Arson victim's daughter says she just wanted stepmother beaten

Jun. 27—Tiffany Lukasiewicz acknowledged to a jury Tuesday that she recruited her twin sister's help in having their stepmother beaten up but said she opposed the setting of a fire that instead killed their father.

The 42-year-old Joplin woman took the witness stand on the second day of her trial in Jasper County Circuit Court to tell jurors that she still doesn't know how the fire that killed her 68-year-old father, David Crowder, started in the early morning hours of Dec. 4, 2020.

Both Lukasiewicz and her twin, Elizabeth Baez, are charged with second-degree murder, arson and domestic assault but are being tried separately, with Baez's trial still to come. Police believe the twins killed their father in a plot to assault their stepmother that went awry.

Lukasiewicz told jurors that all she wanted to see was her stepmother, Linda Crowder, given a beating for physical abuse of her father that the daughter had been suspecting for some time.

"We don't like each other," Lukasiewicz explained.

She said her father came out of his room, where he had been with his wife, sporting two black eyes the day in question. Lukasiewicz, who had been staying with the couple for a few weeks, asked him what happened, and he claimed he had fallen.

David Crowder suffered from heart problems, dementia and alcoholism, and often had trouble walking when he had been drinking, which he had been doing that night, according to trial testimony. But Lukasiewicz believed Linda Crowder had beaten him and decided to get her back, she told the court.

Defense attorney William Fleischaker put his client on the stand in an attempt to counter the evidence and testimony the state had presented following jury selection Monday.

Prosecutor Theresa Kenney called Crowder and a downstairs occupant of the house at 1730 S. Picher Ave. to recount what happened the night of the fire there.

Crowder woke in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and spotted a chair in the living room of the house on fire. When she could not find a fire extinguisher, she tried to put the fire out with water, but the fire spread too fast.

She yelled for Lukasiewicz to get her father out of the house and saw the two of them emerge from his bedroom as she ran to her room to call 911, she told the court. Moments later, she spotted Lukasiewicz and Baez outside the house, but their father was not with them. She tried to make her way to him as the fire was raging and suffered burns on her hands, arms and face without being able to reach him.

Firefighters later found her husband's body in a short hallway where Linda Crowder said she last saw him with Lukasiewicz.

The man who was residing in the basement of the house told how a friend had come over and got him out shortly before the fire. The friend testified that Lukasiewicz had sent him text messages before the fire urging him to get the other man out.

Dale Brooks, the city fire marshal, testified that there were V burn patterns in both the kitchen and living room, indicative of two separate fires. Because there was no apparent accidental causes, Brooks concluded that the fire was suspicious and most likely incendiary despite a lack of evidence that any accelerant had been used.

"Having two accidental fires at the same time is pretty hard to have," Brooks told the court.

Kenney and Assistant Prosecutor Taylor Haas called several investigators to testify that there were additional indications of foul play. An electrical cord leading from the house to its detached garage appeared to have been cut. It was the source of power for video surveillance cameras in the garage.

On a chair outside the window of Lukasiewicz's bedroom, police found a backpack containing various belongings of the defendant, including her wallet, a cellphone and a computer. Next to the chair was a laptop case containing a folder with papers of hers.

Investigators recovered a second phone of the defendant as well and examined the two but found that both had been wiped of data and had no SIM cards. That left them with no record of calls or text messages she had made or received, including those she sent the witness to get the male occupant out of the basement.

Detectives Wes Massey and Chip Root testified as to a series of interviews of the defendant that they conducted, and the prosecution excerpts of video or audio recordings of those interviews for the jury.

Lukasiewicz suffered burns in the fire, had just got out of the hospital three days later and was not yet a suspect when Massey first spoke with her. He interviewed her more extensively each of the following two days when she came to the police station to get her driver's license and a family member's rosary that had been among the items recovered by police at the scene.

She initially told Massey that she thought the fire may have started when some pet pigs that lived in the house may have knocked a lamp over. But, in the meantime, police had learned of the text message she had sent the man who got the other occupant out, and Massey asked her about it.

Lukasiewicz claimed at first not to know anything about the text messages but eventually did acknowledge that she had contacted her sister about the suspected abuse of their father and that they had decided to see to it that their stepmother got an "a—whipping."

She told investigators that her sister had enlisted the aid of a couple of other women who would come with her and assault Linda Crowder. But she claimed not to know who those women were. Police did not arrest her until the day of Massey's third interview.

Root interviewed her for the first time Dec. 10, and she again would admit nothing more than that she had sent a photo of her father's injuries to her sister and that they had planned an assault.

"But her story changed as the interview progressed," Root told jurors.

Her next admission was that they had discussed setting a fire in the alley to lure Linda Crowder out of the house "so she could get her face beat." When Root asked her if that was the plan, why she had sent a message arranging to get the man in the basement out of the house.

"I truly don't know," she at first responded on the tape of the interview played in court.

She then changed her story to say the plan was to set a fire in the basement, not the alley. The following day she asked to talk to Root again.

She told him she had sneaked her sister into the house through her bedroom window that night and that they had discussed the plot in her bedroom. Baez told her that the two girls who she'd paid to help her insisted that Baez start the fire, she said.

"Elizabeth is the one who started the fire," Lukasiewicz suddenly said during the interview.

Root asked her how she knew that because she had been denying all along that she knew how it started.

"She left my room and threw something toward the living room," she said.

She said her sister then told her she had started a fire and that she should get their father out. She told the detective that she subsequently crawled out the window of her father's bedroom and that she had not been telling the truth because she wanted to protect her sister.

"What about protecting yourself? So, why, why the change of heart?" the detective asked in the interview.

"I'll never ever be able to sleep at night knowing that ultimately I'm the reason my dad's dead, because of anger," she said.

The trial resumes at 9 a.m. Wednesday with closing arguments.