A Mysterious Case of Poisoned Relations : Murder: A Dana Point couple’s dark secrets came to light only after wife’s death by cyanide.

DANA POINT —  She was a lively, gregarious woman who doted on her son, did her own car repairs and plunged selflessly into the world of public education. He, though polite, was a bookish, self-absorbed man who held a keen interest in computers and exuded an intellectual arrogance.

Janet L. Overton, an 11-year trustee of the Capistrano Unified School District, had lots of friends. On occasion she would show her appreciation of the district’s bus drivers by delivering them doughnuts.

Richard K. Overton, an itinerant college lecturer and business consultant, knew few people well and was jealous of his wife’s celebrity in the community. One family friend said that Richard and Jan wouldn’t replace the dilapidated refrigerator at their Dana Point home because of a disagreement over which one should pay for it.

Jan’s and Richard’s mutual interests in computers seemed to be one of the few pursuits they shared. Yet, beneath what many saw, the Overtons had something else in common: Both clung to deep secrets about their marriage and personal lives.

Interviews and court documents unsealed last week show that the Overtons’ 19-year marriage was wracked with discord. There were money problems. Richard and Jan did not sleep together. There was infidelity.

It all ended when Jan Overton collapsed suddenly and died one Sunday morning, Jan. 24, 1988, a day that she and her son, Eric, were to go whale watching on a boat with family friends.

Now, nearly four years later, the question is whether 63-year-old Richard Overton--as a grand jury has charged--murdered his 46-year-old wife, poisoning her with a lethal dose of cyanide.

Defense attorney Robert D. Chatterton of Orange has declined to discuss the case, and has just begun to develop his defense for the trial, set to open Jan. 27.

Chatterton said only, “He’s not guilty.” Overton, who remains free on $250,000 bail, declined to comment.

Authorities have spent three years probing the death, one of the longest investigations in the history of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Detectives have culled three locations for evidence, interviewed dozens of people and examined how the vivacious school board member could have ingested the cyanide that killed her.

The intrigue of it all has left friends and acquaintances of the Overtons alternatively puzzled, frustrated and angry.

“I think I’ve read this whole thing in Agatha Christie,” said Hugh J. Scallon, a Dana Point attorney whom Janet Overton once hired. “. . . This is an incredible case.”

Affidavits filed by investigators in support of search warrants indicate that Jan Overton’s $100,000 inheritance from her deceased mother and Richard Overton’s suspicions that she had affairs with two other men may be presented as motives for her slaying.

The affidavits, unsealed last week, also suggest allegations that Richard Overton poisoned Jan over many years with toxic levels of selenium, an element necessary for humans in trace amounts but potentially lethal when mixed in certain compounds.

What court documents do not say explicitly is that Jan Overton’s death--indeed, aspects of the last months of her life--remain a macabre mystery:

Hers is the story of an otherwise cheerful woman who was terrorized during those final months by agonizing dehydration, which defied medical diagnosis, and lesions so painful that the friction of her clothes was almost unbearable. It is the story of how the Orange County coroner’s office was unable to discern the cause of her death for 11 months--long after her body had been cremated.

Also unanswered by court documents is why Richard Overton was not prosecuted in 1973--even though, according to a sheriff’s investigator’s report, he had admitted to authorities that he poisoned his then-wife, Dorothy. The records show that 15 years later, the recollections and suspicions of Dorothy Boyer would spur investigators to begin viewing Jan Overton’s death as murder.

For Jan Overton’s friends, one thing was certain when they learned that she had died: It couldn’t have been suicide.

“No way,” said Linda Kroner, a former Capistrano Unified administrator who now is vice chancellor for human resources at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. “ . . . The thing she wanted most in life was to hand her son (Eric) his high school diploma. And she didn’t make it.”

