Dorothy Marie (Robards) Strauch

Dorothy Marie Robards was born to Steven and Beth Robards. She went by the name "Marie", and was an only child. Dorothy Robards married Karl Strauch in Texas City, Texas in August of 2005. Marie was 29 at the time, and was out of jail after serving seven years of the twenty-seven years she had been sentenced. When Dorothy was 19, it was reported in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (January 27, 1995) that she was arrested for the murder of her father, Steven Robards, who was a letter carrier in Colleyville. He was 38 at the time of his death. It is alleged that he was bi-polar (it was described as "manic-depressive" back then) and Dorothy said that he abused her. His girlfriend at the time, Sandra Hudgins, disputed this and said that he was a loving father. See a photo of Dorothy Marie at 16, in a high school photo: Dorothy "Marie" Robards. Before Dorothy confessed to the murder, her father's death was thought to be from natural causes. See his obituary at Steven A. Robards Obituary. The truth came out when Dorothy told her friend Stacey High about her murdering her father during an emotional moment as the teenagers were reading about Shakespeare's Hamlet in class. Stacey struggled with what to do with the information - she told her mother right away, but took a few days to tell the police. This impacted Stacey's life significantly as told in this 1998 article Court observer recalls struggle with dark secret. When Dorothy was arrested, she told the police that she obtained barium acetate from her high school chemistry class because her teacher had shared with the class that it was poisonous. On February 18, 1993, she put some of the poison in her father's dinner (refried beans) and a few hours later, he sickened and died. She said that she only intended to make him ill. Dorothy's parents had divorced in 1980, and her mother had requested that Dorothy live with her father, although she had also frequently lived with her grandparents. She was a student at the University of Texas at Austin at the time of her arrest, but she returned to Granbury TX to live with her mother (Beth Burroughs) and stepfather (Frank Burroughs, a Hood County Sherriff's deputy) while she was under juvenile custody. Her father Steven had died when she was only 16, but she was later tried as an adult, and not a juvenile. On May 10, 1996, it was reported in The Monitor that Dorothy was found guilty of murdering her father by poisoning his food. The jury had deliberated about 50 minutes (another paper reported deliberations as taking 2 hours). She received a 28 yr sentence at the conviction hearing, and the sentence was upheld on appeal in 1998. She was also fined $10,000, which came out of her $67,000 inheritance from her father. She was eligible for parole in 2003. Dorothy had planned on becoming a coroner as an adult and had worked at TGIF's as a waitress, appearing in a commercial for them until they found out that she was on trial. To read about Dorothy's background and life until 2019 see Marie Robards: Deadly Daughter. Other sources of information: The crime was fictionalized in Megan Abbott's 2018 novel Give Me Your Hand, and covered in episodes of Forensic Files (Season 6, episode 5 (2001)), Redrum (Season 2, episode 17 (2014)), and Deadly Women (Season 6, episode 2 (2012)).