The Storm
For one thing, unlike most of the bodies found in the aftermath of a hurricane, Landon hadn’t drowned. Though he was discovered face down in the surf near a local nature preserve, his lungs were free of water, according to the autopsy.
It was initially suspected that Landon’s death hadn’t come from the raging surf, but instead from the wind. It appeared that he had been struck by something heavy in the back of the head, an object that had fractured his skull and driven fragments of bone into his brain.
It would not have been an abnormal cause of death in a storm, especially given the magnitude of Hurricane Marie, but something unusual caught the attention of Buddy Byrd, the coroner and owner of St. Medard’s Bay’s only funeral home (something that might be seen as a conflict in some places, but not Alabama).
According to Byrd, Landon appeared to have sustained multiple blows to the head, as opposed to a single fatal strike, as you’d expect to see in a storm death.
There was also the odd positioning of the body when it was recovered.
Landon was face down, his arms stretched out straight over his head—almost as though someone had pulled him down the beach.
Abrasions on his chest were consistent with being dragged through sand, while the otherwise intact nature of his body and his clothing suggested that the fatal injury had occurred on dry land.
Even his wristwatch was still tight around one wrist.
But the truly odd discovery was found snagged on the inner lining of Landon’s tuxedo jacket: the jagged tip of a hot pink fingernail.
The chaos and destruction of a storm could explain many of these details. And if Landon Fitzroy had been anyone but Beau Fitzroy’s son, his death probably would have been classified, at most, as “undetermined.”
But Governor Fitzroy knew there was something odd about his boy being in St. Medard’s Bay at all that night. Landon had actually been in Birmingham earlier that evening, a solid five-hour drive away, set to attend a glitzy gala that was meant to be the soft launch of his own political career.
Instead, Landon had vanished from his own coronation only to show up dead on a beach less than twenty-four hours later.
Why?
The answer, Beau decided, was Lo Bailey, and when he put that bug in the ear of Buddy Byrd and the local police chief, Ron Steensland, Lo was hauled down to the station for questioning.
Right from the beginning, there were clear inconsistencies in her story.
She claimed to have called Landon’s office once the day he died but that she’d talked only to his secretary, Linda Green, as Landon wasn’t in.
But Miss Green countered that Landon had received two phone calls that day, both of which were from Lo, and that the second time, Landon Fitzroy had taken the call.
Miss Green said she heard him talking to someone in his office, making promises that he would see whoever it was “as soon as I can.”
Phone records later confirmed Miss Green’s version of events, but Lo never changed her story.
And then there were her bruises.
Lo showed up at the station in, according to Steensland, a tight T-shirt advertising a local seafood spot.
“Who goes to see the police in a shirt that says, ‘Shuck ’em, suck ’em, eat ’em raw’?” Steensland later said on the local news, his beady eyes widening as much as they could in disbelief. “I knew right then that Governor Fitzroy was right to tell us we needed to talk to that little girl.”
But it wasn’t the shirt that Steensland focused on initially. No, what struck him was the cardigan she was wearing over it.
A sweater.
In Alabama.
In August.
When Steensland asked her to remove it, she apparently refused.
“Gave me some real lip, called me a dirty old man, whole thing,” he remembered a few years later. “But she took it off in the end.”
And when she did, Steensland noticed the fading bruises on her arms, bruises that looked very much like fingerprints.
She claimed she’d gotten them helping her mother, Beth-Anne Bailey, cover some windows at her souvenir shop, but that didn’t make any sense to Steensland.
When he later confirmed she had in fact called Landon the day of his death, that made two lies he’d caught her in.
And, of course, that nail. Steensland had looked closely at Lo’s hands when she came in, and while several of her nails were cracked and broken—more damage from storm prep, according to Lo—the paint that remained was the same hot pink.
It wasn’t much, not at first. Circumstantial at best, flimsy at worst.
But that was before one of Lo’s friends came forward with a story about seeing Lo and Landon together in the hours before the storm made landfall, about Lo’s near-rabid jealousy and determination to hold on to Landon at all costs.
And that was before Landon’s own friends told police about Landon’s wandering eye and his growing frustration with his teenage mistress.
Murder is a chaotic thing. It’s a violation of the natural order, an event that should never happen to any of us, an act none of us should ever commit, and yet every year, the impossible happens over and over and over again. What do we do with that?
More often than not, we try to make it make sense.
We tell ourselves a story.
And the story that was beginning to twist itself around Lo Bailey made a lot of sense to a lot of people.
By the time she went to trial in the spring of 1985, that story had sharpened and refined itself like a blade.
It went like this.
Lo, realizing that she’s losing her grip on her married lover, makes a desperate play, begging him to come to St. Medard’s Bay. Is it a test? That’s the prosecution’s angle, another example of how manipulative Lo is: “Prove you love me by racing toward me as a hurricane approaches.”
We’ll never know the reason Landon agreed, but he does. He meets Lo at their bungalow on the beach, as is confirmed by Lo’s best friend, who sees the two together.
They argue.
Landon is tired of Lo’s demands, tired of her petulance, ready to put an end to it all, but Lo is not going easily.
The fight moves down the beach, the prosecution speculating that Lo makes dramatic threats. Maybe she’s heading toward the ocean, threatening to walk in and drown herself if he leaves her, to refuse to take shelter as the storm comes in.
They struggle, resulting in Lo’s bruises and the broken fingernail found inside Landon’s jacket.
And here is where the story falters, just the littlest bit.
Lo strikes him, they claim, but with what? No weapon is ever found, and the best the coroner can say is that the wounds are consistent with that of a “heavy object with sharp edges, possibly a lightweight anchor.”
It makes enough sense–—that stretch of beach between the Rosalie Inn and the nature preserve is often littered with debris from a handful of shipwrecks just off the coast. Maybe it was an anchor, maybe it was some other piece of metal, but in any case, the prosecution alleges that Lo strikes him again and again, until the back of his skull caves in and he drops to the sand.
Now? Panic. What to do?
Here’s where the prosecution really leans in.
Lo, they say, grabs Landon’s wrists and starts tugging him toward the water.
She’s banking on the fact that the storm will cover up what she’s done, hoping that the ocean of her childhood will wash him out to sea and this whole thing can be chalked up to a bad dream.
But Landon is now deadweight, and Lo Bailey is a petite woman. She can’t move him very far, and the storm is only building, and before long she’s forced to give up, no doubt assuming that the surging seas will take care of the rest.
Unfortunately for her, they don’t. Landon’s body is found the very next day, in a condition that can’t be fully explained. A young woman’s small lies make no sense unless they’re covering up a much bigger one, and just like that, Lo Bailey goes from mistress to murderess.
Deadly Waters, Deadly Love by J. Anthony Marsh, Pocket Books, 1988