Deadly Relations

Deadly Relations is based on a true story

2012-01-28T12:43:00.000-08:00

Deadly Relations is a movie based on fact. Scroll below for the actual story and real pics.

The Movie Is on TV Jan 28, 2012

2012-01-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

Deadly Relations is on tv today. Check your local listing for this movie on the Lifetime Movie Network.

Leonard Fagot and Carol Fagot Family Photos

2010-12-02T09:42:00.000-08:00

Thanks so much Kim for the photos. She was still so beautiful.

Carol Fagot passed away from cancer not long after this photo was taken

A younger Carol Fagot

Pics courtesy of Find a Grave

Leonard Fagot Family Article

2009-01-25T06:16:00.000-08:00

They were the picture of a happy family -- successful lawyer father, nurturing homemaker mother and four beautiful daughters. There was love and laughter in the Leonard Fagot home. The family was closely knit. But then began a nightmare of bizarre events that tore the family apart.Carol Donahue and Shirley Hall felt they had to tell the story so others would understand why the family turned their father over to Jefferson Parish police for the murder of Carol's husband, Mike Holland, and what led the immediate family to realize that Leonard Fagot had killed not one son-in-law but two and had terrorized his family with threats and deeds too horrible to contemplate.Writing Deadly Relations (Bantam Books, $4.95, paperback) was therapy, said Carol Donahue, who now lives in Denham Springs, but talking about her daddy and his twisted viewpoint is still not easy for her. Baton Rougeans may view a segment dealing with the story on Hard Copy Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. on Channel 2. The sisters have also been on the Sally Jessy Raphael Show.The slim blonde sat in the coffee shop talking about her family's tragedy. To hear it makes everybody else's problems dwindle into insignificance.It's a complicated story, beginning around 1969, said Carol Donahue. "Daddy began having an affair with a teen-age girl, 27 years younger than he. He flaunted it. He made no attempt to hide it or to be discreet. My little sister, Shirley, who co-authored the book, was only 11 at the time. She found my father in the back yard in the car, making love to the girl. She ran, and he caught her and told her not to tell her mother because she would get mad and leave us. I found out about it a few months later when I was married and living in Germany."He had had affairs before, she said, but he had never "planted a girl on the doorstep before. I don't understand why he thought it was all right."This girl made obscene phone calls to the family. "She'd call and hang up or call us bitches when we answered. Things slid downhill very fast. Mother (whose name is also Shirley) wanted a divorce. Daddy refused."Leonard Fagot had not been an abusive husband or father as the girls were growing up, his daughter said. "But Father was capable of violence. He was a highly decorated Marine war hero. He had a terrible temper. There was always a sense of violence about him. It was the way he said it more than anything else."The book fills in details not covered in her oral telling of the story. When the girls became teen-agers, their father's rules became stricter, and he was totally inflexible about them. No phone calls after 8 p.m. Curfew at 10 p.m. Ceaseless criticism of makeup, hair and clothing. Disapproval of dates.Leonard Fagot had mapped out his daughters' futures. They were to graduate from college, marry professional men and live in homes he would build for them at the family compound. He did not want his daughters ever to leave him. While fathers are frequently overly protective of daughters, Carol and Shirley's anecdotes indicate that he went to extremes.Oldest sister Joanne sent their father into a tailspin first by announcing she was not going to college and then that she was getting married."George Westerfield was a sunny-natured, friendly guy. It was impossible not to like him. He had a problem keeping jobs, and Father expected us to marry professional men... . He never liked any of our husbands." Joanne and George were married in August 1966.Carol believes that things really began to go awry after her father had a heart attack the following year. Though the doctor had told the family that Leonard could resume a normal life, including his law practice, Leonard suddenly became an invalid, playing the role to the hilt. He quit going in to work, threw temper