Tonight on Heart Copy, dentist's dark secret, tortured wife's revenge, also the day from
hell.
Dr. Merker was the friendly local dentist, but when he went home he became a real life
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
He could be so loving, one minute and then within a second, it was like a split personality.
Everyone thought Larell Merker had the perfect life when she married a successful dentist.
They were shocked the night the shots rang out.
Larell shot her husband point blank.
She went to court and that's when the ugly truth came out.
Dr. Merker treated his patients like gold, but his wife suffered the dark side.
A newspaper called John Say the cheapest date in town.
His date said their romantic weekend was a date from hell and he made her pick up the
tab.
Now this is a guy our Diane Diamond had to meet.
I think she wanted me.
But what did Diane want?
This is Hard Copy for Monday, April 15th, 1991.
Hello and welcome.
I'm Terry Murphy.
Dr. and Mrs. Merker's marriage had all the right trimmings.
Nice house, expensive car, fashionable clothes.
Right up till the night she shot him dead, they'd seem so happy.
And as our Rafaela Bromovitz discovered, he had seen the perfect gentleman.
Yeah, he was a charmer all right.
A romantic with all the right moves to win a woman without wasting a beat.
You're looking at a snapshot of Dr. Glenn Merker and the woman who killed him.
A snapshot taken when everything was about as perfect as it could possibly be.
They said I executed him in cold blood.
Something to that effect.
Dr. Glenn Merker had everything Laurel could possibly have dreamed up.
He was rich, he was romantic, he was generous.
From the moment they met she could hear the wedding bells.
He was great, he was wonderful, he was loving, he was kind.
Roses every week at my office.
Take me out to lunch, dinner.
Just very romantic.
Literally swept off my feet.
In the span of five to six seconds, Dr. Merker was struck six times.
He died sprawled on the bathroom floor near the master bedroom he had shared with his
wife Laurel for five years.
Laurel was arrested and charged with his murder.
It's horrible and I just keep reliving it many times over and over again.
I still to this day cannot get it out of my mind.
Now all of this happened in Yakima, Washington, a small town where Dr. Glenn Merker had established
an excellent reputation as a dentist.
As a man who was gentle and kind and considerate, who was loved and respected by those who knew
him.
He even closed doors at Homer at the office, Dr. Glenn Merker according to his wife wasn't
quite what people had come to believe him to be.
He wanted to have sex in the dental chair.
I at that point got real nervous.
I said no and to make a long story short, we wound up having sex in the dental chair.
At that point I started to get up.
He disappeared for a few seconds, came back and put the nitrous oxide mask over my mouth.
I tried to push him away and he forced me down the chair and held the mask that covers
your nose with both hands like that and I could feel myself getting sick and I just
started to freak out.
According to his wife, Dr. Glenn Merker had something against women, something she didn't
realize until after they were married.
It started about three months after we were married.
He would have men coming over the apartment once or sometimes twice a week in suits and
as soon as they came over I was directed to go into the bedroom and close the door and
turn the TV on.
And I did that several times, it went on and on and I finally said to myself what is going
on here and I confronted him about that.
And he slapped me a couple of times and said stay out of my effing business, it's my personal
business it's not yours.
And I just ran out of the apartment, I later found out that these were private investigators
and he had them following his ex-girlfriend.
Suddenly things were different, the gentle, generous, romantic Dr. Merker disappeared
and someone with a cold, cruel heart took his place, but only in private behind closed
doors.
In public he was sweeter and kinder than ever before.
I know what he did to his ex-girlfriend or tried to do, he talked about murdering her,
having somebody murder her in Tucson, Arizona.
Larell claims that her husband became more and more violent towards her and began to
systematically isolate her from her friends and neighbors.
He'd come home sometimes, it happened several times, in the middle of the day without any
acknowledgement he just burst through the door, opened the dishwasher, pull it out and
look for glasses if they had any lipstick that weren't mine, I wasn't allowed to have
any friends in the house when he wasn't here.
He also began to accuse his wife of infidelity, claiming one day that he knew that a man had
been in the house while he was away.
And I was sitting here, he was sitting over there and he had our other dog's scooter at
gunpoint and wanted me to go into explicit detail what I did with that man that day.
And there was no man.
And I had to make up a story before he let that animal go, I was afraid he was going
to blow his brains out.
