Murder in Rivercrest Pt. 2 | Signal 51 Chronicles

This is the Signal 51 Chronicles, murder and river crest, the Coslow case.
I'm John Henry.
I'm joined here by my compadre, Jake White, and welcome back at long last to the Signal
51 Chronicles.
In the parlance of the day, it has been a minute, Jake White.
It's been a minute for sure.
It seems like every week, over the last two years, year and a half, whatever it was,
somebody would ask us, when is the damn podcast coming back?
What happened?
What happened to it?
Yeah, a little hiatus.
We have all these answers to crime and crime itself and the human condition, but we couldn't
answer that question.
No, we were.
Well, we're back.
Welcome back.
This time, we're on the platform, the Sunset Lounge DFW platform.
Yep.
Excited.
We find the famed Mike Reiner there.
The legendary Norm Hitchkiss is there.
I was listening to Norm Hitchkiss when I was 12 years old, and that was not just yesterday.
More details?
Over like 30 years ago or 40 years ago, yeah, I think that's probably closer to right there.
Back angle, sports columnist extraordinaire has a show there.
So for those of you who have been with us from the beginning, you know what the term signal
50 signifies, signal 51, signal 51, I used to work for a thing that did signal 50.
Signal 51 is police code for investigation, and that's what we do here.
We dig into stories, real cases, real people, and some crazy twists that are better than
fiction.
Almost all of these will be curated in the DFW area.
A lot of them are going to be in Fort Worth, and we'll tell you why that is.
Some mothers will be from around the state, some will actually be lower 48, but like true
crime itself, who knows where we'll turn.
So a lot of these, a lot of these are going to emanate from Fort Worth, Texas, because
Jake here is a retired police sergeant in Fort Worth, Texas.
I am a not retired editor and writer, still hard at it.
I'm the editor of Fort Worth Inc, which is a business lifestyle magazine here.
At our office at Panther City Media, we have two titles under that umbrella.
One is Inc and one is Fort Worth magazine, and that's a monthly lifestyle magazine.
City magazine is what it is, and I work for it as well.
So we're busy.
I'm busy here in Jake, but I'm not going to say that I'm not fully retired by any
stretch of the imagination.
That's true, unfortunately.
We also have, we are also joined this time by Ashley, producer extraordinaire, Ashley makes
this all happen.
I don't know about extraordinaire, but I'll take it.
There you go.
Well, I say extraordinaire.
I appreciate you.
What does she, what she's, what she's made happen here today at our undisclosed location
is nothing short of miraculous.
Oh, absolutely.
Watching the scene, the amount of stuff.
Oh, yeah, I know.
You said you got here earlier today.
I was like, why didn't you call me?
I really didn't mean it.
I just said that.
Why didn't you call me to help?
I was just trying to be nice.
So where did this all start to signal 51?
Do you want to tell us, Jake?
Well, the birthplace.
The birthplace.
Well, I mean, it's where a lot of good things, and I suppose bad things start and start
at the bar, sitting around telling stories.
Yeah.
And it was usually just you and I and some onlookers on the patio of the illustrious Oscars pub.
Oscars pub, yeah.
And yeah, you know, there was something, you looking back on it, they would go on for
hours.
And then we realized we should actually tell these stories.
We should we should combine our expertise, retired law enforcement, investigator.
I do research.
I do storytelling.
It's like, let's do this in Fort Texas.
And so we gained a little bit of an audience and we're back and it's just more, the moral
of the story ultimately is that no good story begins with a salad.
No.
It's vodka that that that really tells the tale.
There are many good stories that begin with you remember that time at Oscars pub?
Many, many good stories.
So welcome back to our former audience and also to our new audience.
Welcome to the signal 51.
And if you're just turning in for the first time or returning, you've picked a good time
to start because we've got an interesting case.
So let's first go to the police blotter.
You familiar with the police blotter?
Oh, yeah.
