Settled in the early 1800s by German farmers, the village of Long Grove, 30 miles northwest of Chicago, had become an ”in” place for wealthy suburbanites by the time Larry and Nola Jean Weaver moved there in 1976. Their new $100,000 home was in the luxury subdivision of Country Club Estates on the outskirts of town.
The Weavers had grown up together in the little town of Camden, Ark., where Nola Jean was a cheerleader and homecoming court member and Larry a basketball and football player at the high school. After graduation in 1961, Nola Jean moved to California with her parents but moved back the following year to marry Larry.
They both chose academic careers, and by the time they moved to Long Grove, Larry had become assistant superintendent for administrative services for the Buffalo Grove-Wheeling School District and Nola Jean a physical education teacher at Elk Grove High. When their new neighbors in Country Club Estates invited them to the annual party at the exclusive Hillcrest Country Club, the Weavers knew they had ”arrived.” The couple took an active part in Long Grove`s community life, which centered around the church where their 8-year-old daughter, Tiffany, attended Sunday school.
On Sunday night, Dec. 4, 1977, the Weavers` bright dream world came to a shocking end.
It was a peaceful night, in contrast to just two days earlier when the Weavers` next-door neighbor, Earl Goodfellow, saw two suspicious-looking men in a green pickup driving slowly by the Weaver house as though they might have been casing it.
Shortly after 1 a.m., the Goodfellows were awakened by a frantic pounding on their front door. It was Nola Jean, clad only in her nightgown, holding Tiffany, sleepy-eyed and wrapped in a quilt, in her arms and with the Weavers` two dogs at her side.
”Call the police and fire department!” she screamed hysterically as Goodfellow opened the door. ”There`s been some shooting and a fire!”
As Nola Jean blurted out more details, Goodfellow dialed the sheriff`s office, which in turn called the Long Grove Volunteer Fire Department. Soon a fire truck was rolling up the Weavers` driveway, but the firemen noted no outward signs of smoke or flames in the totally dark house. A squad car, its red lights flashing, pulled in quickly behind the fire engine, followed soon afterward by four more squad cars.
As the lawmen slipped into the house and checked it room by room, the acrid smell of smoke hit their nostrils. The door to Tiffany`s bedroom was open, but they found the master-bedroom door closed and warm to the touch.
”OK! Firemen inside, on the double,” a lawman barked from the front door. Upon entering the master bedroom, the men found a king-size bed smoldering in the smoky darkness in the middle of the room. It hissed and steamed angrily when the firefighters turned their hand extinguishers on it.
The fire had charred and melted various objects in the room, and ceiling tiles had loosened and fallen to the floor. But all eyes were riveted on the bed that was the center of the fire. Lying on one side of the bed, clad in the remnants of his pajamas, was Larry Weaver, his face partially burned away, his teeth glistening eeriely from his blackened skull.
”Looks like a home invasion,” Sheriff`s Lt. Eugene McGaughey told Lake County Coroner Robert H. Babcox when he came on the scene.
”Poor devil`s burned beyond recognition-over 90 percent of his body, it looks like,” Babcox noted.
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”The wife said he was shot, but you can`t tell by looking at what`s left of him,” McGaughey said.
”That`s for sure. Let`s go talk to her.”
Nola Jean was sitting on a couch in her neighbors` living room, nervously twisting a damp handkerchief in her hands. ”We were awakened about 1 a.m. by the dogs` barking,” she said. ”Larry got up to investigate. He came back and whispered that there were two people in the house. He said, `Honey, get the gun (a .22 caliber rifle he kept in the house) and make a run for it.` ”
She did, she said, but just outside the door, she ran into two men, who wrested the rifle from her. They then called into the house and ordered her husband to surrender. When Weaver appeared, they roughly shoved her back inside and began demanding money. ”Larry said he didn`t have that kind of money, but they wouldn`t believe him,” Nola Jean said, sobbing.
Weaver then told the men he knew where he could lay his hands on some cash, she continued. The older-looking of the two then held Nola Jean in the house while his younger partner left and drove off with Weaver, still in his pajamas. About 15 minutes later, Weaver returned with the younger man, who then took Weaver into the bedroom. ”Then I heard one shot,” Nola Jean said. The younger man then raced into the room where she was being held and shouted to his companion, ”We`d better get out of here!”
As soon as the men fled, Nola Jean said, she awakened Tiffany and ran to the Goodfellow home. ”You know the rest,” she sobbed.
An autopsy performed the next morning after Larry`s identity was established through dental charts revealed he had been shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon and that he was then doused with a flammable liquid and set afire.
At the Weaver house, detectives found no evidence of forced entry, and nothing appeared to have been disturbed or ransacked. Even the papers on Weaver`s desk were in neat piles. If the intruders were after money, they were evidently satisfied none was hidden in the home.
State arson investigators determined that some type of accelerant had been spread on the right side of the bed and ignited and that Weaver was under the covers when he was set afire.
Nola Jean, meanwhile, spent more time with investigators to provide them with more detailed descriptions of the two invaders.
Her detailed descriptions enabled sheriff`s artists to prepare composite drawings of the murder suspects, which were distributed to police agencies throughout the area the following day. Armed with copies of the drawings, a dozen detectives were assigned to question friends, neighbors and relatives of the Weavers in an effort to find anything in the couple`s background that might have precipitated the killing.
Nola Jean also voluntarily submitted to a lie test, but when the test proved inconclusive, she surprised her questioners by refusing to take a second exam on the advice of her attorneys.
