Two and a half years in a French prison had not been kind to Joy Davis Aylor. When the 44-year-old one-time socialite and millionairess-to-be stepped off a Delta flight from Marseilles and back into the consciousness of the Dallas public last November she looked like hell.

Without makeup or recent benefit of the Texas sun she was supernaturally pale, pallid almost to the point of ghostliness. Her eyes -- captivating, remarkable eyes as green as the water around a South Sea atoll; eyes that once blazed with intelligence and humor -- appeared dull and empty. Her hair, formerly long, blonde and stylishly coiffed, had faded to a mousy brown and was inexpertly clipped into a tight helmet.

A woman who had once shopped at Nieman Marcus and took pride in her casual but elegant attire, emerged at her long-awaited homecoming dressed frumpily in an inexpensive baggy blue sweatshirt, red sweatpants, and white sneakers. Struggling to cover the handcuffs that linked her thin, fragile-looking wrists, now scarred as the result of an ignominious suicide attempt, she glared defiantly into the tv lights and compressed her lips in contemptuous silence.

Flanked by burly lawmen, she shuffled dejectedly toward a waiting car that delivered her into the dubious hospitality of the Lew Sterrett Justice Center, Dallas County's high-rise jail. There she shared a roof with hundreds of other North Texas miscreants: accused rapists, armed robbers, child beaters, drug dealers, and -- like herself -- alleged killers.

It had taken law enforcement authorities more than 10 years to bring Joy Aylor to the brink of trial on charges of capital murder, solicitation of capital murder, and conspiracy to commit capital murder. During that decade various pillars of her life collapsed as if rocked by an earthquake: Her 18-year-old marriage fell apart; her only child, a teenage son, was killed in a mysterious, fiery, automobile crash; her two sisters betrayed her in different ways, and her father was crippled by a stroke.

For Joy Aylor -- a former belle of Dallas's prosperous homebuilder's community, the pampered daughter of an uneducated farm boy who made millions in Dallas's freewheeling construction business -- the return to Texas almost exactly 121 months since the brutal murder of the rival for her husband's affection marked the nadir of a life turned tragically and inexplicably pathetic.

Looking back, it is not difficult to see that the cataclysmic series of events that transported Joy from the mundane world of Dallas's peaceful suburbs to the prisoner's dock occurred at readily definable and retrospectively predictable stages.

The first developed in the spring of 1983 when her husband Larry, an ambitious 35-year-old builder of expensive, quality homes, told Joy, then 34, that he was filing for divorce. He wanted to be free, he explained, so he could marry Rozanne Gailiunas, a dark-haired, vivacious, 33-year-old registered nurse who simultaneously was planning to divorce her husband, Dr. Peter Gailiunas Jr., a prominent kidney specialist.

The wedding never took place.

Some six months after Larry first broke the news to Joy, on October 4, 1983, only a few days before the planned marriage, paramedics responded to a report of a "sick woman" at a house in Richardson, a quiet Dallas bedroom community. In the house, they found Rozanne stripped and tied spread-eagled to her four-poster bed. She had been shot twice in the head and left for dead. Her 4 1/2-year-old son, who apparently had napped through the late afternoon assault, was unharmed.

Although Rozanne was still breathing when the medical technicians arrived, she suffered irreversible brain damage and was allowed to die two days later. She never regained consciousness; was never able to tell investigators who attacked her or why.

From the beginning, the investigation into Rozanne's murder ran into difficulties. There were no witnesses and pitifully few clues. In the absence of any solid leads, Police Sergeant Morris "Mo" McGowan, the man in charge of solving Rozanne's murder, fell back on his instincts. Who might want to see her dead? he asked himself. He came up with three possible suspects: her estranged husband, the respected nephrologist, who was losing his wife and son and would have to part with a considerable amount of money in a divorce settlement; her soon-to-be new husband, Larry Aylor, who could be considered a suspect for no other reason than a spouse or a fiance is always examined, and Larry's estranged wife, Joy, whose life was about to be torn asunder.

Predictably, there was dissension among the three. When asked who he thought murdered Rozanne, Gailiunas unhesitantly replied: "I think it was either Larry Aylor or his wife, Joy."

Larry responded angrily, pointing his finger at Gailiunas. "The doctor did it!" he said accusingly. Pausing, he added: "I think it was a contract job."

Joy remained above the fray, hurling no stones.

