Every Town - The Black Widower - Lowell Amos - Detroit, MI

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

How far will a person go to achieve their dreams? Well for Lowell Edwin Amos, his greed for money led him to commit a deadly sin, not just once but 4 times which had made him a certified serial killer. --------------------------------------------💀 Exclusive Video Content & Access: https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries 🥇 Watch This Episode on Youtube!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-et99xMyaU&ab_channel=ScaryMysteries--------------------------------------------🎧 Scary Mysteries PodcastApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scary-mysteries/id1273612861Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkTAll Others: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1235579 Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you love true crime, grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a dose of creepy true crime every single morning with morning cup of murder. This short daily show is the perfect podcast to incorporate into your morning routine, because in less than 15 minutes, you'll hear about a true crime that took place on a day's date in history. Each day's dark history lesson will kickstart your morning with intriguing tales of murder, abduction, serial killers, cults, and everything in between. With over 20 million downloads, Morning Cup of Murder has something for every true crime lover. One listener describes the show as a small package with a powerful punch of crime.

Another writes that the show is an absolute delight in the morning. Support yourself a piping hot cup of murder every single morning with Morning Cup of Murder. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Everytown. Thank you guys so much for tuning into our podcast. If you guys enjoy listening to Everytown, then I wanted to let you know that there are always a video component to each episode over on our YouTube channel called Scary Mysteries. They're really well put together and put faces to the names, so you can always head over to our Scary Mysteries YouTube channel if you want to view them. There's also two other videos that come out on our YouTube channel. each and every Monday and Wednesday, where we cover strange and creepy stories from all around the world.

Those can also be listened to in podcast form on our other podcast channel called Scary Mysteries. We have tons of cool content for you all around. Thanks so much for the support and tuning in. Hope you enjoy the episode. Every town has a dark side. How far will a person go to achieve their dreams? Well, for Lowell Edwin Amos, his greed for money let him to commit a deadly sin, not just once before times, which made him a certified serial killer.

This storyline of committing crimes to get what you want is not all that uncommon. But what's revolting about this particular story is that Lowell's victims were all people who loved him. His three wives and old mother. I'm Andrew Fitzgerald, and welcome to another unreal episode of every single. For even more content from us, go check out our Scary Mysteries podcast or YouTube channel where we have tons of wild stories for you to check out. But right now, let's head back to 1979 to Detroit, Michigan, the night that the black widower, Lowell Amos, got his crime started.

Lowell Amos, finally called Ed by his family and friends, was born on January 4, 1943 in Anderson, in Michigan. He was a former General Motors plant manager and a 1979 candidate for the Republican nomination for Mayor of Anderson. People who knew him said that he was a rather good-looking businessman who appeared to be very intelligent. With a stable job, Mr. Amos got married to Sondra Hurd, whom neighbor, Connie Alexander, described as a loving and friendly person who liked to cook. an advertising director of the Herald Bulletin, Miss Alexander lived next door to Ed and Sandra in 1979. She and the Amosas became good neighbors,

and the two women became close pals. Connie said that Sandra confided in her, that Ed had taken out a $1 million life insurance policy on her, and she would tease her that Ed would knock her off for the money. Sandra meant it as a joke that should be taken lightly, but fate would take it more seriously. On January 13, 1979, Mr. Amos announced his candidacy for mayor as a Republican. Being a supportive wife, Mrs. Amos exerted efforts to campaign for her husband.

Connie vividly remembered that on January 24th, Sandra was at the Lady Elks Club meeting for her husband's candidacy. After her engagement, she went to Connie's house at 10 p.m., and the two friends shared a few bottles of beer, but Sandra left after an hour because Ed called and said he was home early from his job at Inland Fisher Guide. At around 1 a.m., Connie was surprised by a loud knocking on her door and got more startled to see Sandra's two young children standing outside.

They said, something is wrong with Mommy, and the ambulance is stuck in the snow. Connie's husband helped free the ambulance from the thick, snow covering the pavement, but the 36-year-old, Mrs. Amos, was pronounced dead a little later at the hospital. When Ed got back from the hospital, Connie went to his house and she witnessed what he did. She said, he was burning her clothes in the fireplace. He said there was so much blood on them because she fell and hit her head in the bathroom. This was Ed's side of the story, but the

autopsy reveal that traces of a sleep aid called Dalman and alcohol were found in her body. But the coroner ruled the cause of death to be undetermined, so this case was simply closed. Sandra was then buried shortly after, and the rumor mill started churning about speculations and questions, and why a woman in her mid-30s would die for no apparent reason. From this tragedy, Mr. Almost collected $350,000 in life insurance. insurance, and freed himself from any responsibility for his wife's death. Connie said that Ed used the insurance money to renovate his house in Anderson. His political career may not have taken off, but Mr. Amos found a new wife,

whom he had been dating while still married to Sandra. So within the year, Carolyn Lawrence then became Ed Amos's wife, number two, and he moved to her place in Middletown, Indiana. It was a wonderful married life for Ed and Carolyn in the next few years of being together until they engaged in frequent arguments which their friends attested to. The bone of contention was the huge insurance policies Ed had bought on Caroline's life. She didn't agree that her own life was insured for a massive amount and he was the beneficiary. A couple had frequent disputes about this and when Ed refused to cancel the insurance policy,

