One-time Laredo physician Dr. Richard Illes sentenced in wife's slaying

By María Eugenia Guerra

In early 2001 as I visited my mother at Mercy Hospital , I met a jowly, balding physician I had never seen before. He was very thorough in asking my mother a series of questions and recording them on her chart. His bedside manner, though professional, was not warm. His icy blue eyes suggested he might be a little cold-blooded. I had the sense that he had not been in Laredo very long.

He hadn't. His name was Illes, Dr. Richard Illes, a cardiovascular surgeon, who had joined the Laredo Medical Group in January 2001, about two years after he was first considered the prime suspect in the January 1999 murder of his wife Miriam Zambie Illes in Lycoming County , Pennsylvania .

LareDOS ran a story in the April 2001 issue, discussing Dr. Illes' brief tenure at Mercy and a recap of the known details of the murder, a story that included the comments of Lycoming County District Attorney Thomas Merino, who considered Dr. Illes the prime suspect in his wife's murder. Our story questioned Mercy Hospital and LMG's protocol for searches for physicians. Earlier hospital press releases to local media extolled Dr. Illes' skills and credentials, and billboards showed him as a member of the hospital's heart team.

In the culmination of a five-year investigation by authorities who had jurisdiction in the case, a Pennsylvania jury recently convicted Dr. Illes for that murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. The television magazine 48 Hours earlier this month aired the story of the murder investigation and the trial.

On January 15, 1999, Miriam Illes, recently divorced from Dr. Illes, was shot through the heart by someone who waited and watched from a drainage ditch behind her house until she came to a kitchen window. While she chatted on the phone with a friend in Montana , she was shot through the back by a small caliber bullet that tore through her heart, the bullet causing immense damage because it fragmented as it went through the window.

With his ex-wife dead, Dr. Richard Illes would be spared an acrimonious court battle for custody of the Illes' son Richie, the payment of $13,000 a month in child support, and a protracted and valuable property settlement. Illes, who remarried six months after Miriam was killed, might also be the beneficiary of a quarter of a million dollar life insurance policy.

What Dr. Illes was not spared was the doggedness of the Lycoming County District Attorney's office and the investigators of the Pennsylvania State Police who kept the doctor in their sights over the next five years. Police investigators made note of the drill presses in Illes' workshop that could have been used to make the crude silencer found just outside Miriam Illes' house. They also found on Dr. Illes' nightstand a book entitled They Wrote Their Own Sentences: The FBI Handwriting Analysis Book. The investigators also made note of a series of anonymous letters that followed the FBI formula for untraceable letters, pencil and block-print letters mailed anonymously and suggesting who the real killer of Miriam Illes might be. The letters included false clues like hairs that did not match Illes' DNA. One such letter pointed the finger at Illes' medical partner Dr. Nche Zama.

Neither was Illes spared the determination of someone who always knew the city of his most recent employment, someone who mailed out plain brown manila envelopes of news clips of Miriam's murder to the hospital where he was employed or the newspaper of that city.

While Lycoming County investigators had worked over the years to tie Illes to his wife's murder, he moved from city to city to find employment if not as a cardiothoracic surgeon then as an expert witness or a cosmetic surgeon.

After his truncated two-month stay in Laredo, Illes reportedly sought work in the western states and ended up in Spokane, where he was about to join a heart surgery practice. The arrival of the manila envelope of news clips dissuaded his prospective employers.

In May 2002, LareDOS received a phone call from attorneys in Tampa , Florida who said that Dr. Richard Illes, unable to find work, had surfaced as an expert witness in malpractice trials. We pointed them to the news stories we had received and the one we wrote back in 2001.

The discovery by authorities of the suspected murder weapon, a bolt-action Savage .22 caliber rifle, and shoes that matched prints found in the snow outside Miriam's house on the night of the murder, brought investigators closer to tying Illes to the murder, as they were found near the road Illes told authorities he drove on the night Miriam was killed. The old Savage bore no serial number -- it been filed off and the rifle had been manufactured and sold in 1949, before gun registration. While going through an old scrapbook at the home of one of Illes' sisters, detectives recognized the Savage in a photo of Illes' late godfather Joe Kowalski, who had also been Illes' hunting mentor and had left him his rifles.

By December 2002, Pennsylvania authorities decided they had enough circumstantial evidence to arrest Illes. They coordinated with Spokane authorities who made the arrest. A search of Illes' home yielded a manuscript on his computer entitled Heart Shot: Murder of the Doctor's Wife, a narrative of Miriam Illes' murder, a narrative that used the real names of everyone related to the case. Investigators called it “a confession,” but Illes told them, “I thought it would generate more interest and more widespread knowledge of the actual facts of the case, which were not being disseminated by the police. That was my motive.”

Of Miriam and her surgeon husband, Illes wrote, “They displayed a superficial veil of perfection . . . which hid the divisive issues that led to their separation . . . and to her brutal murder.”

Though rigorously maintaining his innocence on the 48 Hours program, Illes never took the stand in his own defense in the five-week trial. Jurors deliberated two and a half days before finding him guilty of murder in the first degree.

In the five years since the murder, investigators had plenty of time to measure Illes' wile and intelligence -- the false clue of a cigarette butt left in the creek bed, hair other than his own left on the silencer, the fake letters, hairs on the envelope flaps of the fake letters. “He's smarter than me,” District Attorney Michael Dinges told 48 Hours. “He's probably smarter than any of the individual police officers. But he's not smarter than all of us together.”