As time went by, Larell claims that things went from bad to worse to the unimaginable.
He'd call and leave messages on the phone, things that he was doing with other women
in motel rooms, in explicit detail.
And it got to a point where I just couldn't function anymore, I just felt I was the ugliest
thing on the face of the earth, I was worthless, I couldn't work properly, I was stupid, I
was ignorant, and I was lucky to be his wife, that he would give me a room and a roof over
my head.
And under that expensive roof in one of the finest sections of Yakima, Washington, the
gentle dentist, Dr. Merker, according to his wife, used her as a human punching bag.
I was thrown downstairs, I was beaten, I was kicked, I was thrown out of the house.
I had to run to neighbor's houses, bleeding.
Larell Merker claims that she tried to leave her husband on numerous occasions but didn't
get very far.
Several times I packed my suitcases, got him in the car, started up the car, he's come,
he would get like a little child, he'd cry, he'd hold on my legs, get down on his hands
and knees several times, and just plead with me, he'll never do it again, please, I love
you, I will never do it again, I love you, I love you.
And I just, I just would believe him, and it would be okay for a couple months, then
he'd come home and boom.
Her husband also loved guns, he had them around the house, and whenever Larell would threaten
to leave, he would pull out a weapon and convince her to stay.
One time when she was on the phone calling the cops, he turned the weapon on himself.
Then he put a gun this way, up to himself, and say, go ahead, call, call, my brains will
be all over your effing, effing face, and it'll be your fault, go ahead, call, call,
he'd do that.
According to Larell, there were several handguns, shotguns, and a variety of rifles around the
house, including this pistol that she says her husband made her buy for him.
A few months after the purchase of this gun, Larell used this weapon to shoot her husband
to death.
He pushed me down on the bed, grabbed me by my hair, started to choke me, and he put a
pillow on my chest, and he just looked at me, and I will never forget his look, he looked
like something out of the bowels of hell.
He was dripping sweat, and he just said, I'm gonna kill you.
No one is gonna help you ever again.
No one.
You're dead.
And I reached for the gun, and I shot, and I just remember two shots going off in my
head, and when I found out several days later that I had shot him six times, I still find
it hard to believe, but I did.
The police who arrived on the scene found Larell's version of self-defense difficult
to believe.
They were convinced that she had deliberately executed her husband, and that's where Christopher
Tate, attorney at law, former boxer, comes into the story.
And in this town, everybody was talking about it, morning, noon, and night.
It was on the news every hour, it was in the paper every morning, and on the TV every night.
And people said to me, as they stopped me on the sidewalk and talked to me about it,
they said, you know, the problem with this is that she shot him six times.
Why wasn't one or two enough?
And a jury would be faced with a dilemma.
Larell had been tortured, but she shot him six times, and self-defense was going to be
hard to swallow.
That's next.
And a little later, our Diane Diamond goes out with the so-called Date From Hell, a New
York newspaper called him the cheapest date in town.
Nowadays, people are turning to lighter, healthier foods.
And they're turning to Skippers, presenting Skippers new baked fish.
Our famous fillets are hand-cut and baked to tender, flaky perfection.
They're served piping hot for eat-in or take-out with a baked potato in your choice of salad
or coleslaw.
So lighten up and catch the flavor.
If I could afford a sports sedan, the road would belong to me.
Bob, I'd have one of those multi-valve engines, independent suspension, and of course, a spoiler
on the back.
Yeah, if I could afford a sports sedan, life would be a cruise.
Oh, it's you, Bob.
Being the Nissan Sentra, SER, because rich guys shouldn't have all the fun.
It's the 19th annual KYVE auction.
Your chance to bid high, bid often for items donated from throughout the Yakima Valley
and across the nation.
Don't miss your chances.
Tuesday, April 16th through Sunday, April 21st, 7 p.m. to midnight daily.
Call 452-4700 for your express bid number.
Sold on the KYVE auction.
Tonight, he set me up.
A betrayal, a daring escape, and a rescue mission that may be too late.
Hey, stop the Americans!
MacGyver.
Then, it was a perfect partnership.
Boys will be boys.
John Lithgow.
What am I gonna do without you, Walter?
James Woods.
I can't just lie down like a dog.
Before he leaves us for good, help him help you.
The boys.
Only after six bullets ended Dr. Merker's life did the world learn the dark secrets
of the friendly family dentist.
