Insured for Murder Book

Insured for Murder has all the ingredients of a first-rate thriller: a murder, an insurance scam with a multimillion-dollar payoff, a playboy businessman, a sinister neurologist wielding a stun gun, false identities, and an international manhunt. Robin Yocum and Catherine Candisky, two reporters with The Columbus Dispatch, describe how they unravelled a con game that was three years in the making. On the morning of April 16, 1988, the emergency squad was called to the office of Dr. Richard P. Boggs, a respected neurologist in Glendale, California. On the floor of the examining room was the alleged body of Melvin E. Hanson, the vice president of the Just Sweats athletic clothing store chain, based in Columbus, Ohio. Apparently, he had collapsed and died of heart failure during a routine examination. Early next morning, Hanson's business partner and the company president, John B. Hawkins, arrived from Columbus and had the body unceremoniously cremated. The coroner ruled that Hanson had died of natural causes, so there was nothing to be investigated, and the Glendale police did not pursue the case further. Behind the facade of just another mortality statistic, however, was the yet-undiscovered fact that the body lying on the floor was not Hanson's. The corpse was an anonymous double who had been murdered in a scheme to fraudulently collect on Hanson's life insurance policy. The deception was eventually uncovered by an insurance investigator, but only after one million dollars had been paid to John Hawkins, the sole beneficiary of Hanson's life insurance policy. But the full extent of the scam might never have been discovered except for the hard-nosed efforts of Yocum and Candisky, who doggedly pursued the story and published the results of their investigation in a series of articles in The Columbus Dispatch. Piece by piece they revealed what was intended to be a five-million-dollar scheme of fraud and murder, and unmasked Hanson and Hawkins as con men with a histo