A Texas sheriff has revealed that a true-crime detective show played a role in the arrest of an 84-year-old woman for the 1984 shooting death of her husband.
Leon County Sheriff Kevin Ellis said on Wednesday that the arrest last week of Norma Allbritton was aided by the program 'Cold Justice,' which contributed its own investigator, a retired district attorney and other resources.
The death of Johnnie Allbritton in the couple's home near Buffalo, Texas, was revisited in 2015 by sheriff's investigators and some evidence was later digitized forwarded to the reality show airing on Oxygen.
Norma Allbritton, 84, was arrested July 1 on a murder charge in the 1984 shooting death of her husband
According to a contemporaneous account of the murder published in The Eagle 35 years ago, Johnnie Allbritton, 64, was shot five times in the chest and back with his own 20-gauge shotgun inside his home on May 14, 1984.
Police said at the time they believed the victim, who owned a grocery store, interrupted burglars ransacking his house, who then shot him.
According to the article, his wife, Norma, came home at around 4pm after picking up their son from school and found the house locked up.
Johnnie Allbritton was a World War II veteran who owned a grocery store in Buffalo, Texas
Fearful to enter by herself, she called a county constable who arrived and found her husband's lifeless body lying on the floor between the kitchen and the den.
The investigation that followed had failed to produce any actionable leads or suspects.
Two weeks after her husband's death, Norma was set to take a lie detector test, but that morning she allegedly shot herself in the chest by accident. The polygraph test never took place.
On Wednesday, Sheriff Ellis declined to say what new evidence was presented to the grand jury in late June that indicted Norma Allbritton on a murder charge.
Of the 'Cold Justice' team's involvement in the case Ellis said this: 'This truly was a team effort. Without Cold Justice, I don't think we could've progressed as we have – but they also couldn't have done it without the LCSO staff,' reported The Palestine Herald.
Johnnie is pictured with his first wife (third from left) and their children. He married Norma after the passing of his first wife
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ShareThe program assigned one of its investigators, Johnny Bonds, a retired homicide detective from Houston, to work alongside sheriff's deputies on the case, which entailed making multiple trips all around the state to meet with and interview 50 witnesses.
'Cold Justice' covered all the travel expenses, and also provided forensic technology and its own laboratory to test evidence.
The episode featuring the Allbritton cold case is expected to air sometime in March or April of next year.
Meanwhile, Norma Allbritton was released from the county jail on July 3 after posting $50,000 bond.
Allbritton's daughter Judy is pictured with her father and mother. Now a grown woman, Judy Robinson said she was not surprised by her stepmother's arrest
According to articles published by local news outlets over the years, Johnnie Allbritton was a World War II veteran who married Norma Clinkscales in the late 1960s after the death of his first wife.
His two marriages produced a total of six children. His second wife also had a son from a previous relationship, Randy. At the time of his death, Johnnie and Norma had been married for 18 years.
Three years before his murder, Allbritton's 13-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Pam, died of a shotgun wound, in what was ruled a suicide.
Judy Robinson, Johnnie's older daughter from his first marriage, told KBTX on Tuesday she was not surprised to learn of her stepmother's arrest.
'Well, we've always kind of thought that she was the main suspect so that part wasn't a shock,' she said,
Judy, who was married and no longer living with his father's new family at the time of his death, told the station she believes her stepmother may have been unfaithful to her dad and living a double life.
On her Facebook page, where Robinson has been posting messages about her father's death through the years, she did not mince words.
'The devil has many disguises,' she wrote. 'We are dealing with pure evil in disguise. I grew up with it, I know.'
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