tantrums and made unreasonable demands and accusations. "He gave up a lucrative career at age 47, at the height of his career."The book is told from two sisters' alternating viewpoints: Carol's and Shirley's. Shirley, who lives in Jacksonville, Fla., describes her father's affair with teen-aged Marty, whom he later married. The writing style of the sisters is straightforward, fairly objective (which is amazing, when you consider how emotionally involved they were in the events). It reads like fiction but is not.About Marty, Shirley says in the book: "His life had begun to revolve around Marty. She had a strange hold over him, something that seemed to me, even at 11 years old, to exceed the boundaries of love into something else completely." When Marty lost her temper or was sarcastic to any of the Fagot women, Leonard demanded that they apologize to her.Leonard faked angina attacks to attract attention, usually when 11-year-old Shirley was home alone with him.Then, on May 15, 1970, Joanne's husband George was found dead behind the stables. "He was installing floodlights for my father above the stables and had fallen from a tree. The coroner said he died of a broken neck." Did Carol suspect her father of foul play?"Yes, I did. We had looked for George all day. Around 5 p.m., my father called and spoke with my mother. We told him we had been looking for George. He asked if we had looked behind the stables. We had the horrible thought that we would find him there."How could her father possibly think they wouldn't suspect him?"He thought he was smarter than anyone else, above the law. What led us to truly believe he had killed George was that he collected a $200,000 insurance policy on George. He turned over to Joanne a $20,000 policy he had taken out on George, which she did not know about. He was an insurance nut. He clipped insurance coupons out of the paper. He wanted us to fly on separate airplanes to Hawaii so if anybody died the others could collect the insurance." His wife put her foot down; they all flew to Hawaii together.It was when his wife was going through the financial statements, looking for proof that he had bought a Corvette for Marty, that she found a deposit slip for nearly $200,000, along with George's autopsy report and life insurance policies on everyone in the family -- double indemnity. Since he was not practicing law at the time, she had no idea where the money had come from. She learned that the money came from a policy on George.Why does Carol believe her father killed George?"He was very possessive of his daughters. No one was good enough for us. Money was another motive."The family did not tell the police they believed Leonard had killed George. There was no proof. But how did their feelings about the death affect their relationship with their father?"My dad was my idol. I perceived him as a brave and courageous man. He ruled the house with an iron fist. As things progressed, there was more fear, a different kind of fear. He never threatened us" (the daughters).In August 1971, Leonard shot off his left hand with a gun. "It was deliberate. He collected insurance" but not all of it. The insurance company was suspicious and settled for one-quarter of the quarter-of-a-million-dollar policy. In the hospital, Leonard was more concerned about what Bruce (Carol's husband) might tell the police than about losing a hand. It made the family suspect that the injury was no accident.There were other instances of Leonard's violent rages and threats against his daughters' husbands or boyfriends. Then came the attack on Carol's mother. "It was late at night. I kept hearing a scratching noise and realized it was coming from the back of the house."I heard my mother going, "Carol, Carol,' and scratching on the door. Mother stood there with blood on her face. Marty was standing behind her with a rock in her hand. Marty had struck my mother twice with the rock, and strangled her. Marty went off and sat on the grass, with her knees drawn up and rocking, saying "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.' Mother went to the hospital and was treated for her wounds. Marty was arrested for aggravated battery and resisting arrest. Father bailed her out ofjail and told my mother it was nothing more than a cat fight between two jealous women."Mother said she wanted to move away from him, as far as possible. He threatened her. She said she would drop the charges (against Marty) if he would buy her a house in the country."At the same