I've never understood how people would be like the cops would be like eating somewhere and
then they've got this thing in their ear or maybe here or something.
I don't know on the shoulder and they're getting the radio.
They're talking to them.
Yeah, they're talking to them.
How do you got?
How do you keep up with that?
I mean, you just get used to it.
You just get used to it.
Yeah.
You're supposed to completely get used to it.
They'd be like, hey, Henry, where are you?
Henry, Henry, Henry.
That can't happen from time to time.
That'd be sitting there eating my hamburger or my donuts or whatever and just not seeing
anything.
All right, let's go to the police blotter.
Let's do it.
Let's see, where's our first?
This was in New Jersey.
I believe officers responded to a welfare check on an elderly gentleman, Jake, after
officers, after neighbors, pardon me, hadn't seen him in a while.
Good fences make good neighbors and good neighbors are essential, especially when they don't
see their neighbors in a while.
They call the police and they're for a welfare check.
So when the cops get there, the house was empty.
No sign of a resident.
They took a quick look on the garage and saw the mystery.
There they found the elderly gentleman fast asleep behind the wheel of his car.
Engine sputtering out of the last of a meager tank of gas.
Turns out that the man had attempted to take his own life by car or monoxide.
But he underestimated both his fuel level and the clean running efficiency of his
brand.
It's a new civic.
So of course, when officers woke him, I mean, what he was certainly more annoyed than
relieved that they found the officer not St. Peter had to have been like disappointed.
They didn't really say, but God bless that gentleman.
Are you saying a new car you cannot, I'm civic, I guess this was a civic, odd to civic.
Just burns clean.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe he didn't realize it was electric.
There was a punchline coming.
No, I just made that up.
I don't know.
Anyway, God bless that gentleman and we're happy you're still with us.
We hope you're still with us.
Indeed.
All kidding aside, if you do find yourself in a situation that you want to do that, please
don't.
Call some calls.
Make some calls.
Make some calls.
Please.
We beg of you.
So we were in North Carolina last year, our first episode, we were in North Carolina.
We're back in North Carolina.
The officer takes a call about a high stakes theft at Target, Tarjez, some people call
that.
He arrives to find a teenager trying to escape.
Are you ready for this?
Aborder one of those electric shopping carts, you know, for folks who need help getting
around the store.
He's on one of those.
So, this cart's just loaded down with stolen merchandise, you know, like it's a one-man
black Friday or something, okay?
And he's topping out at a blistering five miles per hour, yeah.
I actually have a true story about something similar to this.
I'll wait till you're finished.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to hear about this.
So he made it about 30 yards before, according to reports, before the battery tapped out.
With this world's slowest pursuit officially over, the police officer showed him some grace
by said, just push that son of a bitch back where you found it and return that shit, yeah.
Easy enough.
So anyway, that criminal mastermind is no more, we hope, hopefully he's repented and
sent, sending no more.
Probably not, but let's hope that that is the case.
Is that your experience?
Well, no.
The recidivist everywhere?
Yeah, the recidivism is for real.
No, but it's funny you brought that up because this only happened a mere two months ago.
But a nearby grocery store in the morning, I was taking my daughter to school and like
all our many teenage kids, girls, that famous coffee shop is always on the stopping list
often.
And so it's like pumpkin spice.
That's one of those.
I don't, I mean, it's embarrassing.
I make her older at now because it's just frankly embarrassing for me to do it.
But as we're pulling out, we see a guy on one of those electric shopping carts across
the street from the grocery store with employees in pursuit by walking.
And of course, we're at the red light waiting to turn where they pointing at him like it's
the guy in the car.
Yes, they're doing all of that and my daughter's looking and she is, she'll have some wheels
off moments.
She is not scared.
You've met her.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I have no idea what she's doing.
She rolls down the window.
I think maybe she just wants to hear the commotion.
No.
She wants to be able to do this.
She heckles the thief.
And screams nice.
It's probably the story.
I did not.
