Rose Azbill Wife of Sylvester Azbill found dead Dec. 27, 1967, at her Rancho Circle estate
Sylvester Azbill, seen here in November at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City, has asked for clemency from the state Pardons Board three times since being convicted of killing his wife. The board denied his request each time. Photo by Brad Horn/Special to the Review-Journal.
Sylvester Azbill, 79, recently had a heart attack and is battling diabetes. Photo by Brad Horn/Special to the Review-Journal.
The old man raps his wooden cane on the tile floor as he speaks.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
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He has had a lot of time to think, and he has a lot to talk about.
He talks about that day almost 40 years ago -- the day of the fire, the day his wife died. He talks about the son who testified against him and the lawyers who couldn't keep him out of prison. He talks about the time he was known as an aspiring politician, not a heartless killer.
Back then, Sylvester Azbill was a handsome man with jet black hair and a penchant for dark suits. Half a life later, the hair he has left is gray, and he wears a blue denim prison uniform.
Sitting at a cafeteria-style table in a bare visiting room at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City, Azbill fidgets with his cane and tells his story: He didn't start the fire. He tried to save her. He was framed.
It's the same story he has told since that day.
Few believed him then. Few believe him now.
Most are convinced he married a rich older woman for her money, then killed her before she could dump him.
Azbill stands by his story, even though it keeps costing him a chance at freedom.
Now, with his health failing, the 79-year-old taps his cane and talks, sometimes sounding angry, sometimes sounding defeated, sometimes sounding hopeful. A recent heart attack and a battle with diabetes have weakened him, and he hopes he'll get a chance to clear his name before his body fails him for good.
"It's just a hell of a thing to have to live with," he says.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE
The year 1967 did not start well for Azbill.
The 40-year-old had just been trounced in his second run for Nevada secretary of state, his 3-month-old marriage was disintegrating and he was out of work.
He finally caught a break when a family friend, legendary Las Vegas lawyer Harry Claiborne, offered Azbill a job as an investigator. At the time Claiborne was representing Rose Louise Mapel in her divorce from wealthy Sahara executive Edward Mapel.
She lived in a large house in Rancho Circle, an exclusive neighborhood of doctors, entertainers and other Las Vegas elite. During a June 1967 visit to the house, Claiborne found Rose passed out in a chair with a half-empty bottle of vodka at her side. He also found pills lying on a table.
Soon Azbill was looking after Rose and helping her with errands and household tasks.
Early in the morning of Sept. 20, 1967, Azbill and Rose showed up at the marriage license bureau. A clerk noticed they were drunk but issued the license anyway. They wed in a ceremony later that day at the Mount Charleston Community Church.
He was 40. She was 61.
"We had the same outlook on life," Azbill said from prison. "Everything was looking good. All the things we were going to do. ... She seemed enthused about remodeling (the house) and traveling around the state, meeting people. She'd like things like that. I had to get her away from that environment of a-whiskey-bottle-in-one-hand type thing, you know. She knew she was drinking too much."
Dale Iness, an Azbill relative, said the marriage was one of convenience. Rose had someone to take care of her, and Azbill could live the high life.
Her friends and family were suspicious of Azbill's motives. He was so much younger, and the marriage happened so fast.
Her niece, Donna Kellogg, made plans to move Rose out of her Rancho Circle home after seeing how eager Azbill was to feed Rose pills and fill her glass with booze.
Rose also started questioning the marriage, telling family she would get an annulment.
She didn't get the chance.
THE GREAT PRETENDER
The man Rose had married had been "wild as wild" when he was younger, said his cousin, Wanieta Iness.
He drove fast. He talked fast.
He had a knack for practical jokes and could usually scheme his way into what he wanted.
Such as the time Azbill had hurriedly rounded up his band for an audition at a Lake Tahoe resort. They didn't have much time to rehearse and went over their songs on the drive from Reno.
When the resort's regular band took its break, Azbill led his band to the stage. Azbill's saxophone was occasionally off-key, but the audition went well. The next day, Iness asked Azbill if they got the job.
Well, Azbill confessed, it wasn't a real audition and the band never was supposed to be there. Azbill knew the entertainment director would be gone that night and duped his replacement into believing they had been promised an audition.
Azbill even convinced the man to pay him for the audition.
Iness also recalls the time Azbill helped an overweight businessman with bad eyesight who feared failing his driving test. Azbill put on one of the man's suits, stuffed a pillow in his shirt, greased his hair, donned the man's horn-rimmed glasses and headed to the DMV. He passed all the tests and got the man's driver's licensed renewed.
Azbill turned down the businessman's cash.
