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Hastened to the Grave:
The Gypsy Murder Investigation

Jack Olsen (1925-2002)

Hastened to the Grave: The Gypsy Murder Investigation is a true story about Fay Faron aka Rat Dog Dick, a beautiful, never-say-die P. I., determined to bring the ruthless Gypsy Family to justice-- even when the authorities turned a blind eye to their cunning con-games and uncanny ability to extract large sums of money from elderly, well-to-do men and women who, due to their failing health, strength, and mental state, could be conned out of their fortunes by heinous neglect, abuse, and possibly even murder.

Fay Faron is the youngest child of an Arizona state official and his stay-at-home wife. Fay was always a restless soul and had dropped out of Arizona State University to explore the U.S. She moved to San Francisco in 1976 and started a monogramming business, which she sold in the early '80s. But when she sued a man who had sold her a leaky houseboat, she saved on legal fees by doing her own investigating. She liked it so much she started a detective agency, named Rat Dog Dick equipped with an ancient Everex 286 computer (Evil Evie), an outrageously green Toyota Tercel (The Frog Prince) and a big, funny-looking dog (Beans).

In 1992, an elderly San Francisco woman hired Fay to look into the past of Danny Tene, who had charmed her into putting his name on the deed to her home shortly after he had befriended her. Fay's research led her to Tene's mother, Mary Steiner, who had gotten her last name, along with a $300,000 duplex, from her husband of four years, Philip Steiner, who had died at 91 in 1987. By 1986, Mary had befriended Konstantin Liotweizen, an 88-year-old Russian immigrant who promptly took ill. Mary Steiner became Liotweizen's caretaker, and when he died in 1989, her name was on the deed of his apartment house, valued at more than $1 million.

Fay found public documents dating back to 1984 showing that Steiner's daughter, Angela, had followed this same pattern. She had acquired the name Bufford, along with a $225,000 home, from an 87-year-old husband who had died one month after their 1984 wedding. Fay suspected a family of serial murderers.

Fay was determined to bring Angela Bufford and her Gypsy family to justice. She contacted the San Francisco Police Department fraud unit, which had been tracking the family since the early '90s. But they said they didn't have the evidence to make an arrest. Nobody was doing anything and Fay felt these old people needed to be protected, and she wasn't going to quit until they were.

Fay continued investigating on her own. By 1994, after months of poring over public records, questioning witnesses and collecting potentially incriminating food scraps, she discovered that once Angela Bufford and her Gypsy family had control of their victims' finances, they were hastening the elderly men's demise by poisoning them with digitalis, derived from the foxglove plant, a hard-to-trace drug that, in large doses, can be lethal. At least four elderly people, for one reason or another, surrendered their belongings to Angela Bufford and her clan, and three of them soon lost their lives.  

After more than four years of dogged sleuthing, Fay had the pleasure of watching the "foxglove murder case," as it was known in San Francisco, presented to a grand jury in November 1997. Five members of the Gypsy family, George Lama, 39, Angela Bufford, 37, Mary Tene Steiner, 57, Danny Tene, 35, and Teddy Tene, 27, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder.   

Prosecution of the case, however, fell apart largely because police were slow to investigate plus the occurrence of a series of snafus. The charges against Angela Bufford's brother, Teddy Tene, were dropped due to the expiration of the statute of limitations on his crimes. Charges against their mother, Mary Tene Steiner, were also dropped because there wasn't sufficient evidence to try her in connection with the death of a 92-year-old man.  Angela Bufford and George Lama agreed to a plea bargain and pled guilty to the lesser charges of theft and elder abuse and the murder charges, which could have kept them in prison for life, were dropped. As part of the plea bargain, Bufford was to pay $22,500 restitution to one of the victim's estate, and Lama was to pay up to $60,000 to the estates of other victims. Bufford was sentenced to four years in prison, with 1,297 days credit.

Other best selling books by Jack Olsen:

• The Man with the Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders (1974) - A brilliant, investigative, journalist's story of the mass murder of almost 30 young boys in Houston by Dean Corll, a homosexual owner of a candy factory, and his two teen-aged accomplices, Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., and David Brooks.

• SON: A Psychopath and His Victims (1983) is the story of Kevin Coe, Spokane's South Hill rapist whose rich and influential mother was sent to prison after trying to hire a hit man to kill the judge and prosecutor who convicted her son.

• Give a Boy a Gun: The True Story of Law and Disorder in the American West (1985)- "Give a boy a gun and you're makin' a man," Claude Dallas, Sr., said this about his son, Claude Jr., a self-made cowboy, trapper, and "mountain man'' who was convicted of manslaughter in the shooting deaths of two Idaho game wardens.  Was this a case of self-defense or outright murder?

• Cold Kill: The True Story of a Murderous Love (1987) - A double murder of Texas lawyer James Campbell and his wife Virginia by their daughter Cindy and her lover, David West.

• Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (1989) is an incredible account of a rural Wyoming doctor who relied on his patients' naiveté and Mormon female submissiveness to rape generations of women on his examining table.

• Predator: Rape, Madness, and Injustice in Seattle (1991) - This book focuses on three men: McDonald ("Mac") Smith, a serial rapist who preyed on women; Steve Titus, a carefree partygoer who was wrongly convicted of the predator's crimes; and Paul Henderson, a reporter for the Seattle Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for tracking down the truth.

• The Misbegotten Son: A Serial Killer and His Victims (1993)- An account of the life and crimes of convicted killer Arthur Shawcross describes how Shawcross, after being found guilty of the murders of two children, was released only to murder eleven prostitutes.

• Charmer: A Ladies' Man and his Victims (1994) - A true crime story of George Russell, Jr., a charismatic young African American from an affluent Seattle suburb who targeted and killed three beautiful women and whose charming outward appearance kept him from suspicion.

• Salt of the Earth: A Mother, A Daughter, A Murder (1996) - Joe Gere said he died on the afternoon his twelve-year-old daughter Brenda disappeared. It was left to Brenda's mother Elaine to sustain her stricken family, search for her missing child, and pressure the authorities for justice. From the first minutes of the investigation, suspicion fell on Michael Kay Green, a steroid-abusing "Mr. Universe" hopeful, but there was no proof of a crime, leaving police and prosecutors stymied.

• Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt (2000) - This is a story of true crime American injustice. Pratt, a war hero and leader of the Black Panther Party, was convicted of murder based on the perjured testimony of a paid FBI informant. After spending twenty-seven years in prison, he was finally declared innocent and released.

• I: The Creation of a Serial Killer (2002) - In February 1990, Oregon State Police arrested John Sosnovke and Laverne Pavlinac for the vicious rape and murder of 23-year-old Taunja Bennet. Pavlinac had come forth and confessed, implicating her boyfriend and producing physical evidence that linked them to the crime. Authorities closed the case. There was just one problem. They had the wrong people...

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