She literally screams nice ride and just rolls the window up and I'm like, nice ride.
Nice ride.
I'm like, what are you doing?
Is she just laughing?
She has, she, that's good.
She has potential.
Where she learned that.
I don't know.
I don't want to.
I don't want to.
I don't know.
So anyway, that is, let's get back at it.
Let's get back at it.
The Murder and River Crest, the Coslow case.
In episode one, we just, please, please receive a 911 call from a neighbor of Jack Coslow
who had stumbled over to his house.
That gentleman called 911, reporting what Mr. Coslow was telling him that there had been
an intruder at their house in the middle of the night.
His wife had been beaten, so had he.
He didn't know what the condition of his wife was, but he knew it was dire.
When police arrived there, they did indeed find his wife, Karen Coslow, deceased the victim
of, I guess you would call it blunt force trauma, beaten repeatedly by a tyrant.
And detectives, not immediately, but after a little bit of digging, kind of immediately
focused on the husband, Jack Coslow, as is often the case in these types of cases.
And the reason they did that is one, the husband's always a person of interest, at least,
but as you mentioned, the good detectives and these detectives didn't necessarily do that.
These detectives live in a world of gray, and they looked at all the adjacent possibilities.
Bergerly was ruled out because there was no forced entry.
Well, there was forced entry, but the alarm is the, right, they knew, whoever this was,
knew the alarm code.
And there was nothing missing in the case of either Bergerly or a robbery.
And so detectives, not gradually, but they kind of centered, they kind of focused on
Jack Coslow as certainly a person of interest in this case, if not a suspect.
That changed when, please receive a phone call from kind of a panic teenager, who told
them that he had what he believed was evidence that they might be interested in, and that
included a bloody tire tool, clothing, and he also said he had knowledge of how those
items were disposed of.
So 13 days after the murder, detectives moved in, a stakeout ended when officers swarmed
a street near West 4th and Dorothy Lane, just blocks from the home of Christy Coslow,
who lived there with her mother.
Before, please conduct a plainclose stakeout on a Westside street and use two unmarked
vehicles, a black Mercedes and a burgundy Chrysler, to box in a white Ford S-Quirt at a
stop sign near West 4th and Dorothy Lane.
Neighbors watching from their windows initially thought they were witnessing the kidnapping
of Christy Coslow as she was hustled into the Mercedes, which then sped away back east
towards downtown.
Uniformed officers and additional units quickly arrived revealing the scene as a coordinated
police arrest, not an abduction.
Just later, officers handcuffed Brian Salter nearby.
Shortly after, Christy's mother Paula Coslow arrived at the stop sign area, distraught
to find her daughter already taken into custody.
Police then towed the Ford S-Quirt, noting visible items inside, including clothes hangers,
a leather bag, and a long plastic tube as part of the on-scene processing.
And then finally, a 19-year-old friend of Salter, Jeffrey Dillingham, was arrested at
a blockbuster video store in Arlington.
He was an assistant general manager there.
The arrest naturally rocked for Orse uppercrust.
The notion that a teenage girl with river crest ties raised the mid-privilege in polish
to conspire to kill her own parents was beyond comprehension.
It's getting into a little background of Christy Coslow, Brian Salter, and Jeffrey Dillingham.
It kind of reveals a web of privilege and resentment, I think, would be the best way
to describe it.
So Christy Coslow had grown up in privilege.
Her father, Jack, was a successful businessman.
Her mother Paula was described as warm but lenient.
After their divorce, Christy grew angry and defiant, resenting Jack's new wife, Karen.
Friends described her as, quote, wild and angry.
One former classmate told the four-star telegram, she always said she always said she hated
her step.
On this charming but reckless, he dropped out of college and drifted between jobs.
Dillingham, in contrast, was polite, intelligent, from a Catholic family in Alito.
He was engaged to be married.
One source stated, quote, friends and neighbors say Dillingham was the last person they expected
to see in handcuffs.
