Tangled web

It was a cold case -- literally.  The partially frozen body of a man was found slumped inside a Bronco, shot twice.

The suspect then is still the suspect today, more than 20 years later:  the beautiful, enigmatic widow with seductive eyes and a string of hapless men on her charm bracelet.

A black widow to some and a mystery to so many.

She's gone by several names over the decades, but most people have called her Sandra.

When they talked about the suspicious deaths and the murder, when they whispered about the coast-to-coast scams, the name on their lips was Sandra.

And right here is where the whispers started.

Dallas, Texas.

And not just plain old Dallas, but Highland Park, with its decorator magazine houses and expensive cars. Big D's answer to Beverly Hills.

And in 1984, that's where Alan Rehrig, a young Oklahoma guy new to town, found himself cruising pricey streets looking for a garage apartment.

Best old friends Phil Askew and Carl McKinney wish they could stop the movie of Alan's life right there. Fate.

She was Sandra Bridewell, a recently widowed mother of three. Dark-haired, helpful and to Alan, a major babe.

Barbara Nathan was one of Sandra's closest friends and she'd seen men drool that way before.

An old-school Southern belle with a Mercedes convertible and a home in the best zip code.

Now, 29-year-old Rehrig had just moved down from Edmond, Okla., where he'd been a glory-days hero, a star athlete in high school and college.

He'd made a pass at professional golf and then tried the oil business,  without having much success at either.  So his longtime buddy Phil Askew invited him to Dallas with an offer at his mortgage company.

Down checking out the possibility of renting a cheap apartment in Highland Park when he spotted that attractive woman on her front lawn.

Soon the perfectly turned-out woman from Highland Park society was calling the jock from Oklahoma, inviting him to black-tie galas.

Gloria Rehrig is Alan's mother, and he couldn't believe that this woman was interested in him.

Back in Oklahoma, all she knew about the Dallas woman was that Sandra was 36 -- several years older than Alan.  She'd been widowed twice with three children.

Gloria Rehrig thought the relationship would be a passing flirtation.  But Alan's friends felt otherwise.

Sandra's beauty and apparent wealth were pluses for Alan, for sure, but so were her children.

Soon the friend remembers, the children began showing up at work.

It was building to a boil, as it turned out, to tie the knot.  Alan and buddy Phil were driving to a basketball game when a distraught Alan broke some big news.

Alan and Sandra were married Dec. 8, 1984, just 6 months after Alan had moved to Dallas.

The odd-coupling of the society woman and the good ol’ boy seemed to work for his buddies but on Sandra's side, one close friend, Barbara Nathan, wondered what Sandra could have been thinking.

Not even two months after they were married, Sandra called Al with devastating news.  Phil Askew was with him.

And soon both Sandra and Alan were telling their friends that their marriage was hitting the rocks.

Less than a year after the wedding, in November, 1985, Sandra and Alan separated. He moved in with his friend Phil.

They'd been split for a month. No calls. No visits.

When Sandra phoned and asked Alan to come meet her at the mini-storage where they'd warehoused some stuff, they agreed to meet there late afternoon. It was a Saturday in December.

Phil Askew last saw his friend Alan Rehrig in his Bronco pulling out of the driveway late Saturday afternoon on Dec. 7, 1985. Alan was on his way to meet his estranged wife Sandra at a storage warehouse.  A few hours later, Sandra called Phil.

Phil had been putting his friend up. But Alan never came home that night. Or the next.

Monday morning comes, and Alan's not in the office. Phil calls Sandra.

While Alan's friends searched for him, Sandra hired a private investigator named William Dear.

But Sandra hadn't hired Dear to find her husband.  She'd asked the private eye to protect her from him.

The investigator took the job, checked the security in her home and put some of his men outside to keep watch.

In the meantime, Alan's friend Phil Askew filed a missing person's report with the Dallas police -- something Sandra refused to do.

Four days after he went missing, the “where's Alan” question was answered 200 miles north of Dallas in Oklahoma City, near an electrical substation about two miles away from the city airport.

On a chilly night, two police officers had stopped to check out a 1984 Bronco parked here.  When they looked inside the locked vehicle, they saw the body of a man slumped between the front seats.  Running the Texas plates soon told them the dead man was Alan Rehrig.  He'd been shot in the chest and the head.

As friends and family gathered in Oklahoma for the funeral, Alan's widow was starting to make them uneasy.