Kroner said that Jan Overton had already arranged with colleagues on the school board to be the trustee who would hand each graduating Dana Hills High School senior a diploma at the conclusion of Eric’s senior year. The preparation did not surprise friends, who were accustomed to Jan’s endless doting over Eric, now 20. Even during Eric’s teen years, mother and son were constant companions: They went to football games together on Sundays; they worked together on his van; they were to watch the whales the Sunday that she died.

Kroner recalled vividly Jan Overton’s “unexplained and unbelievably terrible illness. It was just awful to watch her fall apart, in lesions. . . . I can remember like yesterday the first episode.”

That was in late February, 1987--almost 11 months before Jan Overton would drop dead.

Kroner, who herself had been hospitalized in February, 1987, said that Jan called to see how she was doing and ended up describing her own discomfort. “She said, ‘I have some funny sores and I can hardly move,’ ” Kroner recalled. “She was puzzled, but she wasn’t worried yet.”

After Jan Overton’s physician in San Juan Capistrano, Dr. Bernard Huss, was unable to pinpoint what was causing her internal and external lesions, Kroner and other close friends, including Carole Bailey, urged her to seek other treatment.

“Linda and I kept saying, ‘Go get a second opinion. Get a third opinion,’ ” recalled Bailey, who remains an assistant superintendent for the Capistrano Unified School District. “She was hobbling around on crutches. . . . She was in such pain and in such misery. It just made you sick.”

Later that year, Jan Overton on two occasions checked herself into the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla. More tests, more doctors--but still no diagnosis. When Jan died, Kroner said, “I was kind of angry. They had taken all these tests. Why couldn’t they find it?”

Based on court documents that have surfaced so far, it appears unlikely that Richard Overton would now stand accused of murdering his third wife, Jan Overton, were it not for the emergence of his first wife, Dorothy Boyer.

Already, Boyer’s credibility and her motives for coming forward are being questioned, mostly in private, by those who dispute that Overton could be a murderer.

It was Boyer who suggested to authorities in July, 1988, that Jan Overton’s death may have involved foul play, according affidavits by investigators. Richard Overton, Boyer said, had tried to poison her a decade earlier.

According to investigators, Boyer said that Overton, with whom she helped raise four children, had tried to “murder me through a process of slow poisoning” after they divorced in 1969. She claimed that Overton broke into her house in the early 1970s and spiked her food and drink. Investigators determined subsequently that Boyer’s shampoo, milk and coffee all contained selenium.

Boyer’s complaint was documented at the time by the Sheriff’s Department, officials said. According to the sheriff’s investigator who examined Boyer’s complaint in 1973, Richard Overton confessed to having tried to poison Boyer and agreed to seek psychological counseling. He was not charged with poisoning her, and officials with the district attorney’s office and the Sheriff’s Department said last week that they were unable to explain why.

Nevertheless, court documents show that after Boyer came forward in July, 1988, investigators began focusing on Richard Overton as a suspect in Jan’s death. Later, they would speculate in sworn statements that Overton, as he had allegedly done to Boyer, tried to poison Jan Overton with selenium. The sores, rashes and lesions that afflicted her, investigators said, were “consistent” with selenium poisoning.

Toxicologists say that the symptoms apparently evident in Jan Overton--including the lesions--could be caused by selenium or a number of other substances or maladies. Dr. Philip Edelman, medical director of the Poison Center at UC Irvine, predicted that the Overton trial will feature “a battle of (forensic) experts.”

In any event, Boyer’s role in jump-starting the investigation of Richard Overton did not end with the tips she passed on in July, 1988. The following month she brought investigators potentially important physical evidence.

After visiting Overton’s house with one of their daughters, Boyer said, she found in Richard Overton’s desk drawer a woman’s eye-liner, rubber gloves, a selenium rectifier and a syringe. Tests found that the eyeliner contained selenium, according to affidavits by investigators.

According to their divorce documents, Boyer’s and Overton’s marriage dissolved in 1969 after she learned that Overton, while still married to her, had secretly married another woman with whom he had a child.