Certainly what I thought when I saw that.
I think one of those years ago.
With ours, one of the things that was interesting was, you know, archives to this in the sense
that we know people who knew all three of these suspects, personally, grew up with them.
That happens in Fort Worth.
That happens in Fort Worth.
Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody.
There's three degrees of separation.
So one of the sources I talked to grew up with Brian Salter since elementary.
So again, Salter was Christi Coslo's fiance.
The best way, and there were several people that described him as this, a nerd.
I don't know how that was the common theme, the common term used that we've called that
before.
Yeah, but he kind of took on a different tone with it.
You know, it wasn't like the kind just buried in a book, so to speak.
Yeah.
And more, several of them described it more as kind of the annoying type.
Yeah.
You know.
So he did.
A gas.
A gas.
A gas, a lot of people.
Yeah, that's how I picture it.
Yeah.
And so with that, he fell victim to being bullied back, I suppose.
All right.
We'll get into that in a little bit.
Another one described Salter.
It was more or less manipulated by Christi, and he would do anything that she asked him
to do.
Dillingham, Jeff Dillingham, on the other hand, one of the sources that I talked to, Jeff
was a, he was a smart kid, national honor society, into cars, got along with people well,
not quite as picked on like, like Salter was.
I think where it got interesting, or one interesting point was the night before the murder
of Karen Coslow, one of the sources that I spoke with, was with Brian Salter and Christi
Coslow.
This person had not told this story in some 35 years, 33 years, whatever we're dealing
with.
Almost reluctant, but that night before Brian Salter turns to this source and says, hey,
we're about to come across a lot of money.
It's also reported that prior to the murder, Coslow and Salter, they'd already picked out
cars.
They wanted to buy when the inheritance hit their account.
Yeah.
Like those guys out in California, those brothers, the Menendez brothers.
The Menendez brothers.
Very similar.
Yeah.
Similar kind of deal.
Spending spree.
Like I said, that was, you know, having the access to talk to people that knew them grew
up with them, with all three of them.
You know, I think that two of them were not as much as the surprise, Dillingham was certainly
the wild card that I think most people were surprised by.
Well, let's take a look at Christi Coslow.
She was said to be angry at her father, jealous of her stepmother, and in love with the
boy who needed money.
Christi was seemingly that rich kid had gone awry.
We've seen these sometimes.
Some might call it starting life on third base, but she started a life going to an affluent
private school in West Fort Worth.
She described that school as a fashion show for rich kids.
As a ninth grader, she was moved out of that school and went to Arlington Heights.
Arlington Heights is a famed institution in Fort Worth.
It's the high school that dates to before the turn of the last century, 1896, I believe
is the number.
The current Georgian revival school that we know on I-30 in Hulan, designed by Preston
Garen, was open in 1937.
It, of course, has that commanding presence on top of Hilltop, in fact, it's often been
called the Hill or the Hilltop.
I can't remember.
I think it's the Hilltop.
It overlooks Trinity River Valley to the south and Rivercress back to the north.
It's just really a few hundred yards to the north from Rivercress.
This proximity to Rivercress, of course, meant that it served children of families, a
lot of children from there.
Up to the early 1970s schools, schools generally affluent and only white.
De-segregation orders, of course, changed that, and children from families of the predominantly
Black Como neighborhood, as well as Butler to the, to the, about five minutes to the east.
Begin at any school there.
Because of its history, and because it's been there so long, it has a very rich history,
and it's alumni include John Denver, Bill Paxton, Delbert McClinton, and dozens of
others who went on to leave, you know, that imprint on the city.
Another one, another probably notorious graduate, which is, well, he didn't graduate.
Jim Nye is Lee Harvey Oswald, who was there, less than a semester, maybe, maybe just
a month, actually.
And he literally left there to join the Marines, I think, 17 years old.
He finally left there and ended up at, I guess, is the now defunct West Academy.