Carolyn grew him out of their house in 1987. In an unexpected decision, Mr. Amos then moved in with his 76-year-old mother, Mary Tolls. A few weeks later, the septuagenarian woman was then rushed to the hospital, seemingly confused and confounded. The doctors couldn't determine the illness, so they weren't able to issue a diagnosis. The hospital then released Mrs. Tolls and sent her home, and a few days later, she died of a unspecified reason. Because Mary was already 76 years old in 1988, her death was not considered suspicious, no odd autopsy was performed, and authorities presumed she died of natural causes. It was clear that Ed didn't want to move in with his elderly mom to take care of her.

Instead, he anticipated, or perhaps perpetuated her death in order to inherent $1 million from her insurance policy. On the day his mother died, Mr. Amos called up his second wife, Carolyn, to deliver the sad news. So she drove to her mother-in-law's house. When she arrived, she caught Ed throwing his belongings into his car, and when she asked him, why? The twice-married man said that he didn't want people to know that he was living with his mother. But why?

Was Ed scared of getting implicated in his mother's death? At that time, he found solace and Carolyn, who took him back perhaps out of pity, or maybe she truly loved him. She allowed him to move back into their Middletown Indiana home despite her misgivings on the overly large insurance policy that he had taken out on her. But then, nine months later, in 1989, Carolyn suffered the sad fate of Mr. Amos' first wife, Sandra, and his mom, Mary. On the night she died, Mrs. Amos, number two, had been out drinking with friends, and she went home and decided to wash her hair.

This was the moment McCarrelin met her untimely death, and expectantly, Ed had his version of the account. According to him, he brought a glass of wine to his wife in the bathroom, where she was blow-drying her hair next to a bathtub filled with water. He left, and when he returned shortly to the bathroom after, Ed found Carolyn dead in the bathtub, electrocuted by the hairdriar. Significantly, the wine glass was missing from the bathroom and later found rinsed out in the dishwasher. However, the autopsy showed no proof that Carolyn was electrocuted, but indicated the presence of valium and alcohol in her system before she passed. So for the third time, Ed was off the hook, as the coroner ruled the cause of death undetermined leading to the closure of the case. It was surprising that the Middletown police didn't look a little more closely at the circumstances of Carolyn's death,

which happened less than a year after Ed's mother passed under mysterious circumstances as well. Ultimately, it was Mr. Amos, who gained from the loss of his second wife, as he became $800,000 richer from Carolyn's insurance policy. But Lowell Amos wasn't done yet, and he wanted more. Greed drove him to commit his rudinary murder. And his fourth, and final victim, was his third wife, Roberta Wagner. Mr. Amos liked playing the role of a playboy, dressing up an expensive clothes, wearing a flashy watch like a Rolex and driving a luxury car like a Cadillac.

He exuded confidence, power, and affluence, which a lot of women found attractive, including Roberta Wagner, referred to as Bobby by friends and family. But her mother, Marie Wagner, was doubtful about the man her daughter was about to marry. Although she got along just fine with Mr. Amos and found him a brilliant man when both of them were still working, at General Motors plant in Anderson. She knew that Ed's previous two wives had died of unknown reasons. Her suspicion became a first-hand experience when in 1994, Roberta, now Mrs. Lowell Amos,

became a victim of a questionable homicide that wasn't much different from what happened to Ed's first wife, Sandra in 1979, his mom, Mary, in 88, and his second wife, Caroline, in 89. On December 9th, 1994, the Amos couple were in Detroit, Michigan to attend a Christmas party for Ed's corporate consulting firm, and they were staying at the Athenium Hotel. They spent the evening socializing and drinking with friends and business associates until the morning of December 10th. In fact, a friend of Ed's associate had confirmed that she was with the Amos couple in their suite until 4.30 a.m. She observed that Roberta looked tired while Ed was jumping and talkative before she left the room.

