The Secret Life of Eric Wright

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2:11Love is blind. I think I was blinder than most. Kathy Spires fell hard for Steve Markham. Hi, Steve! I fell in love with a man that was so giving and fun. She was also intrigued by his past, including his stories about working for the CIA. He's charmed everybody he's ever met. But then, his stories began to unravel. You had no idea this guy had ever been married before. Revealing a lifetime of lies. I said, your parents aren't dead, and you have a sister? Kathy was convinced there was something more sinister. He gave me fuel to be very angry and motivated. Susan Spencer investigates. What else could he be hiding?

2:57The body was found caught up in the gate right here. Is it murder? I didn't stop. I couldn't. The woman who had loved him now was out to get him. Kathy was definitely in danger. A 48 Hours Mystery. Sporned women are very, very good witnesses and very, very good snitches for us. The Secret Life of Eric Wright.

3:26Steve's caught a fish. Now you've got to hold it up, Steve. He is absolutely amazing. Hi, Steve. Hi, Al. Where are we? We're in Avalanche Creek. He's charmed everybody he's ever met. Hi, Stevie. Hi, you're welcome. Everybody liked him. He made me feel like I was the most beautiful. I was the most best friend of his he's ever had. Kathy Spires met Steve Markham back in 1980 at the Denver restaurant where she worked. She was 30. He was two years older. He was applying for a best boy position. He got the job and he'd be working with us. He followed me around a lot after meeting him. And love soon followed, too.

4:15Both were smitten, as Steve Markham remembers today. Cute, funny, just full of life. God love her. In no time, they were a couple. Went everywhere together. Wave to the camera. But Kathy did notice a few strange things. Though only a busboy, Markham always had a lot of money. He even bought Kathy a Porsche, telling her he'd come into a big inheritance when his father died. I fell in love with a man that was so giving and fun and spontaneous. Another odd thing, he said part of the inheritance was some gold, unrefined bars like this one, kept in, of all places, the toilet tank. Can we just stop a minute?

5:03Why would you put gold bars in the toilet? The one thing that's left when a house burns down is that nice porcelain toilet that doesn't burn. So if the house burns down, I know where my gold will be. And that wasn't Steve Markham's only little quirk. He tended to boast a lot, and he liked to hint at a dark and mysterious past, a past that included, believe it or not, time spent as a hitman for the CIA. But he said his days of espionage and aliases were over now. Now he claimed he actually was hiding from the CIA. As if all of this weren't confusing and bizarre enough, he also told Kathy that before coming to Denver, he had been in a California prison.

5:53I was in prison for murder. Why were you there? Well, I got in a bar room fight and killed someone. It was an accident, he said. He was defending a woman who had been attacked by someone at the bar. Total fabrication. And what else did you tell her about your background? Um, parents were deceased. Not true. No. It was all fabrication. They're really good stories. Cindy and Alan Ferry were Steve and Kathy's best friends. They say they never believed any of it. He wasn't telling her these stories because he wanted to spend the next 20 years of his life with her. He wanted to get laid. I would have never dated him if I was.

6:30Somebody told me they were in the CIA and a hitman. I'm sorry, they wouldn't have gotten the time of day. But for other friends, and especially for Kathy, it was no laughing matter. He said because of his life, he'd never been married. He'd never had children. He had obtained tons of different IDs and aliases because of the work that he had done. Did you find all these stories sort of exotic and, you know, romantic, if you will? Well, yes, but so did everybody that heard them. So, in 1981, bizarre stories and all, Kathy and Steve tied the knot. Love is blind. I think I was blinder than most, although I didn't want to believe it at the time.

7:17This is Steve and Kathy's house, Honeymoon Resort. At first, all went well. But as the months wore on, Steve's stories got more complicated and contradictory. There was an anonymous call to the house for someone named Eric Wright. Finally, Kathy demanded answers. You basically threatened to leave him unless he produced some proof of who he was. Yes, I did. I did. He agreed to show her. They got in the car and headed for Fresno, California, where he claimed he was born. And all of a sudden, he says, pull off here. Here was the town of Exeter in the Central Valley, his real hometown. I pull off in Exeter, and I just about dropped him off right there.

8:03But he's begging me not to leave him. They drove to Exeter's cemetery to visit his mother's grave. But, Kathy says, he couldn't find the grave. I'm on the ground looking for headstones. He's on the ground sobbing hysterically. He's yelling, those bastards, those bastards. They took her. They took everything. And now they're going to take you too. Now I'm getting really scared. He basically, I guess, must have convinced you to some extent that this was real. He did absolutely. He became the victim then. So I've told these outrageous lies that frankly amazes me that anyone ever believed. It is astonishing anybody ever believed you.

8:46Yeah, absolutely. Kathy did. But Kathy likes drama. Keep in mind, Kathy loved the drama, the whole thing. Steve could lie better than most people could tell the truth. Who can cry like that on cue? In fact, Kathy says Steve's performance at the cemetery was so convincing that, incredibly, she now believed that his stories about the CIA, his dead family, his hitman days, all were true. She even felt guilty about not having believed him before. And I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for ever doubting him. But that leaves open all the questions. Why did he tell these elaborate lies? Is he hiding something from his past?