"He was like the great pretender, and he did it for the fun of it, not the money," said Dale Iness, Wanieta's husband.
DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR
Azbill was born Jan. 29, 1927, in Kentucky. He moved to Northern Nevada 14 years later to reunite with his father, a musician who had divorced Azbill's mother and headed west during the Great Depression seeking better economic opportunities.
After a stint in the military, Azbill married and had two children. His son later died of leukemia and his daughter of pneumonia, according to Azbill's cousin. That first marriage ended, though Wanieta Iness did not know under what circumstances.
Azbill attended the University of Nevada, Reno for a year before moving south to attend the fledgling university in Las Vegas. In college Azbill led the Young Democrats and spearheaded a petition drive to lower the voting age to 18. After college he worked a stint in Washington, D.C., under Sen. Alan Bible. Unable to support a new wife and their two young boys, he returned to Las Vegas.
Back in Las Vegas he was a regular at political functions. In 1962, Azbill ran against longtime Nevada Secretary of State John Koontz. He lost in a landslide.
He worked on Claiborne's U.S. Senate campaign in 1964.
In 1966, Azbill ran for secretary of state and lost again to Koontz.
Azbill "had delusions of grandeur," said Ralph Denton, a longtime Las Vegas lawyer who was active in political campaigns of that period.
Behind the high-profile political work, Azbill's finances and marriage were in turmoil.
In October 1966, he married Sarah Josephine Ohnstad. She divorced him five months later, citing "extreme cruelty, mental in nature."
At the time Azbill claimed his income was $41 a week in unemployment.
He had a history of mishandling his bills. He had defaulted on two car loans and failed to pay one of his lawyers. In the wrongful death lawsuit filed against Azbill later, a banker testified that before Azbill had married Rose, he had the lowest credit rating possible.
Another banker testified that when he had gone to Azbill's home to repossess a 1966 Ford LTD, Azbill sent his son to stall him at the front door while he sneaked out the back door and drove away.
'IT JUST DIDN'T MAKE SENSE'
A year later, Azbill was living at Rose's Rancho Circle estate, wearing expensive suits and living the high life.
Even his 12-year-old son, Brad Azbill, bragged to his friends about his father's new digs. Brad usually lived with his mother, but two days after Christmas 1967, he invited several friends to his father's house for a sleepover.
Mark Hutton, 14, John Hutton, 11, and Frank Luhman, 15, went to the sprawling one-story central Las Vegas home for what was supposed to be a day of fun.
The boys spent the day goofing off in and out of the guesthouse. They started a charcoal fire on the patio and used a can of Wizard lighter fluid to keep it going.
Inside the home, Sylvester Azbill, whose right ankle was in a cast, lounged in the living room, draining a bottle of Seagram's VO Canadian whiskey. Rose stayed in her bedroom, drinking beer and vodka.
About midday, a young woman stopped by and disappeared with Azbill into the guesthouse for about 45 minutes. When the woman left, Azbill gave her a $50 check.
She would later testify that she had sex with Azbill and that he had told her he would be rich when his wife died in a few days.
Later that evening, the boys watched an episode of "Lost in Space" in the guesthouse. Azbill called Brad into the main house about 8:30 p.m.
Fifteen minutes later, Frank screamed.
Smoke poured from the main house. The three boys ran inside. The smoke hung low.
They saw Brad in the kitchen and asked what was burning. He said it was the stove, but Brad's friends checked the stove and saw that it was not the source of the smoke.
The boys went to the living room, where Azbill was sitting in a chair. They asked him what was burning. He told them the Christmas tree had been on fire, and he and Brad put the fire out. The boys checked the tree, and it hadn't been on fire.
The boys began frantically searching the house for the source of the smoke, but Azbill didn't seem worried.
"It was like he wasn't really doing anything," Mark Hutton said recently. "It just didn't ring true. We were kids, and he was the adult for God's sake. It just didn't make sense."
Mark ran down the hall and opened the master bedroom door. He found the fire.
The boys ran outside, grabbed a hose and broke the bedroom window.
"There's a real live person in the room," Frank screamed.
During the commotion, Mark noticed Brad wrestling with his father, who appeared to be trying to run toward the fire.
The first two Las Vegas police officers to arrive saw the struggle and handcuffed Azbill, who was ranting and incoherent.
"I have to go get her," he told the officers.
Firefighters found Rose's charred body on her bed. The lead investigator said the fire was an arson fueled by a flammable liquid.
QUESTIONS ASKED
Within hours, news of the fire reached Rose's niece, Kellogg, in Southern California. She suspected foul play and shared her suspicions with detectives.
