Robert Fay Adams Slays His Wife

   When twenty-one-year-old Adela Adams and her nineteen-year-old sister, Donna, left their Springfield home for school on the morning of February 3, 1970, their father, Robert Fay Adams, was lying on the couch, and their mother, Willa Lee Adams, was getting ready for work. It was the last time the girls would see their mom alive.
   When Adela and Donna came home that afternoon, their father said Willa had left after he fell asleep on the couch, taking some personal items with her, and he didn’t know where she’d gone. The girls knew their parents had been having marital problems, but some things about their mother’s disappearance just didn’t add up. For instance, Willa hadn’t shown up for work, and that just wasn’t like their mother. The longer she stayed gone, the more concerned the young women became.
   Later in February, Adams went to Florida, and when he came back, he told his daughters he’d met their mother there and she was coming home in early March. When she didn’t show up at the appointed time and their father left for Kansas City, the girls finally went to the police.
   A check in Kansas City revealed that Adams had never arrived there. In mid-March, he was located in a Pensacola (Florida) hospital. He’d been admitted the night before when a young woman sought help for him after he took an overdose of medicine. Just twenty-two, the woman had run away from Springfield with the older man about ten days earlier.
   Adams’s stomach was pumped, and when he regained consciousness on March 18, he admitted he must have killed his wife but claimed not to remember how. All he remembered, he said, was seeing her lifeless, bloody body on the floor of their bedroom with a revolver beside the body. He’d loaded the body into a vehicle, cleaned up the mess in the house, and buried the body with a bulldozer at a gravel bar southeast of Forsyth in the Kissee Mills area. He also disposed of the gun in the same general area.
   Willa’s body was found on March 19 buried in a ditch that ran beside a gravel bar along the banks of Beaver Creek. A post mortem determined that she had been shot in the head, and a first-degree murder charge was filed against Adams, who was brought back from Florida on March 21. Acting on a tip from Adams, divers retrieved the suspected murder weapon from Bull Shoals Lake near the Highway 86 overpass.
   At Adams’s preliminary examination, the state introduced the admission Adams had made about burying his wife’s body. To establish motive, the prosecution also called Patricia Weidmann, a Springfield woman, to testify that Adams suspected his wife was cheating on him. The witness said she’d accompanied Adams on the night before the murder as he followed Willa and saw her meet another man at a Springfield motel.
   Arraigned in Greene County on May 1, Adams pleaded not guilty by reason of mental defect. The trial finally got underway in February 1971. Testifying for the prosecution, the defendant’s daughters both said they’d seen their father’s revolver in his closet right before their mother disappeared but that it was gone after she disappeared. Both also testified about their parents’ marital problems, and Adela added that her mother had told her on the morning of her disappearance that she was irritated because the girls’ father had followed her the night before.
   Although called by the state, Mrs. Weidmann was treated as an adverse witness because she kept offering testimony painting Willa Lee as promiscuous and even suggested that Donna might not be Robert Fay Adams’s biological child.
   The defense claimed Adams killed his wife during a heated argument that ensued after she confronted him on the morning of February 3 about following her the night before. During the quarrel, Willa Lee threw up the fact that he’d raised a child that wasn’t even his, told him who Donna’s real father was, and called Adams a “damn fool.” Willa Lee went for her husband’s gun, but Adams got it and shot her in a fit of anger. He couldn’t remember actually pulling the trigger, though.
   Adams took the stand to deny killing Willa, claiming he’d never hurt his wife in his life. Also, two mental health experts testified that Adams had a hysterical personality that might lead to a mental breakdown when confronted with his wife’s infidelities. This might very well cause him to have no memory of killing his wife.
   During rebuttal, the prosecution, seeking to refute the idea that the murder was not premeditated, called a woman to the stand who said Adams had discussed with her in 1969 possible ways of killing his wife.
   On February 20, the jury came back with a verdict of murder in the second degree and a sentencing recommendation of forty years in prison. Adams was released on $25,000 bond while the defense appealed his case to the Missouri Supreme Court. He absconded during the first half of 1973, while the case was still awaiting a hearing.
   Adams was recaptured in November 1973 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport as he returned from Germany, where he and a new wife had been to visit her parents. Adams was brought back to Missouri and taken directly to Jefferson City to begin serving his prison term.
   Because of his reported good behavior at the state prison, Adams was transferred to a minimum-security facility in Fordland prior to 1981 It was thought he’d probably be released on parole in a few years, and he was being considered for a work-release program. In mid-March 1981, he was even granted a furlough to visit friends in Columbia.
   Big mistake! He was last seen in Columbia on March 14, and he didn’t show up on the 17th when he was scheduled to be back at Fordland. Nobody knew where he’d gone, and nobody in Missouri ever saw him again.
   This blog entry is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.