time, Marty was pressuring Leonard into marriage, Carol said. "I truly believe he wanted to hang onto my mother." They were divorced in 1973. "My mother moved out, and Marty moved in."Carol and Bruce were divorced, and Carol married Mike Holland, who was to be Leonard's next victim. Carol and Mike moved into a trailer on Carol's mother's property in Covington, and things went well for a while.Things were not going so well for Shirley, the youngest daughter. She was skipping classes at Covington High and had a new boyfriend. When her mother swallowed her pride and asked her father to talk to her, the teen-ager got on the phone with her father and was told that he was busy but could make an appointment to meet her next Friday at 3. "It broke her heart. She ran away. It broke my mother's heart, too," Carol said.Shirley ran away with her boyfriend, Ray. "I can easily have him taken care of," her father told others in the family. The young couple eventually returned home, were married and moved to Colorado.Carol's husband, Mike, became involved in a drug-smuggling ring. He went to Mexico, bought marijuana and sold it in the United States. "There was no excuse," said Carol. "It was easy money, and it was an illegal activity."Leonard found out about the business by accident from Carol."He feigned an attack of illness and threatened to drive his car off a bridge because he needed money. My loyalty for my father overrode everything else. I told him how Mike made a living. He wanted to be his partner. Mike made a run to Mexico and brought back $38,000 for my father. He wanted more. He pressured Mike, who totally refused to do it."In 1975, Mike lost his job with Shell Oil. "He was moping about, hurling verbal abuse at me. Then he kicked my dog to death, an Irish setter named Annie. It was terrible for me. My feelings for him were beginning to change a lot. He was not the same person I had married. My life began to unravel. He said he hated himself for what he had done. Mike said he would make a run for my father. He got busted by the Federals, had an M16 shoved in his face. They confiscated his marijuana and my father'smoney, $5,000, which probably would have reaped $80,000 on the market. My father didn't believe him. He thought Mike was ripping him off."Carol left Mike after he had set fire to the children's toys. She also wanted nothing to do with her father, who was addicted to drugs. She went to see him once and "He was very much drugged. He didn't seem to know who I was. He was not in control of himself. He told me his children were all greedy users. He asked me, "Is it blood you want? Wasn't one enough? How many bits and pieces do you want?' His eyes were cold, like the eyes of a snake. I genuinely believe my father was a sociopathicpersonality. I was horrified. I couldn't imagine what in the world he was talking about. I believed he was not sane, lost to me forever, no longer the father I knew."The next event in the saga of family tragedy was a car accident. Because he had no left hand, Leonard had a prosthesis, which he rarely wore. The day he wrecked the car, however, he was wearing it -- and it "had gone through his eye. He went to the hospital. They had to remove the eye. The insurance company flatly refused to pay him anything for his eye. Then he asked people if they would blow up a sailboat so he could collect the insurance."Carol was trying to get on with her life, but she noticed that "whenever one of us got married, he bought life insurance policies on our husbands."The most bizarre incident related in the book and in person concerns the murder of Mike Holland. Carol's father asked her one day if she knew where Mike was living and suggested that she go over there and "unlock some of the bedroom windows "so I can kill him.' It totally blew my mind. Within the week, Mike called and said Father wanted him to get some marijuana. I told him not to go over there, that he had been threatening Mike's life. He went anyway. Mother and I went to see what was going to happen. We saw Mike get in his truck and leave. Two nights later, the phone rang. It was Bruce. "You don't know what's happened? Your father and Mike had a shootout on Citrus Road. Mike is dead.' It kept going through my mind: Mike is dead. Mike is dead. The police asked me if there was anyone who wanted Mike dead. I said no because I was afraid my father would do something to me. Then Daddy told me, "I killed Mike. I plugged him right through the heart. I do what I have to to survive. George