DallasJustice.com, Law offices of Michael Lowe, For a more complete description of the interrogation, check out Dallas Morning News coverage from the day that the jury was shown the interrogation videotape, Kim Sanders explained that the Lord interrogation was intimidation, Sanders also pointed out Thompsons failure to read Ms. Lord her Miranda rights, Michael Lowes Things to Know if You are Being Investigated for a Crime in Texas, Salinas v. Texas: Your Silence During Police Interrogation Does Not Get 5th Amendment Protection, Can Be Used Against You As Evidence Of Guilt To The Jury. Chip Gaines Bought Larry McMurtrys Historic Texas Bookstore. Whats more, she didnt want him to go to Las Vegas for a bachelor party. Thompson testified that Lord had little blood on her hands and that she smelled of cleaning solution, which led him to believe she had washed her hands. . . Was it possible that he thought he was about to lose the woman he loved?. Shearin then asked if she was included in Burnsides will or his life insurance policy. And thats hurtful. No, said Quinton, Thompson hadnt mentioned either of those things. According to news reports and witness testimony of what happened in that interrogation room, Thompson suddenly became aggressive in his questioning, yelling accusations at a weeping Lord, things like You shot him! Thompson, a 21-year veteran of the Police Department, has been a homicide detective since 2006. Patricia Sharpe writes a regular restaurant column, Pats Pick, for Texas Monthly. Dwayne Thompson has spent over 18 years with the Dallas Police Department. Burnside told her that he was under financial stress, having to pay both his mortgage and his income taxes. Shearin was outraged. Thompson stormed out of the room and asked Lundberg to see what he could get out of Lord. Im devastated., Thompson bore down. Why are you doing this to me right now? Lord asked Thompson at one stage during the questioning. He was confident and charming, she said. A uniformed officer walked over and told Thompson that the house belonged to a man named Michael Burnside, age thirty. He said that based on Burnsides victimology, there was no way that a young man with a bright future would put a bullet in his brain simply because his girlfriend was peeved at him. Jaffe said he had been at the house earlier that evening, helping Burnside install a dishwasher while Lord was painting the doors and baseboards, and that he had left before midnight. Comments are moderated and these will not be published. Then, on June 5, his phone rang. Lundberg gently brought up the bloodied towels in the kitchen, asking if she had used them to wipe blood off her body. But Lord wanted her arrest to be permanently removed from her record, which would require her to be no-billed by a grand jury, a finding in which the jurors refuse to indict a suspect, primarily for a lack of evidence. I know verbally from him that he owes the government a lot of taxes, Lord replied. The trial finally began in a federal courtroom in downtown Dallas this past Januarynearly four years after the shooting. Thompson repeatedly asked Lord during the interview why she waited seven minutes to call 911 after trying to reach a friend of Burnsides by phone. Ive never seen anything like it, Sanders said. I wasnt going to leave him., She then told me something she had not mentioned before. She also said that when he got angry, he could be a little scary and that he threw stuff in the house. She would usually ignore him when he got into one of his moods, but this time it had only made him angrier. Lord was released. As he nodded sympathetically, she again talked about how hurt she had been on her birthday. These laws are especially important when those being questioned are already emotionally reeling from the events themselves like Ms. Lord who first dealt with the discovery of her boyfriends body, calling 911 for help, and that loss then to face questioning by police while vulnerable and upset like Lords being questioned by Thompson as if she had committed a crime for several hours. Ill tell you this about Mikey: his motto was I love my life. Every time something worked out, hed be like, I love my life. In fact, Jaffe said, Burnside had used that very phrase that evening because his company was about to bill $70,000 for work it had done in a single week. When Dallas Detective Dwayne Thompson checks out a missing persons apartment and finds it covered in blood, he's launched into one of the strangest cases in his career--a case that he must s Read allWhen Dallas Detective Dwayne Thompson checks out a missing persons apartment and finds it covered in blood, he's launched into one of the strangest cases in his career--a case that he must solve without the victim's body. Although Thompson would not consent to my request for an interview, people who have talked to him say he feels that he has done nothing wrong. Still, Thompson had only a theory. She helped him with his finances, reminding him to pay his bills and to keep his spending in line. In fact, she had purchased the airline tickets for herself, her nieces, and her nephew to go to California thirteen days before the arrest warrant had been filed. There were too many unanswered questions, he said. 4. IMDbPro. Something is definitely not adding up, Thompson thought, as he walked into one of the interview rooms where Brian Jaffe was waiting. He sustained a fatal contact gunshot wound to the right temple. Seriously, does anyone believe this story that Olivia tells about being in the bathroom and hearing something that sounded like glass breaking in the kitchen? She was wearing a blue T-shirt and gray sweatpants, her knees stained with blood. I wondered about the story Jaffe had told Thompson about finding her in the front yard, desperately saying, I