Services for Weaver were held that same morning in the First Baptist Church in neighboring Palatine. His remains were then shipped to Magnolia, Ark., where his mother lived, for burial. Nola Jean accompanied the body, and spent the next week there with her mother-in-law. She returned to Long Grove alone, leaving Tiffany with the child`s grandmother.
On Friday, Dec. 16, she went back to work at Elk Grove High, where she had taught for nearly eight years. Shortly after noon, she was summoned from her modern-dance class by two sheriff`s investigators, who told her, ”We have a warrant for your arrest, charging you with the murder of your husband, Larry Weaver.”
Arraigned before Circuit Judge Charles F. Scott, who set bond at $100,000, she posted the required amount and left the courthouse insisting over and over: ”I didn`t do it. I just didn`t do it.”
But the investigators knew otherwise. There were no mystery men. Nola Jean had concocted her story on the basis of her neighbors` report of two strangers driving suspiciously past her house several days earlier.
She had been a suspect from the time Coroner Babcox noted that her husband`s body was found under the covers, indicating he was asleep when the two bullets were fired into his temple. Also important was the absence of signs of forced entry, tampering with doors or windows, ransacking or any struggle.
As for her account of Larry driving off in his pajamas with a 6-foot-2 killer in search of money, detectives found that although the garage was unheated, the engine block of Nola Jean`s blue car was warm, indicating it had been driven a short time before, but Larry`s car was ice-cold.
Could Larry have taken his wife`s car when he went off with one of the killers? But in addition to finding water from freshly melted snow on the driver`s seat floor mat of Nola Jean`s car, investigators noted that the seat was fully in the forward position. Larry, a 6-footer, could not have driven that car with the seat in that position. Furthermore, Nola Jean`s purse and car keys were found on a counter beside the door leading to the garage; she apparently had dropped them there after driving off and back-presumably to dispose of the .22 rifle, which was never found.
And why did Nola Jean`s lawyer suddenly refuse to let her take a second lie-detector test? There were a few discrepancies. On the night of the murder, for example, she said that after hearing gunfire in the bedroom, she awakened Tiffany and fled to the neighbor`s home. But later she said one of the men held her and Tiffany in one room while the other, with the gun, marched her husband into the bedroom and shot him.
Finally, the only footprints in the new-fallen snow noted by the police and the firemen when they arrived at the scene were those of Nola Jean`s and the dogs` leading to the house next door.
As for her motive, investigators learned that Nola Jean was having extramarital affairs with at least two men-her boss at Elk Grove High and her own brother-in-law. It was no secret among her students that the young gym teacher had something going with the school`s athletic director.
Placed under surveillance after the murder, Nola Jean seemed blissfully unaware that a detective was seated behind her on the plane when she accompanied her husband`s body back to Arkansas. The athletic director flew with her, and the two of them were seen nuzzling during the flight to bury Larry.
About six weeks before he was murdered, Larry confided to a female friend that he and Nola Jean had argued violently over her involvement with her younger sister`s husband. The man and his wife were then living temporarily with the Weavers. Larry said he was so angry he beat Nola Jean, who then took out his .22 from the bedroom closet. A struggle over the rifle ensued, and a shot was fired into the ceiling. Several weeks later, police learned, Nola Jean purchased ammunition for the weapon while visiting in Arkansas.
Furthermore, investigators found that Weaver was heavily insured, had liberal employment death benefits, co-owned with Nola Jean a condominium in Florida in addition to their Long Grove home and stood to inherit a considerable sum from his parents. With Larry out of the way, Nola Jean would get it all.
On Oct. 18, 1978, Nola Jean Weaver went on trial for her husband`s murder.
Prosecutor Ann Regan told the jury of six men and six women that the murder was ”the product of adulterous love affairs . . . and resentment built on seven years of discontent.”
Defense lawyer Sam Banks scoffed at the state`s case, saying he would prove Nola Jean`s story that Weaver had been killed by home invaders. ”The police did absolutely nothing to find and locate and prosecute the real murderers,” he told the jury.
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On Nov. 1, after 10 hours of deliberation, the jury found Nola Jean Weaver guilty. On Jan. 3, 1979, Judge John L. Hughes sentenced her to from 40 to 60 years in prison.
Still professing her innocence, Nola Jean appealed her case and on Nov. 6, 1980, got the Illinois Appellate Court to grant her a new trial. ”Evidence was sufficient to find the defendant guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt,” the court said, but it ruled that she did not get a fair trial on two counts: improper references by the prosecution to the jury about her extramarital affairs and failure by the trial judge to poll jurors on whether they had been influenced by media coverage of the murder.
Free on bond, Nola Jean awaited her new trial, scheduled to begin June 27, 1983. On June 9 she stunned everyone by walking into the Lake County Circuit Court in Waukegan to plead guilty as charged.
Judge Harry D. Strause Jr., as surprised as anyone else, asked whether any threats, promises or inducements had been made to move her to admit her husband`s murder. ”There have not been any threats,” she replied in a strong, calm voice. ”It`s just . . . .” At that point, Banks, still her lawyer, cut her off with a gentle touch on her arm.
The charade was over. Under terms of a plea-bargain agreement negotiated with Assistant State`s Atty. Raymond McKoski, Nola Jean was sentenced to 14 years and one day in prison. With credit for time already served, she would become eligible for parole in two years.
Nola Jean served a total of four years and nine months: two years and 11 months at the women`s penitentiary in Dwight, Ill., and then 22 months at the Jessie ”Ma” Houston Community Correctional Center, a halfway house on Dearborn Street, just north of Chicago`s Loop, where she participated in a work-release program, holding an outside job and returning to the center at night. On March 23, 1988, she was released on a three-year parole, to start, at age 44, a new life.