"Manipulative” Woman Hires Hitman to Kill Lawyer’s Wife After She Imagined Romantic Relationship

On her death bed in 2003, Mary Orsini told police she’d “found Jesus” and wanted to “clear the record” and “confess her sins.” More than two decades after her husband was shot in cold blood in his bed, she admitted to pulling the trigger. But the confession didn’t end there — she also admitted to plotting the murder of her lawyer’s wife to get her out of the way for her own romantic relationship with Bill McArthur.

“I mean, she worshipped him — thinking that he was the greatest attorney ever,” said Bob McArthur, brother of Bill, on Snapped, airing Sundays at 6/5c on Oxygen. “I think for her it was she was evil. This is all just some deranged woman who had an obsession and decided to act on it.”

On July 2, 1982, prominent criminal attorney Bill McArthur called Little Rock, Arkansas police to report his wife had been murdered while he was at work. Near Alice McArthur’s body was an usual object.

“At her feet was an arrangement or bouquet of flowers,” said Alfred Dawson, former North Little Rock police detective, on Snapped. “The flower bouquet had a note, basically attached to it, that said, ‘Have a nice day.’ I think that whoever shot Alice brought the flowers.”

Keep reading to find out how Mary Orsini orchestrated not only her husband’s death, but her lawyer’s wife’s demise — which included a failed car bombing.

On March 12, 1981, Mary Orsini called 911 asking for help, and reported her husband bleeding in their bed. When police arrived, they saw that Ron Orsini had been shot. But Mary claimed he’d gone to bed alone the previous night, while she slept in her sick daughter’s room. When she woke up, she found him dead.

Mary Orsini. Photo: Oxygen

Private investigator Fred Myers called police during the investigations into the murders of Ron Orsini and Alice MacArthur and told them Mary Orsini had been his client beginning in November 1980 when she wanted an “activities check” on her husband.

“She told me that she was virtually certain, she said, that Ron had become involved in the buying and selling and transporting of drugs,” said Myers on Snapped.

Although Myers found this accusation not credible, he did learn from digging through their finances that the Orsinis were behind on their bills and mortgage. He also discovered a motive for Ron Orsini’s murder that he shared with police.

“They didn’t have any money,” said prosecutor Judy Kaye Mason on Snapped. “She didn’t have grounds for divorce. She would lose everything if they got a divorce. But at some point, they decided to get life insurance.”

Myers also provided a connection between Mary Orsini and Bill McArthur: He’d provided McArthur’s name as a lawyer recommendation to Orsini while she was under investigation for her husband’s murder. McArthur defended her well, and a grand jury didn’t indict her in Ron Orsini’s murder. But defending her also paved the way for another murder: Alice McArthur.

“A light bulb comes on,” Dawson said. “She thought that in the long run she would have Bill and then she would have all the social ramifications and all his riches, and everything else that she was actually desiring.”

Bill McArthur told police his wife’s murder in their closet wasn’t the first attempt that had been made on her life. Six weeks before the murder, a pipe bomb in the family car failed to fully detonate. Police believed Bill to be the target.

“They had enough explosives to blow her to kingdom come. But it didn’t work,” Bob McArthur said. “It was a miracle the kids weren’t in the car. The mystery of it was, ‘Why would they do that to Alice? Did they make a mistake?’”

Although the investigation into Alice McArthur’s murder stalled, a tipster eventually called police and claimed a hit man named Larry McClendon was the one who pulled the trigger. Meanwhile, fingerprints pulled off the bottom of the flower vase at the murder scene came back as belonging to a petty theft criminal named Eugene “Yankee” Hall.

Hall was arrested and questioned, and immediately started confessing — claiming his “partner,” Larry McClendon was the shooter, but that they’d been hired by a woman named Mary Orsini for $25,000. He said after the failed car bomb, they used a flower delivery ruse to get inside Alice McArthur’s home and kill her.

“The thing that stands out the most in my mind is that [Larry McClendon] had no remorse, emotion, whatsoever about killing Alice McArthur,” said defense attorney David Williams on Snapped. “As a matter of fact, I remember him stating specifically, ‘We killed that bitch.’”

Although they had the word of Larry McClendon and Eugene Hall, police still needed evidence against Mary Orsini for Alice McArthur’s murder. Looking into Orsini’s finances, they realized just before the murder she’d sold her mother’s house and put the profit of $25,000 into her own account — the exact amount McClendon and Hall claimed she offered for the hit.

But it was when Orsini brought police the recording of a call she claimed was from an anonymous tipster that they got real evidence of her involvement, as she tried to throw them off her trail. Police recognized the voice of the caller as local real estate agent Larry Burge and questioned him.

“He gave it up pretty quick that she’d given him a script to read on the phone, so the recording was completely bogus,” Jack Lassiter, a friend of Bill McArthur’s, said on Snapped.

Burge still had the handwritten script and gave it to police. Handwriting analysis confirmed the script was written by Mary Orsini. In September 1982, a jury convicted her of capital murder, and she received life in prison without parole. In 1983, she was found guilty of her husband’s murder, but that conviction was later overturned. Before she died in prison in 2003, she gave her death bed confession to police.

“She’s manipulative, she’s remorseless, she’s smart,” Lassiter said. “She can keep three stories juggling at one time and hardly ever miss a beat.”

Larry McClendon was sentenced to 20 years in prison and was released on parole in 2004. Eugene Hall received life in prison without the possibility of parole and died in prison in 2019.

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