All three had alibis; all maintained they were miles away at the time of the attack. Gailiunas said he was in his office. Larry was with his sister. Joy was at her parents' lakeside cabin. Investigators substantiated their claims. McGowan's investigation was at a dead-end. The detective reluctantly stamped Rozanne's file "unsolved" and shoved it into a bottom drawer. His one-time hot-looking suspects picked up their lives as best they could.

Gailiunas remarried and dropped into relative obscurity; Larry and Joy attempted a reconciliation, which, although rocky, seemed to be working.

As soon as Larry got back to Dallas he telephoned McGowan, insisting the ambush was connected with the attack on Rozanne. McGowan dismissed the idea. It was poachers, the detective countered. Larry was certain that the detective was wrong.

Stage Three. Convinced that Joy was somehow connected to the attempt on his life, Larry filed for divorce a second time. It was granted on August 19, 1986, almost exactly 18 years after they were married.

Again, life seemed to return to normal. Eighteen months after his divorce from Joy, Larry remarried. But then an incident occurred that helped bring the past back into focus. Early in 1988, almost four and a half years after Rozanne was murdered, a woman called Larry. Speaking in an obviously disguised voice, she confirmed that Rozanne's murder and the attempt to kill him were connected. Furthermore, she said, she knew who was behind both incidents.

At Larry's urging, the woman called McGowan and agreed to meet with the detective. She was interested, she said, in the still-valid $25,000 reward posted by Gailiunas for his estranged wife's killer. That launched Stage Four.

When she showed up at his office, McGowan was flabbergasted: The woman who claimed inside knowledge about the two events was Carol Davis Garland, Joy's sister; Larry's former sister-in-law.

According to Carol, Joy had been so upset by Larry's 1983 plan to divorce her and marry Rozanne that she contacted a self-employed pest exterminator named Bill Garland to arrange for Rozanne's murder. Garland had not committed the crime himself, Carol added, but had subcontracted it to someone else.

What about Larry? McGowan asked. Why had Joy allegedly tried to have him killed?

Carol smiled cynically. It was, she said, because Joy had discovered that Larry earlier had an affair with the youngest Davis sister, Elizabeth. The three were 13 years apart in age. Carol was the eldest, older than Joy by two years. Elizabeth was 11 years younger than Joy, meaning she would have been a teenager or close to it when she conducted her alleged affair with her brother-in-law.

Confused by the details that were pouring from Carol, McGowan wanted to know how she had become privy to so much knowledge.

It was simple, Carol said. After Joy had made up her mind to have Larry killed she allegedly decided to go back to Bill Garland to set up a second killing. Unwilling to have direct contact with him a second time, however, Joy enlisted her -- Carol -- as a go-between.

As a result of her contact with Garland, Carol said, the two fell in love and were secretly married. Together they concocted a scheme to blackmail Joy and were successfully extorting money from her when they had a falling out. Not long afterwards, they too were divorced. But before they split, Carol said, Garland had confessed to her details about Rozanne's killing.

Acting on this new information, McGowan began to piece together what had happened. Eventually, he concluded there were two parallel "chains" created to deal separately with Rozanne and Larry's murders.

The first chain was formed when Joy allegedly approached Garland about having Rozanne killed. Garland then, according to grand jury indictments, subcontracted the murder to a man named Brian Kreafle, who in turn subcontracted it to a former ministerial student named George Anderson "Andy" Hopper. It was Hopper, McGowan eventually determined, who killed Rozanne. He was paid a paltry $1,500 for the murder.

The second plot was equally serpentine. With Carol acting as intermediary, Garland again -- according to court documents -- subcontracted the crime, this time through a man named Joe Thomas. As Kreafle allegedly had done earlier, Thomas also passed on the assignment. A pair of ne'er-do-well brothers named Gary and Buster Matthews were enlisted to kill Larry. They were to be paid $5,000.

Armed with these new details, McGowan began rolling up the chains, arresting Joy, Bill Garland and the two middle men, Kreafle and Thomas. Eventually, Carol also would be charged. When the Matthews brothers learned they were being sought, they fled to New Mexico where they were arrested three months later.

