9
On April 12, ABI agents Brown and Thomas arranged to meet with Darlene’s two children, Heidi Wynne Langford and Larry Benjamin “Benji” Langford, to take their statements and to get their help to develop as much background as possible on Darlene, her family and friends, and their relationships.
On the day of his mother’s murder, Benji and his girlfriend had both slept late at their home in Taylorsville, Georgia, he said, then left that evening to go to a friend’s home in Rockmart, Georgia. Later, they went on to another friend’s house to shoot pool, and they didn’t return home until around 6:00
A.M.
It was the first time Benji had stayed out all night in quite some time, he told the officers.
As soon as they returned home early on the morning of April 7, Benji told the investigators, he saw all the calls on his answering machine and checked the caller ID. He immediately knew that something was wrong. He first called his former father-in-law, who hung up on him. He then called his aunt, and she told him that his mother had been murdered.
“Mom was my best friend,” Benji told his interviewers. “The only thing I ever lied to her about was my drug problems. Mom didn’t like it, and I got straight and moved in with Mom and Vernon and stayed for about three years, until a couple of months ago. Then I went off with a friend and stayed gone for a week. We argued about it when I got home, and I moved out.”
Benji said he had called his mother on Sunday, April 2.
“I think I tried to talk about my ex-wife, about her not letting me see my son,” he said. He and his mother had gotten into an argument, he claimed.
“She hung up on me because she thought I was being a smart-ass to her. I called her because she has always been able to fix any problem I had.”
The investigators wanted to know some additional details about the shotgun that Vernon had told them was probably hidden somewhere in the house by Darlene. Benji had allegedly sawed off the barrel; then Darlene confiscated it and put it away in a secure hiding place.
“It was a bolt-action shotgun with a clip,” Benji said. “I had cut the barrel off because it had a bulge in the barrel. I also had a belt that held shells. It was a twelve-gauge shotgun and I had several shells—buckshot and small game. The shells were red, blue, and yellow, three-inch shells, I think. Mom saw the gun after I sawed it off, and she thought I would get into trouble with it, and she took it and hid it. The gun should be at her house, maybe in the garage or in the room with the green carpet. She would have it hidden really well.”
Benji told the investigators that his father, Larry Michael Langford, and Darlene got along when they needed to; they would never be together again, but they had a civil relationship.
“The only time they were around each other was my birthday,” he said.
There had been incidents of abuse during their marriage, Benji claimed, saying that his father had treated his mother “like shit,” slapping her and “slinging her around,” and even pulling a gun on her at one point. However, he said that his father would never have shot her. Benji said he hadn’t spoken to his father for several months prior to his mother’s murder.
Benji then offered the investigators his own ideas about who might have been responsible for the murder.
“I think Vernon’s ex-wife Barbara may have had something to do with Mom’s death,” he told them. “Barbara is crazy.”
He said that Vernon had been talking to Barbara entirely too much on the phone “for the past couple of weeks, maybe about insurance or something. I don’t think he should have been talking to Barbara on the phone.”
The phone calls between Vernon and Barbara, he said, had made several of the family members mad, including his sister, Heidi.
Benji told the investigators about several incidents of alleged stalking and harassment that had taken place before and during his mother’s marriage to Vernon.
“When Vernon and Mom married, Vernon had a Buick Riviera and a truck. I got Mom’s car, and she drove the Buick. She didn’t like it because it had been Barbara’s, and she traded it for a new Thunderbird. Then Barbara went and bought the Buick and had a wreck in Atlanta, with a man.”
Benji went on to say that Barbara had come to the home of Vernon and his mother about three years ago. She had been wearing a ski mask and overalls, and she had sneaked into the yard and attempted to spy on them while they were in the hot tub, nude, behind their house.
“Vernon saw someone in the yard, and he chased them and caught them. It was Barbara, disguised. He drug her by the hair to her car and made her leave.”
Benji also said Barbara had vandalized Darlene’s apartment, spray-painted her car, and put flares in the heat vents of her apartment, all before Darlene and Vernon were married.
Vernon took care of Darlene, Benji told the investigators, and he loved her. It was the happiest his mother had ever been, he said, being married to Vernon.
