It seemed like a Hollywood romance; a beautiful pre-med student/model and the millionaire businessman/bodybuilder. Barbra Piotrowksi and Richard Minns may have been over twenty years apart in age, but they became attracted to each other shortly after a chance encounter on the Aspen, Colorado, ski slopes in 1977. Both were sporty and sexy: together, they were even sportier and sexier.
A relationship ensued which began like a dream, but soon morphed into a disaster. The whirlwind romance became a tornado of terror nearly culminating in murder on the evening of October 20, 1980.
The aftermath was exacerbated with the likely culprit at the top of the conspiracy killing tree escaping responsibility.
Richard Minns and Barbra Piotrowski
Twenty-three-year-old Barbra Piotrowski was a model, registered nurse, and pre-med student at UCLA. She was the complete package of beauty and brains, taking the crown in many beauty pageants and earning straight A’s in the classroom.
The beautiful Barbra turned heads wherever she went.
Barbra the Beauty
Richard Minns, a man with the figurative biggest of heads, was among those smitten.
The forty-seven-year-old bodybuilder was a multimillionaire co-founder and owner of the President & First Lady Health Club Chain, encompassing several upscale health spas across six states.
Minns the Bodybuilder
Barbra was initially not interested in a relationship with a man over twice her age. Undeterred, Minns persisted, continuing to woo her; she ultimately became attracted to him.
As the relationship progressed, Minns persuaded Barbra to drop out of college and move to Houston to live with him and to work as a model for his health spas.
Though she initially rebuffed the buffed body builder’s advances, Barbra Piotrowksi, in her words, soon fell “head over heels in love” with Richard Minns.
A Romance Ensues . . .
The charismatic and convincing Minns told Barbara he also loved her and that he also wanted to spend his life with her; he did not tell her that he was already married.
When Barbra learned her lover was wed to another, Minns explained he and his wife had an open marriage. When that explanation did not satisfy her, he told her their divorce was in process and, once it was finalized, he would marry her. Once the divorce became official, however, Minns was infuriated over losing half of his $12 million fortune to his former wife, Mimi, who had built the health spa businesses with him. He became short-tempered and abusive and, even though Barbra was pregnant with his child, he put his plans to marry her on hold.
Although he no longer wished to marry her, Minns still coveted the beautiful model who was near the age of his daughter as his trophy girlfriend.
Barbra, however, had had enough. She ended the relationship and, while Minns was away, she moved out of their townhouse, taking almost all of the furniture with her.
. . . But It Soon Fizzles
Not surprisingly, Minns was irate and embarrassed when he returned to a near empty home. He called Barbra’s sister, begging for her to ask Barbra to meet him. Against her better judgment, Barbra agreed.
The meeting was arranged at a hotel room. Minns was characteristically late, and when he did finally arrive, he was, even more characteristically, in the company of another young woman. In a fit of rage, Barbra slapped him. Shortly thereafter, the police arrived with a warrant for her arrest.
Barbra was charged with felony grand theft of the furniture, jewelry, and other belongings she had taken from the townhouse. A charge of aggravated assault was soon added because of the strike against her former lover.
Detective Spider Fincher, a known friend of Minns, told the jailed Barbara that her slate would be wiped clean if she signed a document attesting that she had never known Richard Minns, had not had a relationship with him, and was not carrying his child.
Minns had set Barbra up by using his connections to have her arrested. He hoped to spook her into signing the bogus document, but she refused to do so.
The charges against Barbra were weak and were soon dropped. She was released from jail. Shortly thereafter, she miscarried.
Barbra is Arrested
Barbra did not tell Minns of the miscarriage and he probably would not have cared. He was, however, infuriated at what he considered a miscarriage of justice inflicted upon him: being dumped.
With his ego still bruised, Richard Minns was determined to make Barbra further pay for leaving him.
Minns is Livid
Minns engineered his next measure of revenge on April 17, 1980, when two Houston Police Detectives served Barbra with a search warrant allowing them to confiscate much of her furniture at her new residence because Minns was the legal owner. Barbra was again told the matter would be dropped if she signed papers promising never to sue him with respect to relationship or paternity. Again, she refused.
Over the following six months, Barbara’s phones were tapped and she believed she was frequently being followed. Her parents and sister were also harassed.
But the worst was yet to come.
Barbara is Harassed . . .
On the evening of October 20, 1980, four months after ending her relationship with Minns, Barbra made a purchase at Houston’s Winchell’s Donut House. After she exited the store, a car pulled into the parking lot.
As Barbra entered her car, she was plastered with bullets.
. . . And Then Shot
Barbra survived, but the wounds collapsed her lungs and severed her spinal cord.
The attack rendered her paralyzed from the waist down.
. . . and Left Paralyzed
Two policeman on patrol happened to drive by the donut shop as the attack was in progress and arrested the bumbling hitmen. Twenty-six-year-old Nathaniel Ivery and twenty-one-year-old Patrick Stein were petty thieves from California who had no connection to Barbra Piotrowski.
One week later, one of Richard Minns’ former bodyguards told police that one month before the attack, he had heard of a contract put out on Barbra’s life. The hitman refused to provide further information.
In March 1981, Ivery and Stein were convicted of attempted murder and both were sentenced to thirty-five years in prison. I was unable to find how much time either man served and when they were released.
Nathaniel Ivery and Patrick Steen
Police determined the car used in the attack belonged to a California trucker, Robert Anderson. During an undercover investigation into another case in 1984, the FBI recorded Anderson boasting of his involvement in “the Piotrowski hit.”
