Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 4, 1993 TAG: 9304050262
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID M. POOLE and MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
LATEST CHAPTER IN `SOAP OPERA LIFE': CHARGE OF MURDERING MAN FOR MONEY
NELLIE SUE WHITT says her boyfriend committed suicide by throwing himself in front of the truck she was driving. But a Bedford County grand jury suspects otherwise.\ The day after Roy Thompson was killed, his best friend was struck by one image.
There, parked outside a funeral home in Buchanan, was Thompson's pickup truck - the same truck that hit and killed him the morning before. A fresh dent was notched in the front end.
It had been driven there by Thompson's girlfriend, Nellie Sue Whitt - the woman who had been at the wheel when Thompson was killed on an isolated Bedford County road.
Whitt told friends that his death had been an accident, that she had been unable to stop when Thompson jumped in front of the truck.
His friends found it hard to believe. They knew that Thompson's world had been turned upside down since he left his wife and moved in with Whitt nine months earlier. But suicide?
Their doubts were not eased by the sight of Whitt driving in the pickup truck the day after Thompson's death.
"If I had run over somebody, I couldn't have drove that truck," said Art Clarke, one of Thompson's friends.
Friends were not the only ones troubled by Whitt's version of how Thompson's life ended on July 13, 1991.
State Trooper W.O. Coleman suspected foul play from the start.
Whitt was the only witness to the accident, which happened about 11:20 a.m. on Virginia 670 several miles east of Bedford. She gave Coleman the same account that she would tell friends - that Thompson had jumped off an embankment and into the path of the truck.
Coleman asked for assistance from Barry Keesee, a state police special agent who specializes in homicide investigations.
For 20 months, Keesee traveled around the state gathering evidence and drawing a profile of Whitt. Last month, a Bedford County grand jury indicted Whitt on a charge of first-degree murder.
Prosecutors say Thompson was killed so Whitt could claim the benefits of a $100,000 insurance policy that had been changed days before his death to make her the beneficiary.
Keesee declined to discuss his investigation until after Whitt stands trial in August.
Whitt, 44, says she is no killer.
"You don't know half of the story about the murder charge," she said in a brief interview. "You don't know half of the background there. Oh, there's lots there. All you're getting is from one side."
On advice of her attorney, Whitt said she would wait to tell her side in the courtroom.
\ A `soap opera' life
People who have known Whitt describe a woman who, since the divorce from her first husband, has searched for ways to provide for herself and her four children, two of whom are still in school.
"My children are my world," she said.
Whitt has done what she can with public assistance and a series of low-paying jobs - nursing home assistant, ad sales for a sportsman's magazine and laborer at a horse farm.
In her struggle, Whitt often looked to men for help.
One of them was Bennie Sloan, a Buena Vista man who married her in December 1991 - five months after Roy Thompson's death.
Sloan said Whitt cleaned out their joint bank accounts and then demanded $40,000 in cash and a car as part of a separation agreement signed three weeks after their wedding.
"Basically, I learned that I couldn't afford Nellie Sue," Sloan said in a deposition taken as part of his divorce petition.
Whitt admits that her past is littered with broken relationships. "My life is a soap opera - I'm telling you that right now."
She was born Nellie Sue Horn, the daughter of a Russell County coal miner. In 1965, at age 17, she dropped out of high school to marry a miner named Joseph Whitt.
The marriage lasted 15 years. Whitt - known by friends as Sue - stayed at home and raised two girls. A third child was born about the time her marriage began to fall apart.
After a divorce in 1981, Nellie Sue Whitt and the children moved to Craig County, where she had relatives. She continued to receive child support from her ex-husband and worked part time selling ads for a magazine distributed free to hunters and fishermen.
She began a stormy relationship with Jess Harper White, a farm worker who was 12 years younger. They were married in 1983 and divorced two years later.
Her fourth child was born sometime during that period.
People in Craig County remember two Nellie Sue Whitts.
One was a polite, well-spoken mother devoted to her children.
"She was nice as pie," said one woman who works at a New Castle company where Whitt did business.