9:27And who, in fact, really is Steve Markham? Kathy was definitely in danger. I was quite concerned for her safety.

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12:05For Steve and Kathy Markham, the 80s seem to speed by. I thought it was a very happy marriage. I think Kathy would agree, and certainly I think anyone who knew us during those years would agree. That looks like a couple in love, doesn't it? He was very attentive, very much my friend. She'd learned to live with his idiosyncrasies. For example, she discovered, to her shock a few years earlier, that Steve Markham wasn't even her husband's real name. She'd stumbled across that unsettling fact in their visit to his hometown in California. When I went to the high school, I went into the office and got the yearbook out and opened it up.

12:45And there were several other pictures of him in there. Pictures of Steve. And underneath them, the name Eric Wright. And the reason he told me he didn't tell me his name was Eric Wright, it was too dangerous for me to know. Dangerous, he said, because he, Eric Wright, was a man on the run from the CIA. I knew there was more. And I wouldn't allow myself to believe my own intuition. So she ignored the contradictions and the growing problems in their marriage. Until the early 90s, Kathy says, when Steve's behavior changed. He became unpredictable, erratic, sometimes even physically abusive. He became very combative with me.

13:30Combative? He gets so mad at me that he picked me up underneath my arms, off my feet, and I'm dangling there, and he threw me into a wall and threatened to kill me. That's the first time I saw Eric Wright. I did not ever threaten Kathy, and she's made numerous allegations of threats, and I have never threatened her. But Kathy says she was frightened and desperate to understand what had happened to the man she loved and who after all was he? That looks like something from a high school yearbook. It was, it is. She began to dig, starting with that old yearbook. Many people might have reacted by simply running, not by trying to piece together who he was.

14:14It wasn't that I wasn't going to walk away. I had literally nowhere to go. Right. Nowhere to go. She located Chuck Knox, a teacher who'd gone to school with Steve, or rather with Eric. He was pretty well liked among all the students, very active in school activities. He did it all. He was the golden boy of Exeter High School. Here is Eric as most dependable senior. Most dependable? Most dependable. Oh, you must have gotten a laugh out of that. I did. But her first phone call to Chuck Knox was anything but amusing. Well, I'm explaining that I'm looking for a yearbook for my husband because his family were gone and they were dead.

14:51His house burnt down. I said, I don't believe his parents are dead. And I drove by his house two days ago and it's still standing. Huh? I know. That's what I said. You ought to talk to his sister Joanne. I think she can clear all this up with you. And the phone kind of went dead for a moment. She said, I don't ever remember him telling me he had a sister Joanne. And they'd been married for about 12 years. You couldn't have just accepted this immediately. Now I'm getting really angry. I'm getting angry and I am in shock. She confronted Steve. I said, your parents aren't dead. And you have a sister?

15:30And he looked like I'd shot him. And he said, what have you done? You have just got us killed. Because of his old CIA ties, he said, revealing any detail of his past could cost them their lives. By now, Kathy had heard just about enough of this, and pretty soon their already troubled 13-year marriage fell apart. The divorce was protracted and ugly, and the more it revealed about Steve Markham, or rather about Eric Wright, the more determined Kathy became to uncover the truth. He gave me fuel to be very angry and motivated. Of course, she could have just walked away. But Kathy continued to investigate Wright, visiting records offices, libraries, court document rooms.

16:25I didn't stop. I couldn't. Did you get obsessed with this? I was determined. Was I obsessed? Yes. Let's put it this way. I couldn't eat and I couldn't sleep. Oh, my Lord. These are all your notes? These are all my notes. And it goes on and on. All along, I wanted to know what happened to my best friend. And what I found out is that my best friend really never existed. Her best friend, it turned out, wasn't even legally her husband. Kathy discovered he had three children with two different women. And before he met her in Colorado, he'd been not a prison inmate, but a businessman, living with his last wife and child in California.

17:09Kathy had married a bigamist. She had no idea I was married. I did commit rigamy, no doubt about it. You're lying to somebody who cared about you a great deal. At what time do you stop telling the lie? You had no idea this guy had ever been married before. That must have been a huge shock. My world just stopped as I knew it. I was pissed at him and I was pissed at me for not listening to my gut, for not listening to my instincts, for not listening to the red flags. Kathy also began wondering if there might not be a grain of truth in some of Eric's lies. What was it that made you think that this was anything more than somebody who had just lied about his past?

17:51He was so detailed about killing people, murdering people. She was genuinely afraid and she had good reason to be, says Bruce Bolton, then a detective with the Littleton Police Department in suburban Denver. I was quite concerned for her safety. He'd gotten to know Eric Wright, alias Steve Markham, when Kathy filed a criminal complaint against him during the couple's messy divorce. I believed him to be a sociopathic personality. I felt that she was in grave danger and she needed to take precautions. In fact, Kathy says she took extraordinary precautions. She went into hiding for nine long years, frequently on the move, all the while still investigating Eric Wright.

