Episode 30: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I'm your host Julie Mattson. This week we conclude our Valentine's Day Murders with a story about Nathan Leuthold, a 39 year old former Baptist Missionary, who shot his wife Denise Leuthold in the head on Valentine's Day 2013, to make room for his lover, a 20-year-old Lithuanian woman the couple sponsored to study in the United States. Ready? Listen in...
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson. Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:29 We're winding up the end of the month of February and we're still talking about murders that occurred on Valentine's day.
0:37 I was thinking earlier about how you know, it used to be more of a holiday that was geared towards love and gift giving.
0:48 A lot of people wanted their well day to be on Valentine's day because it was a super special day and a big event for them shoot even my husband wanted to get married on Valentine's day.
1:03 I wasn't crazy about the idea because I always just wanted our anniversary to be a special date, that was just our anniversary.
1:13 I didn't really want to have to share it with another holiday.
1:17 Always felt sorry for kids growing up who had a birthday on Christmas day.
1:22 I thought that was kind of a rip off.
1:24 You know, they had to share their birthday with Christmas and all their siblings got gifts as well as them and so anyway, I just didn't want to share our anniversary with Valentine's day.
1:39 It's really sad that some people look at it a little bit differently and plan that to be the day that they hire a hitman to kill their spouse.
1:52 Times have definitely changed.
1:55 But we have had a recent Valentine's day murder that just happened this year in South Carolina and it's a really sad story.
2:06 Of course still under investigation.
2:09 A 26 year old mom was actually shot and killed in front of her Children outside of a cougar grocery store.
2:18 And apparently she had been shopping at the Kroger that Tuesday.
2:25 And then when she came outside and I guess was loading her kiddos up into the car, she got into a verbal dispute with a stranger after the argument, the stranger pulled out a gun and just shot her in the back.
2:40 Super sad, two year old child and infant were actually in the car when it happened this mom was a cosmetologist and she was actually going to nursing school.
2:53 No one really knows what the argument was about.
2:57 Of course all still under investigation. It's pretty new.
3:01 23 year old Christina Harrison actually fled the scene initially and then ended up turning herself in that evening.
3:11 She was charged with murder and some other weapons related offenses and then booked at the Lexington county detention center.
3:20 There she was supposed to appear in court on Wednesday.
3:24 Her attorney waived the hearing, tempers flared and who knows I mean people get into arguments about parking places and pulling out in front of each other and turning in front of somebody.
3:41 I know that I have friends that have been followed home.
3:45 It's scary.
3:46 I guess the best thing to do, which is terrible that we have to do this but is to always assume that you're in danger and that way you're prepared for the worst that can happen.
4:03 I'm sure she never thought of Valentine's day when she was buying groceries with her Children that she would be shot.
4:11 So super sad.
4:13 Apparently just six days prior her brother died of a gunshot wound.
4:19 So her family is going through a lot right now.
4:23 I was also looking back at some older cases, but I did want to mention that because it is very new, it is still under investigation, But the person who shot her has been arrested, who knows if the reason for the fight will ever actually come out.
4:42 But I found a murder that happened on Valentine's day back in 2013.
4:47 It's not a lot different than a lot of the others where there's an affair and one spouse decides they're going to stage the other one's murder, make it look like a robbery, hire a hit man, all of the things, it's pretty much the same.
5:08 Super similar.
5:09 Very predictable.
5:11 Again, I don't know why people believe that they can get away with these kinds of things and that the police aren't gonna suspect them from the very beginning.
5:19 But Nathan Luther old was actually a Baptist minister, he was 39 years old.
5:27 He and his wife Denise, who was also 39 were on a missionary trip in eastern Europe While they were there, Nathan fell in love with a 21 year old Lithuanian student now, the two had sponsored her to study in the United States.
5:45 And so when they returned to Peoria Illinois, where they lived, he actually murdered his wife on Valentine's day so that he could be with the student.
