LOVERS SCAMS (For Abacus Investigations magazine)
By Lary Crews
By and large, Americans a too trusting for their own good. Many singles looking for a lasting relationship spend less time investigating a future spouse than they do looking into a potential car dealer or a new doctor. Often, the desire to trust and the lack of investigation can lead to real tragedy.
On Nov. 7, 1997, a hit man shot and stabbed Sheila Bellush, a mother of six, in her Sarasota, Florida home while her then-toddler quadruplets from her second marriage played nearby. The babies walked through their own mother’s blood and sat on the floor crying until their teenaged half-sister came home from school and found her mother dead. Police found a multitude of clues at the scene, including fingerprints. Within weeks, three men had been arrested.
But the crime was not a robbery and the three men had never met Bellush before.
Two years later, her ex-husband, wealthy San Antonio businessman Allen Blackthorne, was convicted of arranging the murder of his ex-wife at her Florida home and was sentenced to life in prison. A few weeks ago, his fourth wife finally divorced him.
Sheila might still be alive had she known about Allen’s bizarre past. She was actually Allen’s third wife, not his first. Also unknown to Sheila when she met Allen was the fact that his alcoholic mother had been married three times and that his father had never met him. When Allen did finally meet his father, he went into business with him and ended up cheating his dad out of thousands of dollars and skipping town leaving him to hold the bag. Incredibly, he also bankrupted Sheila’s parents shortly after they met.
There were countless clues that Allen was a dangerous and secretive man and that his ability to kill began when he was a teenager.
At one point, just months after he and Sheila married he ran down a motorcyclist on a lonely road because he was angry that the cyclist passed him on the highway and then demanded that Sheila back up his claim that a motorcycle gang had attacked them and it was self-defense.
Blackthorne was not even Allen Van Houte’s real name; he adopted it after seeing the television mini-series Shogun. Richard Chamberlain played Englishman John Blackthorne, an explorer whose fortunes left him and his crew stranded in Japan during the 15th Century. That fictional character rose from the ashes to a position of great power, which was also Allen Van Houte’s desire. Instead he landed in prison.
Had Sheila merely thought to check out his background, chances are good she would never have married him.
Due diligence has a lot to do with happy endings. We know everyone has their own idea of what a happy ending is, but for the con artist it is leaving with your money, and often the scam artist leaves with a things you may value more; your future, opportunity, hopes and sometimes your health. Or, as in the worst-case scenario cases of Sheila Bellush, Chris Northon and Ted Binion, failure to check out that person with whom you are in love could result in death.
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