At that point, McGowan had not yet identified Andy Hopper as Rozanne's killer and would not do so for another eighteen months. However, when police sought to question Hopper about his possible involvement, he abandoned his wife and two young daughters and escaped to the Rocky Mountain West, where he evaded authorities for six months. He was arrested five days before Christmas, 1988, after returning to Dallas. (see sidebar #1)

Enter Stage Five. Early in May, 1990, with her trial date rapidly approaching, Joy panicked. Cleaning out her bank account, she stuffed $300,000 in cash into a travelling bag (money Larry claimed was stolen from their joint account years earlier), jumped her $140,000 bail, and fled to Canada with one of her lovers, a former assistant district attorney-turned-defense lawyer named Mike Wilson.

Wilson, who also faced trial on drug charges unconnected to the accusations against Joy, was arrested at a resort near Vancouver where he and Joy had registered under aliases. However, Canadian authorities failed to nab Joy, who had left Wilson a few days earlier to fly to Mexico.

Joy stayed in Mexico for several months, then skipped to Europe, where she eventually settled along the French Riviera. Masquerading as the wife of a travelling oil company executive (a man believed to be another of her lovers, Dallas businessman Jodie Packer, a former husband of a Dallas civil court judge), Joy may have remained successfully hidden in her comfortable villa near St. Paul de Vence if she had not wrecked her rental car, thereby setting up Stage Six.

Although the accident was minor, Joy abandoned the vehicle. When police began checking the registration, they unravelled Joy's string of aliases and discovered she was a much sought-after fugitive.

Arrested by French police on March 16, 1991, she was taken to nearby Nice for further questioning. While at the police station, Joy asked to use the toilet. Once she was alone, she whipped out a razor blade she had concealed in the waistband of her sweatpants and slit her wrists. A matron found her several minutes later and rushed her to a hospital.

The man who claimed to be her husband, allegedly Packer, had not been in the villa when Joy was arrested. Although he was picked up two and a half weeks later at Joy's parents's cabin, he was quickly released on $50,000 bail. Just as quickly, he disappeared.

Even before she was transferred from the hospital in Nice to a French jail cell, Joy began her fight against extradition. She almost succeeded.

During the two and a half years she waited for a decision from French courts on whether she would be returned to Texas, Joy became a cause celebre, winning the support of a number of high-ranking Parisian politicians, supposedly including the French First Lady. At one point, according to French news reports, she came incredibly close to being released on bail, a possibility that caused considerable apprehension in Dallas, where prosecutors were certain that if she were set free she would simply disappear again.

Finally, the French agreed to send her back. But there was one condition: District Attorney John Vance had to promise that she would never be executed even if she were to be convicted of the crimes with which she was charged.

While the focus of Joy's trial, naturally, will be on her guilt or innocence, a subtheme will be the expected ferocious battle between the defense and prosecution.

In May, 1988, soon after she was arrested, Joy hired one of the city's best known lawyers to defend her, a former first assistant district attorney named Douglas Mulder, called "Mad Dog" because of his enthusiasm in handling prosecutions, particularly in capital murder cases. During his 16-year tenure in the DA's office, Mulder tried 24 death penalty cases and won 24 convictions.

He left the prosecutor's office in 1980 after he was offered $100,000 -- $35,000 more than he was making in a whole year as a prosecutor -- to represent a man charged with murder. The man never went to trial and Mulder's career as a successful defender was launched. In short order he built a reputation as one of the most successful and flashy defense attorneys in the city, exhibiting a genius for attracting wealthy, high-profile clients. There is, however, a cloud over his head.

In 1977, while he was still in the DA's office, Mulder had prosecuted an itinerant laborer named Randall Dale Adams, who was accused of killing a Dallas patrolman. The officer, Robert Wood, had stopped a vehicle for a minor traffic violation when he was shot by someone inside the car. Investigators determined that the car was registered to a man named David Harris. Adams allegedly was a passenger.

With comparative ease, Mulder won a death sentence against Adams. However, three years later, while Adams was waiting to be executed, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction because of irregularities in the jury selection process. Rather than spend money for a second trial, the district attorney asked the governor to reduce Adams's sentence to life. At that point events took a strange turn.

In 1985, an independent film maker named Earl Morris began researching a documentary on a Dallas psychiatrist, Dr. James P. Grigson, commonly called Dr. Death or Dr. Doom because of his frequent testimony supporting the death sentence. While looking into the cases in which Grigson had testified, Morris became interested in Adams, eventually switching his focus away from the psychiatrist to the man convicted of murdering Officer Wood.

