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Dead Pool

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"I kept hoping he'd tell me something I could pass along to the police," remembers Mortensen. "He'd just talk and talk for hours. He thought the sheriff was out to get him and constantly complained how he needed money. Finally I was like, 'Well, Lionel, you could get a job!'"

Nine months after his wife's death, Sands attempted to throw off investigators. At a Republican fundraising event in 2002, he cornered then-Governor Jeb Bush to complain that the sheriff was trying to frame him. The bewildered governor promised to have someone look into it. In April of that year, Sands met with an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE).

For 70 minutes he spun a tale of conspiracy stemming from the day in 1993 when he was arrested for kidnapping a former coworker. Angered by what he considered to be false charges by the Jackson County sheriff, Sands sought consolation with a local Bible study group. It's there that he met the thrice-convicted felon Dan Brown.

"For the first year, my contempt for the sheriff was so bad they were praying for me ten times a day," Sands told the FDLE agent of his two-year stint in Bible study.

While in jail facing the kidnapping charges, Sands claimed sheriff deputies pulled over and harassed Gail on two separate occasions. According to Sands, his wife had taken an interest in solving an unsolved murder.

In December 1991, 25-year-old Teresa Hall and her infant daughter, Tiffany, were found bludgeoned to death in their home in nearby Cypress, Florida. Sands claimed Gail was dangerously close to solving the case when she died. Time and again, throughout his interview with the FDLE, he suggested that the Halls' and his wife's killer were the same person. All three victims were blond. All three died of head injuries.

Sands ended the interview: "My wife, a perfectly healthy woman, is found dead in my pool. I have one witness and, lo and behold, he is a convicted felon. I couldn't have picked a worse predicament if I tried. What can I do? What can I say? I don't know anyone who had a grudge against Gail. But again, everything gets back to the Halls."

On March 22, 2006, attorney Rich Witzel caught a flight to Florida, the first of a half-dozen sojourns he'd make there on behalf of Gail's family. The next morning Witzel arrived at the Tallahassee headquarters of the FDLE, which in 2002 took over the inquiry into Gail's death.

Although the murder investigation remained an "open case" with the Jackson County Sheriff's Office, FDLE closed its file in late 2003, allowing Witzel to make a Freedom of Information Act request of the state police department's records.

As spring breakers sucked beer bongs and flocked to the MTV tent located across from his Panama City hotel, Witzel spent the weekend picking apart the story Sands and Brown told police. "The day of Gail's death, Sands claimed he opened the gate to their yard and all of a sudden says to Brown: 'Gee, where's that ladder? I hope she didn't try to move it.'

"What are the chances of someone saying something like that?" continues Witzel. "Then he finds the ladder on top of her in the pool? Seems pretty convenient to me."

On Monday morning Witzel piled into his rental car for the hour drive north to Marianna to meet with the sheriff department's homicide unit. It was a regular show-and-tell as the sheriff deputies revealed to him items not included in the FDLE file, including Gail's autopsy report, morgue photos and a video of the crime scene in which Sands explains to the police his theory of how Gail fell into the pool.

"I don't think they knew the significance of what they did," recalls Witzel. "The state attorney wasn't going to allow us to enter into evidence any information from the sheriff's investigation because it was still an 'open' case. But since I'd already seen much of it, the judge ruled it public record. It was a huge break for us."

Witzel returned from his five-day visit optimistic that Gail's family could prove in the insurance lawsuit that Lionel Sands murdered his wife. Much like the wrongful-death trial involving O.J. Simpson, the case would not bring criminal charges against Sands, but it would harm him financially — in this case, denying him access to Gail's lucrative life-insurance policies.

From their law office on Big Bend Boulevard, Witzel and Kanzler began a sweeping probe into Lionel Sands' background. Assisted by Kanzler's younger brother and fellow attorney, Chris Kanzler, the lawyers discovered Sands had been married three times. Though he claimed to have no children, the attorneys found he'd fathered a son with his first wife but abandoned the family and never paid child support. The marriage ended after Sands reportedly beat his ex-wife and threatened to harm their son.

Sands' second marriage also ended violently, with his then-wife filing a restraining order against him in October 1981 — months after he'd already married Gail in the fake ceremony. Today, Sands' second wife, Susan Schenk, is remarried and lives in Portland, Oregon. She recalls the final days of their ten-year marriage as "haywire."

In one of her final encounters with her husband, Sands took Schenk deep in the woods. She says he was depressed and was going to kill himself. He pulled out a handgun from his jacket and started counting down slowly from ten to one. He told Schenk he'd make his death look like an accident so she could claim his life insurance. Finally — on the count of three — Schenk convinced him to turn over the gun.

That next day she returned home to find their house cleared of everything but her clothes. Sands, she recalls, was seated in the middle of a darkened, empty room. "He gave me an ultimatum," she says. "I was to leave the house, leave the state and quit my job with the National Guard. If I disobeyed, he said he'd have a member of my family killed. He said he had everything arranged."

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