“I want to say Vernon didn’t have anything to do with what happened,” he said, “but something about this and Vernon bothers me. I know my mom wouldn’t stop for anyone or pick up anyone, unless she knew them and trusted them. If she didn’t know them, she wouldn’t stop for them—no matter what the circumstances were—and she always locked her car doors when she got in to go anywhere.”
10
When the investigators talked to Darlene’s daughter, Heidi, later that morning, Heidi brought a few names into question that had not previously been mentioned. She claimed that two of the women who had worked with Darlene, and were allegedly two of her closest friends at Temple-Inland, were actually very jealous of her.
“She would act like she was her best friend,” she said of one of the women, “but that was not true.”
Heidi said the other woman’s actions on the night of the murder were “strange,” but she wasn’t able to pinpoint exactly why she had gotten that impression.
Something had seemed to be wrong with her mother, earlier on the day of the murder, Heidi also told the investigators. She said that she did not know what the problem might have been, though.
Heidi and her mother had gone shopping together on the afternoon of Monday, April 3, to Goody’s Family Clothing store, located in Rome, when Darlene had bought shoes, clothing, and the Rosetti viscose purse, which was, at that time, still missing. It was being sought as important evidence in the murder investigation.
Heidi mentioned Darlene’s ex-husband, Ronnie Deems, and claimed that his marriage to her mother was abusive. During the years they were married, Heidi said, he had pulled Darlene’s hair, beaten her, and attempted to run her over with his vehicle.
Heidi said Deems kept pictures of Darlene, Heidi, and Benji hanging on the walls of his home, but she said he had been told by the family not to come to Darlene’s funeral.
The phone conversations between Vernon and Barbara were also brought up by Heidi during the interview, with her confirming Benji’s statement that she did not like Vernon talking on the phone with Barbara. Heidi told the investigators about Barbara’s alleged incidents of vandalism and harassment that had been directed toward Darlene and Vernon, and she told them that her mother had been seeing Vernon while he and Barbara were separated.
As far as she knew, no one had ever confronted Barbara about threatening letters she had allegedly written to Darlene, Heidi said, or about the vandalism that had been done to Darlene’s vehicle.
The interviews with Darlene’s son and daughter had brought up several points that caught the interest of the investigators, like the allegations of physical abuse they had made against both Darlene’s former husbands. But they also had both mentioned Vernon’s ex-wife, Barbara Roberts, in a way that immediately placed her prominently on the list of persons of interest. When Vernon Roberts came in for his scheduled interview that morning at 11:45
A.M.
, there were several new lines of questioning that the investigators planned to pursue.
As for the “best friend” of Darlene’s who, Heidi had claimed, was very jealous of her mother, she and Darlene were, indeed, the best of friends, Vernon said. He said he had known the woman for many years, when he lived in Texas, where they had worked together at a Temple-Inland plant there.
Vernon said that Darlene had recently taken him to her father’s grave and told him, “That is where I want to be buried.” He also said that Darlene had told her sister about dreaming that she had been shot. He also told the officers that Benji Langford had broken into his sister Heidi’s house at some point, but his statement did not indicate the reason for the break-in or what connection, if any, he thought it might have to the case.
When the investigators brought up the subject of Barbara Roberts, Vernon’s first statement was that he did not see Barbara as being the one who killed Darlene. He then told the officers that Barbara and her boyfriend, Dr. Robert John Schiess III, had gone to Texas to attend her mother’s funeral.
Since his first statements made on the night of the murder, Vernon’s memory seemed to have improved somewhat concerning his activities after he left work on the day his wife was killed. A few minutes away from his home, he said, he had received a phone call from Barbara on his cell phone. He wasn’t getting good reception and couldn’t understand what she was saying, so he told her to call him back in around five minutes on the phone in his house. When he got home, the house phone was ringing, and it was Barbara, he said, who was calling him to give him some information on a place for one of his daughters to live. The girl was looking for a place in Georgia, but Vernon said he told Barbara it was too late in the evening, and not to worry about it. He’d take care of it himself the next day.