5:57 Now Denise, his wife again was 39.
6:01 She was found by police at around 3:40 p.m. Again on Valentine's day 2013 just outside the door of the residence with a single gunshot wound to the head.
6:13 Now it came to be discovered that Luther old actually staged a break in at his in law's house to cover his tracks.
6:22 He and Denise lived with his in laws and tried to make it look like a robbery gone wrong so that he wouldn't look like a suspect that didn't work out too good for him.
6:37 As you'll hear.
6:38 He was a former Baptist missionary and now he and Denise had three Children.
6:44 They had recently returned to Peoria.
6:47 They had been missionaries since 1998 and they've done a lot of good work together, they started churches, they took part in Christian outreach.
6:58 But again, initially he did a great job of making this appear to be a robbery gone wrong.
7:05 All of the local schools went on a soft lockdown because they didn't know who did this and they wanted to protect the kids of course he called 911 at around 3:15 after he returned home and I guess he came in apparently through the garage, noted some broken glass.
7:30 A few things had been thrown around and so he called 911 and he waited outside for the police and when the police showed up they went inside and found her body.
7:43 Now he was eventually charged with first degree murder and sentenced to 80 years in prison.
7:50 But looking back at things that happened again, criminals aren't always really good at covering their tracks and Nathan was no different.
8:01 Some items were missing from the home and also Denise's car had been stolen or it appeared to have been stolen.
8:09 It was not at the house.
8:12 Now Nathan was arrested in March and you'll hear the reasons why he was eventually arrested but initially he was not considered a suspect.
8:24 They did believe it to be just a robbery gone wrong.
8:28 But when they started to investigate him, as always happens, prosecutors wanted to block him from accessing his safety deposit box because they thought that he was a flight risk.
8:42 They thought there was a good possibility that he would try to flee the country.
8:45 And so they were a little bit too late though because when they searched his car, they found foreign currency passports and the keys to the safety deposit box.
8:57 Now in the home itself there was really no evidence of a break in.
9:03 A neighbor actually saw Nathan walking home from the park where Denise's car was found at about 12:20.
9:11 Even though he told police that he left the house at 11:15 and returned home around 3:15, which is when he called 911.
9:19 So your neighbors are always paying a little bit closer attention than you think always reminds me of Mrs. Kravitz on Bewitched.
9:31 I remember when I was a kid she was always looking in the window and telling her husband what her neighbors were doing.
9:42 There was a time to growing up where I live in an apartment actually was when I very first graduated high school I moved out on my own and our apartment complex had this lady named Rosie and I called her nosy Rosie, she freaking knew what everybody was doing.
9:58 She was all up in our business.
10:01 Our neighbors pay much better attention than we give them credit for.
10:05 So they were paying attention to him and they did see him walking and actually proved that he was lying to the police when he said he left at 11:15 and didn't get home till 3:15.
10:18 Now the Lithuanian student that he and Denise had moved to the U.S. to study actually denied involvement with him.
10:28 But then she did admit that Nathan came to Chicago about 20 times to see her.
10:34 She had also been dismissed from a college due to the inappropriate relationship with Nathan.
10:41 He bought her food and clothing and paid for all of her living expenses with an account that he shared with her.
10:50 So that makes it pretty obvious now defense attorneys actually argued the day the trial opened would have been Nathan and Denise's 19th wedding anniversary, which was super sad and then a note was found in Denise's Day planner that said Nathan was running around with a 20 year old.
11:13 Now all this came out in court.
11:15 Of course the prosecution analyzed the handwriting and confirmed that it was written by Denise and it was most likely written on the day of her murder.
11:27 It also read that she had never been good enough for Nathan and that she would not please him anymore.
11:35 The strange thing is Nathan actually never asked what was going on or if his wife was okay when the police initially came out of the house and so he just really didn't act super concerned.