Police questioned Azbill, and he denied starting the fire. He told investigators the boys must have been responsible.
Detective Beecher Avants didn't believe him.
"I said, 'The kids didn't do this.' I said, 'It had to be somebody with a motive, somebody who could benefit, and you're the only guy,'" Avants said recently.
Detectives got a break when Brad told them his father had set the fire.
Police obtained an arrest warrant charging Azbill with murder, and he turned himself in to authorities on Jan. 3, 1968.
He's been locked up ever since.
HIS SON'S CRUCIAL TESTIMONY
The funeral was the next day.
Azbill got the district attorney's permission to attend the services. Escorted by two sheriff's deputies, Azbill sobbed in a private room before being taken back to jail.
Azbill said he wanted to hire Claiborne, a brilliant lawyer who would later become a federal judge, but that was not possible because of Claiborne's conflict of interest -- he had been Rose's divorce lawyer. So, Azbill turned to John Manzonie and Louis Wiener, one of Clark County's most influential lawyers.
The lawyers earned their money early, filing a flurry of appeals on just about every legal decision that went against Azbill. They got the Nevada Supreme Court to toss out the indictment because of questions about evidence linking Azbill to the crime, but prosecutors refiled the case.
The trial started in May 1969, and it was the talk of the town.
"If you were a friend of Sylvester's you would root for him on that basis alone," said lawyer Paul Sorenson, who represented Rose's relatives in the wrongful death lawsuit. "If you were a friend of Mrs. Mapel, you probably wanted to kill the bastard."
On the night before the trial started, Wiener paced his apartment late into the night, rehearsing his opening argument. He paused and looked at his daughter, Valerie Wiener, who was home from college.
"Honey, he didn't do it," the state senator remembers her father saying.
"I said, 'What?' He said, 'He didn't do it. I believe in my client, and I believe in the law. But now I believe he didn't do it.' "
Much of the trial focused on the conflicting opinions about what killed Rose. The defense had pathologists, including two local doctors, who said they concluded she died from a lethal combination of alcohol and barbiturates. Prosecutors, led by veteran Assistant District Attorney Ray Jeffers, countered with their own national experts who rejected the booze and drugs theory and said it was the fire that killed Rose.
Prosecutors also had testimony from Charles D. Moore, a firefighter from Reno and an acquaintance of Azbill. Moore told the jury that Azbill called him several times on the day of the fire, asking about what materials could start a fire and whether charcoal lighter fluid could be detected. Recent attempts to locate Moore for this story were unsuccessful.
The most compelling evidence, however, came from Azbill's own son. During sometimes tearful testimony before a packed courtroom, Brad recounted how his father asked him to retrieve the can of Wizard lighter fluid from the backyard and how he had then watched Azbill punch Rose, douse her with the lighter fluid and light her on fire.
When Rose sat up, Azbill hit her with one of his crutches.
"I just looked away and I said, 'No, no don't,' and just turned around and then it started to smoke," Brad told the jury.
He also testified that his father then told him, "Don't tell anyone. You know what happens to rats."
The defense tried to show how Brad had changed his story several times in the course of the investigation, at first saying he was drunk and didn't remember anything, then coming up with the detailed account.
The defense also put Azbill on the stand. Manzonie asked him only one question: whether he started the fire.
"No, sir, I did not," Azbill replied.
Prosecutors didn't cross-examine him.
The jury convicted Azbill on murder and arson charges.
"It was obvious he did it," jury foreman Wilbert Shimoda said recently. "He was guilty."
The jury gave Azbill a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. But some jurors, including Harlo Sartorius, wanted a death sentence.
"I think he should consider himself lucky he's still alive," Sartorius said recently.
In an appearance on a local television show in 1990, Wiener stood by his client.
"We felt she was dead before the fire was lit," he said. "I didn't buy the (prosecution's) theory, but the jury did."
THE SECOND TIME AROUND
As Azbill went to prison, his lawyers appealed the conviction on a technicality. The defense had argued it should have been allowed to question Brad about an arrest he had for auto theft. He and a couple of his friends stole a car in Las Vegas and drove it to Southern California, where they were caught. The case was never prosecuted.
The defense wanted to show that Brad's testimony might have been influenced by his fears about possible prosecution for the auto theft. He might have been trying to say whatever he could to satisfy the district attorney.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the defense's argument and overturned the conviction in 1976. Azbill returned to the Clark County courthouse in May 1977 for the retrial.
A decade had passed since the fire. Some evidence had disappeared. Memories had faded.
And the star witness, Brad Azbill, now said he had made up the story that had sealed his father's fate during the first trial.