Morris's movie -- The Thin Blue Line -- was released in 1988. It attacked Mulder's tactics and alleged that Adams was wrongly convicted. This claim was substantiated the next year when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the verdict and cited Mulder for suppressing evidence and allowing perjurious testimony. Subsequently, the man who was driving the car in which Adams had supposedly been a passenger, David Harris, confessed that Adams had not been present at the time of the shooting. Twelve years after he was sentenced to death, Adams was released.

Following these developments, three attorneys who had been involved in Adams's defense asked the Texas Bar Association to investigate Mulder for possible disciplinary action. While the TBA dismissed the complaints, Mulder's reputation was tarnished. Not that it seemed to hinder his ability to secure new clients, especially those involved in highly publicized cases.

One of his clients who became nationally known, in addition to Joy Aylor, was a former high-ranking Methodist minister named Walker Railey. An exceedingly popular preacher seemingly devoted to his wife and family, Railey was accused of trying to murder his wife so he could continue an affair with his bishop's daughter.

Railey was acquitted early in 1993 after a four-week trial. Although some hailed it as a resounding victory for Mulder, others contend that the acquittal was more the result of an incompetent prosecution than dazzling defense work.

The mixed reviews accurately reflect the feelings of members of Dallas's legal community toward the controversial Mulder. In some circles he is held to be brilliant, a lawyer endowed with a special talent for spotting holes in the opposition's presentation and then tearing opposition witnesses apart with rapier-like cross-examination. Others, particularly some members of the staff in the district attorney's office, regard him as a man who is using the skill and knowledge he gained in his years as a prosecutor to enrich his reputation and pad his bank account. There is nothing many of the ADAs would like to see more than a decisive defeat for the flamboyant Mulder, especially after he manhandled the prosecution team so handily in the Railey trial. However, the two men prosecuting Joy will not be such easy targets.

Heading the district attorney's team is Kevin Chapman, a slim, balding, 38-year-old former head of the district attorney office's special projects section. A soft-spoken, even-tempered lawyer who rarely raises his voice even during heated cross-examination, Chapman is viewed as a perfectionist and an obsessive preparer, a tireless plodder who firmly believes that the key to courtroom success is groundwork rather than histrionics. In his 10 years as a prosecutor, Chapman has tried hundreds of criminal cases including four capital murder cases, winning both convictions and death penalty sentences in all of them.

Sitting in the second seat is 42-year-old Dan Hagood, a tall, athletic man with a permanent scowl on his face and a bootcamp haircut, a man known around the courthouse as "the colonel," not only because he is an actual lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve but because of his ramrod straight bearing and an apparent lack of a verifiable sense of humor. As head of the DA's organized crime division, Hagood has hundreds of trials under his belt and two more capital murder trials than Chapman, a total of six, all of which have resulted in convictions and death sentences.

The two have been preparing for Joy's trial since she was indicted in 1988, patiently collecting volumes of documents and mounds of statements. Because of their tenacity, there are many in the Dallas legal community who feel that Chapman and Hagood have become obsessed with the Aylor case, especially Chapman who resigned from the DA's staff after Hopper's trial in 1992 but returned late in 1993 specifically to try Joy.

This fixation, some feel, could be a detriment at trial, perhaps blinding Chapman and Hagood to some detail that could wreck the prosecution. This almost happened in Hopper's trial when the ADAs apparently overlooked or ignored a report from a medical laboratory that showed significant traces of the drug Thorazine in Rozanne's system when she was admitted to the hospital after the attack.

Hopper's appointed defenders, Peter Lesser and Larry Mitchell, used the report to try to convince jurors that Rozanne's estranged husband, the kidney specialist, may have been involved in her death, thus shifting some of the culpability away from their client. It was a move that apparently caught prosecutors by surprise.

The defense team hypothesized that Dr. Gailiunas, who allegedly would have had access to the drug (one of the uses of Thorazine is to prevent nausea in patients undergoing dialysis as part of the treatment for kidney disease), went to Rozanne's house, found her severely wounded, and injected her in an attempt to cause her bullet-damaged brain to swell even more, thereby hastening her death.

To the amazement of no one, Gailiunas denied this scenario under cross-examination, refusing even to concede that he had been at his estranged wife's house on the afternoon of the attack although there was testimony that implied that he was.

Forced to play catchup, Hagood and Chapman tried three different ways to explain the presence of the drug, none of which was convincing. In the end, the drug's presence was never satisfactorily accounted for. But that failed to make a difference because two other factor combined to seal Hopper's fate: His confession (see sidebar #2) and Judge Patrick McDowell, who also will preside at Joy's trial.

