Peggy Sue Thomas at trial. Just as one of the parties in a highly publicized murder case was released from prison, yet another TV crime series recounted the sordid story of a 2003 murder on Whidbey Island. The Oxygen network’s series “Snapped: Killer Couples” ran an episode on Peggy Thomas and Jim Huden last week.
Though she didn’t pull the trigger, investigators are convinced Peggy Sue Thomas helped set the stage for Russel Douglas’ murder on the island she knew so well. “How does a former beauty queen end up at the heart of a murder case?”
Peggy Sue Thomas was a former beauty queen having won Ms Washington. She used to be a naval aircraft mechanic. But having lived through several failed marriages and being a single mum to two daughters, she decided to transform herself.
Peggy Sue Thomas went on with her life, driving a limo for high rollers in Las Vegas. Finally a tip came in that uncovered Jim Huden’s whereabouts in Veracruz, Mexico. Jim was arrested on June 9, 2011, and flown back to Whidbey Island, Wash. One month later, Peggy Sue Thomas was arrested in New Mexico.
How long was Peggy Sue Thomas in jail?
Peggy Sue Thomas served a four-year prison sentence for her crime. After a years-long investigation, Thomas was formally charged with murder in 2011, but she struck a plea deal with prosecutors just before her trial was due to begin, according to Oxygen.
Lifetime is descending into a Circle of Deception with its TV movie of that name, which premiers Saturday, March 6, and dramatizes the real-life story of “beauty queen gone bad” Peggy Sue Thomas.
Just know that I love you and you’ll never see me again,” Thomas said on 48 Hours. Bill Hill, a former bandmate of Huden, said that Huden told him that he suffered abuse as a child at the hands of his stepfather, and that Huden said he “started lookin’ for somebody that met the M.O.” and ‘shot [Douglas] in the head.’”.
The movie shows how Douglas was murdered by his wife’s best friend’s former lover. Source: CBS News. Peggy Sue Thomas. In a synopsis for Circle of Deception, Lifetime details the story that inspired the movie, the Ann Rule book, and even an episode of Oxygen’s Killer Couples . Article continues below advertisement.
Who was the woman who killed Thomas?
Jean Huden had told detectives that her husband and Thomas plotted and carried out the murder; she’d spoken to Thomas about it on several occasions, she said, according to the South Whidbey Record. Bill Hill, whose call to detectives blow the case open, also testified. “It was … a scary situation,” Hill told CBS.
Brenna Douglas, a close friend of Thomas, met the couple in April 2003 in Vegas — months before her husband’s murder. Thomas had worked as a hairdresser at Brenna’s Whidbey Island …
She was also the only person of interest with an apparent motive: A potential $500,000 payout from life insurance policies that she was set to collect after her estranged husband’s death. This would be helpful in the face of mounting debt and a struggling salon.
It was also the subject of a season 8 episode of Oxygen’s “Killer Couples. The book and film give a true-crime account of what happened between Brenna Douglas, her friend Peggy Sue Thomas, Thomas’ lover Jim Huden, and how it all ended in bloodshed and prison for two of them, even as questions about the case linger.
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The story of the Whidbey Island murder was the inspiration for veteran true-crime writer Ann Rule’s bestselling 2013 thriller, “Practice to Deceive,” and now the Lifetime movie, “Circle of Deception.”. It was also the subject of a season 8 episode of Oxygen’s “Killer Couples. The book and film give a true-crime account of what happened between …
Who was Peggy Sue Thomas’ chauffeur?
Mark Allen recalls that he fell for Peggy Sue Thomas the night they met, after she picked him up, literally, in Las Vegas. As a chauffeur for Presidential Limousines in 2006, she was dispatched to ferry the wealthy New Mexico horseman to casinos and hotels around the Strip.
Peggy Sue came from a large family with numerous stepsiblings, most of them the offspring of her father Jim Stackhouse and his first wife, Mary Ellen. According to information given to investigators by family members, Mary Ellen Stackhouse was murdered in 1963 at her home in San Jose, Calif., by a teenage intruder.
The accusation has, however, made it difficult for her to collect on the policies. When Brenna Douglas sought the proceeds of one policy—for $200,000—in January 2004, AIG, the insurer, refused to pay, saying that prosecutor Banks had labeled both Peggy Sue and Brenna “accomplices” in the murder by Huden.
Thomas, then 35 , finished out of the money in the Vegas pageant for single, divorced, and married women ages 25 to 55. But the comely six-footer, in four-inch heels and a plum-colored dress, did win the evening-gown competition.
Jim and Doris were later divorced, and Jim wed a third time in 1984. Around that time, Rob Stackhouse, a son of Jim and Mary Ellen and a stepbrother to Peggy Sue, was murdered at a party in Alaska by a man he had beaten in an arm-wrestling contest.
Jim, a Navy man, moved his kids—three boys and three girls—to Whidbey, where he’d been assigned to the naval air station at Oak Harbor. Jim subsequently wed Doris, who gave birth to Peggy Sue in 1965, and who already had two daughters from a prior relationship.
But neighbor Jeanie Dodd is convinced Thomas did it. “From my knowledge of her, she’s a sociopath,” says Dodd , a massage therapist who used to live next door to Thomas and her then-husband Kelvin and, after they broke up, lived next door to Brenna and Russel Douglas, the murder victim, who rented the home from Thomas.
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