At the outset of the Oklahoma City police’s murder investigation, the police received a  call, out of the blue, from a woman in Dallas who called herself Highland Park's “Deep Throat.”

There was a Sandra unknown to her dead husband, his friends, his family...

Alan Rehrig was found shot to death in Oklahoma City. As detectives began their investigation, a tipster 200-miles south started calling the police.  The message was to be careful of Sandra.

Steve Pacheco, one of the lead Oklahoma City detectives on the case, now retired, already had the widow Sandra high on his list of people to talk to. It’s only routine when a spouse is murdered. But when he sat down with her before the funeral, he had that gossip in mind, as dished by the Highland Park Deep Throat.

The detective caught Sandra in a lie, and it was a whopper. It was Sandra's story about being pregnant before she married Alan, and that she'd had a miscarriage. But the police had learned that Sandra couldn't have been with child, much less twins, as she claimed.    

Sandra had also lied about her age to Alan. She'd shaved off four years. Sandra was 41 -- eleven years older than Alan. 

A follow-up interview with Sandra was arranged for the next day. But Sandra stood up the Oklahoma City cops and flew back to Dallas.

It was the last time they ever spoke to Sandra. Back home she'd hired one of the city's most prominent criminal lawyers, who told the cops to stay away from the widow and her kids.

And some findings at the crime-scene investigation were quickly turning the detective's person of interest -- the widow -- into a suspect.

Alan Rehrig's body was found between the driver's and passenger seats. He was wearing shorts and a t-shirt even though Oklahoma was in the midst of a bitter cold snap.  That told the detective that Alan Rehrig had come from somewhere warmer -- Dallas likely -- and was cruelly delivered home to Oklahoma.

The medical examiner found two gunshot wounds through the right torso and behind the right ear. The shots were fired, it was determined, as Rehrig sat in the driver's seat.

But someone else, they surmised, sat behind the wheel after Alan had been killed.

Someone shorter. Someone with a reason to drive that car.

Sandra was 5 foot 3 inches tall.

And Pacheco says crime scene technicians determined Rehrig couldn't have been in that seat-forward position when he was shot. His wounds and the bullet hole in the seat didn't line-up.

That location – Oklahoma – is an important element in what the detective sees as a carefully planned scheme.

Sandra's alibi has her accounted for on the Saturday Alan went missing until 1:30 a.m. Sunday morning when she returned home from dinner and a movie with friends.

Sandra, he speculates, could have left Dallas around two in the morning, and been in Oklahoma City before sunrise, leaving the body in the Bronco at the power station near the airport.

But cops did find a few unidentified prints in the bronco. Maybe it hadn't been Sandra at all?

For detective Pacheco, it all pointed to Sandra -– even more so when he took his investigation to Dallas.

A past of either catastrophic bad luck, or of a deeply troubled person.

Even before the murder of her third husband in 1985, Highland Park had been abuzz about Sandra.

If there's anyone who knows the chapter and verse on Sandra, it's Dallas Observer reporter Glenna Whitley. She's been on Sandra's trail for 20 years and has the facts -- boxes of them -- behind the Dallas scuttlebutt.

Sandra Powers, adopted, raised in a middle class Dallas neighborhood, had set her sights early on the conspicuous splendor of Highland Park.

By 23, she was on her way when she married up-and-coming dentist David Stegall in 1967. They were raising three children in a home decorated by one of Dallas' most renowned interior designers.

In February of 1975, David Stegall tried to kill himself.  Sandra found him in a closet with a gun to his head. Several weeks later, he succeeded. He'd shot himself in the head while in bed after slashing his wrists.

Barbara Nathan was one of Sandra's close friends.

She used those wiles to attract an A-list catch: Bobby Bridewell, a real estate developer and horse owner, who developed an exclusive hotel in Dallas, The Mansion on Turtle Creek.  They married in 1978.

Sandra, now 34, had finally arrived. She had the home in Highland Park and social standing. Then in 1980, tragedy struck.  Bridewell developed cancer.  After a two-and-a-half-year battle, he died at age 41.

During her husband's decline, and after, Sandra turned to Bridewell's oncologist, Dr. John Bagwell, and his wife Betsy for shoulders to lean on.

But after months of being there for the needy Sandra, in mid-July of 1982 it all got to be too much for the Bagwells.

