Little Rock police confirm that the body of Little Rock lawyer William McArthur was found lying outside his home in the Shadow Lake apartments at 13111 West Markham Street about 10 p.m. last night. A police spokesman said cause of death was believed to be natural, but an autopsy will be performed.
McArthur, who was about 71, was a figure in one of Little Rock’s most famous crime cases, the murder of his wife Alice. Three people were convicted in the case, including a former client of McArthur’s, the late Mary Lee Orsini, who also had been convicted of killing her husband. Gene Lyons wrote a book on the manipulative widow, who drew then-Sheriff Tommy Robinson into her web in a case that made headlines for years.
NOTED: From the evil-men-do-department is the roundup story on McArthur’s death. Thanks to an unstable sheriff’s connivance with a lying two-time murderess, McArthur goes to his grave with one last re-publication of Tommy Robinson’s thoroughly unsupported smearing of McArthur in his wife’s death. There’s some salve in the fact that Robinson remains one step away from jail himself for serial contempt of court as he tries to evade the various creditors that have forced him into bankruptcy for his irresponsible ways.