The other Nellie Sue Whitt they remember was a rough woman who knew how to get her way.
"She's a sweet-talking big girl who what she couldn't sweet-talk her way to, she'd muscle her way to," said one police officer familiar with Whitt.
Craig County authorities say suspicious fires destroyed three houses owned by people who had contact with Whitt. A house that she was renting burned after a landlord threatened to evict her. A trailer she and Joe Whitt owned burned about the time of their divorce. Her parents' house burned to the ground in 1986, authorities said.
Whitt was not charged in connection with any of the fires. Still, some Craig County residents would not talk about her because they say they fear retribution.
Her mother, Verna Horn, also declined to talk about her daughter "because of things that have happened to us."
A pattern has emerged in her relationships since her second marriage. Whitt finds men, showers them with affection and takes over their lives.
At a court hearing last month, Whitt blew kisses and mouthed, "I love you," to her most recent boyfriend, Michael Stanback. "We're very much in love. We're going to be married," he testified.
Stanback's family was alarmed by the relationship, saying Whitt made him a virtual prisoner in her house in Botetourt County.
Whitt got an unlisted phone number after Stanback's family kept calling him. She threatened to take out a restraining order if his family came to her house.
"All we want is to live in peace and be left alone," Whitt wrote to Stanback's brother last month.
Roy Thompson's friends say Whitt and Thompson broke away in a similar way when he left his wife in the fall of 1990.
Thompson and Whitt met during that previous summer, when one of her daughters and his youngest son began dating after meeting at a church camp. Thompson and his family lived in Appomattox at the time. Whitt was still in New Castle.
A friendship evolved between the two families.
Soon, Whitt was traveling to Appomattox. She would come to visit for an afternoon but often end up staying for several days, said Natalie Thompson, Roy's daughter-in-law.
Whitt talked about moving to Appomattox permanently, finding a job and moving into a trailer that Roy and his wife, Patsy, owned behind their house. Whitt took an interest in the motorcycle club that Roy and Patsy rode with, the Gold Wing Road Riders Association. She even bought an old Honda Gold Wing from Roy and Patsy that they had replaced with a newer model.
Roy and Patsy's marriage splintered in October during a motorcycle trip they took to Florida with Whitt. Roy announced he was romantically involved with Whitt. Patsy flew home, ending their 27-year marriage.
Thompson and Whitt came back to Virginia and went to Art Clarke, Thompson's closest friend from the Gold Wing Road Riders, for a place to live. Thompson, Whitt and her two youngest children, now ages 11 and 13, stayed for a month.
Roy and Sue seemed happy together, Clarke said.
Whitt told Clarke stories about her life. She said she had been abused as a child and raped as an adult, and lived a hard life. "It was always `feel-sorry-for-me' type of stories," he said.
Clarke tried to be a good host, although he found it hard to believe that Roy and Patsy Thompson had split up. "To see Roy and Patsy before this came up, you couldn't have asked for a better couple. They seemed dedicated to each other, just a family," he said.
Other friends were equally surprised. They described Roy Thompson - a longtime truck driver and former rodeo rider - as a dedicated family man who prayed before every meal and doted on his grandson, who called him "Papa Roy."
His family was stunned.
"He just completely changed after meeting her," Natalie Thompson said.
In April 1992, a Lynchburg social worker evaluated Thompson at his employer's request. The social worker observed that Thompson appeared depressed and emotionally dependent on Whitt. The social worker also noted that Whitt did most of the talking during the hour-long session.
By then, the couple had moved to the Peaksview Mobile Home Park on U.S. 460 between Bedford and Lynchburg. Ed Owens, who owns the trailer park, remembered them coming into his store, Owens Market, located next door.
"They used to come in hanging on each other like two teen-agers," Owens said.
Clarke saw less and less of his friend after Thompson moved to the trailer park.
Their weekly motorcycle rides together became less frequent. When Thompson and Whitt did join him, Clarke said, they isolated themselves by cutting off their two-way radios so nobody could talk to them.
All the while, "she's steady bending his ear, got her mouth right up against his helmet," Clarke said.
"Sometimes, I felt like we were in the way, even though we were the ones who invited them."
