Nola Jean & Larry Weaver were living in the small town of Long Grove, IL, about 37 miles northwest of Chicago. The area had become the “in” spot for wealthy people looking to live in the suburbs. Larry was working as an assistant district superintendent of schools for the Buffalo-Grove-Wheeling School District while Nola Jean was a PE teacher at Elk Grove High School where she’d worked for eight years. The couple had been given enough money from Larry’s father to afford the sprawling ranch style home they lived in with their 9-year-old daughter, Tiffany. Their $100,000 home was in the luxury subdivision of Country Club Estates on the outskirts of town. From the outside, it appeared as if they were living the American dream.
The Weavers grew up together in the small town of Camden, Arkansas where Nola Jean was a cheerleader & homecoming court member & Larry was a basketball & football player in high school. After they graduated in 1961, Nola Jean relocated to California with her parents but moved back the following year in order to marry Larry. By the time they moved to Long Grove, IL, Larry had gotten into his current assistant superintendent position. The family fell into a routine & took an active part in Long Grove’s community life & also attended church where Tiffany attended Sunday school.
Sunday, December 4, 1977 was a peaceful night which was in contrast to two nights earlier when the Weaver’s next-door neighbor, Earl Goodfellow, noticed two suspicious men in a green pick-up truck driving slowly past the Weaver home & it appeared as if they might be casing the house.
At about 1:30 a.m. in the early morning hours of December 5, 1977, the Weaver’s next-door neighbor, Cindy Goodfellow, was awoken to the sound of loud knocking on her front door. When she answered the door, she found Nola Jean wearing a nightgown, carrying her daughter Tiffany who was wrapped in a blanket with their two dogs in tow & Cindy immediately noted that Nola Jean looked to be “full of panic & scared to death” as she told her that there was a fire at her home. Nola Jean asked Cindy to call the fire department & the police as she explained there were also two men in her house with guns. After Cindy called the fire department, she looked out her window in the direction of the Weaver home & saw nothing unusual, only a dark house.
As the police & fire department arrived, there were no obvious signs of a fire & police entered the Weaver home through the sliding glass door that stood slightly ajar. This was the door that Nola Jean & Tiffany used to exit the home. As they entered, carrying flashlights, they detected the faint odor of smoke as they headed down the hall to check the bedrooms. Each door they passed stood open, but as they approached the primary bedroom, they noted the door to be closed. The door was hot to the touch so they called in the firefighters who broke the window from the outside in order to enter the home which occurred 45 minutes after the original call was made from the Goodfellow home. They found the bed glowing with a smoldering flame that they extinguished using a hand-held fire extinguisher & a stream of water from a 1.5 inch fire hose. On the right side of the bed, they found the badly burned body of Larry Weaver lying on his back. His identity was confirmed using dental records. The exact cause of the fire wasn’t determined nor was it known if an accelerant was used. The majority of the fire damage was localized to the left side of the bed where Larry was but the fire charred & melted various items in the room & the ceiling tiles had loosened & fallen to the floor.
A distraught Nola Jean was questioned at the Goodfellow home & indicated that their two dogs woke them up at a few minutes to 1 am. Larry got out of bed to investigate & returned a short time later & whispered to Nola Jean that there were two men in the house. Larry asked Nola Jean to get his .22-caliber rifle & make a run for it. She said she was accosted by the men as she walked out of her bedroom & they wrestled the rifle out of her hands. She said they ordered Larry to put his hands up which he did. The intruders demanded $750,000 & based on the things that they said, it was Nola Jean’s belief that the men had mistaken their home for that of a wealthy doctor. Larry told the men that they did not have that kind of money but he could get them some cash. The men agreed & one stayed with Nola Jean while the other drove off with Larry who was still wearing his pajamas. Fifteen minutes later they returned, but empty-handed.
Larry was then ushered to the bedroom & Nola Jean heard shots & then the men fled from the home. This was when she grabbed Tiffany & headed to the Goodfellow home. She gave police the description of the two white men who had murdered Larry & composite sketches were made.
Police began to search the home for evidence in order to put the pieces of what happened together. They found out that each door was locked from the inside except the sliding door that Nola Jean & Tiffany exited through. None of the windows had been tampered with & nothing in the house was found to be disturbed; they found papers on a desk that were neatly stacked. When they entered the garage where the double automatic doors were in the down position, they found a 1975 Ford & a 1973 Oldsmobile. When the officer raised the hood of each car, the Ford’s engine was cold to the touch but the Oldsmobile’s was warm. When the inside of the Oldsmobile was inspected, the floor in front of the driver’s seat was wet & presumed to be from melted snow that had been tracked into the car. The driver’s seat was found to be in the full forward position & it was noted that Nola Jean was 5’7” & Larry was 6’ tall. It should also be noted that Nola Jean described the intruder as well over 6’ tall & either intruder would have had difficulty driving the car with the seat so far forward. Nola Jean’s purse was found on the counter that led to the garage.
