
happened to this prominent surgeon was the stuff that
scandals are made of. Correspondent Harold Dow reports.
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Both Stephanie and David were married when they first
met. She’d landed a nursing job at the heart clinic Dr.
Stephens had founded. For him, Hattiesburg was home for
more than a decade. He had been married to wife Karen
for 34 years, and they had two children: Kristen and
Allen.
Before long, Stephanie, a married mother of two
daughters, says she began to fall for the man behind the
surgeon’s mask: “We both felt like we were in love and
talked about it. And neither one of us were willing to
leave our partners.”
The couple began an affair and their secret trysts
continued for years – until their affair was discovered
in 1995, when Stephanie decided to call Dr. Stephens’
house.
“My mother had answered the phone,” recalls Kristen, who
says that her mother suspected her husband was cheating,
but didn’t know until then, with whom. Now, she was
devastated. “She got a gun, then she ran out into the
driveway with it in her mouth and called his name,
wanting him to turn around and look at her -- to see how
desperate she was that she could not tolerate him
leaving her. And she tripped and the gun went off.”
Karen Stephens was rushed to the hospital with a gunshot
wound to the head. For three months, she lived in a
coma, until one night, she died. It was ruled a suicide.
“I knew that it was very important that if I wanted to
keep my father, I needed to let him know that I forgave
him for that,” says Kristen. “And I couldn't be angry
with him, because I knew from his voice, from the words
that he used to talk to me about it, that he felt
enormously guilty.”
Stephanie says she felt guilty, too: “I did contribute
to her death by having an affair with a married man, and
the consequences that go along with that … It was
several months before I could look at myself in the
mirror! It was painful.”
But she and David seemed determined to move on. Months
later, right in front of the Stephens’ home, where Karen
had shot herself, the couple were married. “I thought it
was too soon,” says Kristen. “I accepted the marriage,
but it didn’t mean I had to like Stephanie.”
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Stephanie says she was a loving wife, and stuck by her
new husband, even when he fell seriously ill in the
summer of 2000.
“He was diagnosed with Hepatitis C and was in liver
failure … And was on the liver transplant waiting list.
And he also had diabetes,” says Stephanie. “The thought
of having a long-term illness to a surgeon is
unthinkable. He talked about not wanting to go through
having a liver transplant.”
“She didn't care how he died, as long as he was dead,”
says Kristen, who claims that Stephanie never loved her
father - only his money.
On May 1, 2001, Kristen discovered that her father had
died in his sleep. “I was extremely shocked that he had
died,” says Kristen, who left her home in North Carolina
and rushed to Hattiesburg, suspecting foul play. “When I
entered the bedroom, I knew immediately, she’d done
something to him.”
She says Stephanie was acting strangely: “On the bed
were all of my father’s financial documents. Who would
be reading that sort of stuff, not even 24 hours after
their husband died?”
”There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think of
him,” says Stephanie.
But Kristen believes Stephanie is responsible for her
father’s death: “I shoved her up against the wall, and I
stared her right in the face and I said, ‘You killed my
mother...and you killed my father...and I hope you rot
in hell, you bitch!’”
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David Stephens was chief of surgery at Hattiesburg’s
Forrest General Hospital. He was on the board there, and
at the university in town.
Stephanie admits she is guilty of adultery, but not of
murder: “Just because people don’t like me, doesn’t make
me a killer.”
In fact, Stephanie says her life has been like a Greek
tragedy. Soon after she married David Stephens in 1996,
she was crippled in a car crash. After Stephens’ death,
the dream house they built together was robbed.
And now, with Kristen Stephens contesting her father’s
will, Stephanie says it’s hard to make ends meet. She
has no car, and no phone. But it’s been the loss of her
friends that’s hurt the most.
“The truth keeps me going. That, and my daughters,” says
Stephanie, whose daughters live nearby with her first
husband. Krystal, 16, is Stephanie’s only real link to
the outside world. “They’re the reason that life goes
on. It’s hard to stay focused on a reason to live.”
