Convinced of his mother's innocence, Wade says he and his kid sister Elizabeth "Cricket" Burnett, now 23 and an editorial assistant at D magazine, were initially "paralyzed" by the verdict. "We felt like if we just kept listening to [her] attorneys, everything would work out fine," he says. It didn't, and in 1993, fed up by their lack of success in appealing her conviction, Wade spent five months—12 hours a day, seven days a week—poring over 30 volumes of trial testimony until he had uncovered enough troubling inconsistencies to persuade Fort Worth lawyer Bob Ford to take the case. Now, aided by Ford and $20,000 raised by Susie's friends, the 25-year-old law student is about to see his mother set free. Earlier this winter the Texas court of criminal appeals overturned Mowbray's conviction, with Judge Darrell B. Hester accusing the prosecution of "at best, a questionable trial strategy and, at worst, intentional deception." (The Cameron County district attorney has not commented on whether she will seek a retrial.)
At the time of the shooting, Wade Burnett was a high school sophomore. He had just moved back in with his father, Gerald Burnett, a general-practice civil lawyer in Shreveport, La., after spending seven years with his mother and stepfather. Some 600 miles south, near the Texas-Mexico border, the Mowbrays, who had married in 1979, and Cricket lived on a five-acre gated estate with a tennis court, stables and a private fishing pier. Yet the household was hardly a happy one. Cricket describes her stepfather as generous but "volatile." Wade, who had moved out when his relationship with Bill grew tense, says, "We went hunting together. We played racquetball together. [But] Bill definitely had a dark side—total withdrawal or sudden flashes of temper."
At times, Bill Mowbray's dark moods turned suicidal. In the late '70s he shot himself almost fatally in the chest after his girlfriend announced she was leaving him. In 1985, according to the Mowbrays' marriage counselor Walter Reifslager, who testified at Susie's trial, he threatened to kill himself when Susie made plans to move out after discovering he had been unfaithful to her. Susie did move to Austin with her children for nine months but then agreed to a reconciliation. Cricket remembers pleading with her mother not to return. " 'Please, Mom, let's don't go back,' " she recalls saying. "And she said, 'Honey, Bill's gonna do something awful if I don't.' "
By then, Bill Mowbray was facing more than domestic problems. He confided to a friend, real estate broker Larry Holtzman, that the IRS had been investigating him for three years and had recently referred his case for criminal tax-fraud prosecution. Holtzman remembers telling him, "Well, that's no problem. You pay your fine and go on." According to Holtzman, Mowbray replied, "No, this is the kind where you go to jail. I'm not going to jail. Before I go to jail, I'll be gone." The following day, he was dead.
Throughout Susie Mowbray's trial, Wade trusted his mother's lawyers to establish her innocence. In retrospect, he believes they were simply outsmarted. Prosecutors painted a damaging portrait of Susie as a relentless spendthrift and made a major issue of the insurance money. After she bought a pair of nylons at an upscale mall on the day of Bill's funeral, prosecutors suggested she had gone on a shopping spree. "They portrayed her like a cheerleading, gold-digging whatever," says Holzman's wife, Susan. "People sat in lines for tickets [to the trial] from 6 o'clock in the morning. It was quite a spectacle." It took the jury just two hours to find Mowbray guilty, and over the next five years lawyers filed several unsuccessful appeals.
By 1993, Wade, then a college junior and quarterback of the Louisiana Technical College football team, had grown "frustrated and angry" with the legal system. "What I needed was information," he says. "[My coach] told me that if the attorneys weren't giving it to me, then I should go find out for myself."
With the support of his wife, Amy, 23, whom he married in 1995, Wade did just that, taking a leave of absence from college to examine court records. He gradually became aware of contradictory testimony and evidence. Astoundingly, he discovered a key report that had never been introduced to the jury. Ed Cyganiewicz, the lead prosecutor on the case, had sent Susie's nightgown to Corning, N.Y., forensics expert Herbert MacDonell, one of the country's foremost blood-splatter authorities. MacDonell not only had found no evidence of blood on the nightgown—an impossibility if Susie had killed Bill, since he had been shot at point-blank range—but had concluded that Mowbray's death was almost surely suicide. Instead, police Sgt. Mentford "Dusty" Hesskew, an Austin forensics expert, testified for the prosecution that he had identified 48 microscopic blood droplets on the gown. Yet, in a 1995 hearing before district court Judge Hester, Hesskew conceded that the finding was scientifically invalid. Although Cyganiewicz denies any improper behavior, Hester later ruled that the prosecutor's suppression of MacDonell's testimony "in large measure thwarted" presentation of an effective defense for Susie. "If the jury had heard MacDonell," wrote Hester, "...there is a substantial probability a verdict of not guilty would have ensued."
At a state women's prison in Gatesville, where she has been imprisoned since June 1988, Susie Mowbray has been allowed one 5-minute phone call every 90 days with Wade, now a second-year law student at Louisiana State University, and a monthly visit with Cricket, who lives nearby. At long last they are about to be reunited. "We never lost faith that Mom would walk out of there," says Wade, who expects his mother's release this week. "Now, after all these years, that faith has been rewarded."
PATRICK ROGERS
RON RIDENHOUR in Brownsville
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Saved by the Bell Reunion
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