The house was thoroughly searched, including the basement & crawl space & no guns or .22-caliber ammunition were located despite the fact that Larry was known to have a .22-caliber rifle as recently as a month & a half before his murder. The car & the house were dusted for fingerprints but none were found. Nola Jean’s eyeglasses were found outside in the snow in the area of the yard closest to the Goodfellow home. Other footprints in the snow were also found by police leading from the back of the house to the garage, not the route that Nola Jean would have taken to escape & no casts were made of the prints. There were no other footprints noted in the new-fallen snow when police arrived other than those of Nola Jean’s & the dog’s leading to the neighbor’s house.
It was theorized by the state that Nola Jean murdered her husband with his own .22 rifle while he was sleeping, using bullets that she obtained herself, possibly in Arkansas since the state does not require a gun owner’s license to purchase bullets & the family had spent Thanksgiving there. Based on the warmth from the car’s engine & the wet driver’s side flooring of the Oldsmobile, it’s believed that she drove to an unknown location to dispose of the weapon & then came back to burn her husband’s body. The rifle has never been recovered. After she started the fire, she woke her daughter & carried her over to the Goodfellow home. As she walked, she may have realized that the fact that she was wearing her glasses may have been incriminating so she tossed them into the snow.
It was discovered that Nola Jean was having an affair with Robert Tipswood, her boss & athletic director of the high school where she worked. The affair had gone on for seven years. They also found that Nola Jean was having some sort of relationship with her brother-in-law, Dennis Johnston, her sister’s husband. Nola Jean’s sister, Judy Johnston, as well as Larry were aware of the situation & had attempted to put a stop to it. Dennis Johnston testified that he had been infatuated with Nola Jean though they had not been intimate. During the summer of 1977, Judy & Dennis shared the house with the Weavers when the Johnstons first moved to Illinois & they moved out on October 16, 1977, less than two months before the murder. Dennis testified that the day after they moved out, Nola Jean & Larry came to visit them at their new apartment & he noticed that Nola Jean had a red mark under her eye.
According to Dennis, Larry told him that he had beaten Nola Jean & emphasized the fact that he hadn’t just hit her, he had beaten her. She broke away from him & retrieved Larry’s rifle from the closet. According to Larry, neither he nor Nola Jean believed the rifle to be loaded & was only using it to make a point. Larry felt she was fully justified & when he grabbed the gun from her, the gun went off & shot a bullet into the bedroom ceiling. Police later did locate this bullet but it was a different bullet than what killed Larry. The bullet used to kill him was copper colored & manufacturers do not mix such bullets. It was impossible to determine if the bullet was fired from the same gun. It was theorized that Nola Jean needed to buy new bullets after this argument because Larry likely threw the bullets away that they had on hand.
Nola Jean would financially benefit from Larry’s death since she had a $70,000 life insurance policy for him ($354,650 in 2023). They also owned three properties; the home they lived in in Illinois, a Florida condo & land in Arkansas as well as other assets.
Dr Euphil Choi completed Larry’s autopsy & testified that Larry had been shot twice in the head by copper-covered .22 bullets which was the cause of death & it was likely that Larry died instantly. Based on the stipplings around the bullet hole, the gun was likely positioned very close to Larry’s head to the point of near contact when it was fired. Because he didn’t know what exact gun was used, he couldn’t definitively say exactly how close. He was then doused with a flammable liquid & then set on fire. It was also determined that the fire had been started anywhere from a minute to an hour after the shooting which was consistent with the theory that Nola Jean left the house to dispose of the weapon. However, on cross-examination, Dr Choi admitted that in his grand jury testimony, he stated that the burns occurred immediately after death. .Dr Choi wasn’t able to determine if Larry had been sitting, standing or lying down when shot.
Michael Johnson, a chemist from the Northern Illinois Police Crime Lab testified that he had removed charred material from Larry’s legs & upon analysis he found three layers of fabric; pajama bottom material, the middle layer of sheet material & the top layer of blanket material. This would support the idea that Larry had been shot while sleeping. On cross-examination, it was admitted that, when the firemen extinguished the fire, they tossed burned debris onto the bed & could have thrown the material analyzed onto the bed. Additionally, a photo of the bed after Larry’s body was removed, showed that he had been lying directly on the bottom sheet. The area of the bed that was directly under Larry’s body was not burned which would reinforce that he was laying down. It was also doubtful that the intruders would have forced him to get back into bed & pull the covers over himself before shooting him.
