Tennessee Man Confesses to Murdering 3 People in Staged Accidents: "He Was Evil"

Amy and Tony Vick were high school sweethearts. They married in 1984 and had a son shortly after.

Late on the night of April 4, 1993, Tony called Franklin, Tennessee dispatchers for help — claiming his 31-year-old wife had slipped, fallen, and drowned in the bathtub. Tony told officers he and Amy had been having a bath together, then he went downstairs to move the car. When he came back, he found Amy head down in the bathtub, and called his parents, who lived in the home, for help. Both Tony and his father — as well as their neighbor, respiratory nurse Kathy Beadle — unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate Amy.

An autopsy was performed on April 5, 1993.

“There was water in the lungs,” said Tim Hutchison, former Knox County Sheriff, on Accident, Suicide Or Murder. “They did not find bruising from either falling [or] hitting her head. At the end of the autopsy the doctor ruled that she had drowned.”

Toxicology reports showed both painkillers and anxiety medication in her system when she died.

“Even with the toxicology coming back, you still can’t put your finger on what caused the drowning,” Hutchison said. “Was it intentional? We don’t know. And it still didn’t prove another individual being responsible for Amy’s death. So, the medical examiner ruled it accidental drowning.”

Tony Vick told police that the reason for the painkillers was Amy had been involved in two car crashes within eight days of each other, five weeks before her death.

“It was very strange that there were two accidents within a week,” said Kathy Rhodes, neighbor of Amy and Tony, on Accident, Suicide or Murder. “And in both cases, Amy was driving alone.”

Police found the cause of each accident was undetermined.

“Looking at it now, after Amy’s death, investigators, their concern at that point was: are these two different car accidents intentional?” Hutchison said. “There’s suspicions there. I mean, it doesn’t make sense.”

Tony’s brother called officers after Amy’s death and alleged that Amy’s aunt, Francis, had also recently died a mysterious death. In June 1991, Francis pulled her car to the side of the interstate, left a note that it had broken down, and then was hit by semi-trailer. But police discovered her car was running fine.

“[Francis] had taken out a one-million-dollar life insurance policy and made Amy the beneficiary,” Hutchison said.

Amy and Tony Vick received the money from the insurance policy, and Amy was dead less than two years later.

Within days of Amy Vick’s death, her husband Tony began a relationship with their widowed neighbor and mother of three, Kathy Beadle.

“They moved right on, built their family and decided to change locations to build a new life,” Rhodes said.

Tony, Kathy, and their four children moved to Knoxville. But on April 15, 1996, three years after Amy’s drowning in a bathtub, Kathy disappeared.

“Kathy Beadle dropped her children off at the school, and she’s never seen again,” Hutchison said. “She just vanishes.”

Beadle’s parents told officers their daughter had been sick in the months before her disappearance. After she went missing, her parents received communication from her through faxes. Beadle claimed she was being treated for cancer in Canada.

“Her parents knew their daughter better,” Rhodes said. “They knew she would never talk to them like that. They knew how their daughter cared for her children. She wouldn’t go off and leave them for that long.”

In June 1996, Beadle’s father searched for her at the Canada hospital at which she’d claimed to be and found out she had never been a patient there. At this time, Tony Vick dropped the kids off with a neighbor, and disappeared himself.

On March 10, 1997, nearly a year after Kathy Beadle first went missing, police searched her house with a cadaver dog. The 39-year-old's body was found in the backyard under some concrete. The medical examiner found a bone break in her neck, and ruled she died of strangulation.

“That’s just too close of circumstances. Cemented that this was a pattern,” Baugh said.

Tony Vick was eventually arrested for shoplifting in New Jersey and charged with the murders of both Amy Vick and Kathy Beadle.

“When he admitted guilt to the death of Kathy Beadle, I felt such a sense of relief,” Bobel said. “His reign of terror was over.”

In February 1998, he also pled guilty to Amy Vick’s murder.

“He had killed two wives,” Rhodes said. “These were my neighbors.”

Tony Vick was sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole. While behind bars, he admitted to journalist Janet Lethgo that he killed Amy’s aunt, as well as his wives.

“Amy, he held her down in the water until she stopped thrashing around,” Lethgo said on Accident, Suicide or Murder. “And Tony told me that he had drugged Kathy with his prescription drugs. Once she was asleep, he asphyxiated her with a dry-cleaning bag … he didn’t care about the people that he killed. He profited. He wasn’t sad. He was evil.”