was aworthless bum. Joanne is better off without him.' ""It confirmed what I knew in my heart. If he had done one, he had done them all. I went to Mike's funeral. I fainted. I talked to Mother and my sister. We made up our minds we had to stop him. Mother said, "Do you think he'll draw the line just because you are his children? He's dangerous, out of control. Who will he hurt next?'"We gave our statements to the police. They were extremely pleasant to us. They said that most families pull in the ranks to protect a loved one. They said we had been honest and open and helpful. A few days later, they came with a search warrant and found the murder weapon hidden behind a row of books. Mike's blood was on the gun, a .38. Daddy and Marty were arrested for second-degree murder. The grand jury indicted Daddy on that charge and indicted Marty as accessory after the fact. They got out on bond, and that was the beginning of our horrors."Nancy, Mother and I moved in together because we knew in our hearts there would be intimidation tactics. We began receiving threatening phone calls. It was Marty. She threatened to kill Joanne's children on sight. She threatened my children. Our apartment had been broken into and the faces cut out of family photos. We couldn't prove who had done it. Shots were fired at Joanne in her car as she drove down Citrus Road."One evening, I had gone to the Red Knight with Steve (Steve Donahue, who was to be Carol's third husband). Marty was standing in the foyer with a gun pointed at my stomach. I was scared to death, trembling. She said if I didn't retract my statement to police, she wouldn't be responsible for my children's safety. Steve came, and she ran out the door. He said she looked like a rabid animal."My mother's home was trashed one night. Pillows torn up. Stuffing out of furniture. We had no proof that Marty did this, but we know she did."The trial began in June 1977. Leonard had an angina attack in the courtroom, and the judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial. A new trial was set. The harassment stopped. The trail began. A coronary unit, paramedics, oxygen and stretcher were present. This judge was not going to let him off the hook. He was convicted of second-degree murder and given the maximum sentence allowed, 40 years in prison without benefit of parole. He filed an appeal."On March 3, he disappeared. Marty waited 10 days to hire a private investigator. She told no one. On March 18, his body was found in the trunk of his car at the Holiday Inn on Causeway Boulevard. The coroner said he'd been dead for six days, shot with a large caliber weapon. It was suicide made to look like murder. We don't know who put his body in the car."When Carol, her sister Joanne and their mother went to the police with the information about Leonard's activities, "we were shunned by all the relatives on my father's side. Since he was a man of many faces, only his immediate family understood what he was really like. Not only did Daddy and that girl destroy all of our lives, it divided the family. Writing the book was very therapeutic for me. It was a chance to get it all out from inside of me. We were not out to get my father. We loved my father."Carol and Shirley originally wrote the story as a novel. They chose an agent out of Writer's Digest magazine and submitted the manuscript to Bantam. An editor called to say she loved the book and was amazed that it seemed to be real-life. Carol told her it was actually a true story, and the editor asked her to redo it as nonfiction. "Money was the least thing from our minds at first. But now, we are looking to recoup what should have been left to his heirs. Marty took all the contents of the house -- photo albums, my sister's baby grand piano, our high school diplomas. We decided we would bare it all."How does her mother feel about the book?"My mother is happy we wrote it. She is embarrassed that her life turned out like it did, that she married a man like that."It's difficult to accept that a beloved father could commit such atrocities. "There was always a part of us that said it couldn't be true," she said. Illustration:PHOTOCarol Donahue on coverCarol DonahueNancy Fagot and Gary Gonzales' wedding dayJoanne and Carol FagotJoe Tracy, Shirley, Gary Gonzales, Nancy, Leonard Fagot, Mike Holland and ShirleyCarol DonahueRear entrance, where police dogs led detectives night of murderFagot on the night of his arrest
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Update