At a Pardons Board hearing years later, Louis Wiener said prosecutors offered Azbill a plea deal just before the retrial: If he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, he would get credit for the 10 years he already had served and be allowed to go free.
"Mr. Azbill would have been able to walk the next day," Wiener said.
The lawyer urged Azbill to take the deal, but Azbill refused to plead guilty. He chose to take his chances with another trial.
The second trial followed many of the same lines as the first. Except that this time, Brad Azbill, 21, testified that his father never set fire to the bed and had nothing to do with Rose's death. He said he lied the first time because authorities pressured him and threatened to send him to prison.
Prosecutors countered the new testimony by reading Brad's earlier statements to police and in court. When asked for details of the threats, Brad responded with a lot of "I don't knows" and "I don't remembers," and he provided vague recollections about two men in suits intimidating him.
"I just don't remember," he testified. "I have spent too many years trying to forget all this."
Alan Freedman, the prosecutor for the second trial, pointed out that Brad had visited his father 16 times in the months leading up to the second trial, including the weekend before the trial started.
Defense lawyers fought hard to keep Brad's earlier statements out of the trial but lost their argument.
"I could see it on his face," juror Ray Landry said recently. "When the judge ruled on it, Louis Wiener was at a total loss. I think he knew right then he was going to lose the case."
Brad's earlier testimony was too much for the jury to ignore. It convicted Azbill for the second time.
During sentencing, District Judge John Mendoza noted the terrible crime and its lasting effects on those involved, especially Brad, who by then had trouble with drugs and the law.
Brad "has had to go through quite a bit in his testimony, and undoubtedly that will live and last and will have a detrimental impression upon him until he dies."
Reached at his Las Vegas home recently, Brad Azbill said he doesn't want to talk about his father and what happened all those years ago. He did say his father should be freed.
"I think he should have been out years ago," he said. "There were people in there -- there were cop killers, the scum of the earth -- and they've gotten out."
RECALLING ROSE
Rose's niece, has no pity for Sylvester Azbill. Never had. Never will.
"He had no compassion for her," Kellogg said. "This wasn't a swift death. This was a horrific death. No matter how sick he is, he deserves to die behind bars."
Rose was a kind-hearted family matriarch who took care of her younger brother and sister after their parents died young. Her brother, Charles Brundige, retired as a Navy commander, but when he took the stand to talk about his sister during the trial of the wrongful death lawsuit, he cried.
The family won a $1.2 million judgment against Azbill, but saw little of the money, Kellogg said. All the lawyers involved had to be paid. But, for Rose's family, the money was not important, Kellogg said. It couldn't change what happened and it couldn't relieve the pain that remains to this day.
"It really kills me to think of how she suffered like that, and I couldn't help her," she said.
SUPPORTERS REMAIN
Most of Azbill's family gave up on him long ago.
The few relatives who still care about him -- a couple of grandchildren and the Inesses -- try to keep in touch, but Azbill would rather they didn't see him in prison. It's too hard on him, he said.
He hopes they'll see him as a free man someday.
First, he'll have to win clemency from the state Pardons Board, which consists of the governor, attorney general and Supreme Court justices. Azbill has asked the board for a chance at parole three times since 1984. Each time, he has refused to say he killed Rose, and each time he was turned down.
He wants one more chance before he dies.
His family doesn't like the odds if he clings to his innocence.
"To me it's silly," Dale Iness said. "I've got principles, strong principles, but if I was sitting in prison, convicted twice of the same crime, I would ask myself what difference does it make if I admit to something they think I did already."
Azbill admitted a degree of responsibility for what happened at his 1989 Pardons Board hearing, saying he should have been more watchful. He said that just admitting that has bothered him ever since.
"It was a lie," he said. "It's not the truth, and it's bugged me ever since I did it. So this time, I'm not lying with any of this business about any wrongdoing. ... I did not kill my wife."
He still thinks the boys had something to do with the fire. He still says he could have saved Rose if he wasn't stopped by his son. He still says he was a victim of a money-fueled conspiracy.
"It just seemed like it was rigged against me," he said.
The Inesses believe in his innocence too.
"Only Sylvester, his son and God knows for sure what happened that day, and I believe in Vess," Wanieta Iness said.
If Azbill is ever freed, he would live with the Inesses in Las Vegas. Azbill said he envisions spending time with his grandchildren and maybe working in politics again.
"If I'm out and Hillary (Clinton) runs, I'll work for her," he said.
He said he wouldn't be overwhelmed by the new Las Vegas, even though it hardly resembles the city he knew four decades ago.
"It's something I think I could adjust to," he said. "In 24 hours, it'd be like I never left."