And it was an alternative school for kids, typically with kids, I guess, with behavioral
issues.
I think it's safe to say.
So Salter, kind of like we mentioned, the nerdy kid who got picked on, but also the
kind of guy that would, I guess, more or less just shit talk people.
I don't, I mean, that was, like I said, that was kind of the basic description.
Probably a way for him to get attention.
He's probably one of these attention seekers, and that was the way he was.
Yeah, yeah.
I think so.
I only play a psychologist on Facebook, but, yeah, you know, well, you do a very good
job at it.
Yeah.
So he grew up, so Salter grew up going to white settlement schools, a suburb of Fort
Worth, out West, out West.
But later, junior or senior year, he transfers to an affluent private school in West Fort
Worth.
You know, these are, again, these are our schools that are, they've got a nice price tag
to them, you know, typically affluence per fails there.
Jeffrey Dillingham.
So according to new sources, Dillingham is portrayed as a former honor student from
white settlement schools, but from Alito, he's raised in a stable middle class family.
He graduated from Brewer High School, where he was in the National Honor Society, worked
part-time jobs, and was engaged to marry his high school sweetheart.
Friends and family described him as polite, hardworking, and deeply religious, attending
the Possible Attending St. Peter of the Apostle Catholic Church for marriage classes with
his fiance.
Jack Coslow, 48 at the time of the attack, he was a successful Fort Worth business man
and a former bank executive.
Jack worked for Merrill Lynch as an investment banker in the mid-70s.
He then worked at Fort Worth National Bank as a commercial banker, rising to the position
of executive vice president.
In 1993, Jack purchased a supply company where he built a successful, masonry supply
company and helped grow the United Masonry Contractors Association, serving on the board
of directors for over 13 years.
He was widely described as disciplined, reserved, and self-made, having worked his way up
from modest beginnings into Fort Worth's upper middle class.
Mason friends saw him as a savvy investor and a man who valued structure and achievements,
traits that reportedly extended into his parenting style.
After divorcing his first wife, Paula Coslow, Jack married Karen Courtney and built a new
life of wealth and stability in Rivercress.
Their stately brick mansion on Clark Avenue reflected his success and the couple's social
aspirations.
Karen Courtney Coslow was 40 at the time of her death.
She came from an old line for the oil and banking family, the Courtney's, who had a long
standing influence in the city's business and philanthropic circles.
Her uncle was Will Courtney, who was a well-known oil man and civic leader in her family's
wealth originated in the Texas oil and land industries, positioning her among the upper
echelon of four society.
Unlike her husband, Karen was a fourth native who attended Country Day and later graduated
from University of Texas.
She went on to earn an MBA from SMU.
And as later a banker, she immersed herself in civic life.
She too was a philanthropist and arts patron active in the Jewel charity ball, four symphony
orchestra and various junior league and charity events and was remembered by friends
as creative, stylish and generous with a particular passion for floral design and entertainment.
It's here where the story starts to come out, what we can call the confessions.
This is where we learn the details, the why, if you will, what the root cause of this
was, with first examined the interrogation of Jeffrey Dillingham and his statements to
police, Dillingham said he hesitated behind the Coslow Homes wooden fence, asking
Salter if he was sure that this was what they wanted to do.
Hesitation perhaps, cold feet, Dillingham told detectives in his interview according
to reports that he stood there for a full minute breathing hard before he followed
Salter inside.
Once he entered the Coslow Homes, the violent killing and attack unfolded.
Dillingham told detectives that he struck Jack and Karen Coslow multiple times with a crowbar.
So after the two weeks later, about six hours, six hour interrogation, ultimately he said
he did it.
We went in.
Two weeks after the murder.
Two weeks after the murder, he said, I did it, we went in, she wanted them dead, she
being Christy Coslow.
Days later, Dillingham handed the murder weapon to a friend and that's where the phone
call, the phone call, that's where it all began.
And Salter's confession, he stated, initially it was what he described as a joking conversation.