wasnt going to leave him. If I discover anything that substantiates what I believe, Im going to charge you with murder., He glared at her for a moment. In a typical suicide, he said, when someone shoots himself in the temple, he points the gun straight at his head and the bullet travels through the brain and exits in a line roughly parallel to the floor. Because that is the only thing that makes sense.. Political career [ edit] In 2014, Thompson ran for election to represent District 10 in the Tennessee House of Representatives, but lost to Republican incumbent Steve McManus. Rastegar ran outside and asked her what had happened. She appeared to be so despondent that a jailer thought she needed to be put on suicide watch. Jaffe and Lord were taken to the station, and Thompson headed inside Burnsides home. Lord was accused of murder countless times, and she always denied it. When Shearin called Lord with the news, she thanked him for all he had done for her, but then she said something else. Maybe, Jaffe speculated, when Burnside and Lord had started arguing, he had declared that he was never going to marry her, which sent Lord into a tailspin and led her to grab the gun. In Texas, both federal and state laws exist to protect people like Hephzibal Olivia Lord from being overwhelmed and mistreated by police during criminal investigations. | Recent Lawyer Listings And now that he had a witness who was going to provide bombshell testimony about what had really happened that night, he was ready to go to trial. In truth, she had called 911 seconds after she had tried to reach Jaffe. (2014) Raised in Ohio, Thompson spent five years in the Army, earning the rank of captain and commanding a military police unit in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. The detective was 47 years old and built like a linebacker at six feet two inches and 230 pounds. Michael Lowe is Celebrating Over 20 YEARS of Service. She said Burnside had been drinking heavily, and at some point, in the midst of the fight, he had walked into the kitchen and shot himself. In this trial, Lord was definitely the underdog. He was not a depressed type of person at all. | Editor And in Cleveland, an argument among friends spins out of control when one of them makes a deadly decision. 1983 claiming that she was wrongfully arrested for a killing that she did not commit, which landed her in jail for nine days. Why did you let my son bleed to death on his own kitchen floor? He told Thompson that his son had had the most positive personality of anyone he had ever met. The idea that she would put a gun to his head and pull the trigger is just unfathomable.. [4] It was a stupid fight., Jaffe paused. She explained that after she had found Burnside, her calls to 911 kept getting dropped due to a weak signal on her cellphone. Burnsides family and friends were caught off guard by the lawsuit. Whos that? Thompson asked, pointing to a man kneeling beside Lord in the front yard. A 9mm Beretta was also on the floor about five feet from where Burnsides body had been. She did her own interviews, speaking, for instance, with a firefighter who said he believed he had accidentally kicked the gun away from Burnsides body. One of his tasks was to take boxes of cold-case files out of the death room, where all homicide files are kept, and haul them to a storage area in city hall. Im willing to accept that Mikey might have totally screwed up. Her parents hired an attorney named Joe Shearin, a former guard for the University of Texas Longhorns who had played in the NFL before becoming one of Dallass most prominent criminal defense lawyers. As Tatia Wilson, one of the City of Dallas attorneys representing Thompson, explained to the jury in her opening statement, Sometimes homicide detectives may make mistakes in their evaluation of the evidence. After the First 48 (2008- ) More at IMDbPro. Sometimes I want to walk inside, thinking he will be there. What this trial is about is whether this detective had probable cause to believe that she did it. Then Schuette began listing all the reasons that would make a detective like Thompson believe Lord had killed her boyfriend. He can go so far as to lie to a suspect to try to obtain a confession. Nor did Burnsides parents invite her to the reception. HEPHZIBAH OLIVIA LORD Dwayne Thompson (I) IMDbPro Starmeter. The judge ruled that there had been probable cause to arrest Lord, though the testimony in the examining trial did little to prove or disprove Lords guilt. And even if he took a shortcut or two, he adds, he didnt hide or invent evidence. Thompson, a 21-year veteran of the Police Department, has been a homicide detective since 2006. She works at a clothing shop, making $14 an hour, far less than what she was earning when she was in the mortgage business. When Dallas Detective Dwayne Thompson checks out a missing persons apartment and finds it covered in blood, he's launched into one of the strangest cases in his career--a case that he must solve without the victim's body. Olivia kept saying, I wasnt going to leave him. Lord was charged with murder a month after Burnsides death, based on Thompsons affidavit, and spent nine days in jail. Dallas Detective Dwayne Thompson and the homicide team investigate the brutal double murders of two friends shot and burned beyond recognition in the trunk of a car. Shearin went to see Brandi Mitchell, a prosecutor with the Dallas County district attorneys office who was in charge of the Burnside case, and claimed that Thompson had perjured himself. On May 11, 2011, in the case of Texas v. Lord, the grand jury returned a no bill. He told the jurors that he didnt believe that Lord had shot Burnside. Of course not, she said. Im innocent, Lord kept saying. Yes. Basically she said, I know the kind of stuff that goes on