Alan Masters, 65, a southwest suburban lawyer whose 1989 trial for plotting his wife’s murder exposed widespread corruption and spawned a television mini-series, died Monday, Oct. 9, in the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minn., said a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Before being convicted of charges stemming from the 1982 death of his wife Dianne, Mr. Masters worked his connections to a criminal underworld, dabbling in bookmaking and prostitution operations and cultivating relationships with corrupt cops, according to testimony at his trial.
“He is the one who can put the right public officials in place, the one to make it go, the master fixer,” said one prosecutor during his trial.
Mr. Masters lived in a luxurious southwest suburban home and held parties with guests including some Cook County sheriff’s police officers, and even one or two judges.
He ingratiated himself to law enforcement officials. When he was out of town, a sheriff’s police officer watched his house, and when his porch needed repair, a sheriff’s officer visited with tools to fix it.
But in June 1988, the Palos Township defense attorney was indicted on racketeering, bribery and mail-fraud charges that accused him of conspiring to murder his wife.
Dianne Masters, 35, a member of the Moraine Valley College Board, disappeared March 19, 1982. Her body was found nine months later in the trunk of her yellow Cadillac, which had been sunk in the Sanitary and Ship Canal in Willow Springs.
The volatile nature of the couple’s relationship was widely known, and she had a $100,000 life insurance policy through the college.
In 1989, a federal jury convicted Mr. Masters and two others, Cook County sheriff’s Lt. James Keating and Willow Springs Police Chief Michael Corbitt, of conspiring to kill Dianne Masters and covering it up by allowing the investigation into her disappearance to languish. They were also accused of participating in a variety of bribery and kickback schemes.
A federal appeals court described the three as a “miniature suburban Mafia.”
No one was ever charged or tried for the actual murder of Dianne Masters, although a federal judge ruled in 1991 that there was enough evidence to hold Mr. Masters responsible.
Mr. Masters’ story was dramatized in a made-for-television mini-series called “Deadly Matrimony” that aired in 1992. It was also the subject of the book “Blind Justice” by Ray Gibson, Edie Gibson and Randall Turner.
In 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court declined Mr. Masters’ request to hear an appeal of his conviction.
Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said Mr. Masters became eligible for parole in 1996 but had not received it. She said the bureau’s records show his sentence to have been 20 years.
She said he was transferred to the Federal Medical Center in April from the Pekin Federal Correctional Institution in Illinois.
Mr. Masters is survived by a wife, Janet; two sons, Steven and Douglas; a daughter, Anndra; a brother, Leonard; and four grandchildren.
Services have been held.