Around May 1991, Thompson and Whitt moved to Botetourt County to work on a Buchanan horse farm. Clarke said he had little contact with them after that. "I felt like I had lost a friend. Someone had just come in and took over."
\ `A body-sized dent'
Three months later, Roy Thompson was dead.
From the start, Clarke said he was troubled by Whitt's claim that his friend's death was a suicide.
"She had these stories about how Roy would lose it, he would completely go off," he said.
Whitt told him that Thompson often talked about driving his motorcycle off a cliff. She said when they lived together at the trailer park on U.S. 460, she often had to restrain him from running out in front of tractor-trailers in the road.
But to him, it didn't add up. "I don't think Roy was unstable," he said.
She told him that Thompson was upset, that he had climbed out of the pickup truck to walk along the roadside and calm down, he said. She told him that they sat together on a roadside embankment.
She said Thompson told her to tell his friends that he loved them. From there, Clarke said, it was never clear in Whitt's story what happened next, how she ended up behind the wheel of his truck or how he ended up dead.
At times, Whitt said that she ran over Thompson; other times, she said he bounced up and went through the windshield when she hit him, Clarke said.
Yet, he noted, the windshield wasn't broken when he saw the truck the next day.
There was only a dent on the front end. "A body-sized dent," he said.
A retired military policeman who works now as a prison guard, Clarke said his doubts deepened after the funeral when she told him that Thompson had given her power of attorney and that she had signed over ownership of his truck and his motorcycle in her name. She said she had done the same with Thompson's life insurance policy and offered to produce the paperwork, Clarke said.
The insurance policy figures to be a key piece of evidence at Whitt's murder trial. Bedford County Commonwealth's Attorney Jim Updike has said that Whitt had a $100,000 motive for killing Thompson.
Nine days before Thompson's death, Whitt signed his name on a form making her the beneficiary of his life insurance policy.
Pan-American Life Insurance Co. refused to pay and filed a petition in Bedford Circuit Court claiming the beneficiary change was invalid because Thompson never signed the form. Whitt has claimed that she had his permission to sign his name.
It wouldn't be the last time she had trouble over men and money.
Five months after Thompson's death, she married Bennie Sloan, a forester and bar owner. The marriage quickly soured after they returned from a honeymoon trip to Cancun, Mexico.
In divorce papers, Sloan claims that Whitt overspent their $1,250 budget for their six-day honeymoon and, when they got home, withdrew more than $6,000 from their joint bank accounts.
Sloan was troubled by more than his wife's spending habits. He learned that Whitt never married Thompson, as she had led him to believe. He also began hearing rumors about Thompson's death.
After he admitted he was having second thoughts, Whitt presented him with a handwritten separation agreement that gave her $40,000 in cash and a $13,000 Chevrolet Corsica. Sloan signed - even though he had been married to her for less than three weeks.
"My lawyer told me I was overly generous, but I was anxious to get away from her," he said.
Whitt next met Michael and Karen Stanback. As with the Thompsons, Whitt befriended them and ended up with the man.
Michael Stanback, an air-conditioning contractor, moved into her house last July. Whitt helped him in his business, which Stanback ran out of the back of a dilapidated van.
Friday, Botetourt County authorities charged Whitt with welfare fraud, claiming she received welfare assistance even though Stanback was helping her with household expenses. She is in jail in lieu of a $10,000 bond.
After he moved in, Stanback soon began cutting off ties to his family. At Christmas, he did not visit his mother in Franklin County for the first time in his life.
In October, Whitt was charged with beating up Stanback's estranged wife. She was convicted of assault and is awaiting sentencing in Roanoke County Circuit Court.
Stanback initially stuck by Whitt after she was charged with murder. But he moved out last week after Whitt called the police when Stanback's brother tried to visit them in Buchanan. Stanback left the house on foot, leaving his clothes, tools and van.
His sister, Sandy Mills, said Stanback has decided not to retrieve his possessions.
"He said, `Just let her have it. I don't want to go back down there,' " Mills said. "He's more or less trying to stay hid right now."
Keywords:
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