Susan Elizabeth Van Note goes on trial Tuesday in the slaying of her father and his girlfriend

The murder trial of a Lee’s Summit lawyer accused of shooting her millionaire father and then forging his signature to have him taken off life support begins Tuesday in Lebanon, Mo.

Susan Elizabeth Van Note, 48, is also charged with killing her father’s longtime girlfriend in the late-night attack on Oct. 2, 2010, in a three-story home at the Lake of the Ozarks.

The girlfriend, Sharon Dickson, 59, died at the scene. William Van Note, 67, was taken to a hospital in Columbia, where he died four days later after his daughter showed up with a durable power of attorney for health care dated Sept. 23, 2009. His signature was at the bottom.

Or so doctors thought when they shut off his ventilator and William Van Note died, slowly.

Investigators say Susan Van Note produced the document from one she’d prepared for a client three days before the shooting. Also, two persons listed as witnesses to William Van Note’s signature admitted to detectives that Susan Van Note brought the document to them after her father had been shot, court documents say.

Prosecutors say the daughter went to her father’s Sunrise Beach, Mo., house that night to kill the couple because she wanted to get her hands on his money. She was executor of his will, but it named Dickson as the prime beneficiary.

Susan Van Note was an attorney who specialized in “end-of life” matters.

During questioning, she acknowledged a volatile relationship with her father. She said that when she was a teenager, “I was going to run him over with his boat, but then he stopped water skiing.”

A friend of William Van Note’s remembered him saying of his daughter: “She hates me because I left her mother.”

What would seem particularly damaging to Van Note’s defense is evidence that allegedly shows her cellphone pinged a transmission tower seven miles from her father’s home. The call was made five minutes after her father called 911, court documents say.

Susan Van Note’s mother, Barbara Van Note, told investigators that Susan was home in Lee’s Summit with her when the shootings occurred. Lee’s Summit is 119 miles — two hours — from Sunrise Beach.

In 2005, Barbara Van Note went to prison for forging her mother’s name to a power of attorney. She was ordered to repay $108,000 to a trust fund.

In the months leading up to Susan Van Note’s trial on two counts of first-degree murder, defense attorneys argued that investigators cut corners in getting the cellphone records.

“Camden County detectives never sought a warrant for this information prior to executing the investigative subpoenas,” a motion said.

They later withdrew the motion.

Monday, the judge will hear arguments about whether Van Note’s legal team will be allowed to use a “someone else did it” defense. No evidence gathered at the scene — hair, fiber, DNA — puts her in the house at the time of the crime, the attorneys say.

Jury selection is set for Tuesday morning.

The case was moved to nearby Laclede County. The trial is expected to last 12 days.

The Missouri attorney general’s office is assisting county prosecutors.

William Van Note, who had been a prominent Liberty businessman, and Dickson had been together 20 years. Friends say the two had what seemed like a high school romance.

“He was ornery, and she made him laugh,” a woman said of the couple shortly after Susan Van Note was arrested.

Court documents say that William Van Note had a net worth in 2009 of nearly $8 million. After his death, Susan Van Note assumed the role of executor of the estate.

In September 2012, a grand jury indicted Susan Van Note for both murders and forgery. Investigators had seized Van Note’s laptop computer from her Kansas City law office and found the power of attorney document for her father filed under the name of a woman who hired Van Note to prepare the same kind of document for her.

A judge set bond at $1 million — an amount that typically keeps someone locked up, especially someone who had filed bankruptcy three years earlier.

But about three weeks after her arrest, someone showed up at the jail in Columbia with a cashier’s check for $1 million.

“She’s got more friends than I do,” Tom Bath, one of her attorneys, said at the time.

An attorney for Andrew Dickson, Sharon Dickson’s son, then asked a judge to remove Susan Van Note as executor of the estate. A judge agreed and froze the assets.

Van Note’s replacement, David Holdsworth, a Liberty attorney, quickly filed a petition asking that she be ordered to return any estate property she had used for herself.

Van Note claimed she couldn’t because she had used the money to post her bond. She was found in contempt and sent back to jail.

This story was originally published June 7, 2015 at 6:04 PM with the headline "Susan Elizabeth Van Note goes on trial Tuesday in the slaying of her father and his girlfriend."