Stephanie says that before David died, he was feeling
the same way. Even with almost a million dollars in a
retirement fund, she says they worried about their
future: “It was tough. We had gone from, you know,
making a full surgeon’s salary to disability.”
By the spring of 2001, David was weak and disoriented -
and rarely slept through the night. On the night of May
1, Stephanie says he tossed and turned for hours, and
fell asleep around dawn.
“I woke up and when I sat up in bed, I saw him. He was
purple in the face and I got up and ran around the side
and pulled the covers back, and he was blue and not
breathing,” recalls Stephanie. “It was obvious he was
dead and had been dead. He was cool. I just laid there
and cried. Put my head on his chest and cried.”
Coroner Butch Benedict was on the scene: “When we first
got there, it appears to be that he died in his sleep.”
David was lying on his back, arms crossed on his chest,
his insulin pump strapped to his side. Benedict says he
thought he had an open and shut case, until Stephanie
opened her mouth and seemed in a hurry to remove the
insulin vials from the pump.
This made Benedict suspicious. When he ran blood tests
on the body, he said “there were chemicals in his body
that shouldn’t be there.” He contacted Hattiesburg Det.
Rusty Keyes, who started digging deeper into the case.
“The fact is that he died, whether accidentally or by
his own hand, that’s a question I’ll never know the
answer to,” says Stephanie, who claims that he was ill
and depressed at the time of his death.
“He was not depressed. Stephanie wanted people to think
my father was very sick because it was convenient for
everyone to think he was very sick, because they
wouldn’t question when he died,” says Kristen, who plans
to help Keyes unmask a murderer.
“Stephanie wanted to live the life of a socialite. She
had the fancy house. She had the nice cars, the best
clothes,” says Keyes. “She wanted it easy. She wanted it
through Dr. Stephens’ hard work … This man was murdered,
and I was going to prove how.”
“The time that I spent with David was so good that it's
hard to deny that that was the best years of my life,”
says Stephanie Stephens, who insists she has no idea how
her husband died next to her in bed. “You never prepare
yourself for when you wake up and your husband’s dead.”
But Kristen, David’s daughter, doesn’t buy her story:
“She knew when she married my father he was sick. I
don't think that he died quick enough for her, is what
the problem was.”
Kristen says Stephanie was counting on people assuming
David Stephens died of natural causes and never thought
coroner Butch Benedict would do a blood test on the
body.
“There was a chemical in his blood that was usually
given by an anesthesiologist,” says Benedict, who
discovered Etomidate, an anesthetic, in his system. “So
where did that drug come from because it should not be
in his system?”
“First, we had to find out how he could have gotten this
etomidate in his system. That’s all we had,” says
Hattiesburg Det. Rusty Keyes. “She [Stephanie] didn’t
have any idea how this drug got into his system. and she
didn't even know what the drug was.”
But Stephanie allowed police to search the house, and
Keyes says he discovered some interesting things. “I
found that he was a diabetic, and that he was on an
insulin pump,” says Keyes. “It was obvious that we had
to exhume Dr. Stephens, to prove exactly how he died.”
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More tests produced more questions. There was another
drug in Stephens’ body, called Atricurium, used to relax
muscles during surgery while patients are on life
support.
But without life support, Keyes says it will “totally
paralyze your heart, your lungs, and you will die.” In
fact, he says these drugs act so quickly that David
couldn’t have possibly injected himself and cleaned up
afterwards.
“That told me lots that somebody cleaned up, so then I
knew then that I had a homicide,” says Keyes, who also
discovered a piece of paper – one that said that every
year on May 1, David Stephens’ Metlife pension fund
mailed him an option to cash out for almost a million
dollars. David had always signed the form, checking the
box that declined to cash out.