Carol Lee Fagot Theriot
A resident of Denham Springs, she passed away at 12:25 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 3, 2009, at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, Baton Rouge. She was 59 and a native of New Orleans. She was the published author of the book, "Deadly Relations," which was made into a feature film and a former award-winning feature writer for the Denham Springs News. Visitation at Seale Funeral Home chapel, Denham Springs, on Monday, Jan. 5, from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., with a memorial service at 7 p.m. Survived by her husband, Gerard Joseph "Gerry" Theriot; daughter, Kim Applegarth McCauley; sons and daughter-in-law, Bruce and Shantel Applegarth Jr. and Shane Michael Donahue; sisters, Joanne Fayard and Nancy Maddox; grandchildren, Dillon Swetledge, Seth McCauley, Lauren McCauley, Taylor Applegarth, Coleman McCauley and Tucker McCauley; and numerous nieces and nephews. Preceded in death by her parents, Shirley and Leonard Fagot; and sister, Shirley Hall. Arrangements by Seale Funeral Service Inc., Denham Springs.

Deadly Relations movie was Fact Based

2009-01-25T06:15:00.000-08:00

They died - violently - when they were at Fagot's house in River Ridge. One fell out of a tree in 1970; another was shot to death in a car in the driveway in 1976. This was where I came in. Fagot was booked with second-degree murder in the second killing, and I was assigned to cover his trial for The States-Item. Fagot's life and these bizarre deaths are dramatized in "Deadly Relations," which is scheduled to air at 8 tonight on Channel 8. But the ABC made-for-TV movie, which was shot in Georgia and is full of characters speaking in the cornpone drawl that passes for Southern speech, doesn't come close to letting viewers in on the whole story. At the core was Fagot himself. Unlike everyone in the movie, he pronounced the "t" in his name. And unlike hunky Robert Urich, who plays him with all the subtlety of a mustache-twirling villain in a melodrama, Fagot was a slight, nondescript man whose darting eyes always seemed to hint at evil just below the surface. I thought he was a man who might snap without warning; a recent counterpart might be D-FENS, the crew-cut man Michael Douglas portrayed who went on a rampage in "Falling Down." Fagot, a Pearl Harbor survivor and decorated Marine who went on to become a lawyer, might have seemed like an all-too-ordinary family man. But his house in a quiet suburban neighborhood was fitted out with an extensive alarm system, and it crouched behind electronically controlled gates. In his home office were insurance policies he had taken out on several family members, including sons-in-law. Talk around the courthouse was that he had shot off his left forearm to collect insurance benefits and that he had used his hook to gouge out an eye to get more money. Then there was the issue of Fagot's heart, which, his attorney argued, was too frail to withstand the stress of a trial. Despite this claim, a trial was ordered, and in June 1977, Fagot appeared in a Gretna courtroom with medicine, a nurse and several other attendants. An ambulance was outside in the parking lot, just in case. Shortly after 11 jurors had been picked, Fagot started fumbling with a pill bottle and collapsed with what was believed to be an angina attack. A mistrial was declared. Six months later, another trial began. My father happened to be in the jury pool, and he recalled being nonplussed at the view from the jury box: Fagot, 54, looking frail on a stretcher, with an oxygen mask at the ready. Nurses and other attendants stood by in Judge Patrick Carr's courtroom. Heart-monitoring equipment was stashed in a nearby room. My father was excused - guess why - so he didn't get to see the trial. But I did. I must admit that I was suspicious about whether all the medical trappings were necessary, but, then, reporters are supposed to be suspicious about everything. But I had to find a basis for my cynicism, so I followed testimony the way a tennis reporter might cover Wimbledon: My eyes darted from each witness to Fagot to see whether adverse statements might trigger some sort of reaction. They did. One seizure occurred while a Jefferson Parish deputy sheriff discussed his interviews with Fagot the night of the shooting, including one exchange in which Fagot said, "I feel like I'm going to be the patsy." A trembling Fagot was wheeled from the courtroom by a medical aide who said, "Relax. Come on, now, relax." He was gone nearly two hours, and when Fagot returned, he wasn't wearing his usual coat and tie, and the oxygen mask still covered his face. "If you can hear me, indicate by raising your hand," Judge Patrick Carr said. Fagot feebly raised his right hand, and testimony resumed. That was dramatic, but it turned out to be a warm-up for the next day, when the dead man's widow - Fagot's daughter Carol - took the stand to testify that her father had told her that he had shot her husband. Earlier, Fagot had claimed that his son-in-law had pulled the gun and been shot in a struggle in the younger man's car. Shortly after she started speaking, Fagot reached for the oxygen mask, closed his eyes, shuddered and slipped to the floor. He was wheeled out of the courtroom for monitoring, and Carr ordered him hospitalized. While this was fascinating, I realized I had to pierce the veil and try to see what was really going on. So I approached Lisa Yates, Fagot's nurse, to ask for medical facts. Fagot suffered from chest pains, she said, but his vital signs and electrocardiogram were normal. Interesting, and definitely worth reporting. I put it in the third paragraph and hoped readers would see what I was getting at, even if the jurors wouldn't be allowed to. Her testimony did what it was supposed to do. After two hours of deliberating, the jury convicted Fagot of second-degree murder. He was later sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor. But the story wasn't over. As the spectators left the courtroom after the verdict, there was noise in the hallway because, apparently, some people felt Fagot's daughter shouldn't have testified against her father. Some people were in tears. "He killed my husband," she said. "What do you want me to do?" But the story wasn't over. In March 1978, Fagot's body was found in a car trunk in a motel parking lot in Metairie. He had been shot in the right temple, but the thinking was that he had been shot elsewhere: Even though his wound was massive, there was little blood in the trunk. But the story wasn't over. Fagot was a lawyer who knew that if he died while appealing the verdict, his conviction would be set aside because the case hadn't been settled before his death. And without a conviction, it would be virtually impossible to prosecute his wife as an accessory. He was buried with full military honors in the Garden of Memories.