‘I’m here to welcome you to your hell’: murder victim’s son

An Irish Traveller who pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder a 69-year-old housekeeper in Colleyville was sentenced Monday to 14 years in prison.

Bernard “Little Joe” Gorman, 28, had been accused, along with his father, of stalking and killing Anita Fox on Sept. 23, 2014, in hopes of collecting on a $1 million insurance policy that authorities suspect she didn’t know existed.

Just as the Fox family endured their hell on earth when Anita was killed, “I’m here to welcome you to your hell.” Fox’s son, Al Fox III, said to Gorman in the Fort Worth courtroom.

On Jan. 30, Gorman, who had been charged with murder in the case, pleaded guilty to a lesser included count of conspiracy to commit murder, a second-degree felony.

On Monday, state District Judge George Gallagher sentenced him to 14 years in prison, which was a part of the plea.

Colleyville police believe Gorman and his father, Gerard “Joe” Gorman, stalked Anita Fox for days before the elder Gorman went into the Colleyville house where Fox was working and fatally stabbed her. The younger Gorman drove them away from the scene, police said.

After the sentencing, Gorman turned and stood silent and still as Al Fox gave an impassioned speech to him and the court in a “bittersweet” moment, Fox said.

“I’m not going to share my memories of my mom with you,” Fox said, adding that he found Gorman “unfit to hear” about what kind of person she was.

Fox said that the sentencing was a celebration, calling it Chapter 2 of justice being served for his mother. Chapter 1 was when he heard that Gorman’s father had died.

“I was doing cartwheels,” Fox said.

The elder Gorman died of natural causes in January 2015, before he could be arrested in the case.

The Gormans were members of a nomadic, ethnic clan known as Irish Travellers.

After Gorman was taken away, Fox said he found the moment “difficult, but liberating.”

Fox said his mother was a one-of-a-kind woman who held herself to high principle and moral standards. She was a doer and a giver, not a taker and not a negative person, Fox said, and she was compassionate.

“She would have forgiven these people,” he said. “She would have felt sorry for them.”

Gorman’s Houston attorney, Steven Rosen, has told the Star-Telegram that he believed the elder Gorman was in no physical condition to have killed Fox the way she was killed, and that the younger Gorman was simply at “the wrong place at the wrong time.” He called the plea deal “a compromise.”

‘Life insurance scams’

Investigators said the pair killed Fox hoping to collect proceeds from a $1 million life insurance policy that Fox didn’t know existed. There were four other policies totaling $4 million on Fox that listed her son-in-law, Mark Buckland, and/or her daughter, Virginia Buckland, as beneficiaries.

An FBI investigation revealed that Charles Mercier, an insurance agent whose family writes life insurance policies almost exclusively for Travellers, had written five policies on Anita Fox in 2007 and 2008.

“Travellers have been known to be involved in life insurance scams in the past,” FBI Special Agent Ronald Grosse wrote in a probable cause affidavit. “These scams typically involve lying on the policy applications about income, net worth, health, identifying information, and whether other policies have been issued.”

The affidavit describes Anita Fox as an English Traveller.

In July 2013, one of the $1 million policies was changed to make Pat Gorman, an Irish Traveller who resided in Virginia, a co-owner of the policy and the new beneficiary.

After Anita Fox’s death, the Bucklands filed lawsuits against the insurance companies, alleging they had failed to pay out on millions of dollars owed on the policies.

Al Fox III later filed to intervene in the suits, arguing that he is the “rightful recipient” of the insurance proceeds as his mother’s nearest relative and alleging that his sister and her husband are “negligently responsible for the death of the insured,” thus prohibiting them by law from receiving the benefits.

The FBI has made its own attempt to civilly seize the money being held by the court. The lawsuit was still pending Monday.

This story was originally published February 27, 2017 at 11:25 AM with the headline "‘I’m here to welcome you to your hell’: murder victim’s son."