Four hours later, Ed woke up in their suite and found his third wife lifeless. Panic-stricken, he called up his fellow executive, Bert Crabtree, who then informed one of Ed's employees, Daniel Percasi. Both Bert and Daniel headed together to the Amos's suite, where shirtless Ed holding a towel and a cigarette met them at the door. An agitated Ed, told the men that Roberta had died of an accident and said, She's lying in the next room, cold as a mackerel. Mr. Amos also explained that he had cleaned up the hotel room to get rid of traces of cocaine

before he called up hotel security. He then requested Daniel to take his sports coat from him. While Mr. Amos's employee was driving home that morning with Ed's coat and his possession, Daniel looked inside the coat's breast pocket. There he found a small black leather case that contained a needleless syringe and a foul-smelling washcloth with an unrecognizable substance on it. Ed picked up the coat the following day and told Daniel that the syringe was for a saline solution. Just like in the deaths of Mr. Amos's first two wives, police only knew his version since there were no other witnesses to the crime. Ed told the investigators that when he and Bobby retired to their room they engaged in sexual acts that involved cocaine.

He further claimed that when he dozed off, his wife continued to take the cocaine, but since she had sinus troubles, Bobby didn't take the drug by snorting it, but through internal ingestion. Ed's lurid tale made it appear that his wife had a cocaine overdose, and when he found her dead upon waking up, he panicked and flushed the cocaine down the toilet and tried cleaning up the room. Investigators indeed found cocaine on the bed linens, even on the part tucked under the mattress. The bed cover was also soiled and smeared with lipstick, toothpaste, and makeup when in fact Roberta's body and face looked clean. So police suspected Ed cleaned up his wife's body before calling up the police. Forensic scientists,

Dr. Phyllis Good, examined the pieces of evidence more closely. The test samples from the pillow case showed traces of cosmetics, but Roberta hadn't had any trace of it when they found What was more suspicious were the teeth imprint and lipstick found on the pillowcase, which could have only resulted if the pillow had been pressed over a person's face. A shocking discovery then was the autopsy results that revealed there was cocaine inside Roberta's vagina as vaginal swabs had showed. Wayne County Medical Examiner Dr. Sawit Conlune confirmed that Miss Roberta Amos had a tremendous amount of cocaine in her body,

15 times the amount typically seen in a cocaine overdose. He then pronounced her death as a homicide. But Marie Wagner, Roberta's mother, vehemently denied that her 37-year-old daughter was a drug user. Experts had also found some loopholes in the cause of her death. Dr. Suzanne White, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Wayne State University, said symptoms of a typical cocaine overdose reaction include nervousness and hyperactivity. Bobby wouldn't have simply fallen asleep or died quietly had she overdose without Ed noticing it, who himself had a cocaine binge and was jumpy and talkative,

as described by the couple's friend before leaving their suite at 4.30 a.m. Two days after Roberta's death, Ed Amos found a predatory way to cope with grief. He spent $1,000 dating two women and ended up having a trist with them. Authorities struggled to unravel the mystery of Bobby's death, but lacked enough evidence to file charges against Ed. Soon enough, though, the public got wind about the case of Roberta sparked by publicity, and various women started to come forward with their accounts of their dates and encounters with Mr. Amos. What was the common denominator among their stories? These women all felt that they had been drugged before Ed had sex with them. These revelations prompted a

in-depth examination of Ed Amos' background. In investigations about the deaths of Sondra Hurd, Carolyn Lawrence, and Mary Tolls were reopened. As a can of worms was fully opened, Ed became the suspect in the death of Roberta. On November 5, 1995, he was then arrested in Las Vegas, where he had moved to after Bobby's death and was eventually charged for killing her. Due to a 1994 change in Michigan law, the prosecution was allowed to end up to entered details of previous incidents into the trials, but Ed was only charged for Roberta's death. The prosecution was headed by Nancy Westfeld, who was previously a nurse, so she brought her knowledge of nursing and specialized in the medical aspects of the case. In the trial, the prosecution

presented circumstantial evidence that Ed had murdered Roberta. Even though they hadn't found a financial motive for the killing, the prosecution told the jury that Roberta feels, to her husband and wanted out of their marriage. She had, in fact, purchased a house where she would live after leaving it. The prosecution stated that Mr. Amos couldn't stand rejection, so he devised a plan to kill Bobby. Placing two crushed sedatives into a wine glass, he gave it to Roberta, and when she passed out, used a syringe filled with cocaine dissolved in water, and inserted it into her vagina.

When she began to convulse from the cocaine effects, Lowland smothered her with a pillow. Court records indicated that Mr. Amos didn't benefit financially from her death. However, records show Roberta and her mother had loaned him a total of $45,000. So then, on October 24, 1996, Ed was convicted, premeditated first-degree murder, and first-degree murder using a toxic substance. On November 4, 96, he was sentenced to life in jail without the possibility of parole, It was held in Security Level 2 at the Lakeland Correctional Facility in Michigan.

Just a day after turning 79, Ed Amos died in prison on January 5, 2022. But his name will always be synonymous with notorious tags as a modern-day bluebeard and the Black Widower. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown. Tune in next week for another one filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories because who knows, maybe your town will be next.