Police initially believed that this was a home-invasion with a case of mistaken identity. Nola Jean was given a lie detector test that proved to be inconclusive. She refused to take a second test on the advice of her attorneys.
After Larry’s murder, Nola Jean accompanied Larry’s body to Arkansas for burial where his parents lived. Little did Nola Jean know, but a detective was seated behind her on the plane & noted that Robert Tipswood was with her, the two nuzzled together. As Larry was lowered into the ground of the cemetery, Nola Jean & Tiffany wept. After a week in Arkansas, Nola Jean headed home, leaving Tiffany with her mother-in-law. She then returned home & was back to her job as a high school PE teacher on Friday, December 16. She was stunned when two detectives came to the school & told her she was under arrest for the murder of her husband, Larry Weaver. The bond was set for $100,000 & she posted the required amount & left the courthouse as she continued to proclaim that she had not killed her husband.
Detectives believed that there were not two intruders & that Nola Jean had only concocted the story after hearing Earl Goodfellow’s story about the green pickup truck. Their idea was strengthened by the fact that it appeared that his body had been found under the covers indicating that he was asleep when he was shot as well as the fact that there was no sign of forced entry or ransacking of the house which would be expected after Nola Jean indicated that the intruders were looking for money. Nola Jean’s story had also changed; on initial questioning, she indicated that after hearing gunfire in the bedroom, she woke her daughter & fled to the neighbor’s house but later she indicated that the men held her & Tiffany in a separate room from & brought Larry into the primary bedroom where they shot him.
The trial began on October 18, 1978 & Prosecutor Ann Regan told the six jurors that the murder was a result of adulterous love affairs & resentment built on seven years of discontent. Nola Jean’s 9-year-old daughter testified that on the evening before her father was murdered, she went to choir practice at her church at 6 or 7 pm. She said it was her father who picked her up in her mother’s car but did not specify what time. She said that this was the last time the car was used that night. She said that after they got home, she changed into her pajamas & watched TV with her father while her mother prepared play doh to take to school the following day. Her parents did not bicker or argue. She went to bed at 9:30 pm & the next thing she remembers is her mother waking her up & taking her to the Goodfellow house. She said her mother was crying & she believes she was wearing her glasses. She testified that her father owns a rifle but it was kept unloaded. Previously she indicated that it had been kept loaded but her father decided to keep it unloaded.
Nola Jean did not testify & she called no witnesses, instead she asked for a directed verdict in her favor. It was felt that the state provided enough evidence to build the case with the warm car engine, the car seat pulled up to a position that would be more comfortable for Nola Jean vs. Larry, the missing rifle & the evidence that Larry was under the bed covers. All of the evidence against Nola Jean was circumstantial & she maintained her innocence.
On November 1, 1978, after deliberating for ten hours, the jury found Nola Jean guilty of murder by a jury & on January 3, 1979, she received a sentence of 40-60 years. She was sent to the Dwight Correctional Center & Tiffany was sent to live with her paternal grandparents in Arkansas. Side note, the Dwight Correctional Center is where Patty Columbo from episode 106 is incarcerated.
Nola Jean was able to overturn her conviction & on November 6, 1980, she was granted a new trial. According to the court, evidence was sufficient to find her guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt but it was ruled that she did not get a fair trial because of improper references by the prosecution to the jury about her extramarital affairs & failure of the judge to poll the jurors on whether they had been influenced by media coverage on the murder.
She was then free on bond as she awaited her new trial which was scheduled to begin on June 27, 1983. On June 9th, Nola Jean shocked everyone when she pleaded guilty. The judge asked if any threats or promises had been made to move her to her guilty plea & she said there weren’t. Under the terms of a plea-bargain agreement, she was sentenced to 14 years & one day in prison & with credit from time already served, she would be eligible for parole in two years.
Nola Jean ended up serving a total of four years & 9 months in prison: 2 years & 11 months at the woman’s penitentiary in Dwight, IL & then 22 months at the Jessie “Ma” Houston Community Correctional Center which is a half-way house on Dearborn Street where she participated in a work-release program & held an outside job, returning to the center at night. On March 23, 1988, at age 44, she was released on a three-year parole to start a fresh, new life.
Nola Jean developed a strong friendship with a woman named Dorothy Evans who was said to have adopted her. Dorothy died a short time later & Nola Jean inherited her soybean farm in Missouri. She remarried in 1989.
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