That other woman, Caroline Hutcheson, who knew Overton as Richard Halderman, got an annulment just before Boyer’s divorce. The Times has also learned that Hutcheson was convicted in April, 1988, of trying to kill her second husband and is serving an eight-year prison term at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco.

Richard Overton has since married a fourth time, to Carol Townsend of Laguna Niguel.

Boyer, several months after alerting investigators in July, 1988, of her suspicions regarding her ex-husband’s possible role in Jan Overton’s death, went to court to collect $100,000 in back child and spousal support that she said Overton owed her. She also filed a sworn declaration detailing her purported fears of Overton and his alleged poisoning of her in the early 1970s.

However, Superior Court Judge Donald E. Smallwood awarded Boyer only about $10,000. Included in the evidence Smallwood reviewed were contentions that Boyer had maintained amicable ties with her ex-husband and had shown no fear of him.

Boyer, reached on Friday, said she met occasionally with Overton over the years only to collect what child support checks he’d give her.

Said John K. York, an attorney based in Orange who represented Overton in 1989, when Boyer sought the $100,000: “I’ve always found him (Richard) to be very honest with me, very forthright. He’s a true gentleman. . . . Everything he told me would ultimately prove true.”

In February, 1989--13 months after Jan Overton’s funeral--authorities revealed that she had died of cyanide poisoning.

“It’s still hard to believe Janet is gone,” Richard Overton told a Times reporter on Feb. 23, 1989. “Now this comes along. It’s really just impossible to believe.”

After having first attributed Jan Overton’s death to natural causes, “pending investigation,” an amended death certificate, dated Dec. 21, 1988, said she died because of acute cyanide intoxication. The second round of autopsy tests, performed on body samples that had been frozen, also found levels of selenium.

Why did it take so long for the Orange County coroner’s office to reach that conclusion?

Robert H. Cravey, chief forensic toxicologist for the coroner’s office, said that autopsies do not routinely test for the presence of either cyanide or selenium. The presence of those substances would be sought, he said, at the request of an investigator or if the corpse smelled peculiar.

In this instance, investigators in January, 1988, had no reason to suspect that Jan Overton had been poisoned with cyanide or selenium. And, said Cravey, not everyone can detect the bitter-almond smell of cyanide.

“It’s genetic,” Cravey said. “All people can’t smell cyanide.”

Now that Richard Overton has been charged with murder, a number of the couple’s acquaintances have told The Times that Jan Overton was unhappy in her marriage, that she wanted to prevent Richard from sharing in a $100,000 inheritance, that Richard was jealous and suspected her of being unfaithful.

Moreover, a handful of her friends said that Jan Overton organized her own data-processing business in 1986 or 1987 with the intention of enhancing her financial independence and leaving Richard. A check of Richard Overton’s employment history shows that he has lectured at Cal State Long Beach and USC. He also worked as a computer specialist at Hughes Aircraft Co. in Fullerton during 1982 and 1983.

One close friend of Jan Overton said that the reason she retained Scallon, the Dana Point lawyer, was to help her shield the $100,000 inheritance from Richard. Said Scallon: “The only thing I can say is, I wrote a will for her. I think it was in 1986 or so.”

Jan Overton’s mother died of a heart attack in 1986, leaving an inheritance to her three daughters.

There also are indications that Janet Overton put to immediate use a portion of the $100,000. Friends say that she used some of the money to pay for a new roof and a paint job for the Dana Point home; and, she bought four Rams football season tickets at Anaheim Stadium, located in the end zone.

One longtime acquaintance of Richard Overton said that although he wants to give him “the benefit of the doubt” regarding the murder charge, he nonetheless believed that Richard harbored resentments toward Jan.

Russell S. Burkett, a conservative community activist, said that he and Richard Overton were members of an informal breakfast group that used to meet at Molly’s Cafe in San Juan Capistrano. Burkett said that Overton, over his usual order of oatmeal, toast and decaffeinated coffee, would relay tidbits and suspicions of skulduggery within the Capistrano Unified School District.

