i go, where is it? he said, i left it on the set. on the set? on the set. so susan said, i m not going anywhere. then she signaled to her friend in the car and the man got angry. he realized you were with somebody? realized i was with somebody, and he said, you re not right for the part anyway, just forget it. and then he starts to walk away. with susan murphy s help, the police made a sketch of that man who had promised her a part in a bond movie. once we aired the sketch, we had a parole officer call us and say, that happens to be one of my parolees. he had a name. it wasn t victor thomas as he told susan murphy. it wasn t, as he told cathy debuono, brian from disney. his name was victor paleologus, a parolee with a record of violent and white-collar crimes and no connection to the film industry at all.
there is worry. he s a con man and he s very, very good at it. so the rest of the women got up on the stand and recounted the stories much as you ve already heard, of the apparently mild-mannered guy who offered to help make them famous. who dangled the possibility that they like lana turner might instantly find fame and glory in hollywood, or at least an opening role as a bond girl. and then suddenly, 13 days into the trial, victor sprang a surprise. after all those years of denial, all those years of blaming everybody else for all his troubles with the law and after a parade of opening statements and witnesses, victor simply stopped everything. he had decided to ask for a deal from the prosecution. had decided to plead guilty to the crime of murder. in july 2006, paleologos appeared in open court before the judge and agreed that he and
murdering an innocent young woman. his lawyer, he told us, would have lost a prepaid vacation if he continued the trial. he really was going to win, he said. the real victim here, he said, is himself. this whole issue has been really about what someone else can say about victor. what someone else can dirty bring up on dirty laundry about victor. round and round for more than an hour went victor, but avoiding one topic. what really happened to kristi johnson? we all know you did it. and i think the whole point is finally no, no, let me finish. finally, somebody wants you to stand up, like a man, but the fact is, we know you did it. so this is all a dance that s kind of silly, don t you think? no, i don t think. no.
fairly confident i wouldn t confess to killing somebody if i hadn t actually killed them. well, i think you can say that with all sincerity today well, maybe but i don t think you can say that in the situation if you were being bent over a barrel for 3 1/2 years. it s funny, you always make plea deals, right? yeah, unfortunately. victor gave us lots of reasons he took the plea this time. unbelievably, one of them, he said, was money. i only agreed to the plea based on the fact that when you consider erroneous costs of even a successful defense, i was going to end up in the same position anyway. seem odd that a man in prison for life would be worried about his own personal financial circumstances? well, get this he wasn t even paying his legal bills. taxpayers had been doing that for a year and a half. but hard as it is to believe, that is only one of several dog-ate-my homework excuses for his decision to plead guilty to
she trusted him just enough to go up there. there was no party. just him. he was trying to kiss me and i pushed him away and then he just attacked me. he threw me on the bed. he tried to rip my clothes off and in that moment, he pulled ropes from behind the bed. he would have had to have arranged this before? exactly. right. ropes already in place? did you tie her up? no. nobody got tied up. there was no attack whatsoever. victor admitted he had been there, taken her up to his suite, but had a very different story about what happened. for example, she showed the cops back then rope burns and bruises, said victor. she had a string purse on her. i picked up her purse and grabbed it. she wrapped it around her wrist, she was pulling back. we got into this tug-of-war type of issue, her strap broke, and she wept flying back over the credenza. we had a suite there.