Big Mouth Bob was also convicted of attempted murder, and he was sentenced to thirty-eight years in prison. I could not find how much time he served. He died in 1996.
Robert Anderson
In the FBI recording, Anderson also implicated Dudley Bell in the attempted murder of Barbra Piotrowski. Bell was a private investigator infamous for operating on the edge of the law and often skirting over it.
After Barbra ended her relationship with Minns, the irate reject hired Bell to follow her. Adrian Franks, one of Bell’s former employees, told police the shady P.I. had tried to hire him to kill Barbra. Franks admitted to tapping her phones, recording her calls, and installing a remote switch on her car, but he refused to do the hit.
Dudley Bell then hired Robert Anderson to commit the murder. Also not wanting to do the killing himself, Anderson instead contracted Ivery and Stein to do the hit. Anderson suspected Bell had been hired by Richard Minns, but he had no direct knowledge that he did so.
In 1987, Bell was convicted of attempted murder and, like Anderson, was sentenced to thirty-eight years in prison. He served only four-and-a-half years before being paroled in 1991.
Dudley Bell died in 2007 without ever implicating Richard Minns.
Dudley Bell
Most legal experts agree the evidence against Richard Minns warranted his being charged with conspiracy to commit murder. He was not only never implicated or charged in the attempted murder of his former lover, he was never even questioned.
The bodybuilder had also built connections with powerful people in Houston, and he is believed to have used them to prevent his being charged with arranging the attempted murder of his former fiance.
Minns Suspected
Richard Minns sold his interest in his health spas and left the United States after Barbra was shot.
He lived across Europe for the next fourteen years, having renounced his United States citizenship.
The Bodybuilder Bolts
In 1982, Barbra filed a civil lawsuit against Minns for wrongful injury. In 1991, she was awarded a $58,000,000 judgment against her former lover for the injuries resulting in her partial paralysis. The judgment, however, was reversed by the Appellate Court on the basis that Minns never appeared for any of the court hearings.
In 1998, a federal jury found the Houston Police Department liable in Barbra’s paralysis, ruling they learned of the plot more than a month before the shooting but failed to warn her or take measures to prevent it from occurring. Barbra was awarded $22.3 million in reparations. Again, however, the appellate court was unkind to her.
In 2001, the Fifth United States Circuit Court of Appeals ruled there was insufficient evidence to support the claim of municipal liability on the part of the City of Houston and its police department. The appellate court ruled the statute of limitations on Barbra’s civil rights claim had expired because she had failed to file a lawsuit within the required two years from when she contended a third party had injured her.
Barbra’s Civil Lawsuits Are Dismissed on Appeal
By the 1990s, Richard Minns was living in Vancouver, Canada. After attending a family reunion in Cancun, Mexico, in July 1994, he boarded an American Airlines flight to Vancouver. When the plane made a stopover at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, he was detained. Minns was using the name Harlan Richardson and was found to be carrying seven passports with five different names from four different countries. After over thirteen years of gallivanting across the globe, he was arrested on suspicion of obtaining several false United States passports and falsely claiming United States citizenship.
In November, Minns pled guilty to eight counts of passport fraud, was fined $100,000, and received a four-month prison sentence. Afterwards, he was deported to Ireland, where he held a legitimate passport. He later moved to Switzerland.
These four months are the only period Richard Minns spent behind bars.
Sad but True . . . Minns Wins
He was never charged in the attempted murder of his former lover, Barbra Piotrowski, but police have now publicly said they believe Richard Minns was the orchestrator. He continued to be a bodybuilder in Europe, and he also became a sculptor.
When I researched this case several years ago, multiple sources said Minns had died in England in 2016. Later, however, the sources said he was still alive and living in Israel.
Recent sources state Minns died on January 9, 2022.
Sculptor
After the attack that changed her life, Barbra Piotrowski changed her name to Janni Smith.
In 1983, she began rehabilitation with Dr. Jerrold Petrofsky, who was developing a device enabling paralyzed people to walk independently by use of computer-induced electrical impulses.
“Janni” and Dr. Petrovsky
Dr. Petrofsky’s device proved successful; with it, his patient, and soon-to-be-bride, could walk for short distances.
Walking
Janni Smith and Dr. Jerrold Petrofsky married on November 30, 1991.
With the assistance of the device developed by the groom, the bride was able to walk down the aisle.
Walking Down the Aisle
Although she no longer goes by the name of Barbra Piotrowski, Janni Smith, with Dr. Petrovsky, co-founded the Piotrowksi Centers in Irvine, California, and Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Janni became a nurse specializing in working with paralyzed people of all ages, but, in particular, with children.
Janni at Work
Janni Smith has competed in and won several wheelchair races, including the Detroit Free Press Marathon for three consecutive years. She has also competed in other wheelchair sports, including basketball, tennis, and volleyball.
With the aid of the device developed by her husband, Janni has also walked several miles in full-fledged marathons.
Competing, Not Complaining
SOURCES:
- Associated Press
- Houston Chronicle
- Los Angeles Times
- People Magazine
- Sleeping with the Devil by Suzanne Finstead
- Unsolved Mysteries
- UPI
I will never forget this sad story. It was one of the first,if not the first, accounts that I read about in a nationally published magazine,Cosmopolitan,many years ago and yes that same photo of Barbra in the wheelchair has haunted me all these years because it’s the same one I first saw.