Texas Confidential

Who Killed The Bookie's Wife?

(CBS) 
Bob says there never was a plan. His theory is that Roger wanted to destroy him and so Roger not only killed Doris, he also tried to frame Bob as his accomplice by making a fake audio tape.

Each brother was pointing the finger at the other. According to Bob, the whole murder-for-hire story was part of an elaborate lie, dreamed up by Roger to incriminate Bob.

"If I was going to hire somebody to do something, why would I hire a person that had been extorting me?" Bob says.

Schlesinger replied, "Because it would give him a motive and it would divert attention away from you and here was a guy who wanted to hurt you so he killed your wife. It made a good story. Good cover."

"If they want to convict me they have to have a theory of why I did it. To me it makes no sense," Bob said.

But in 1998 the state of Texas thought it had a decent case against Bob, especially with that audio tape from Roger's briefcase.

But McClellan had no idea what was about to hit him. Right before McClellan was about to offer Roger the plea deal to testify against Bob and get out of jail, Roger chose a different way out. He shocked everyone when he committed suicide in his jail cell by cutting himself more than fifty times with a razor.

But what he left behind was an even bigger surprise: Roger left a suicide note that said he had killed Doris on his own, Bob wasn’t involved, and the murder was exactly what Bob had been saying it was all along: an act of revenge.

The note read, in part, "I began an elaborate plan to frame Robert for Doris’ death as further leverage to get my money…. He is innocent."

"He did tell me that he had planned to kill himself to save his brother," says Leggett.

Leggett believes, as strange as it sounds, that Roger killed himself and left that note because he had promised his brother he would take the rap for killing Doris.

"He even showed me this letter over a week before he ended up dead. And told me that he had to do this to help his brother, so that hopefully his brother would get off the charges. And he said he really didn’t know whether the judge was going to accept it," Leggett says.

Although the prosecutor’s star witness had flipped sides on him and killed himself, in the end, it didn’t matter. McClellan convinced the judge that the suicide note was hearsay, and therefore, inadmissible.

Going into trial, McClellan still had the audio tape found in Roger's briefcase as his best evidence against Bob and hired an audio expert who once worked for the FBI to identify the voice.

Steve Cain spent hours analyzing the tape.

McClellan was pretty confident but he got some bad news when he called Cain.

"I am very confident that it is not Robert Angleton’s voice on those tapes," Cain said.

Cain had no idea whose voice it was but that didn't matter to Bob’s defense attorney, Mike Ramsey. "Truth of it is, it was a godsend. I mean how can you have better piece of evidence fall in your lap?" says Ramsey. "It’s a lawyer’s dream."