Barbara had told him on many occasions, Vernon said, that she was going to make arrangements for him to be her beneficiary when she died, and he told the investigators that she was not currently married. When they questioned him about the alleged vandalism and stalking incidents, he claimed that he and Darlene were not yet married when Barbara had come to the house dressed in a disguise to spy on them in the hot tub.
With both Benji and Heidi remarking on Vernon’s recent regularly occurring phone contact with Barbara during their interviews, and with both of them saying that Darlene’s family felt that it was “not a good idea,” the investigators began to focus more closely on Barbara Ann Roberts and her boyfriend, Dr. Robert “Bob” John Schiess III.
11
Barbara Ann Comeaux was born on April 18, 1956, as the fourth child of a middle-class strict Catholic family in an all-American small town in southeast Texas. There would be three more children born into the family after her, which made her the middle child of a group of seven brothers and sisters.
Barbara’s parents were said to be very well respected in the community, hardworking and very family-oriented, and they put a very high priority on providing their children with the best possible education that they could afford and building a strong foundation of faith in their lives. They raised their children according to their own values and standards. They expected that the children would maintain those values and standards when they reached adulthood, and, with the possible exception of Barbara, they were, for the most part, not disappointed.
In school Barbara was a high achiever who regularly made excellent grades and was very successful in many extracurricular activities. Learning came very easily to her, and she was talented in many areas, winning awards and contests frequently. Despite her accomplishments, however, she had very low self-esteem. In her elementary and middle-school pictures, there are few smiles to be seen on her solemn little face, despite her many achievements.
Barbara always loved animals and cherished all of her many childhood pets. And as she grew older, she was in demand as a much-requested babysitter, and she adored her little nieces and nephews, spoiling them at every opportunity. Barbara’s teachers and other adults liked her quite a lot, but she didn’t have much of a social life among her peers, having very few close friends apart from her sisters. She tended to have one-at-a-time “best friends” that she felt very possessive toward, which eventually became off-putting and caused the object of her attention to become uncomfortable and gradually begin to drift away.
Barbara didn’t feel that she was very attractive or interesting to boys during her high-school years, and consequently she spent much of her time with activities like choir, where she won many state awards and contests. Her family members said she had a beautiful singing voice, and she was a self-taught guitarist, who spent countless hours sitting in her bedroom, practicing and improving her playing skills.
Acknowledged by her siblings to be the brightest one of the family, Barbara graduated at the top of her class from the Bridge City High School in 1974; then she attended college at Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas, where she completed a three-year course of training as a radiology technician, finishing the course with honors. She went on to work as a radiology technician at Doctors Hospital in Groves, Texas; Mid-Jefferson Hospital in Nederland, Texas; as a physician’s assistant for Dr. Harvey Randolph in Groves, Texas, and as a technician at Bone Scanners Associates in Port Arthur, Texas.
After Barbara graduated from high school, she had worked and paid her own way through college. She had also paid for dance lessons, something she had always dreamed of and had wanted to take, but was an “extra” that the family budget just couldn’t stretch far enough to afford. By all accounts, she was an excellent dancer, performing in public recitals and programs, and as her self-confidence grew to match her other abilities, her appearance began to change. Gone were the heavy glasses and prominent overbite—stylish clothes, makeup, beautifully styled hair, contact lenses, and braces transformed Barbara into the girl that all the men wanted to dance with when she went back to her high-school class reunion.
But the attention of those boys who now noticed and admired her seemed to make Barbara uncomfortable; she remembered all too well how they had ignored her throughout her earlier years. Despite all the outward changes and the seeming increase in her self-confidence, Barbara was still plagued by the same old deep-seated insecurities. Her photos from that period of her life show an absolutely glamorous young woman who is smiling, but the smile still does not show in her eyes, despite her obvious beauty.
There had been clues that Barbara was gradually developing psychological problems for years, but around this time, her family began realizing that Barbara needed help—more help than they could give her. They urged her to talk to professionals and get the appropriate medical care, but she chose not to follow her family’s advice. They were disappointed with the choices she made for herself concerning her treatment. Barbara was beginning to slip closer and closer to the bipolar disorder that would come to rule her life for the next several decades.
Then Barbara met Vernon Roberts, and her world changed overnight.