Plot

Joe Crouch wakes up one morning, and after 40 years of marriage, shoots his wife while she sleeps. He flees to Florida and embraces his fugitive life. He funds his hobbies by robbing banks. It is his love of karoake that gets him caught.

After forty years of marriage, Joe Crouch wakes up one morning and unable to bring himself to tell his wife of their financial ruin shoots her while she sleeps.

After a phone call confession, he flees to Florida and with his new identity of a retired widower, he is able to evade the Feds for months. Crouch embraces his life as a fugitive and begins to fund his hobbies of golf and karaoke by robbing banks. Ultimately, it is his love of karaoke that gets him caught and puts an end to his life on the run.

His wife, Betsy, followed him into the lights. She knew the drill. She was his prop for a sappy ballad of love's regrets that Elvis recorded in 1972, and he reached his arm around her as the piano tinkled the opening chords.

Crouch gazed at his wife of 40 years and sang as though he meant it:

"Maybe I didn't love you quite as often as I could have. And maybe I didn't treat you quite as good as I should have .... But you were always on my mind. You were always on my mind."

About 30 hours later, at 6 a.m. on June 25, 2001, Crouch, 58, positioned a pillow over Betsy's head as she slept in their bed in North Memphis. He pushed a .25-caliber revolver into the fluffiness and pulled the trigger four times.

He then put his golf clubs in the trunk of Betsy's new Mercury, as though leaving for vacation. As he drove away that morning, he called his son-in-law and said, "I just shot Betsy. I'm sorry."

Young love gone wrong

Betsy and Joe Crouch were high school sweethearts, marrying when she was just 16. She went to work as a medical receptionist after their two children were in school, and he built a successful Memphis mortgage and loan company, Metro Credit Center.

In the late 1980s, after their children were grown, Crouch began to avidly pursue adult pleasures. As often as four nights a week, he and Betsy could be found singing karaoke around Memphis, his mettle lubricated with gin-and-tonics.

He was a decent singer and generous tipper, so k-jays on his regular karaoke circuit gave him plenty of stage time.

Crouch's repertoire featured heavy-hearted ballads, including "You Were Always on My Mind" and "Stand By Me," as well as a rendition of "Amazing Grace" straight out of Elvis' jumpsuit era. Betsy's talent and élan did not match her husband's, but she managed a passable version of her signature tune, Patsy Cline's "Crazy."

At about the same time, Joe Crouch began to indulge in less wholesome passions: gambling and hookers.

He lived like a high roller on solo getaways to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, New Orleans and nearby Tunica, Miss., hiring prostitutes to join him at the gaming tables and in his hotel bed.

And when he wasn't handing money to croupiers, card dealers and comely hired hands, he was losing as much as $100 a hole on golf matches with buddies.

His jones for the lush life began to catch up with him in 2000. He was broke, and Metro Credit was sinking from Crouch's under-the-desk borrowing.

By spring 2001 he had begun papering Memphis with bad checks - some $30,000 worth in all. He gave one excuse after another when checks bounced, but on Wednesday, June 20, a terse letter from the Tennessee attorney general warned him that he faced prosecution.

Crouch serenaded his wife the following Saturday night and murdered her early Monday morning.

His motivation was a head-scratcher.

"That's the missing piece of the puzzle," police Lt. Mickey Williams told the Memphis Flyer newspaper. "He could have just left. People do that all the time."

While on the lam, he sent his son and daughter a series of self-serving confessional letters, first insisting that Betsy was dying of cancer anyway. The mercy-killing excuse proved to be hogwash, so he next claimed that he simply couldn't allow her to learn that he was a financial failure.

One letter to his daughter, Teresa Wampler, signed "With deep love," noted, "Some would say that what I did was selfish and was a coward's way out."

That bizarre missive was trumped some months later when she received a karaoke CD from her father - 10 songs that he had titled "Just for You and Maybe Just for Me." The accompanying note read, "Who knows, maybe [my grandson] will enjoy them someday."

For 20 months, Crouch eluded arrest while gambling, golfing and singing his way along the Gulf Coast, sometimes wearing a gaudy fake mustache but more often with no attempt at disguise.

On the small screen

In February 2003, Crouch was a featured fugitive in an episode of TV's "America's Most Wanted."

Detectives believed Crouch's karaoke habit would get him caught, and they played that angle hard on the show. Wherever he's living, they said, Crouch is singing karaoke.

They were right. Karaoke enthusiasts in Daytona Beach, Fla., who saw the show realized the wanted man, known as Jay Nelson, had been performing at the area's karaoke clubs for nearly a year. He had been telling everyone that he was a widower - from cancer, not spousal homicide.

A karaoke promoter, Lloyd Eaton, dropped a dime, and Joe Crouch was arrested at his Daytona apartment on March 15, 2003.

"He never missed a show," Eaton told the Memphis Commercial Appeal. "He was an avid karaoke person."

It turned out Crouch had supported himself with robbery. Police searching his apartment found a legal pad with his own notes on 40 stickups he had pulled across Florida. He kept the log to avoid returning to the same location. He had begun with meager holdups of mom-and-pop stores but progressed into a series of six bank jobs that netted him $88,000.

Cops found Betsy's purse in the Mercury's trunk, pinned under golf clubs.

He didn't seem troubled about being arrested for his wife's murder. But he said he'd miss golf. He whimsically told a cop, "At least I parred my last hole."

Crouch pleaded guilty a few months later and got a life sentence. He would be eligible for parole in 2060, if he lives to be 118.

That, he said in court, "is not likely to happen."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/02/01/2009-02-01_the_killer_karaoke_singer.html?page=1#ixzz0fuvaRxbt