Joan Robinson Hill

Later years and illness

The Kirby Drive house and the music room On June 14, 1960, the Hills had a son, whom they named Robert Ashton Hill, but who was quickly nicknamed Boot by his grandfather. Robinson then bought his daughter a farm after she told him of her ambition to breed horses and establish a riding school. In 1965, the Hills also bought a house at 1561 Kirby Drive, a Southern colonial-style house located in the wealthy neighborhood of River Oaks, a few blocks from the Robinsons' home.

John Hill, whose interest in music began in childhood, was proficient on the piano, as well as the trombone, tuba, flute, and recorder. As a young man, he aspired to become a piano player for a dance band, but his mother steered both sons toward medicine. Following the success of his own practice, he announced to Joan that he wished to convert a former servant's room into a "music room" at their house. Hill asked Ash Robinson to lend him $10,000 for the project, but Robinson refused as he believed it to be frivolous, and Hill already had a loan from him to buy the house.

Hill then arranged for a bank loan, enabling him to pay off the money Robinson had lent the couple to buy the Kirby Drive house, then commissioned a sound engineer to create the music room, telling him, "I want the finest music room since Renaissance Italy." One of his ambitions was to own a handmade Bösendorfer piano, the world's most expensive. On hearing that a local firm had obtained the Austrian company's Houston franchise, he ordered an Imperial Grand for $15,000. Having cost in excess of $100,000, in March 1969 John Hill's music room was almost complete. The room became a bone of contention; Joan was angry about the amount of money her husband had poured into realizing his dream. During their 1968 separation, she had confided in Patti Gordon, a friend who owned a restaurant, that the music room had been central to their troubles. "He doesn't care about me or our son or anybody else. Only that god damned music room. I wish we had never started building it."

Meanwhile, Chatsworth Farm did not achieve the success that Joan had envisaged, and was not turning a profit. A trainer had worked there until 1967, but he left because he did not get on with Robinson, and by 1969, Robinson was considering selling the place. Joan wanted to keep it running, however, and persuaded Diane Settegast, a friend from Dallas, to take on the temporary role of trainer.

Marital problems By 1968, the Hills had begun to have significant conflicts in their marriage. Kurth and Hill became romantically involved a short time after their meeting at the camp. When Joan returned from a horse show outside Houston, she found a note from her husband saying that he had left because things were "not good between us". She phoned her husband's office many times in search of a better explanation from him; Hill did not return his wife's calls. Ash Robinson suggested the use of a private detective to learn what John Hill was up to; Joan was against this idea.

The couple was still living apart in November 1968, when Hill had divorce papers served on his wife. Ash Robinson, who had hired detectives to investigate his son-in-law, learned of his Post Oak apartment from their report. Joan told her father that she still wanted to make her marriage work, despite her husband's infidelity, and contested the divorce.

In early December 1968, Ash Robinson phoned Hill at his Post Oak apartment, asking Hill to meet with him at the Robinson home. Robinson had drafted a letter of apology and a reconciliation offer to his daughter he wanted Hill to sign. Hill was in debt to Robinson for household and professional expenses, and his father-in-law implied that he would begin pressing for repayment if Hill did not return to his wife. Hill signed the letter written by Ash Robinson and prepared to go back to the Kirby Drive home.

Diane Settegast and Eunice Woolen, who stayed with the Hills as house guests a week before Joan's death, would later describe how Hill brought home pastries, but insisted on choosing which ones each of them would eat. |name=friends|group=note Hill would return home with the pastries in the evenings after being called away by a message on his pager. On Friday, March 14, the Hills attended Houston's annual wild-game dinner, where John played a concert with the Heartbeats. They left early, and on the way home, Joan asked her husband if he would be staying out all night again. When he said that he probably would, she reminded him that he had done this on two previous occasions that week. The conversation quickly descended into an argument in which she told him that if he did stay out, he should not bother to come back. When they arrived home, she got out of the car, and he began to drive away, at which point she became angry and shouted, "You've blown it, John! You've just lost your wife, your son, and your god damn music room."

