In some cases, the owner of a promising, or even prize-winning, horse was temporarily strapped for cash and decided to insure and then kill the animal; this was the situation in the 1982 murder of the show jumper Henry the Hawk.
This scheme, a form of confidence game, consisted of bilking wealthy widows of their money by encouraging them to invest in horses.
In some cases, before the women invested, these non-performing animals were first "bid up" in value by the co-conspirators, in an attempt to make them seem more desirable to the purchasers.
[2][3] It was one of these schemes which the wealthy widow Helen Brach uncovered that — when she announced her intention to report the fraud that had been perpetrated on her — led to her disappearance and murder.
[2] In 1981, 17-year-old Lisa Druck of Ocala, Florida, (now known as Rielle Hunter), owned and rode a show horse named Henry the Hawk.
Druck's legal practice consisted of defending insurance companies against claims, and he knew that if a horse were electrocuted in a certain manner, it would be very difficult for a veterinary pathologist to find signs of foul play and the death would be chalked up to colic.
According to ABC News, Lisa was "a prize-winning equestrian when her father was implicated in an insidious plot to electrocute horses for insurance money.
[1] James Druck collected on a $150,000 insurance policy for arranging the killing of his daughter's horse in 1982, but he was under investigation by the FBI[9] when he died of cancer in Tampa, Florida in 1990.
After viewing the mares, she openly displayed rage at the stables, screaming about being cheated and informing anyone within earshot that she was going to the district attorney's office.
Donna Brown insisted that Burns break the animal's leg and make it look like an accident so that the horse would have to be put down by a vet.
The two men confessed to the crime, and Burns, in retaliation for being left without legal aid by his powerful former employers, turned FBI informant and revealed the names of dozens of people who had hired him.
[1] After testifying before the federal grand jury in Chicago investigating insurance fraud in the horse show industry, Harlow Arlie served eight months in jail for breaking Streetwise's leg.
[11] Burns, who revealed the names of many other conspirators, was sentenced to a year in jail for his crimes, including breaking Streetwise's leg; he served six months.
Richard Bailey, who feuded with his brother, and Frank Jayne and his family, were said to have left "a trail of violence" in the horse-club world of the upper Midwest states of Illinois and Wisconsin over the course of decades.
[13] Richard Bailey pleaded guilty to racketeering, mail and wire fraud, and money laundering charges in 1995 and was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the murder of Helen Brach.
[3] Horse trainers also hired Burns in the conspiracy, including Paul Valliere, the owner of Acres Wild Farm in North Smithfield, Rhode Island.
In 1994, Valliere admitted that he hired Burns to electrocute his show horse, Roseau Platiere, so that he could collect $75,000 in insurance money.
[12][14] One of Valliere's close friends, the Rhode Island-born trainer Barney Ward, who owned Castle Hill farm in Brewster, New York, also arranged horse-killings for wealthy owners.
Although he claimed to be innocent of the charges, he pleaded guilty in 1996 to conspiring to kill four horses for their insurance payouts between 1987 and 1990: Charisma, Condino, Rub the Lamp and Roseau Platiere.
Ward was sentenced to 33 months in prison, followed by three years of probation, and ordered to make restitution of $200,000 to one of the defrauded insurance companies.
[12] In 1993 Jane F. Clark, president of the 60,000-member United States Equestrian Federation (USEF), then known as the American Horse Shows Association (AHSA), which sanctioned 2,500 equestrian events, told The New York Times that her organization was giving federal authorities its complete cooperation and noted that she was "eager to see the investigation completed and any guilty parties brought to justice.
"[11] By 1995, the AHSA (now USEF) had expelled a number of members who had been indicted for various crimes connected with the horse murders, including Marion Hulick, Barney Ward, and Paul Valliere.
In 1988 — long before the arrest of Tommy Burns and the subsequent unraveling of the horse murders conspiracy of silence — "Brat Pack" novelist Jay McInerney based a roman à clef novel, titled Story of My Life, on the young adulthood of his former girlfriend Lisa Druck, James Druck's daughter.
[18] McInerney's novel implies that the cause of protagonist Alison Poole's "party girl" behavior is her father's abuse, including the murder of her prize jumping horse.
"[23] McInerney's references to the horse murder conspiracy went unremarked by sports journalists or the general media at the time of the novel's publication, because the scandal itself had not yet come to light in the national press, but the novel received renewed interest in the wake of the Edwards-Hunter extramarital affair.