Totally by accident, the sixtyish McDowell, an easygoing, thoughtful man with a patrician nose and a head of judicially gray hair, was the judge in the Railey trial as well, which means he will be in the uncommon position of being intimately familiar with the styles of both the prosecution and defense: Hagood and Chapman from Hopper; Mulder from Railey.

Before taking the bench, McDowell worked both sides of the courtroom, beginning as a prosecutor and then switching to a defense firm. Somewhat surprisingly given his background, McDowell leaned heavily toward Chapman and Hagood during Hopper's trial, time and again coming down in the prosecution's favor on the close-calls.

However, Joy's trial will be different is several respects.

For one thing, Joy cannot be executed for Rozanne's murder. Before Texas officials could get her back, they had to promise the French that she would never be put to death even though the capital murder charge remains intact. More significantly, though, is the fact that Joy, unlike Hopper, has never confessed. That lack of a confession, in fact, could prove to be the major weakness in the prosecution's case.

Since McDowell long ago issued a gag order prohibiting lawyers from talking about the case or their strategy, there was no indication how Chapman and Hagood planned to connect Joy to Rozanne's murder, a link that almost certainly will have to be made to secure convictions on the charges against her.

Carol Garland was not in the picture when Rozanne was murdered. All she can testify to in that regard is what she wormed out of Joy or her ex-husband. Although Bill Garland was expected to testify that he was hired by Joy to arrange Rozanne's death, as far as is known Garland had no direct contact with the trigger man, Andy Hopper. Brian Kreafle also likely will tell the jury that he accepted money from Garland and passed it on to Hopper but he apparently lacks a tie to Joy. Chapman and Hagood have both ends of the rope, but it is severed in the middle.

Additionally, the state also will face the tricky task of proving that Joy's actions were the direct cause of Rozanne's death. Even if she had contracted for an attack on Rozanne, who besides Bill Garland (certainly not the most credible witness the state could hope for) can say that Joy wanted Rozanne murdered rather than frightened and warned away from Larry? And how can prosecutors prove that Hopper was not acting independent of any connection with Joy when he murdered Rozanne and that his actions had nothing to do with Joy's alleged contract with Garland? Hopper did not testify at his own trial and he will not testify at Joy's. That means Chapman and Hagood probably plan to back into the issue by eliciting testimony from Mike Wilson, who had promised authorities before his own trial to take the stand against Joy when and if he got the opportunity.

The situation was not ideal from the prosecution's point of view but the ADA's had little choice: Wilson appeared to be the only one could knot the ends. The implication pre-trial was that Joy said things to him before or during their ill-fated flight that would tend to incriminate her beyond what Kreafle or either of the Garlands could say.

Then, almost literally on the eve of the beginning of jury selection, Hagood and Chapman had an unbelievable stroke of good luck. Voir dire was scheduled to begin on Monday, May 9. On Thursday, May 4, federal customs agents arrested Jodie Packer as he attempted to cross the border from Mexico into Texas. While prosecutors refused to discuss their plans they undoubtedly scrambled to work a deal with him since it was believed that his testimony would be much stronger than Wilson's.

As if Packer's capture was not sufficient to make up for the problems caused by the extradition battle, the prosecution gods, using Judge McDowell as the vehicle, continued to smile on Chapman and Hagood.

Originally, Joy's jury was to be selected in a group voir dire; an individual voir dire was not deemed necessary since the death penalty was not involved. However, in an attempt to create an advantage for his client -- any advantage would do for the hard-pressed defense -- Mulder asked for panel member-by-panel member interrogation, likely hoping that would give him a better opportunity to manipulate the selection process. Judge McDowell denied the motion. But that was before Packer was captured; afterwards the situation flip-flopped and it was to the prosecution team's advantage to press for an individual voir dire. Turning the tables on Mulder, Hagood and Chapman asked McDowell for an individual voir dire although he had already denied the defense request. Their reasoning seemed to be that by stretching the jury selection process they would have sufficient time to negotiate with Packer and not be pressured by the deadline of an imminent trial.

Not surprisingly, given his history in the Hopper trial of leaning toward the prosecution, McDowell acceded to the ADA's plea and reversed himself. The result was a summer-long delay. Instead of taking a handful of days to pick a jury, it took ... TK. Testimony did not begin until ... TK ... only ... days short of the eleventh anniversary of Rozanne's murder.