11:53 He seemed more concerned about himself being injured or himself being hurt and actually urgently wondering if his wife was okay, nothing had been stolen.
12:04 You know when people break into a house, usually they'll throw things around, they don't try to be neat and clean and orderly.
12:11 It looked like the drawers were pulled out and actually placed in the floor and not duct like you would expect them to be if it were actually a robbery, a black sweatshirt in the closet actually contained gunshot residue and that was found to of course belonged to Nathan.
12:31 Now the student, this is the weird part, she testified that she actually met Nathan when she was six years old.
12:39 Now I'm sure at some point when they originally met Denise was in the picture and of course never suspected that when this little girl turned 21 she was going to be having an affair with her husband.
12:52 Nathan brought her to the US to study when she turned 18.
12:57 She denied staying overnight with him but she did admit that he paid her expenses.
13:03 The two took trips together, they went shooting together and so they obviously spent a lot of time together, who knows what else they did But there was an email that was found after the murder that was from her to Nathan saying that she promised to work harder at their relationship.
13:25 Now although she denied that she was in love with him, she for some reason felt like she should work harder and it was also later revealed that Nathan's parents told her not to speak with the police.
13:39 Now a stalemate of Nathan's after he was arrested actually stated that he confessed to the murder and that he had waited in the closet for Denise to come home and then shot her in the head.
13:54 Now it only took the jury 90 minutes to reach a verdict.
13:57 Judge Keith Lyons called Nathan a thief, he called him that because he robbed their Children of their mother.
14:06 So again he was sentenced to 80 years but in December of 2016 he started challenging things.
14:13 He challenged the letter written by Denise.
14:17 His laptop also revealed searches for ways to kill people how to silence a 40 caliber Glock.
14:26 He searched for ways to kill a person by lethal injection, how to kill someone by electrocution and methods of suicide.
14:36 When he phoned police, even though you know he suggested a break in or supposedly suspected a break in, he really showed no concern for her at all.
14:48 And of course she hadn't been answering her phone phone calls or text and knowing she was at risk, he never ever tried to enter the house and check on her.
14:58 He never stuck his head in and called her by name.
15:01 He simply stood back and waited for the police to find exactly what he knew they would find at around three p.m. Which is probably at the time the murder happened or a little bit after anna the student that he was having an affair with actually wrote a message to him, texted him and he said that he couldn't talk because it looked like the house had been robbed.
15:29 But her response was interesting and then a smiley face.
15:34 So it's also believed that just her lack of concern proved that she kind of knew what Nathan was planning on doing.
15:42 I'm quite sure the two of them had talked a little bit about it.
15:45 I mean she was in their way when he was interviewed he kept calling his wife, she, which pretty much indicates that they didn't have the best relationship in the world.
15:56 Most people call their spouse by their first name and don't kind of talk about them like in an impersonal way, like they don't know them almost like they don't know them.
16:09 And of course police when they interview people are always good at reading body language and how to tell when someone's lying.
16:17 But he showed no emotion when she was dead.
16:20 So that's kind of typical of people with narcissistic personality disorder, which is pretty much what they believed him to have had.
16:28 All of his post trial motions were denied.
16:31 He is currently in the Menard correctional center in Randolph City Illinois.
16:37 Kind of a crazy thing.
16:38 He's actually on the top of the list of the most notable inmates on their Wikipedia page.
16:46 I'm sure it's not because of his amazing personality.
16:50 It doesn't sound like he would be anyone that anyone would want to spend time with, especially being a narcissist, obviously pretty much concerned about himself and no one else.
17:01 Anyway, I just found that to be really sad.
17:05 And again, very typical of spouses who commit murder.
17:10 Try to cover it up, Try to make it look like someone else did it try to make it look like a botched robbery and then for some reason think that the police are never gonna suspect them and they're actually gonna get away with it and be able to live happily ever after with their 20 year old girlfriend.
17:30 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies if you like this podcast and would like to share with others.
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