NARRATOR: On Sunday morning, July 17, 1983, a Kansas couple
out for a canoe trip pulled up to a narrow iron
bridge over the Cottonwood River just outside Emporia.
Most of the rest of the town was in church,
with one conspicuous absence.
Before the couple put their boat in the water,
they came across a woman's dead body floating face
down in the water just downstream
from an overturned automobile.
Her name was Sandy Bird.
Her husband Tom was the popular preacher
of Faith Lutheran Church.
Sandy and I were high school sweethearts.
We met, basically, our senior year.
She was the valedictorian, and I was the jock.
NARRATOR: In addition to being the mother of the Birds' three
small children, Sandy was an aspiring teacher, which
made Emporia a perfect match.
We were excited that there was an opportunity for her
to teach math and take courses and work on a master's
degree in computer math.
So that was really the deciding factor in us coming to Emporia.
NARRATOR: Tom Bird had established a reputation
as one of Emporia's most innovative and personable
preachers.
STEVE MOORE: Tom was the type of person
that he could draw people in and make friends with them
real easy.
People liked him, and he seemed genuinely interested in you.
NARRATOR: And thanks to Bird's people skills,
Faith Lutheran's church family was
growing at a miraculous pace.
The church even attracted members
from different denominations, people
like Marty and Lorna Anderson.
Marty was a lab supervisor at Newman Regional Health Center.
Lorna was a stay-at-home mom of the couple's four children,
the youngest a set of twins.
They always looked clean, well-kept.
She took good care of those children.
And everybody kind of looked at her like super mom.
NARRATOR: That is, those that didn't look
at her as an altogether different
sort of mom, one they'd like to, uh, get to know better.
CHARLOTTE SMITH: She had several boyfriends, as I understand.
And I can't condemn a person, but she
was kind of a lady of the town.
Can I say that?
[laughs]
ESTER SETZKORN: A lot of different men
would come in to her home.
She would send the kids and myself to the basement.
And I didn't think anything about it because I
thought it was normal.
You know, I'm the babysitter.
She wants to have some privacy because she had a lot
of stuff going on upstairs.
NARRATOR: You could say that.
After Sandy's death, he was a lot closer to Lorna Anderson.
It was kind of like, I would see him sometimes every day.
NARRATOR: It would have been enough to set
anyone's tongue wagging.
Or it would have if, in the days after Sandy's death,
Emporia hadn't had even better grist for the rumor mill.
RAY CALL: What's a preacher's wife
doing out here in the middle of the night alone?
Is there something going on here we need to know about?
I mean, what, is she--
what's it all about?
CHARLOTTE SMITH: It's not like it's a main road
coming into Emporia.
The road goes from nowhere to nowhere.
NARRATOR: The location wasn't the only odd thing
about Sandy's accident, either.
BOBBI MLYNAR: Sandy Bird always wore a seat belt. It's a habit.
And you just don't break that habit.
So she didn't have on a seat belt, and that was unusual.
She was thrown from the car.
And that shouldn't have happened.
NARRATOR: Over at Emporia State, some of Sandy's colleagues
started to wonder if her death really was accidental.
There was talk at the university
that perhaps there was someone waiting for her when
she came out of the building.
BOBBI MLYNAR: Well, someone could have attacked her
in the parking lot and taken her down there,
done something to her, and thrown her over.
NARRATOR: But who?
It was a few days after the murder,
and some nurses at Newman Regional
were wondering just that, when Lorna Anderson's husband Marty
made a shocking suggestion.
BOBBI MLYNAR: One of the women said,
isn't it just terrible about the accident, you know?
And she said that she could hear Martin
Anderson rolling on his chair out the door into the hallway.
And he said, you don't believe that, do you?
Tom Bird did it.
NARRATOR: A minister murderer?
Simply impossible, as far as Emporia was concerned.
People would say, oh, Tom wouldn't kill Sandy.
He's a minister.
I don't think anybody wanted to say something like that
out loud, except maybe Marty.
NARRATOR: And he wouldn't be saying it out loud for long.
Top of the hour, KVOE to get your news for the day.
And they talked about a hospital employee
that had been murdered up close to Junction City in Manhattan.
NARRATOR: The dead man's name--
Martin Anderson.
And his death was no accident.
The day before, Marty, Lorna, and their four girls
were in neighboring Geary County heading home from a trip
to Fort Reilly.
Lorna, who was driving, said she was sick, food
poisoning apparently.
She stopped the van.
Lorna got out, walked out in the field approximately
40 yards to throw up.
NARRATOR: Lucky for her, she pulled
the van over just in time.
Marty wasn't so lucky, however.
She came back to the van, told Marty that when she had bent
over, she had dropped the keys.
She asked Marty to get out to go look
for her keys, which he did.
