The Ice-Cold Case

Police became suspicious of Bill Vilott early in the investigation because of his behavior. After his family notified him of the murder, he delayed coming to Kansas City for days, declining Phillips' offer of free corporate jet service. He spoke with police by phone only briefly on the day of the murder, then had his mother act as a go-between, relaying his statements and speaking for him. When he finally arrived in town the afternoon before his wife's funeral, he met with police only with his mother present, and he barely spoke, letting her dominate the interview. He agreed to take a polygraph test but kept putting police off about when and where the test would happen. Immediately after the funeral, he went to his father's home in Texas, and when police finally tracked him down, he acted strangely. Then, through his attorney, he refused to take the polygraph. He wouldn't supply fingerprints, either, according to the police log.

Vilott's alibi seemed solid. He said he'd been in Tulsa the day of the murder, where he was a student at a community college. That day, he told police, he'd met his mistress, Janie Selph, at the college library. But police found it interesting that Vilott hadn't attended any of his morning classes the day of the murder and couldn't name a single witness who might have seen him before 10 a.m. Vilott initially told police he had studied the night before, then he told them he'd taken a cold pill and gone right to bed. But if Vilott had committed the murder, could he have returned to Tulsa in time to meet his mistress? Vilott had a pilot's license, but police decided that even if he hadn't flown (there was no evidence that he had), Vilott could have made the 3-hour trip back to Tulsa by car.

Vilott at first told police that the recently divorced Selph was just a friend. Later he admitted that they had been lovers since before he married. Vilott also told police that security guards had found him in the library and escorted him to an office, where his mother informed him of his wife's death.

Vilott claimed that he and his wife had had an "open marriage." He later told police that his wife wanted to try "sex without love" because she had been a virgin when they married. That came as a huge surprise to people who knew Louise Vilott, who described her as very conservative, devoted to her husband and self-conscious about her weight and looks. (In a later deposition in his civil suit against the hotel, Vilott said the couple did not have an open marriage, and he admitted to several affairs, which he said he regretted.)

Another piece of evidence seemed to implicate Vilott, according to police records: Hotel switchboard operator Colleen Broton picked out Vilott's voice in an audio lineup, identifying it as most like the voice of a man who had called and asked for Louise Vilott's room just before the murder.

The circumstantial evidence against Bill Vilott was compelling. But after two decades, there was little chance of prosecuting him without physical evidence. With no clothing or fingernail scrapings to test for DNA, however, Morgan looked for other ways to tie him to the crime.

She focused on trying to locate the tacky gold ring that was missing from Louise Vilott's finger. In her mind, the ring was key. "I figured only the murderer or an accessory would have the ring," Morgan says. "And we knew we could prove it was the same ring taken from Louise." Morgan's mother, Romain Morgan, had used a letter and a phone number from the old homicide log to contact the manufacturers of the odd gold band that Louise Vilott's husband had picked out as a setting for seven of his own diamonds -- one large and six small -- for a 1977 Christmas present to his wife. "It was described by Louise's secretary as grotesque. It was just such a massive ring, and it was so ugly, they hadn't manufactured very many of them," Romain Morgan says. Romain Morgan also found that no more than five such bands had ever been shipped to jewelers in Oklahoma.

After tracing the ring to its origins, Romain Morgan determined that a jeweler could test the ring to positively identify it, which the KCPD's Eckert confirms. "We talked to the manufacturer, too," Eckert says. "It could be identified if we could get the ring."

Melanie Morgan contacted Eckert in July 2002 and told her that a source claimed to have seen Janie Selph wearing a similar ring shortly after the murder and that she may still have the ring. Eckert classified that as a new lead that should be pursued.

But with plenty of new cases to solve and hundreds of cold cases, too, sending an officer to Selph's home in California to request that she show off her jewelry was probably not at the top of the KCPD's priority list. Nonetheless, 8 months later, Eckert sent officer Brian Bell to the West Coast. Morgan's source had identified the ring from a lineup of drawings conducted at the Orange County Sheriff's Department. But Bell reported back that the ring Selph showed him -- the one she was wearing -- was not Louise Vilott's. As far as Morgan knows, he did not ask to borrow the ring so it could be analyzed.