The Burning Deaths of Willard and Viola Blades

   The lot where Willard and Viola Blades lived at the corner of Grant Avenue and Catalpa Street in Springfield was so ringed with trees and shrubs that, when their home caught fire late Saturday night, June 16, 1984, no one discovered the blaze until it was out of control. A passing motorist finally noticed the fire and called it in, but the house was already consumed in flames. After the fire was extinguished, investigators found the charred remains of the couple in the rubble, but the bodies were so badly burned that investigators said they might never know the exact cause of their deaths. Fire and police detectives did not suspect foul play, and an initial examination of the bodies yielded no clues, leaving authorities to speculate that the couple must have died of smoke inhalation.
   But some things didn’t quite seem right from the very beginning. The couple were known as “sticklers for fire safety” and had several smoke detectors in their home. Mrs. Blades’s body was found in an upstairs room stretched out in the middle of a bed in an unusual position, while her dead husband was found on his back nearby in the bedroom floor. Victims of fire were more often found in a curled up position.
   Suspicions were further aroused when forensics tests revealed that Viola had two head injuries. She also had a piece of rope tied around one wrist and what appeared to be a piece of cloth tied around her neck, suggesting that she might have been assaulted and tied up prior to her death. Investigators concluded from the burn pattern beneath the bed that the fire had probably started there, and tests later confirmed that an accelerant had been used under the bed.
   Unlike his wife’s body, Willard Blades’s body had no signs of injury, and investigators tentatively concluded that he had, in fact, died of smoke inhalation. Officials now strongly suspected that they were looking at either a homicide-suicide or a double homicide.
   But which one? There were no signs of forced entry and no signs that anything of substantial value had been taken. Had Blades assaulted his wife and then burned her and himself up in the fire, or was the arson an attempt to cover up a heinous double murder? Investigators leaned toward the double-homicide theory, despite no evidence of a break-in or a robbery.
   Based on interviews with friends and relatives of the Bladeses in Oklahoma, investigators soon identified an acquaintance of the couple as a person of interest in the case. The man, whose name was not revealed at first, was known to have been in Springfield on the Saturday that the Blades house burned down.
   The “acquaintance” of the couple turned out to be Willard Blades’s nephew Ronald Conn. By July 24, Springfield officers had accumulated enough evidence to charge him and two accomplices with two counts each of capital murder in the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Blades. The accomplices were Ann Marie Dulany and Paul Richard Schmitt, both from Illinois. Conn and Ms. Dulany, who’d been living together, were already in custody in Illinois when the charges were filed, and Schmitt was arrested later that day. The suspects were brought back to Springfield and arraigned in circuit court.
   The defendants’ cases were separated, and Conn’s came up first. He finally went on trial for capital murder in early June 1986. Just after the trial opened, Conn pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in a deal that allowed him to escape the death penalty. As part of the plea-bargain, Conn gave a statement admitting to stealing stuff from his uncle and aunt. He placed primary blame for the crime on Schmitt, however, claiming that he and Ms. Dulany were already outside the house when Schmitt set the fire. Conn was sentenced to two concurrent life terms.
   At her trial in December 1986, Dulany admitted being present at the fire, but she laid nearly all the blame for the murders on Conn. The defense claimed she’d only helped Conn because she was under his control. It didn’t help Dulany’s cause, however, that she had given a conflicting statement shortly after her arrest in which she laid most of the blame for the murders on Schmitt.
   The jury found Dulany guilty, and she was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for fifty years. Her subsequent appeals were ultimately denied.
   In February 1987, Schmitt, the third defendant, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in keeping with a previously negotiated arrangement in which he’d agreed to testify against Conn, if necessary. Schmitt received two concurrent twenty-year prison terms with no possibility for parole.
   So, even though the evidence suggested Conn was the one who actually started the fire that burned up his uncle and aunt and destroyed their house, Ms. Dulany ended up getting a tougher sentence than her male sidekick in that he was eligible for parole sooner. Perhaps that’s the risk she ran by refusing to cop a plea. However, Mother Nature stepped in to rectify the seeming inequity. Conn died of natural causes at the age of sixty-eight in 2014 while still serving time at the Farmington Correctional Center.
   This post is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.