THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 4, 1997 TAG: 9702040217
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON FRANK, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 80 lines
When Wayne A. Heston failed in his attempt to kill his wife in September 1995, he was captured by police and sent to the Virginia Beach City Jail on a malicious-wounding charge.
Incarceration, however, did not end Heston's scheme to murder 29-year-old Jerrie Heston, who was trying to divorce her husband of three years so she could be with her new boyfriend.
While in jail, court records show, Heston hatched a plot to have his wife and her friend murdered in their adjacent homes in the Virginia Village section of Virginia Beach.
The plans were specific and detailed, including the contract price for the two ``hits,'' and maps of the homes where the murders were to occur, including information about where to watch for dogs and likely points of entry.
The plot was foiled when Virginia Beach Police Officer Dennis Santos posed as a hit man and entered the jail as a visitor to get Heston to commit his murder scheme to tape.
On Monday, with prosecutors threatening to enter the taped murder plans as evidence in trials, Heston pleaded guilty to malicious wounding and two counts of criminal solicitation.
He is to be sentenced April 9 and faces up to 30 years in prison and a fine of more than $100,000.
Evidence of the contract-murder attempt also included the maps and instructions that Heston, a Navy man from Ohio, drew to give directions to the killer.
``They were very detailed,'' prosecutor Paula Bruns said Monday. ``It was to orient (the hired killer) to the victim's houses in relation to the neighborhood . . . and details about the home.''
Heston drew up the plans while sitting in city jail, apparently stewing over a marriage that began to come apart in late summer 1995 while he was stationed on the Yellowstone, a destroyer tender berthed in Charleston, S.C.
Some time earlier, his wife, Jerrie, had started a relationship with a next-door neighbor. Eventually the relationship got serious enough for her to ask Heston, 28, for a divorce.
She repeated that request Sept. 29, 1995, when Heston made a trip from South Carolina to Virginia Beach to pick up some of his belongings at the home he shared with his wife and her two daughters on Wales Run Court.
While both were packing belongings for Heston to take with him, Heston grabbed his wife from behind and sliced her neck with a fish fillet knife, according to evidence. He then retreated to a bathroom and sliced his own neck.
Neither wound was fatal, although Jerrie Heston's was serious and required surgery. Wayne Heston was arrested several hours later within blocks of his home.
Authorities believe Heston planned the attack before leaving South Carolina.
He gave a letter to a shipmate the day he left for Virginia Beach, instructing the man on what to do with his belongings if Heston did not return to South Carolina.
That was only the beginning of the written evidence in the case that Heston would create.
While awaiting trial in city jail, Heston contacted inmate Anthony Carroll to inquire about hiring someone to kill his wife and her boyfriend.
Carroll, according to evidence read into the court record Monday, contacted a man outside the jail who had a history of dealing with contract killings.
Carroll pretended to help Heston, according to police Investigator Don Rimer, knowing the ``hit man'' would go to police.
Heston mailed his maps and instructions to the man, whom authorities would not identify, and the man turned them over to Santos.
Santos brought the maps and instructions with him when he visited Heston in the city jail.
Santos was wearing a wire for tape recording.
Heston offered $2,500 for the two murders, according to the tape that Santos made. And he didn't care how Santos completed the task, he said. He just wanted his wife and her boyfriend dead.
``He left it up to Santos,'' Bruns explained in an interview after Monday's hearing, which was held before Circuit Judge John K. Moore. ``What he was going to do was give him the contents of (his home), the furniture and other things, amounting to about $2,500.'' ILLUSTRATION: Wayne A. Heston
KEYWORDS: MURDER FOR HIRE INTERVIEW