Last week, the city of Austin, TX celebrated Lori Adams, one of its beloved famous citizens. One of world's oldest female pilots alive today has been flying for over 60 years. Not only did she fly over 29,000 miles, she had owned a pilot school in the area for many years, teaching others to fly. The local paper interviewed 81-year-old Lori Adams for the commemorative front-page feature article loved by all.
The paper routinely conducts criminal background checks on feature subjects; not only does it allow a journalist to get a fuller insight into the subject's world, it also helps to avoid all kinds of surprises. Ms. Adams'
background check did not contain any criminal records.
After the story ran, the paper received an anonymous e-mail that said: "Here is her scarlet letter: M is for Murderer". The tipster proceeded to attach a 70s newspaper article, which indicated that in 1973, Lori Adams was convicted for murder.
This, of course, caused quite a furor, and led to a full investigation. It turns out, during the initial interview, the celebrated pilot had omitted rather important information about her background. She had mentioned that she had lost her husband, Dick Adams, in a plane crash, and never remarried. She never mentioned her first marriage to Ronald Stevens in 1968, but county records attest to it. A subsequent
background check under a different married name revealed the murder conviction.
During the second interview, Lori Adams admitted that no one in her life today, even her closest family members, friends and business associates knew about this part of her life, and she refused to discuss the incident in detail. However, the journalists pieced the rest together from that same old article submitted by the anonymous tipster.
According to this account, a year after the Stevens were married, Mrs. Stevens was arrested for the brutal beating of her 6-year-old stepson, which resulted in the child's death. She cried and told the police she had "whipped" the boy, but the child died from a fractured skull and broken neck, and the autopsy showed many other potentially fatal internal and external injuries. Here's the kicker, though: the judge had sentenced her to just two to four years in prison, and there is no record of her actually serving time. There is, however, a record of the 1975 divorce.
Lori Adams has lived a long, celebrated life and managed to hide the fact that she is a convicted child killer from everyone, even fooling the initial
background check due to incomplete information. Luckily, in all these years she never hurt another child. But the truth does have a way of surfacing and catching up with one eventually, no matter how long it takes.