And this had gone on for the idea of the murder of Jack and Karen Coslow with Christy Coslow
being the mastermind.
This had been something that had been talked about for a while, a year at least.
She had actually tried to recruit a couple other people prior to this plan.
So Salter, at first they thought it was just a joke.
Christy stood to gain a lot of money from them being dead.
She told Salter to talk to Dillingham about murdering them.
Salter continued, as he told the detective, she just said to do it quietly.
At around 4.30 that morning, the night of the, or the morning of the murder, Salter called
Coslow and said, he and Dillingham went to the house when Coslow asked if they were dead.
Salter replied, quote, I don't know.
As regards the confession of the mastermind of this scheme, Christy Coslow, the day of
her arrest, she told detectives originally, she and Brian Salter discussed robbing her
father as a joke a year prior, just kidding around.
It was just a joke, she reportedly said, I didn't think people would take me seriously.
A month or two before the murder, the conversations turned serious.
Christy eventually provided Salter with a hand-drawn floor plan of the house and the alarm
code.
The floor plan included where certain valuables were located in the home.
However, as the interrogation continued, reports said it was not the contents of the house
that Christy Coslow was interested in.
She wanted her father and stepmother dead.
She reportedly said, I just told him it would be easier if they were dead.
For me and my mom, both because they had dealt with so much misery for the last nine or
ten years, reportedly continued by saying, I just started thinking about everything that
he's done to us and I hated him for it.
So one thing that we just talked about when Salter, when Christy asked if they were dead
and he replied, I don't know.
It didn't go quite as planned, does it ever?
No, I don't think so.
Why?
I don't know.
Maybe it does.
I don't know.
This one did not.
Salter and Dillingham actually were armed.
Perhaps they didn't have the ability to just walk in there and shoot them.
So they were armed with pistol, with guns, okay?
So they go in there with crowbars and pistols.
I don't remember if it was Dillingham or Salter, a 32 caliber pistol was discharged.
So the reason they didn't know if they were both dead was simply because when that gun
went off, it freaked them out and they left.
Stole a couple things because Christy gave them a map and said, hey, there's money here.
This is where he keeps valuable things in the house.
All that was indicated on the map that she provided.
The reason he didn't know was because they left sooner than planned once that firearm
was discharged.
So that's why I don't think he knew what the outcome was at least that night.
Was there any speculation that that firearm might have been discharged by someone in the
house, like Jack or did they have any idea of a gun or weapon like that?
Yeah.
He had a shotgun.
There were some fire shotgun shells on the floor.
But no, there wasn't anything initially.
It was odd because there were, you know, the fired 32 caliber, the shotgun shells.
So there were some oddities during the initial slurs.
So the shotgun shells, the un-fired shotgun would indicate that maybe Jack was trying
to load.
To load.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then like I said, one of the two discharged that 32 caliber pistol, which caused them
to panic and leave.
So when you start looking, you know, when Christy asked, they simply didn't know.
They didn't know if both of them were dead.
The trials in these were, you know, this was a different time, right, or kind of a weird
time.
I mean, you know, we're going to the cadet murder era.
Yeah.
We've got the female involved in a murder, a mastermind of a murder, which is rare to
this day.
So trial one was 1993, not for Christy, but for Jeffrey Dillingham.
Prosecutors portrayed him as a greedy and calculating.
Ultimately, he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.
And it was a pretty quick sentence, just a few hours.
Brian Salter takes a plea deal, life in prison in exchange for testifying against Christy
Coslow.
Ultimately, Salter really kind of gave the blueprint for how this was to go down.
What was Christy's plan, right?
So Salter was able to provide them with that.
And that left one defendant.
The teenager accused of orchestrating her stepmother's murder at the age of 19, Christy
Coslow now faced the death penalty.
So the next time on Murder and Rivercrest, Christy Coslow faces her father and court.
Join us for episode three.
This is a stolen water media production.