And that's when he was killed.
Somehow Marty got shot, shot in the back
of the head execution-style.
She told us that she thought it was a robbery.
And his billfold was gone, his credit cards.
NARRATOR: Armed robbers casing a Kansas cornfield in hopes
that someone would pull over?
The cops were immediately suspicious.
Things got even fishier the Monday after the murder.
That's when Lorna's insurance agent called the Geary
County Sheriff's Department.
According to the agent, Lorna wasn't
exactly a grieving widow.
She contacted him before noon on Saturday
after the homicide occurred on Friday night
wanting to get all the details about the insurance
and how quick she could get it.
NARRATOR: Lorna's roster of lovers
made an excellent motive.
And combined with her sudden interest in insurance
and doubts about her account of the murder,
it was enough for the Geary County DA's office.
On November 28, 1983, Lorna Anderson
was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
Around Emporia, the arrest wasn't that much of a surprise.
There had been people who were suspicious of Lorna Anderson
and thought perhaps she would have a role in it.
My impression has always been, probably,
that she's a little bit on the looney tunes side.
NARRATOR: But that wasn't all, folks.
A search of the Anderson home revealed
some pretty, um, tantalizing evidence
in Lorna's lingerie drawer.
BILL DEPPISH: But as I dug down through the lingerie, and some
of it was pretty exotic, but I went clear down
to the bottom of that lingerie drawer
and found a couple of envelopes.
NARRATOR: Inside were two love letters.
BILL DEPPISH: The love letters related how they would
be together after Friday night.
NARRATOR: Martin Anderson had been
murdered on a Friday night.
The letters were from Tom Bird.
She was a secretary, and she was thought to be a party girl.
And the investigation really began to gather steam.
NARRATOR: The next breakthrough came on December 10,
when the cops questioned a man named Danny Carter.
Danny Carter was Lorna Anderson's beautician.
He was a welder.
But on the side, he was a beautician.
NARRATOR: And Danny was something
Lorna did on the side, too.
Apparently, Lorna had asked if he knew
anyone who would kill someone.
And he didn't.
But I think he suggested, ask my brother.
BILL DEPPISH: Some different murder plots
were discussed, supposedly, with Lorna, Tom,
and the one Carter brother.
They knew of a bridge leading down from a hill that had
a sudden dropoff to the river.
NARRATOR: Hmm.
That sounded familiar.
In August of 1984, Lyon and Geary
counties opened a joint investigation
of Sandy Bird's accident.
Sandy Bird's head and back showed signs of being
beaten with a blunt object.
And that wasn't the only damning thing in the original coroner's
report.
Her lungs didn't have water in them.
So they knew that she was dead before she went in the water.
NARRATOR: Which may have explained the blood
on the bridge that the highway patrolman
found the night Sandy died.
I believe that night that Sandy was killed on the bridge,
and then she was thrown over the edge of the bridge.
To be honest, I think Lorna operated
in her own little world.
And I'm not too sure that she didn't fantasize
maybe something with Tom.
NARRATOR: There was only one way to find out.
Tom Bird's murder trial began on July 1, 1985,
at the Lyon County Courthouse in Emporia.
Sandy Bird didn't drown.
She was murdered, at least that's
what the prosecution said.
And the proof that Tom Bird did it, they claimed,
was in the phone calls he made after Sandy's disappearance.
When she didn't come to pick him up, he didn't call home.
He didn't call the school.
He called the police.
RAY CALL: Now, with most reasonable people,
if my wife didn't show up to meet me somewhere,
why didn't you call home, say, hey, did Sandy show up?
But he never did.
NARRATOR: The prosecution hammered the point
home in closing arguments.
Tom Bird didn't call because he knew
exactly where Sandy was, floating face
down in the Cottonwood River.
Yes, his job was a minister of the church.
But that didn't change the evidence given.
It didn't put them higher, didn't put him lower.
It was just an individual charge by the state of Kansas
and judged by a jury of his peers.
NARRATOR: The jury found Tom Bird guilty.
There's people believe what they want to believe,
and I think that they were set up to believe
this by the rumors in town.
NARRATOR: He spent the next 20 years in prison,
remarried while in prison.
He was released on parole in June of 2004.
Although no longer ordained, he continues
preaching as a lay minister.
His specialty?
Marriage counseling.
Speaking of prison relationships,
Lorna, who remarried in 1985, pled guilty to Marty's murder
in 1988.
Her second husband filed for divorce shortly afterwards.
Currently serving a 15-year sentence,
Lorna is scheduled for release in December 2005,
and according to her attorney, is planning to re-enter
the secretarial field.
CHARLOTTE SMITH: Even though somebody is a minister
doesn't mean that they can't do bad things.
Because they can, and they do.
[music playing]