His wife was charged with murder, and at first it seemed clear-cut, as Raphael continues.
Yes, it did look bad for Mrs. Merker in the beginning, but the picture was about to change.
Her lawyer, Christopher Tait, sensed it, and he didn't let go of that scent.
You learn by their actions.
You know what they've done to you in the past.
You know what they've done to their ex-wives in the past.
And I just wasn't gonna wind up dead, Mr. Hanson.
I didn't want to take that chance.
And yes, I was afraid of him.
Christopher Tait had a serious problem on his hands, and he knew it.
His client, L'Oreal Merker, had shot her husband six times, which was a few too many for the
cops, given the claim of self-defense.
A lot of people had big trouble with that, and said, hey, I can live with one.
Maybe I could live with two.
And gosh, in a pinch, I could live with three, but don't bring me six.
I felt my throat being constructed, and I reached for the gun.
But six bullets had struck the dentist, and the crime scene, according to the cops, didn't
quite bear out the defense contention that a life-and-death struggle had taken place
on the bed before the first shot had been fired in self-defense.
Well, after the investigation, I believe that the doctor was sitting on the end of the bed,
tying his shoes, trying to leave, getting ready to leave.
And L'Oreal shot him while he was bent over, tying his shoes.
But Christopher Tait, the defense attorney for Mrs. Merker, says police experts got it
all wrong.
Besides, there's much more to the case, he claims, than the five or six seconds involved
in the shooting itself.
And if all you look at is this five-second bubble in which he gets shot six times and
he dies on the floor in the bathroom, yeah, it looks real bad.
But what you have to do is you have to look beyond that, and you have to ask yourself
some hard questions like, why did this happen?
And what's the history behind this?
And so you start looking at the history.
You start not only listening to what she tells you, but then you look at what she can produce
to support what she says.
She says that he's beat her up for years.
And she produces some pictures, taken on three separate occasions in three different locations
by three different people who didn't know each other.
And you don't have to be a plastic surgeon to look at these pictures and figure that
she's been hammered.
And I mean seriously hammered.
She testified that one of the things that he would do from time to time when he was
angry with her was hold her hair behind the back of her head with his left hand and hold
onto that just as tight as he could, and then punch her in the head with the right hand.
And I mean, you know, let her have it.
And I used to be a boxer.
I know what facial bruises look like.
I had the police called six to a dozen times, had him put in jail.
He'd always bail himself out or get his office staff to bail him out.
I bailed him out a couple times.
It was just an ongoing thing.
He threatened neighbors with guns.
It was just, I was afraid of him.
I tried to leave several times.
He cut off my credit cards.
I couldn't get anywhere very far.
The times I did go, he would find me, drag me back, and he'd tell me point blank, if
you ever leave me, if you ever divorce me, I'll kill you.
The jury couldn't reach a verdict.
Eleven of the jurors wanted to convict Mrs. Merker on the murder charge, but a twelfth
jury refused to go along with the overwhelming majority.
And so a second trial had to be ordered.
And we called almost 35 witnesses.
As the witnesses came and went and told their story, it began to come together.
It really did.
It was a horror story, but it was a horror story that made sense.
This past February 20th, the second jury, after deliberating for only a day and a half,
found Mrs. Merker not guilty, but not necessarily because they accepted her claim that her life
was in jeopardy at the time she actually shot her husband.
What the jury obviously did accept was that her dead husband had been a real live Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
There was a chilling, chilling similarity between the testimony of all these people
who described this wild man, this Jekyll and Hyde.
He wasn't always this warm, wonderful dentist who cared so much about his patients.
He'd go home and be a wild man.
He'd go home and be a violent wild man who had beat the daylights out of his wife.
And that could be proven.
I always thought I'd be killed.
But that moment when I was on that bed, when I felt I'm going to die, some spark, something
in me wanted to live, surprisingly enough.
And I still find that surprising.
And I did.
Rafael, it seemed like the jury simply said that this woman's been through enough.
Yeah, Terry, I think that's exactly it.
I think the evidence might have been there to convict her, but I think the jury thought
that a deeper justice demanded that she be acquitted.
Thanks, Ralph.
Now, have you ever been on a date from hell?
A New York woman took hers to court.
She said he was so cheap.
So our Diane Diamond invited him out.
That's next.
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