Here's the story according to investigators:  Sandra had called Dr. Bagwell and asked him to come help her with her stalled car.  He did, only to get there and see a police officer pull up and start the car immediately.  This car stunt was the last straw for Dr. Bagwell. He told Sandra he and Betsy had no more time for her.

It was the same old car story.  Now Sandra claimed it had died in the church parking lot. She asked Betsy to please run her to the airport, Love Field, to rent a car. When they got there, as Sandra would later tell the story, she announced she'd left her license behind. So they drove back to the church lot.  Sandra tried her car again -- and it turned right over. Sandra was the last person to see Betsy Bagwell alive.

And that's how the medical examiner ruled it: a suicide.

He found the residue on Mrs. Bagwell's hand consistent with someone who had the gun in her hand and pulled the trigger.

But nothing seemed to make sense about this suicide.  There was no note.  Investigators say she left food thawing in the sink, and warned her kids not to "pig out" before dinner. And the gun in Mrs. Bagwell's hand was stolen, registered to a dead man.

An independent forensics expert later looked at the same evidence and reached a different conclusion: the residue may have gotten on Mrs. Bagwell's hand as she grabbed for a gun held to her head. It was a murder scenario.

Even though the Dallas police didn't see the death that way, any number of society matrons did.

Flash forward three years to 1985, and another figure in Sandra's life, Alan Rehrig, is found shot to death in a car by an airport and the Oklahoma City detective investigating that Rehrig murder now found the story of Betsy Bagwell's death intriguing indeed.

Had Sandra pulled the trigger on both?

There were too many deaths, he thought, connected to the same person. Still, no murder charges were ever brought against Sandra Bridewell Rehrig.

And remember this man, William Dear?  He's the private eye Sandra hired after Alan Rehrig went missing.  But the detective quickly thought something was off about his client.

Oklahoma authorities wanted to put Sandra on a lie detector. The private eye says he arranged for his own expert to wire Sandra up as a test run.

The private eye got Sandra with the lie detector examiner and left the room.

Shortly after that he dropped Sandra as a client.

Sandra Bridewell -- she'd dropped the Rehrig -- had had it. Now 42, she was pulling up stakes and moving on, to another one of those tasteful places -- Marin County, California.

Lots, as it turned out. Lots.

In the summer of 1986, a beautiful widow from Dallas was charming her new circle of friends in suburban San Francisco, Marin County. She and her three children were living in an airy apartment by the yacht club. She'd introduced herself as Sandra Bridewell, using her second husband's name that had that nice ring about it.

The 42-year-old Sandra graced her way into the smart set but kept her eye squarely on the target -- finding her next potential male -- and they were all players: businessmen, developers, lawyers.  But the widow's charms were quickly wearing thin in the Bay area.

Two of the men who loaned her money took her to court, but never recovered any money. There was an attorney, smitten with her, who loaned her $23,000. And ditto for the married businessman who wrote Sandra checks totalling $70,000 drawn from his pension fund.

Meanwhile back in Dallas, Sandra was gone, but not forgotten, thanks to a cover story in the Dallas city magazine called D. There in black and white were all the whispered stories -- the murdered husband, the suspicious suicide of the close friend. The article mysteriously began showing up in California.

Reporter Glenna Whitley, writing for D magazine at the time, had inherited the story and she found herself fielding call after call from Marin County.

The San Francisco media picked up the juicy story of the "Black Widow" and after that spotlight of attention, Sandra left behind both the Bay area and her first name.

Now and then through the ‘90s, Glenna would get calls from places like Arizona and Idaho asking “Who is this flim-flamming Sandra / Camille character?” But when the century rolled over, a fresh new Camille arrived as well -- the coy, eye-batting, southern belle character was retired. It wasn't playing now that she was well into her 50's.

Camille had found Jesus.

The reporter hears from time to time that the missionary Camille is traveling around the south and parts of northern California and she's on to a new game.

She captivates them with pictures of orphans from what she says are her mission trips, tells tales of smuggling bibles into China. She's offered money and a place to stay until her next trip. 

But two of Sandra's hosts became suspicious and checked her background. They found those stories about the Dallas "Black Widow" and threw her out so abruptly -- one with a kitchen knife in hand -- that she left her belongings behind.

These belongings were turned over to the one person who seemed to know what Camille was about.

