The Von Bulows: Digging For A Victim

This might be the most bizarre citizen vs. city hall fight Texas has ever known. Donna Howell, a Haltom City woman, believes that her murdered father’s body was dumped in a county landfill, and she’s spent the past several months petitioning the Haltom City Council to help her find the body. With help from her friends at the Fort Worth-based Sunny Von Bulow National Victims Advocacy Center, Howell convinced Hal-tom City officials last April to seek aid from the state in helping the city evacuate the dump and search for her father’s remains. The project could cost between $5 million and $10 million.

Howell’s father, Donald McRimmon, disappeared in October 1984. Some months later, a sixteen-year-old Haltom City girl claimed that her twenty-one-year-old boyfriend had killed McRirnmon and left his body in a trash dumpster at a Denton motel. Police located the boy-friend and charged him with murder. Later, however, the girl recanted her testimony. With no body for evidence, police dropped the charges.

Records indicate that the garbage company that services the motel transported the dump-ster’s debris to the Camelot Landfill between Lewisville and McKinney. There, Howell was certain, she would find her father’s body. So far, however, police have been powerless to act without more evidence.

The publicity of the Haltom City case has thrust the four-month-old Von Bulow advocacy center into the local, and national, spotlight. Public Affairs Director Anne Seymour says that, in addition to the Haltom City case, the center has fielded more than 300 calls from victims of violent and domestic crime from around the country and as far away as New Zealand. The center functions as an information and referral clearing-house for victims.

The creation of the center stems from the highly publicized murder trials of Martha (Sunny) Von Bulow’s husband, Claus, who was accused of giving Sunny an overdose of insulin that rendered her comatose in 1980. (At his first trial he was found guilty but the judgment was overturned on a technicality; he was acquitted in a second trial.) But Sunny’s children by a previous marriage, twenty-seven-year-old Alexander Von Auer-sperg and twenty-eight-year-old Annie-Laurie Kneissl, remain convinced of Von Bulow’s guilt and have filed a $56 million civil suit against him. Having been victims themselves, Auersperg and Kneissl felt compelled to help other victims.

As D went to press, Howell, the center, and Haltom City officials were waiting to hear from Congressman Jim Wright, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Governor Mark White about funds for the excavation.