Shortly before the arrival of her house guests, Joan had learned that her husband was still maintaining his small apartment and still involved with Ann Kurth. On the day following the argument, Hill took his son for a haircut, and during the drive, they went to his apartment to pick up some things; the boy talked with his mother about it when he arrived home. After a tense evening, Hill put on a romantic record and came over to stand behind his wife's chair. Settegast suggested the couple should dance, and they did. Afterwards, they retired to bed. The next morning, Joan told Settegast that Hill had made her "very happy" the previous night. "He told me things I've never heard from the man before in our whole married life. I think it's going to be all right between us from now on." After checking on her several times, Hill told the two house guests that he was going out to purchase medication for her. Effie Green, the Hills' maid, was told that Mrs. Hill was sick in bed and was not to be disturbed for any reason.

On the morning of Tuesday, March 18, Effie went to check on Joan after the doctor had left for the day. She found Joan in a soiled nightgown; when she moved her to help her change into a fresh gown, Effie saw that Joan had been lying in dried feces. Two towels had been placed under her due to a recent loose bowel movement that appeared to contain blood. The maid did her best to help Joan into the bathroom to clean her. As she did this, Effie noticed that Joan's face began turning blue. The maid hurriedly cleaned up Joan and the soiled bed and called to her husband, who also worked for the Hills, to phone Mrs. Hill's parents' home at once. When no one answered, Archie Green tried unsuccessfully to reach John Hill at his office and left a message. Rhea Robinson was unaware of Joan's condition when her husband dropped her off at the Hill home to visit her daughter.

The severity of Joan's illness was known only to those in the Hill household until the morning of March 18, 1969, when her mother entered her daughter's sickroom. She found Joan lying in her own body wastes and vomit as John Hill stood at the foot of his wife's bed. When Robinson found that her daughter had a fever, Hill told his mother-in-law he thought Joan should be taken to a hospital. Hill did not summon an ambulance for his wife, who was now semiconscious, but insisted on driving her to the hospital himself. The hospital he chose was not one of Houston's noted medical centers, but a new hospital in Houston's suburbs, Sharpstown General Hospital, which was a 20 minute drive from the Hill home. The hospital had no emergency room or intensive care unit at the time of Joan's admission. She was taken into the hospital by a nurse who had come to the car with a wheelchair and was taken to a private room on arrival.

During the drive, Joan told her mother she was going blind; her husband referred to this as a "blackout". Upon arrival at Sharpstown General, Robinson Hill's blood pressure was 60/40; the hospital nurse promptly took a second reading, as she believed that she had made some sort of error.

Still uneasy after his second diagnosis, Dr. Bertinot consulted a colleague, Dr. Frank Lanza, who believed Joan to be in septic shock. The doctors ordered blood cultures, which would take 72 hours to process. Joan had been a patient at Sharpstown General for six hours when her kidneys began to fail; she was not passing any urine and had edema.

Dr. Bertinot checked on Joan at 12:30 am on March 19. While she had not improved, she appeared to have stabilized. Her blood pressure had elevated slightly and she was responding to the peritoneal dialysis. Bertinot felt he could now leave the hospital to get some rest, but Dr. Lanza said he would stay a while longer and would call Dr. Bertinot if anything should change. John Hill also felt he could get some sleep and retired to a couch in a hospital records room. By 1:30 am, both Dr. Lanza and Dr. Hicks had left the hospital. Joan, who had been heavily sedated, was coherent at times. When Hill told her he would be down the hall if needed, she asked the nurse attending her to see that her husband was made comfortable there.

Death, investigation, trials

Death At 2:30 am on March 19, the attending nurse noticed that Joan's vital signs indicated sudden heart failure. She ran to the room's doorway and shouted to the nurses' station to have the resident on duty come immediately with cardiac failure equipment. As she did this, Joan slightly raised her head, gasping her husband's name. As she tried to breathe, a flood of blood rushed from her mouth. The resident tried to save her by injecting adrenaline into her heart, but he was not successful.

Within an hour after moving the body from Sharpstown General, the funeral home began the process of embalming Robinson Hill's body. The hospital's pathologist, Dr. Arthur Morse, arrived at the funeral home at 10 am to carry out the autopsy, only to find that the body had already been embalmed. Morse concluded his autopsy at 11:30 am without finding any signs of what caused Robinson Hill's death aside from a maroon coloration of her pancreas and offered an opinion that she may have died from pancreatitis.

