TV & VIDEO - May 6, 1987

In an interview from his prison cell, the Rev. Thomas Bird--a Lutheran minister convicted of killing his wife and plotting to kill his former lover’s husband, and the subject of the CBS TV movie “Murder Ordained”--said the woman he thought he loved turned out to be a “dragon.” Bird told the Kansas City Star that he and his former church secretary, Lorna Anderson Eldridge, were lovers, but only after their spouses died. “I rose up as a knight in shining armor and felt that she was being mistreated and needed my help,” he said. Bird said the movie cannot be authentic: “If Lorna has not talked to them and I have not talked to them . . . where did they get those scenes? The bottom line is they’re fiction.” Bird argued that the film should not be shown before he has exhausted his appeals.