But in 2001, Keyes noticed that David Stephens’
signature was on the form, and the cash out box was
signed. The form was dated April 30, the day before he
died. On that date, Metlife hadn’t even mailed the form
out yet.
“Somebody wanted his money,” says Keyes. “Somebody
wanted to continue living the lifestyle they were
accustomed to.”
Part II: The
Other Woman
June 30, 2004
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Did Stephanie Stephens murder her husband or did
he commit suicide? (CBS/48 Hours)
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Quote
"If I was so money hungry, it would have been much
easier to just let him die from his illness, and inherit
the money that way vs. trying to kill him. I mean, that
just doesn’t make any sense."
Stephanie Stephens
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(CBS) While digging for evidence, Det. Rusty Keyes
uncovered a possible motive. Now, he had more than just
a homicide. He had a prime suspect: Stephanie Stephens.
“She wanted money. She wanted the nice cars. But she
didn't wanna work for 'em. She wanted it given to her.
And she saw that with Dr. Stephens,” says Keyes. “She
started spending money at a clip after his death.”
Stephanie was coping well with the grief of losing her
husband. So well, in fact, that she married again a year
later –- to a handyman named Chris Watts.
“In the month of June of 2002, when she remarried, she
received an $80,000 annuity that they spent in four
weeks,” says Keyes.
Stephanie admits that her behavior was reckless, but she
insists it actually shows how devastated she was that
the love of her life was gone: “A bad decision. He was
into drugs, milking me for money. I got myself tangled
up into that by my own bad judgment.”
And she says it was never about the money: “If I was so
money hungry, it would have been much easier to just let
him die from his illness, and inherit the money that way
vs. trying to kill him. I mean, that just doesn’t make
any sense.”
Stephanie also says she was so shocked when she found
out how her husband died that she researched the drugs
that killed him -- and the registered nurse found
something investigators failed to consider. What she
found out is that the amount of time it takes the drugs
to work depends on how they’re given.
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48 Hours did some investigating of its own, and it turns
out that Stephanie may be right. We asked Dr. Alan
Lisbon, an anesthesiologist at Harvard Medical School
and Boston’s Deaconess Hospital, to show us how the
drugs that killed Dr. Stephens work in surgery.
It takes 40 seconds to put a patient asleep if it’s
intravenously given. However, Lisbon says if it’s given
through an insulin pump under the skin, “the absorption
of that drug would be much, much slower so that you
wouldn’t see effects of the drug for at least 5, 10,
maybe even 15 minutes.”
That means it would have been possible for David
Stephens to give himself a lethal dose of these drugs
through his insulin pump, and still have time to clean
up afterwards.
In September 2002, 15 months after her husband died,
Stephanie Stephens was arrested and charged with murder.
In a town rocked by scandal, Stephanie’s lawyer, Ray
Price, says his client is the victim of that hate. But
prosecutor Keith Miller says her story can be summed up
with another word – greed.
“One of the seven deadly sins. That got her,” says
Keyes.
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More than two years after David Stephens’ death, his
young widow, Stephanie, is about to stand trial for
murder.
Her parents and older daughter, Krystal, are trying to
help her stay strong. But Prosecutor Keith Miller and
Det. Rusty Keyes believe they can prove murder to a jury
beyond a reasonable doubt.
“She’s the only one that was with him for the 24 hours,
the last 24 hours of his life, and he shows up with
Atrucurium and Etomodate in his system,” says Keyes.
For Stephens’ daughter, Kristen, moving on means seeing
justice served. “I’m nervous, but also a little bit
relieved that soon it will be over and we can move on,”
she says.
Prosecutors begin by telling the jury that Stephanie’s
lust for money, her expertise as a nurse and behavior
after her husband David died lay out like a roadmap to
murder.
But defense lawyer Ray Price warns jurors not to be
distracted by twists and turns in the road, and that the
case is a witch hunt to frame Stephanie for killing her
husband, when the doctor really killed himself. Price
knows even the possibility of suicide could raise
reasonable doubt with the jury.
