Scott Pattison Murder Case: Surveillance, Motive, and Sentence

The Scott Pattison murder case ended with an Indiana roofing contractor convicted of killing his wife, Lisa Pattison, on July 2, 2009, and staging the scene to look like a weightlifting accident in their home gym. The couple’s own security system, which Pattison apparently believed had recorded nothing, captured him inside the house during the hours he told police he was away. A Wabash County jury convicted him of murder, and he was sentenced to 60 years in prison. The Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction on December 9, 2011.¹

The Staged Accident

Scott Pattison called 911 at 12:14 p.m. on July 2, 2009, to report that Lisa was not breathing. He told investigators he had come home from work around 11:30 a.m. and found her in the couple’s exercise room, lying face-up on the bench of a Smith machine with a barbell weight pressing on her throat. Rather than wait for paramedics, he loaded her into a vehicle and drove toward a hospital in Marion, Indiana. Emergency responders intercepted him along the way, and Lisa was pronounced dead at the hospital.²¹

A Smith machine is a piece of gym equipment where a barbell rides on fixed steel rails and can be locked into place at multiple points along the frame. On the machine Lisa was found under, the two safety stoppers were not in place. Even so, testing showed a person lying on the bench should have been able to wiggle free from beneath the bar. The machine itself showed little wear, suggesting it had not been used often.¹

Lisa’s family said she avoided weightlifting because of a prior neck injury and preferred cardio and small hand weights. Her son from a previous relationship, Dillon McCoy, testified that he had seen his mother use the Smith machine only once, and that Scott had been spotting her that time. Dillon disputed Scott’s claim that Lisa could bench press 140 pounds, the weight the machine was set to when she was found.¹

What the Autopsy Showed

The autopsy, performed by Dr. Scott Wagner, determined that Lisa died from asphyxia caused by slow compression of her neck. Her larynx, trachea, and voice box were compressed but not crushed, which Dr. Wagner said was inconsistent with a weight bar falling at speed. He concluded the bar could not have dropped more than an inch or two without causing far greater damage.¹

State crime scene investigator Jason Page noted a bruise on Lisa’s neck and an abrasion on her left shoulder. Examiners also found petechiae, tiny ruptured blood vessels, along Lisa’s back, neck, and waist. Investigators concluded the pattern was consistent with someone straddling her torso and applying pressure, not with a barbell falling on her.³¹

The Surveillance Footage That Broke the Case

The evidence that dismantled Pattison’s story was hidden in his own home. The couple’s security cameras had been installed by a company called Koorsen. When detectives first examined the system after Lisa’s death, the DVD slot was empty, and they assumed nothing had been recorded. On July 15, 2009, a Koorsen representative told investigators that the system actually recorded to an internal hard drive. Detectives obtained a search warrant, seized the equipment, and recovered the footage.¹

Pattison had told police he left the house that morning and did not return until roughly 11:30 a.m. The video showed him walking back into the house at 8:32 a.m., hours earlier than he claimed. The cameras recorded additional activity at 9:56 a.m., 10:03 a.m., 10:07 a.m., and 11:38 a.m. The footage also captured him wearing different clothing at different times, changing between shorts and pants over the course of the morning. Evidence further indicated that Pattison had contacted the security system’s installer to ask how to delete video from the system.¹

Motive: An Affair, a Divorce, and a Life Insurance Policy

Prosecutors built the motive out of marital conflict, an affair, and money. In 2008, Lisa discovered that Scott was in a relationship with Stacy Henderson, who had served as chief of staff to the mayor of Marion, Indiana. Scott stopped communicating with Henderson for several months but eventually resumed the affair. Phone records showed the two exchanged at least 130 text messages on July 2, 2009, the day Lisa died. One of those messages was sent by Scott while he was driving Lisa’s body to the hospital.¹

Scott had filed for divorce in March 2009 but told investigators the proceedings were on hold because he and Lisa were trying to reconcile. Prosecutors offered a different picture. In November 2008, Scott had secretly contacted a real estate appraiser to value the marital home, telling the appraiser he “didn’t know if he could afford a divorce.” By February 2009, he was telling a friend he “wasn’t going to give her 50% of his business.”¹

About a month before her death, Lisa changed the beneficiary on her $450,000 life insurance policy from Scott and her son as joint beneficiaries to her son Dillon alone. Lisa’s sister, Christine Smith, later said that when Lisa asked her to prepare the paperwork, she “knew that she was getting ready to leave.” The day after the murder, Scott told Smith he was “stunned” to learn of the change.³¹

Detectives also uncovered an older detail. A 2001 report filed with the Wabash County Sheriff’s Department alleged that Scott Pattison had asked someone to kill his wife. That investigation went nowhere at the time, and no charges were filed.²

Trial and 60-Year Sentence

A Wabash County grand jury indicted Scott Pattison for murder in September 2009.³ His trial took place in late October 2010. Prosecutors brought the Smith machine itself into the courtroom. Detective Jason Page demonstrated for the jury how the weight bar could be locked into place, showing that a person using the machine properly would have been able to prevent the bar from descending onto their neck. Stacy Henderson testified under a grant of immunity, acknowledging her daily romantic relationship with Scott throughout 2009 and detailing the volume of their communications on the day Lisa died.¹

The defense argued that Lisa’s death was an accident. Attorneys pointed to a case in Iowa where a boy had died on similar equipment, contended that the petechiae found on Lisa’s body were post-mortem discoloration rather than evidence of an assault, and argued that Lisa had toxic levels of a diet drug in her system that could have caused her to faint while lifting.⁴

The jury was not persuaded. During deliberations, jurors asked to examine the Smith machine and ran their own tests, lying on the bench to see whether a person could escape from under the bar and having one juror straddle another while holding their wrists to simulate the conditions the prosecution described. The jury convicted Scott Pattison of murder, and the court sentenced him to 60 years in prison.¹

The Appeal

Pattison appealed to the Indiana Court of Appeals on four grounds: that the search warrant used to seize the home surveillance system lacked probable cause; that letting jurors physically test the Smith machine during deliberations amounted to an improper experiment; that the trial court wrongly denied his request to question jurors about what they did with the machine; and that the evidence was not sufficient to sustain the conviction.

On December 9, 2011, the court rejected all four arguments and affirmed the conviction. It found that the search warrant was supported by probable cause, that the jury’s examination of the machine was not an improper experiment, that the trial court properly denied the juror-questioning request, and that the evidence was sufficient to support the murder verdict.¹

1
FindLaw. Pattison v. State, 85A02-1101-CR-88
2
Legal News. Pattison v. State
3
Oxygen. Scott Pattison Convicted of Killing Wife Lisa Pattison
4
Happy Scribe. The Beauty and the Beast Mystery – Dateline NBC Transcript