With Nancy Grace on Menu, True Crime Convention Draws Killer Crowd: Real Cops, TV Crimefighters and Fans Who Want to Help!
Nancy Grace to Be at Crimecon May 4-6, pictured here with Journalist Art Harris
By Art Harris, The Bald Truth
© 2018, artharris.com, all rights reserved
ATLANTA–After covering crime and justice for three decades, you think you’ve seen and heard it all.
Then a wealthy Republican labor lawyer lawyers up with the brainiest criminal defense attorneys money can buy, veterans Bruce Harvey and Donald F. Samuel.
In court, both argue “Tex,” a nickname he chose, didn’t mean to kill his wife when the .38 “discharged” while he was riding with it on his lap in the backseat; it was just a tragic accident, plain and simple. How could it be anything but?
After all, witnesses at his murder trial confirmed their “love birds” relationship, like he told me when we first met in the living room of the Buckhead highrise he shared with Diane, 58, a top exec with a multi-million dollar advertising outfit.
“We were Soulmates,” Tex told me, professed grief hiding behind a stoic poker face. He said he’d never hurt Diane, going on about missing her, the fatal freak accident, as the gun went off on his lap after going over a bump while driving home from the ranch in Putnam County.
This was a year before trial, after a less media saavy legal team allowed a Tex TV interview with jail bars as a backdrop. I wondered why he didn’t have Harvey and Samuel out front, with his life at stake. Reknowned for helping accused killers, mobsters and the like walk, or cut sweet deals.
As a former CNN investigative reporter, I watched Bruce dance on the defense table at the Gold Club racketeering trial for a John Gotti associate behind an empire of flesh that drew pro athletes and rich jock sniffers to a legendary strip club where champagne was used to water potted plants so rich patrons could order more.
Don has also repped a string of rich, powerful defendants, who with super lawyer partner Ed Garland, had helped steam-clean pro ball player Ray Lewis, whose murder charges were dropped.
I figured money had to be the reason; Tex had a reputation for squeezing a nickel hard.
At the trial, wall-to-wall reporters included national shows like Dateline and CBS 48 Hours, prepping one of the endless crime stories devoured by loyal viewers, and those shows and others will be at Crimecon, drawing headliners like Nancy Grace who had me on her new Sirius XM crime show, Crimeonline to explore McIver and other big cases in recent weeks.
Beyond Nancy, Ashley Banfield, network stars of popular shows, cold case queens like Sheryl McCollum will be in Nashville, May 4-6, when Opryland turned into one big Crime Scene, many of us talked Tex as he sat in an Atlanta jail, awaiting sentencing for murder that could mean life in the big house.
How did he get there, I wondered? He’s not the first high society killer who tried to convince me of his innocence. Another wife killer who burned down his house to cover up that murder, invited me to a toney Atlanta country club to explain his innocence—before Nancy Grace prosecuted him and won a murder conviction–later reversed on appeal by the same lawyer representing Tex McIver, Don Samuel.
In his case, Tex said he was exhausted after a round of golf, so Diane drove the SUV on the first leg back to Atlanta, then switched seats with her best friend, Dani Jo Carter after a dinner where Diane drank a bottle of wine. Tex said he’d had nothing to drink himself, that “wine” was his wife’s thing, though a nurse would testify she smelled alcohol on him; Diane had a BAC in DUI territory, but she wasn’t driving, remember.
Later, mid-trial, I heard Dani Jo testify how the “love birds” had been passing a wineskin back and forth before she took the wheel, and that Tex had indulged.
Why would he lie to me about a little thing like wine? Did he fear a lawsuit by his wife’s estate were he to admit unsafe gun handling after drinking? Reckless negligence by a self-described gun safety nut, maybe? Who once shot into a car full of teenage hot heads in his cul de sac more than two decades ago, and got off?
Nothing was ever made of his drinking, except that an Emory Hospital nurse had smelled alcohol on him, no crime. Diane’s blood alcohol level was beyond the legal limit, hospital records showed. Tex was never tested, but then neither were driving, Dani Jo Carter was the designated driver, sober for years…until she said Diane’s killing caused her to later relapse.
Whatever, there seemed to be more reasonable doubt raised for McIver than in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson I’d covered for CNN. But it didn’t work for Tex…In LA, ADA Marcia Clark and Chris Darden had DNA, but he was acquitted, for a whole bushel of reasons. And the racial divide played a role in both trials.
For Simpson, there was a defense that exploited LAPD officer Mark Fuhrman and the “N” word, and Johnnie Cochran who understood LA’s deep scars of police brutality could be touchstones for jurors, and blowback played into finding any theory tossed in that suggested reasonable doubt…
“They just threw everything against the wall to see what would stick,” an LAPD robbery homicide detective in the case told me.