In a note to herself: "I am a money magnet ... I attract millionaire/billioniare mentors … I am a billionaire in Christ Jesus."

And she wasn't leaving God's gifts to chance. As with Santa, she asked for toys by name. Tucked inside her bible was a picture of a gold Lexus.

Camille had given God everything but the VIN number.  "To receive the gift of & title to my new Lexus, LX 470 of gold w/ Michelin tires, state of the art CD sound system, custom cafe au lait leather seatcovers."

And Camille was after real estate to house her own plans for a Christian mission.  This ad caught her eye -- a $3.9 million-dollar, 25-acre property in California's wine country. "Promised Lands Farm," she called it.  "Promised me as a portion of my inheritance." 

But when she tried to close the deal with a forged letter on a banker's letterhead asserting that she could pay for it in cash, her plans for the farm -- and California -- were finished. She'd been found out again. It was 2004.

Sandra / Camille Stegall Bridewell Rehrig  slipped away, off the grid, until February of this year when, as always, the frantic call came to Glenna again.  This time it was from North Carolina. It was a son scared to death for his elderly mother.

In the summer of 2006, this small country church in Southport, N.C., welcomed a seemingly good Christian woman named Camille into their midst.  She had been recommended by a preacher nearby as a suitable caretaker for 77-year old Sue Mosely.

Mrs. Moseley had been ill, and 62-year-old Camille – who had introduced herself as Camille Bowers -- sounded ideal for the job. Her story was inspirational to Mrs. Moseley's son Jim.

It was agreed that Camille would live with Mrs. Moseley in her waterfront home and look after her until the next missionary trip came along.

Mrs. Moseley brought Camille along to her church where she spoke of her mission trips. Church members happily gave money to her cause. Camille had testified to witnessing miracles.

North Carolina suited her so well that in January of this year, Camille decided to buy a house for herself in Southport. Mrs. Moseley called a realtor, and the three went house hunting.

Jack Vereene is the realtor.

And she found the place: a very desirable $2.7 million house smack on the intracoastal waterway.

But he became a little leery of Camille when his cash-buyer weirdly tried to dicker over the earnest money.

With what little info he had about Camille, the realtor turned to Google for more.

After an hour and a half search, he came upon Glenna Whitley's articles from Dallas. One of them had pictures.

So the realtor called -- who else -- Glenna Whitley, who hadn't heard boo about Sandra/Camille in three-years.

The realtor knew Mrs. Moseley was safe for the time being, staying with her sons while Camille was supposedly off on a brief mission trip. He asked the reporter to call the Moseley sons with the truly bad news.

Glenna e-mailed the son her stories.

Now the son is wondering what Camille may have done to his mother.  He would later $2,500 of unauthorized charges on his mother's credit card and close to $900 of forged checks. Her tax papers were gone and her house was going into foreclosure.

The automatic mortgage payments had stopped for reasons unknown. The lender had phoned and called but Mrs. Mosely didn't respond. Why? Mrs. Moseley says Camille had been answering the phone and picking up the mail.

On a hunch, Jim Moseley called the Social Security office to see if there was any activity on his mother's number. There was.

Moseley discovered someone had called Social Security to have his mother's checks deposited in a different account.  He believes that someone is Camille.

Camille was still away when a shaken Jim Moseley went to the authorities. They issued a warrant for her arrest.  The son figured she'd flown the coop, but last March -- surprise, Camille called, acting very cheerful.

Jim Moseley arranged to meet Camille a few mornings later at this coffee shop in Charlotte, N.C. He said he'd give her the keys to the car but waiting inside with him were undercover officers. For the first time in more than two decades of smoke and innuendo Sandra/Camille had been arrested.

The arrest was bittersweet news for the Oklahoma City detective who never was able to put Sandra in jail.

Sandra / Camille Powers -- her real maiden name, not Bowers -- is now in federal custody.  She's been charged with mail and identity theft, as well as Social Security, and credit card fraud. If convicted she could face over 20 years in prison.

And her arrest has rekindled the murder investigation of Alan Rehrig, husband number three.  The investigative baton has been passed to detective Kyle Eastridge, who believes he has a shot at finally cracking the case.

But then there some people she's encountered, frightened even today, to talk about Sandra in anything but off-the record whispers.

One final note: on the advice of her attorney, Sandra Camille Powers -- the name under which she's been charged -- declined Dateline's request for an interview.