Women Behind Bars Tuesdays at 10p|9c

Lutrische Dancy


Inmate Name: Lutrische Dancy Charge: Second-degree murder Sentence: 45 years Prison: Broward Correctional Unit, Florida Lutrische Dancy was born in 1962, and grew up in a working class neighborhood near Miami, Florida. She was one of nine children in a church-going family. At age 11, she contracted a debilitating illness; when she recovered, she had to learn to walk and talk all over again. At the young age of 13, she gave birth to a child that did not live. Trying to find a positive outlet for her pain, she became active in school athletics. But when that wasn’t enough to keep her attention, she started hanging out with an older crowd and experimented with pot and cocaine. The addiction would chase her for the rest of her life. At 18 she tried to commit suicide. Although Lutrische survived, there would be other attempts as well. In 1988, she married and became pregnant while continuing her drug habit. Her baby was born premature at 7 months. Lutrische got treatment for her drug problem, and went on to have two more children. After another relapse, she left her children with her mother, and entered rehab for 13 months. She emerged clean and sober, and in 2000, she married Walter Dancy, she says, because she was pregnant. Lutrische had an abortion and claims Walter became violent but no police reports could be found to verify this. After two years of marriage, Lutrische says she felt totally humiliated and began to unravel. After several more alleged suicide attempts and hospitalizations, and with her marriage in crisis, Lutrische felt at her wit’s end. When she discovered photos of her husband with other women, she fatally shot him. Desperate to cover her tracks, Lutrische reported her husband missing. After hiding his corpse in the closet for three days, where it had developed a stench from decomposing, she sent her kids to stay with friends, and made her plans to get rid of the body. She dragged his swollen corpse to the bathtub and doused it with muriatic acid, hoping to melt it. When that only made things worse, she tried burning the body by dousing it with lighter fluid, and tried to disguise the smoke by cooking hamburgers on her grill. The ordeal was a failure and the stench from the deteriorating body overpowered the street. Several neighbors called the police to report the suspicious odor. As a last resort, Lutrische asked to borrow a neighbor’s dolly so that she could move the body. The neighbor promptly called the police. Lutrische, finding herself locked out of her house, called her father and confessed to killing Walter. Her father then called the police who came to the scene of the crime. The six-day ordeal was over, and Lutrische finally broke down. Police charged her with first-degree murder. She chose to plead guilty to second-degree murder instead of facing trial, and was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Lutrische corresponds with her children while in prison, and still thinks about how she could have done things differently.