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Even while married to Gail, Sands was briefly engaged to another woman. He met Deborah Ray Shaw while serving in the National Guard in Oregon — during the time that Gail was building the couple's home in Florida. The former fiancée told Witzel in her deposition that Sands flew her to Florida in 1986 and bought her a $5,000 engagement ring from a Panama City mall. The engagement ended when Sands called Shaw to tell her he was in New York City and going to jail for a DUI arrest. Suspicious, she called his home in Marianna a few days later. Sands answered the phone.

Schenk suspects Sands struggled with his sexuality. She recalls the nightmare he had during one of the last nights they shared a bed together. "He was holding his penis and moaning," she recalls. "He told me he'd been born a twin and his twin sister died after childbirth. He said her spirit had been trying to take over his body for months."

In Florida, Sands kept a curious relationship with a man by the name of Kenneth Swaine. While Gail was away for a nursing conference in March 1993, Swaine came to "baby-sit" Sands for a week. Swaine later told police the house was full of guns. For days the two men never left the property. Then one morning Sands borrowed Swaine's truck and drove to the house of a former coworker.

Earl Pettis replaced Sands when he was fired from the River Junction Work Camp earlier that year. In his court deposition, Pettis tells of arriving to his house to find his former colleague parked in his driveway. He said he wanted to talk and Pettis invited him into his home and offered him a drink. When he turned around Sands had a pistol pointing right at Pettis' nose. He demanded money. When Pettis told him he didn't have any, Sands marched him to Swaine's borrowed truck and set off for the bank. Sands demanded he withdraw $500. But at a stoplight, Pettis jumped out of the car and fled.

An hour later a half dozen sheriff cruisers arrived at Sands' farm with their sirens blazing. The commotion caused such a stir with the attack dogs that the sheriff deputies threatened to shoot them if they weren't put in their pen. Sands came out of the house clad, inexplicably, in a pink dress.

He spent the next 40 days in jail brooding over the charges and developing a seething hatred for Jackson County Sheriff John McDaniel. Eventually the prosecutor declined to press charges for the kidnapping. Sands later told Gail and friends that Pettis made up the entire incident.

"Everything was like that," notes attorney Jay Kanzler. "Each story we unearthed, Sands had a story to explain it. In the end, there were so many lies we didn't have the time or money to track them all down."

Lionel Sands showed up to his court-ordered deposition last August dressed in a polyester navy suit, disco-era dress shirt and a red rayon tie. As was his style, the horseshoe of hair clinging to the sides of his head was dyed jet black, providing a stark contrast to the blinding whiteness of his bald crown. On his cheeks and forehead he had applied a heavy layer of foundation makeup.

Witzel and Kanzler used the deposition to further erode Sands' alibi. As they saw it, the two biggest oddities to Gail's death lay in the ladder found atop her body — that and the bizarre story about Sands and Daniel Brown staying within eyesight of each other the entire morning.

Curiously, Sands could no longer produce the ladder in question. He claimed the sheriff's office hauled it away during a follow-up search of his property — an assertion refuted by law officials. In the meantime, Sands purchased what he said was an identical ladder and hired an expert witnesses to demonstrate how the tool's round legs could cause a hammer-like wound to Gail's skull.

The expert later retracted his testimony when Witzel presented crime-scene photos of the actual ladder — with rectangular legs and sharp, square corners. A ladder with such sharp corners, agreed Sands' expert, would be unlikely to cause a round puncture wound.

Three weeks before Sands' deposition the attorneys tracked down Dan Brown in the northern Louisiana town of Monroe. The weather forecast that day called for squall showers and flash flooding. Brown showed up for the July 25 deposition looking as if he'd fallen into the river, with his dark, stringy hair plastered to his face and a Hawaiian shirt clinging to his bulging torso.

He'd recently earned the latest of several DUIs, and without a driver's license he'd been forced to walk to the interview. "I shook his hand when he arrived, and he left my palm soaking wet," recalls Kanzler. "He looked like a drowned rat. I remember thinking to myself, 'This is Sands' alibi?'"

Beyond the drunk-driving arrests, Brown's rap sheet included convictions for dealing marijuana and LSD, along with assault with a deadly weapon when he caught his "old lady" with another man. Brown pistol-whipped his wife's paramour unconscious.

A few weeks after his wife's death, Lionel Sands gave Brown several hundred dollars and the title to Gail's Geo Metro. Witzel and Kanzler believe Sands wanted Brown out of town for fear he might unwittingly say something to damage their alibi. Until then the two had always parroted the same story. The farthest away from one another they were that morning was the time Sands walked back to the house to refuel his weed-whacker. Brown testified that he took a cigarette break and could see Sands as he journeyed to the house and back.

In re-creating the events of that day, Witzel and Kanzler hired an aerial photographer to shoot photos of the farm and employed a crew to survey the property. From the vantage point where Brown claimed to watch Sands, the attorneys found it impossible to see all the way up the quarter-mile driveway to the house. When presented with the evidence, Brown grew testy, wringing his hands and threatening to walk out of the deposition.

"Listen, I don't appreciate you sitting here trying to trip me up," Brown retorted during the deposition. "I don't — I'm not going through with it any more. That's it. I quit talking."

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