18:41I had to distance myself from my friends, my family. I had lost everything. My mother, my father, my family, my friends, my business, my home. It was too overwhelming. the pain and the loss. She says she often traveled under assumed names and lived off a small amount of money that she had saved. Kathy has had a good time with this. A good time with this? As far as this investigation of hers goes, yes. She says it's practically bankrupted her. I'm sorry she's destroyed her life over this, but that's her choice. An obsessed and rather pathetic ex-wife. Why has she pursued this for 10 years? She's a little miffed.

19:22She's a little myth, but to what purpose? Well, because she was deceived for more than a decade. She also thinks that you murdered a man. She has no reason to think that I murdered a man. Is that right? But that is Kathy Spire's firm belief. And questions her dogged investigation raised have landed Eric Wright where he is today, shackled and handcuffed in a California jail, facing the distinct possibility of life in prison. I did lie. I did tell crazy stories. I did say I had murdered people. And all of that has added up to having me here. Luckily for me, he underestimated me because that's why I'm still alive.

20:02He certainly did seem to underestimate you. He did.

20:13The vast California aqueduct, which moves water from the northern part of the state to the parched south. Not uncommon to find bodies in it. Not uncommon. John Huber, a lieutenant in the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office, knows the waterway well. Water's a dumping place for homicide victims. As it was 24 years ago, when in the sweltering August heat, fishermen spotted a body here, badly decomposed, floating face up. The body was found caught up in the gate right here. It was chained. It had a plastic bag on it. What do you mean chained? It had a large heavy link chain tied with cable ties to the hands, the feet, wrapped around the body.

21:05Fingerprints revealed the victim was Lester Marks, described by police as a small-time crook who specialized in fencing stolen jewelry. He worked in this high crime area in San Francisco. He'd serve time? He may have done a little bit of time there, but nothing significant. The case went unsolved. The evidence file was locked away. Fast forward to 1993. I truly believe in my heart he cannot stop what he is. Kathy by now is convinced that all the lies Eric Wright told her were made up to conceal some terrible truth, probably a crime. I had no idea of what I was going to find. I was going to find the truth, no matter what it was.

21:56I had to for my own peace of mind, so I could move on. Her investigation led her to Lieutenant Huber, who took her seriously enough to search his old case files to see if there were any unsolved crimes from around 1980, the time the couple first met. And Kathy had mentioned those mysterious gold bars Eric had. And the gold, he said, came from? His father's dead father's estate. If his dad is alive and his mom is alive, where did the gold come from? Good question. You asked. He wouldn't answer me. But the gold rang a bell with Lieutenant Huber because murder victim Lester Marks was known to have had bars of unrefined gold.

22:40Seven of them, in fact, made, he thinks, from melted-down jewelry. They were two and a half pounds apiece. They're discolored. They had dark and light spots. Back in 1980, gold sold for more than$600 an ounce. And Hubert thinks Marx's gold could have been worth as much as a quarter of a million bucks. After his murder, no gold ever was found. After talking to Kathy, I gave her quite a bit of credence. You know, scorned women are very, very good witnesses and very, very good snitches for us when we have cases that have gone unsolved for a long time. Eric Wright, he learned, also had been in the precious metals business, working for a company that operated out of this building in San Francisco.

23:26He was living from paycheck to paycheck, borrowing money to, you know, make the house payment. So Eric Wright may have needed money. Intrigued, Huber launched his own investigation, on and off for 10 years, whenever he found time. He looked for anything linking Eric Wright to Lester Marks' murder. Some of the witnesses had died. It was difficult tracking people down. In 1997, he took what evidence he had to a grand jury. It found the case too weak to act on, but too suspicious to forget about altogether. I didn't want to let it go. So if I didn't do my best job there, maybe I could clean it up and do a better job down the line.

24:12And you had been urged by the grand jury to pursue it? Yes. Wright had ignored a request from the grand jury to appear. Instead, he'd pulled up stakes for Mexico. For Huber, that alone was a strong sign of guilt. He probably felt that we were actually on to him. Absolutely not. I did not flee. I'd been planning that trip for months. But Huber was able to get an arrest warrant. And finally, in 2002, more than two decades after Lester Marks' death, and nine and a half years after Kathy Spires began her investigation, Mexican police took Eric Wright into custody. Eventually, he wound up here, in this California jail.

25:00Absent you, he never would have been charged with this murder, right? Right. You're convinced that he did this? I know he did it. Now, a judge will hold a hearing to decide if Huber's evidence is enough to bring Eric Wright to trial. I'm confident we have the right person in this case. He'll be held to answer. But Wright insists he can explain it all. Did you, in fact, kill Lester Marks? I did not kill Lester Marks. I definitely did not.

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27:06Back in 1980, gold prices were soaring and Eric Wright wanted in on the action. I had met an individual I was going to be buying some gold from, hopefully. Very attractive deal. In mid-September, Wright says he went to a motel in Richmond, California, north of Berkeley, to meet up with his contact. And who did you buy this gold from? I don't know the individual's name other than Tony. This was about six weeks after fishermen at the California Aqueduct had made their grisly discovery. The body of Lester Marks, a small-time jewelry fence. I was totally unaware of his death at the time. It was of no consequence to me at all.