Sometimes truth reads more like fiction.
This true-crime account begins inside a Missouri law firm — and unfolds into a chain of deaths, explosions, and unanswered questions that investigators couldn’t ignore.
“IT’S ALMOST LIKE A JOHN GRISHAM NOVEL”
The shingle on the law firm door says “Boggs, Avellino, Lach & Boggs.” They have had to change the sign a few times.
The Clayton, Missouri law firm, just outside of St. Louis was known as Boggs, Boggs and Bates back then. One of their attorneys, a likable 57-year-old man named Ernie Brasier, was working late that night on a computer in former attorney Dan Bennet’s office, one door down from his own. A building janitor, making his nightly rounds at 7 p.m., found Brasier laying on the floor, unconscious.
Beth Boggs, the managing partner of the firm, along with her husband Darin Boggs, had the unenviable task of ringing the doorbell within the hour at the Brasier home and telling his wife Pat that her husband of nearly 30 years had had a heart attack. He was dead. But then something strange happened. An autopsy later that night discovered a small tiny hole above Brasiers’ left ear. And inside that hole was a bullet that was in Brasier’s brain. Before 10:30 p.m. that night, police announced they had a murder on their hands.
Remember Dan Bennett? In September 2007, the 38 year old Bennett was found dead in his apartment, apparently of heart disease. Just weeks before Brasier was murdered, Bennett quit his job at this same law firm, divorced his wife, and fled the country, heading to Central America to open a bar. He told his coworkers he was burned out.
A major mid-life crisis. Bennett was supposed to return to the law firm, but he never showed.
Flash forward a year later, to August 2008. 51 year old Vincent Venker, another attorney at Boggs, Boggs and Bates, dies of a heart issue. His wife Lisa tells the St. Louis Post Dispatch that “there is something crazy going on at that law firm.”
Two years go by, and in October 2010 two pipe bombs explode at a home in south St. Louis. There are no injuries, but windows are shattered. Turns out the home is that of Beth and Darin Boggs. They tell police they believe the bombs were planted by their third partner, Mark Bates. Just over a year later, Wade Thomas, who left the law firm in 2008, dies of cardiac arrest. He was only 39 years old.
It was no longer just “something crazy going on at that law firm.” Brasiers’ wife now told the newspaper “It is almost like a John Grisham novel.”
As the detectives kept digging, and interviewing everyone at the firm, the elephant was in the room: Was the murderer working among them? After all, who else has access to a secured building after hours, heads to the law firm, and kills an insurance attorney?
And then came the oddest clue....
Explore the full case inside 25 Frozen, 1 Thawed — where cold cases and shocking turns collide.
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