After Keyes tells his story on the stand, Price goes on
the offensive. He argues that Det. Keyes ignored medical
records that showed how sick David Stephens really was
-- and other leads that suggest he may have committed
suicide. Price also tells Keyes that David was in
therapy for depression, though his therapist declined to
testify.
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Prosecutors, however, are about to stun everyone in
court. They say Stephanie actually admitted killing her
husband and they have three witnesses to prove it.
The first witness is Karen Burnette, a friend of
Stephanie and Chris Watts, who attended their Las Vegas
wedding just a year after David Stephens died. It was
there, Burnette says, when Stephanie told her that David
said he wanted to die and asked his wife to help him.
“She told me that she injected him with two sedatives
and a heart medication,” says Burnette.
In defense, Price points out that Burnette should be on
trial herself – for stealing items from Stephanie’s
house. It’s a claim that Burnette denies, even though
her house was robbed, and some of the stolen items were
recovered from a storage locker registered to Burnette.
Price thinks Burnette made a deal with the state to
testify against Stephanie in return for immunity.
Burnette’s husband, John, was also asked to testify –
for being a witness in Stephanie’s confession in Las
Vegas. But he takes the Fifth Amendment.
And finally, the state wants Stephanie’s current
husband, Chris Watts, on the stand. But he’s in jail,
with troubles of his own.
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Kristen Stephens has been waiting for two years to tell
the court about the father she loved – and she wants to
make sure the jury knows just how she lost him: “If
someone were to tell me that my father committed
suicide, I wouldn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible
having known my father for that ever to be an option. I
don’t care what kind of evidence you have … My father
would have never committed suicide.”
But Price has a bombshell witness whose testimony might
set Stephanie free – someone who claims that David
Stephens was a classic suicide risk.
Dr. Gerald O’Brien, a psychologist brought in to review
the case, says warning signs were everywhere: “He had a
terminal illness. He also had a history of drinking
regularly. The records indicate that his grandfather
either attempted or committed suicide.”
But what’s most striking, O’Brien says, is the date
David died: May 1, 2001 –six years to the day after his
first wife, Karen’s, funeral.
Now, Stephanie and her lawyer have to make a critical
decision -- whether the jury should hear from her
directly.
“I have nothing to hide and I think people want to hear
my side of the story,” says Stephanie. But she’s acting
strangely. She seems sedated. “I had such a rough night
last night, not sleeping, with my leg hurting.”
“She wanted to tell her story,” says Price. “We just
couldn’t take the risk.”
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As the lawyers offer closing arguments, Stephanie can
only watch and wait for her fate to be decided.
After only 90 minutes, the jury comes back with a
verdict. The judge’s words hit the courtroom like a
shockwave: “Ms. Stephens, you have ended a life. The
court hereby sentences you to life in prison.”
Stephanie Stephens will not be eligible for parole for
30 years. “Never thought it would happen,” says
Stephanie. “No … I was honestly shocked. I told this
before… I had not prepared for the worst. I had
prepared, we had prepared to win.”
She may have lost the trial, but she defiantly says she
will never lose hope: “I’ve been pushed around and
talked about and had all kinds of bad things said about
me. It hurts, but I manage OK.”
Although Kristen Stephens will never regain what she
lost, she feels this just may be the next best thing:
“Justice has been served … My mom and dad are here, and
I just feel they were right here with me.”
Stephanie Stephens says she’s working on appealing her
murder conviction. By the time she becomes eligible for
parole in 30 years, she will be 65.
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Since 48 Hours first brought you this story in January,
Kristen Stephens has given birth to her second child --
a girl she named for her mother, Karen. You may recall
that she named her son David in memory of her murdered
father.
As for Kristen's stepmother, Stephanie, she's planning
to appeal her murder conviction. As it now stands, by
the time she comes up for parole in 40 years, Stephanie
Stephens will be 65.
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