Second autopsy

Since receiving Dr. Morse's opinion that his daughter had died from pancreatitis, Robinson had been consulting doctors on the matter, who had advised him that this was an unlikely cause of death. On the morning of Friday, March 21, the day of Joan Robinson Hill's funeral, Ash Robinson visited the office of Assistant District Attorney I. D. McMaster, where he accused John Hill of killing his daughter, telling McMaster of the circumstances surrounding her death and autopsy. McMaster asked Harris County Medical Examiner Joseph Jachimczyk to go to the funeral home to examine the body before the funeral. Jachimczyk ordered Morse to hand over blood and urine specimens taken from Robinson Hill. He then drove to the funeral home to view the body.

Jachimczyk delivered his report on the second autopsy at the end of March, ruling out any poisoning, and concluding, "it is my opinion based upon a reasonable probability that the cause of death is due to acute focal hepatitis, probably viral in origin." On reading the report, McMaster felt there was no case, but Robinson refused to believe that no crime had been committed. He hired lawyer Frank Briscoe, a former Harris County district attorney. Robinson petitioned his son-in-law to give permission for Joan's body to be exhumed for another autopsy, but Hill refused.

Third autopsy

Ash Robinson then hired Dr. Milton Helpern, the chief medical examiner for New York City at the time, to come to Houston to examine Robinson Hill's body. Helpern examined the body of Joan Robinson Hill for seven and a half hours, then went back to New York City with his tissue samples, saying he would issue a report on his findings at a later date. Dr. Helpern's report, issued in April 1970, noted that John Hill's treatment of his wife at home and the delay in seeking specialized medical attention at a hospital were factors in the death of Robinson Hill.

Prosecution and murder of John Hill After Robinson Hill's death, Hill married Ann Kurth in June 1969, and petitioned the district attorney to launch a murder investigation.

In February 1970, the case was heard by a third grand jury. Helpern presented his findings to the grand jury in April 1970. The state of Texas had not previously indicted anyone on a charge of murder by omission. She also told the court that he had confessed to killing Robinson Hill, explaining in detail how he had allegedly done it by lacing pastries with infectious bacteria and later injecting Robinson Hill with the same bacteria.

On September 24, 1972, a few weeks before the second trial was to start, Hill was shot dead by a masked gunman during a robbery at his mansion as Hill and his third wife, Connie, returned home from a medical conference in Las Vegas. but refused to cooperate with police until he was positively identified as the perpetrator by Hill's mother. When he confessed to the murder, he told police that he had done it for financial gain, Vandiver's trial was set for September 1973. The trial was eventually rescheduled for April 1974, but Vandiver failed to appear. He had moved to Longview, Texas, adopting an alias. Longview police officer John Raymer grew suspicious of the newcomer to his town. After discovering the man's first name was actually Bobby, Raymer confronted Vandiver at a cafe one evening in May; Vandiver pulled a gun, and Raymer shot him dead.

Under questioning, McKittrick corroborated Vandiver's story. McKittrick was tried and convicted in 1974 of being Vandiver's getaway driver She was paroled after serving five years.

Lilla Paulus was convicted and given a 35-year sentence. She died of breast cancer at the Gatesville prison on May 16, 1986.

Cultural impact

The events surrounding the death of Joan Robinson Hill have been the subject of several books, as well as a 1981 television film. Journalist and author Thomas Thompson's 1976 book Blood and Money provides a detailed account of the case. He became interested in the story while shadowing doctors in Houston as research for a previous book, Hearts, about the world of cardiac surgery. The legal case was one of three Thompson faced over his book.

Kurth published her own account of the case entitled Prescription Murder, in which she repeated her claim that Hill had tried to kill her, and alleged that he may have poisoned his first wife with bacteria-laced pastries. |name=Julian|group=note She also suggested that Hill had not been killed in 1972, and had instead moved to Mexico after faking his death. |name=alive|group=note Retired Harris County District Attorney Carol Vance also discussed the case in his memoirs, Boomtown DA. case was the subject of Murder in Texas, a television film featuring Farrah Fawcett as Robinson Hill. It concurs with Kurth's theory that Hill may have faked his death, suggesting that he arranged for someone else to be killed in his place. Journalist Jerry Buck noted in an article preceding the film's debut on NBC that the face of the shooting victim had been battered and that there were anomalies in the autopsy report, notably that Hill had a different eye color from that recorded for the dead person. Buck also wrote that Hill was in financial difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service in 1972 and facing a murder case against him. Sightings of Hill had also been reported in Mexico and New York City.

This case was also covered in an episode ("I'm Fine, Look Away") on the podcast My Favorite Murder on May 9, 2019.