Indeed, that spaghetti made it easy for jurors to find enough confusion to cut the Juice loose, despite the slam dunk DNA is supposed to be.
Ironically for Tex, no witness saw him pull the trigger, or heard him plot Diane’s shooting to erase his money troubles by inheriting her $7 million estate and the chance she might foreclose on the farm he’d deeded to her as collateral for hundreds of thousands of dollars he’d borrowed. But even Nancy Grace, a former assistant DA in Fulton County who trained the prosecutor in the McIver case, Clint Rucker had her doubts a murder conviction was possible.
Then I heard Clint’s powerful close, high drama from the heart of a man with a large physical presence who demanded the jury deliver justice for Diane McIver. “Who will stand for her?” he asked the jury, using a nifty prop to drive home all the reasonable doubt raised by defense lawyers. It was a mason jar, filled with muddy creek water from near his home in rural Georgia.
“It’s clear now,” he told the jury, then he shook it up…”Now it’s cloudy, and I’m going to put it down here, and by the time I finish my argument, it will be as clear as Tex McIver’s guilt… for murder.”
“Art Harris, are you telling me he STOLE MY MASON JAR?” asked Nancy.
“Well, Nancy, I’ve seen you use it way back when, but he did a great job…It worked.”
Grace said Rucker had worked under her, an old friend.
“Art, I like to say you discovered me, when you watched me in court, then did the great piece for a CNN profile that showed me how there might be another path” to fight for justice” in the media. I might say I ‘discovered’ Clint,” when he was a young prosecutor with talent.
Indeed, whatever he learned, Rucker nailed the close, making the McIver murder riveting and high profile, with the white hot glare of race beating down, as Tex tried to justify Black Lives Matter protest fears as justification for pulling out his gun as they drove through a rough part of town that night, riff That set off a viral firestorm, burning down any hope for public sympathy.
Then came trial time, just as the city was celebrating the life of favorite son, MLK, Jr., reliving and mourning the assassination of the civil rights hero 50 years ago by a Memphis sniper.
As witnesses testified about McIver’s rich, white boy paranoia of black on white violence as the big SUV took an early exit to avoid traffic and lead under a bridge with homeless people…Tex had told APD investigators he feared car jackers, yadayada. Then hit a bump, which was contradicted, and the gun went off, shooting through the seat, a shot that tore through Diane’s back and set off massive internal bleeding ER docs at Emory Hospital couldn’t stop. She told the doc it was an accident, Tex shooting her.
But to hear Rucker tell it, none of that could explain away how Tex kept telling different stories, shooting himself in the foot, again and again, even putting out feelers via his crisis PR man, Jeff Dickerson, that sounded like he wanted to bribe the DA, and asking the state’s star witness, Dani Jo, to keep quiet and say she wasn’t driving. Then came another PR disaster, selling off Diane’s furs and clothes (on advice of the estate lawyer).
His defense team told the jury Tex might not seem likeable, but he wasn’t a murderer…and urged them not to buy into the DA’s mindset, that Tex was better financially without Diane, as heir to her $7 million estate.
But the jury disregarded defense spin of logic, with a high drama verdict — not guilty of malice, or premeditated murder, but guilty of felony murder, aggravated assault and influencing a witness.
When he’s sentenced later this month, Tex could get life in prison.
“It’s a big win for the DA,” said Nancy. She called Rucker a very smart guy, but smarted on the radio show about lessons he’d learned well from her. “I still can’t believe he stole my mason jar (trick). He got it from me.”
Then, on a break, she texted him congratulations and ribbed him about the mason jar she’d used before in closing arguments when they worked together in the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, locking up violent criminals—killers, rapists, child predators.
But Rucker exceeded the Mason jar, by quoting French literature to portray McIver as a calculating sociopath, fueled by cunning and greed, much like the giant octopus that obsessed novelist Victor Hugo the ADA mentioned.
As a French minor in college, I recalled an era in French letters before Jules Verne brought the chilling creature and his tentacles to life in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” A wide-eyed monster with such terror, it fueled nightmares in young readers like me…. how the giant octopus lay in wait for prey, gelatinous, camouflaged by his surroundings, a sociopath of the deep who would wrap tentacles about unwitting victims, but he didn’t bite or chomp down, for a quick end, he digested them slowly, by sucking the life out of them. Then, to hide murderous deeds, he squirted ink to cloud the water, and hide his escape.
“Just like Tex McIver,” said Rucker, a Georgia native turned Rennaissance DA, conjuring Victor Hugo for the jury in a way I’d never seen a prosecutor use such an author before.
After the verdict, McIver was stunned, but showed no emotion in his dark suit, as he held hands behind his back, to be cuffed. Then the deputies lead him away, a future crime story to be debated endlessly, talked about at Crimecon, and coming to a TV screen near you.