“I used to hang around with Richard, because Richard would come over to Molly’s and have breakfast there,” Burkett said. “. . . He used to confide in me lots and lots of little pieces of dirt from the district.”

Burkett said he found Overton to be “a technical person. An introverted scholar. Fluent in Russian and Spanish. . . . He communicated with Russian scholars and computer people. . . . He had a good grasp of esoteric language. . . . He’d talk about the news, what was happening. If you triggered him with some topic, boom, he was right into it.”

During the occasional rough and tumble of cafe conversation, Burkett said, Overton betrayed “that little built-in chip on his shoulder--that he was better.”

As for the crippling lesions that Jan Overton was suffering during the last months of her life, Burkett recalled that Richard “said it was the darndest thing. . . . He seemed to be rational about it. Very calm. . . . He’s very controlled. He would be an ideal chess player.”

Burkett said that although Richard Overton “detested” attending school board social functions with Jan, he also “enjoyed it, because he could pick up these pieces of dirt.”

Did Richard Overton, holder of a doctorate degree in psychology, resent the popularity and celebrity enjoyed by Jan, who did not hold an undergraduate degree?

“I would say definitely, he resented it,” Burkett said. “He felt that he was smarter than his wife. . . . He was just amazed that she could be elected, that she could be popular, and that she could be this commanding, progressive presence in the district.”

Consequently, Burkett said, he was not surprised that just a few months after Jan’s death, Richard told him that he wanted to seek her seat on the school board in the fall, 1988, election. Overton scripted this “personal note” that accompanied his campaign biography:

“I am a grandfather who loves his family and his country. I am a businessman who demands economy. Thanks in part to my wife, Jan, I understand--and can improve--the inner workings of our schools. To help our children and our Nation, please KEEP AN OVERTON ON THE BOARD.”

Richard Overton lost, finishing fifth in a seven-person race. Burkett, who helped organize his campaign, said that Overton did not work hard enough at getting elected.

Soon thereafter, Burkett said, he was shocked by Overton’s conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. Overton, he said, had not expressed religious beliefs before.

“He shows up in my church,” Ocean Hills Community, in San Juan Capistrano, Burkett said. “He professed to me that he was a ‘born-again,’ fundamentalist Christian.”

Still, Burkett said, he is not convinced that his former breakfast pal and collaborator is a killer. “I’m going to hold out that he didn’t do it and there’s an explanation for all of this,” he said.

Despite the nearly four-year wait, Jan Overton’s friends say their desire for the true cause of her death remains undiminished.

“I understand that things take time,” said Carole Bailey, one of Jan Overton’s closest friends. “Yeah, it’s frustrating. But I think he needs his day in court. And Jan needs hers. And she’s going to have it.”

Overton Case At a Glance

A chronology of events leading to the arrest of Richard K. Overton on suspicion of killing his wife, Janet, by cyanide poisoning.

Jan. 24, 1988--Janet Overton collapses in the driveway of the family’s Dana Point home as she and her son are preparing to leave for a day of whale-watching. She is pronounced dead a short while later. Her death certificate later lists the cause of death as “unknown.”

July 19, 1988--Dorothy Boyer, Richard Overton’s first wife, alleges to Orange County sheriff’s investigators that Richard poisoned her food for three years after their divorce in 1969. Based on this and other allegations, sheriff’s investigators launch a formal investigation into Janet Overton’s death.

Feb. 23, 1989--The Orange County coroner’s office confirms publicly that Janet Overton’s death was caused by cyanide poisoning.

Sept. 25, 1991--Prosecutors begin presenting their case against Richard Overton to the Orange County Grand Jury. Twenty-two witnesses are called to testify.

Oct. 1, 1991--The grand jury hands down an indictment, charging Richard Overton with murder, and he is arrested. He will plead not guilty to the charge and be released on $250,000 bail.