Texas Confidential

Who Killed The Bookie's Wife?

(CBS) 
Paying off his brother worked for a while but Bob says Roger demanded even more cash and in 1997, Roger made one more threat.

Bob says he received a letter from Roger saying if he didn’t get the money - quote - "I will hurt you in a way that will be with you for the rest of your life."

Bob says he ignored the letter. Six weeks later, Doris was dead.

"Whoever walked through that door was getting blown away. That’s what I think," says Bob.

That's Bob's story. So why didn't police believe him? Because they started learning more about him, and his marriage.

Although investigators had little to tie Bob to the murder of his wife, they never took their eyes off him and the more they dug up, the more they believed Bob had a few reasons to want his wife dead.

For starters, Doris had filed for divorce just two months before she was murdered.

Bob says he was shocked and surprised when he learned about the divorce. "Because to me, I thought things were pretty good. And to her, obviously she was seeing another side of it," he says.

According to Tom O'Connor, Doris' divorce attorney, she was about to become a very rich woman.

Asked if he was willing to give Doris half his money, Bob says, "I hate to say we were in a situation that was so comfortable it really wouldn’t have made a difference. It irked me, but it didn't get me that angry."

But there was more. When Doris thought her husband might not pay her what she wanted, just like Roger, she threatened to expose Bob's multi-million-dollar, strictly cash bookie business to the IRS.

"Is that a motive for murder?" Schlesinger asked.

"No, and there is no motive for murder," Bob answered.

"There’s plenty of motives for murder," Schlesinger said.

"There's not enough motive for murder for anybody," Bob replied.

But police kept digging and found what they thought was one more potential motive.

"Their marriage toward the end was not good. She would stay on the Internet most of the night, in chat rooms and stuff," says Doris' close friend and hairdresser Larry West.

Doris told Larry that she was having an affair with a man she met online.

"In fact just a week before Doris' murder, she was in the salon. And she was telling me about the boyfriend. And she had been to see him that prior weekend," says West.

Bob says he never even knew about the affair. "I did not know about any boyfriend until after she was dead," he says.