in Vegas, Jaffe told Thompson. Which brings us to the story this week here in Dallas of Hephzibah Olivia Lord, who sued and won a civil lawsuit against a Dallas police detective for false arrest, reportedly in large part because the jury found that the detective had acted with malice (a legal term here) during his interrogation of Lord after she was arrested on a charge of murdering her boyfriend. Jurors in a civil trial on Thursday got to watch a dramatic video of that tense and aggressive interrogation of Lord, who is now suing Thompson for false arrest in a federal civil trial. Jaffe said he had sped back to Burnsides home, arriving at the same time as the paramedics. . Mitchell realized that the evidence against Lord was weak, but she wasnt prepared to say that Lord was innocent. He often said that victimology was the most overlooked part of a homicide investigation even though it could help explain whether a suspect was guilty or innocent. The jurors, however, werent buying any of it. He first worked in patrol, where he was assigned to some of the citys tougher neighborhoods, and then spent ten years as a detective in the robbery and property crimes division before being promoted to homicide, in 2007. A retired Dallas police officer acting as an expert witness for Lord told the jury there was no evidence that Lord shot Burnside. Thompson formed his hand into the shape of a gun and pointed at his jawline, aiming upward at a 70-degree angle, which infuriated Shearin, who accused Thompson of wildly exaggerating the location and angle of the shot. She has also enrolled in college for the first time. Comments: Editor's Note: Plaintiff will probably file an application for attorney's fees and costs, which will be substantial. They began talking about planning a surprise birthday party in a few weeks for one of their friends and flying to Las Vegas later that summer to attend a bachelor party for another. Self - Detective; 2009-2014 2 eps; Credits. Sipping coffee at a Starbucks one afternoon, he went through various scenarios of what he thinks could have taken place after he left Burnsides home. Why the bottles of cleaning products and the bloody towels? Home She called Thompsons interrogation of her a mental rape and characterized her days in jail as torture. Even now, she said, she felt like an outcast, afraid to go out in public. texasmonthly.com In this interrogation method, its deemed acceptable to manipulate through accusations of guilt through an aggressive protocol of nine steps. Thompson misrepresented any facts or falsified any government documents. They also declared that there was no evidence that Det. West Texans Are Learning What It Means to Live in Bear Country, Jimmy Carters Peanut-and-Egg Taco Made Quite the Impression on San Antonians, The Top 50 Texas BBQ Joints: 2021 Edition, The Campaign to Sabotage Texass Public Schools. In an excited voice, he said that he had been told by his sons next-door neighbor that a neighbor who lived across the streetan attorney named Sheida Rastegarhad information that linked Lord to the killing. We loved our life together.. Lundberg paused again. Had she washed up with towels before the paramedics and police arrived? The officer identified him as Brian Jaffe, a thirty-year-old civil engineer who had been Burnsides best friend since high school. When Michael Burnside was found dead in his Dallas home four years ago, detective Dwayne Thompson decided that the victim's girlfriend, Olivia Lord, had pulled the trigger. The way Lord had described it, she and Burnside were deeply in love, and they had been talking about marriage. In that small house, she mistook the sound of a pistol shot for a glass falling to the floor? Mimi Swartz is a staff writer based in Houston. His voice got even softer. At the end of the interrogation, he had discarded her like trash.. According to Jaffe, Lord overheard the conversation and started to get upset. She told Burnside she was hurt that he would go to the trouble of organizing a friends birthday party when he had done next to nothing for her own birthday a few months earlier. All prosecutors know that almost every murder case contains inconsistent and sometimes contradictory evidence. Sometimes he would think [a gun] was unloaded and he would swing it around, you know, not trying to hurt anybody, just being stupid. She told her parents that Thompson had brutalized her. Lundberg conducted the interview because Thompson had a prior commitment to teach a class at the police academy. If I had killed Michael, then doesnt it make sense that I would have walked away after I had gotten no-billed by the grand jury? A few days after the funeral, Lord called Burnsides brother to ask if she could retrieve some of her belongings from the house. He is one of the most popular detectives in the Dallas Police Departmenta charismatic man, big and boisterous, with a powerful deep voice, says Craig Miller, a former deputy police chief who served as Thompsons lieutenant in the homicide unit in 2010. However, the police may or may not let the person know about this right (remember the experts concerns that Thompson had not told Lord about her right to a lawyer). Lord has just been awarded $800,000 in a jury verdict from a Dallas jury that has found Lord to be the victim of false arrest. Lord called 911, and police came. She was Miss Right as far as he was concerned, Jaffe replied. Lord explained again and again that while she was in the bathroom, her boyfriend shot himself (they had been fighting, he was drunk). Hephzibah Olivia Lord, distraught and sobbing, sat across from Detective Dwayne A. Thompson in the Dallas Police Departments interview room several hours after her boyfriend had died from a gunshot wound to the head. 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