The Garland County Library’s Murder of the Month Club will present an appearance by author and columnist Gene Lyons on July 17th at 3 pm. The focus of his talk will be the Orsini/McArthur murders which made headlines in Arkansas thirty years ago.
“The Mary Lee Orsini case is probably the most fascinating crime to have happened in Arkansas,” Karen Covey, Circulation Supervisor at the library, said. “It had so many bizarre elements and odd characters. Even though there were other accounts of the case, Gene Lyons wrote the best one.”
In March, 1981, Little Rock newspapers reported that North Little Rock resident Ron Orsini had been found dead in his bed, victim of a gunshot to the head. Orsini’s wife, Mary Lee, offered inconsistent statements to the North Little Rock Police, who subsequently found that the Orsinis were experiencing financial problems due to Mary Lee’s lavish spending, of which her husband was not aware.
As investigators grew more wary of Mrs. Orsini’s often far-fetched explanations, she hired Bill McArthur, an eminent Little Rock defense attorney, to protect her interests in an upcoming grand jury investigation into Orsini’s murder.
According to Lyons’ book, Mary Lee Orsini quickly became enamored with her attorney, who was married and the father of two children.
On May 21, 1982, McArthur’s wife, Alice, suffered minor injuries when a bomb, which did not fully detonate, exploded in her car near the McArthur’s Pleasant Valley home. Rumors linked the bombing and other suspicious activities to “organized crime.”
On July 2, 1982, while Alice was packing for a family July 4th trip to Hot Springs, she was fatally shot in her home after she answered her front door for what was apparently a flower delivery. Her body was discovered later the same day by McArthur and a neighbor.
Alice McArthur’s murder ignited jurisdictional debates between the various law enforcement agencies involved in the different facets of the Orsini case and generated headline news throughout the state.
Mary Lee Orsini was eventually arrested for conspiracy to commit murder, after being implicated in the confession of Eugene “Yankee” Hall, who claimed that he and Larry McClendon had committed the McArthur murder.
In October 1982, Orsini was convicted of hiring Hall and McClendon to kill Alice McArthur. She was again tried in 1983 and convicted of the murder of Ron Orsini, though this conviction was later overturned by the Arkansas Supreme Court. She died in prison of an apparent heart attack on August 11, 2003. Bill McArthur died in Little Rock of natural causes on October 4, 2009.
“A synopsis of the case hardly does it justice,” Covey said. “There are so many twists and turns and larger than life characters involved that it takes a great book like Widow’s Web to really bring them all to life.”
Gene Lyons, National Magazine Award winner and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, writes a weekly column for Newspaper Enterprise Association. A Southerner
with a liberal viewpoint, Lyons comments on politics and national issues with a distinct voice
and a no-nonsense approach. A prolific author, Lyons has written hundreds of articles, essays and reviews for such magazines as Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Entertainment Weekly, Washington Monthly, The Nation, Esquire, Slate and Salon. His books include The Higher Illiteracy (University of Arkansas, 1988), Widow’s Web (Simon & Schuster, 1993), Fools for Scandal (Franklin Square, 1996) and, with Joe Conason, The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (St. Martin’s, 2000). In 2004, Mozark Productions released a movie version of “The Hunting of the President.”
Lyons graduated from Rutgers University in 1965, and earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 1969. He taught at the Universities of Massachusetts, Arkansas and Texas before becoming a full-time writer in 1976. A native of New Jersey, Lyons has lived in Arkansas with his wife Diane since 1972. Diane, an Arkansas native, recently retired as from her position as Vice President for Board Relations at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Their two adult sons live in the Little Rock area. The Lyons live on a cattle farm near Houston, Ark., with a half-dozen dogs, three horses, and a growing herd of Fleckvieh Simmental cows.
The A&E “City Confidential” documentary on the Orsini case, “Little Rock: The Politics of Murder,” will be screened at 1:30 pm, prior to Lyons’ presentation.
Door prizes will be awarded. Registration is required for the event. Call the library at 623-4161 or 922-4483 to reserve a seat.
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