Susan Van Note video: ‘I hope he wakes up and has something to tell you guys’

Susan Elizabeth Van Note may not testify in her double-murder trial, but the jury heard from her Thursday.

Prosecutors played a video of investigators talking to Van Note shortly after the attack that left her father critically injured and his longtime girlfriend dead.

“Have you talked to him?” she asked the detectives.

They said they had not because of his injuries. They told her the investigation was just beginning and they wanted her to tell them about her father, his business dealings and anything else that might help them solve the case.

Her father, Liberty businessman William Van Note, 67, was rushed to the hospital on Oct. 2, 2010, after he and his longtime girlfriend, Sharon Dickson, 59, were attacked inside their vacation home at the Lake of the Ozarks. Both were shot and stabbed multiple times.

Dickson died at the scene. William Van Note died in a Columbia hospital after being removed from life support.

Susan Van Note is charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

Camden County Medical Examiner Keith Norton, who performed the autopsies, testified Thursday that both victims suffered gunshot and stab wounds. Dickson was stabbed 18 times, with some of the wounds to her aorta and lungs, including one that penetrated 4 1/2 inches deep.

As the video played for the jury Thursday, Susan Van Note sat motionless and appeared to show no reaction. In the video, she frequently laughed with the detectives.

At one point, she asked them, “Sharon was shot and stabbed, is that right?”

She told the detectives that she and her father had a great relationship and how she felt about Dickson.

“I loved Sharon,” Van Note said. “She was great.”

She complimented Dickson for her grace in putting up with her father, whom she described as sometimes cranky and hard to get along with.

“She’d just smile and go on,” Van Note said. “She was just such a nice person.”

And she had to put up with a lot, she said.

“If my dad was around a woman for 10 minutes he’d be asking her to take her top off and show him her, uh, body parts,” she said. “Even the waitress.”

At the end of the hourlong interview, she said, “I hope he wakes up and has something to tell you guys.”

Authorities say Van Note, 48, a Lee’s Summit lawyer who specialized in end-of-life matters, wanted to get her hands on her father’s millions and was angry that he had named Dickson to receive the bulk of his estate.

Defense lawyers have countered that the state has no forensic evidence linking Van Note to the crime.

Prosecutors say she forged her father’s signature to a document to have his hospital ventilator shut off four days after the attack.

An official from the University of Missouri Hospital in Columbia testified Thursday about meeting with Van Note about her wish to have her father removed from life support.

Myra McCoig, the hospital’s risk management coordinator, testified that Van Note was adamant that her father did not like hospitals and would not want to be there.

“She was very firm that he would not want to be hooked up to a ventilator,” McCoig testified. “I told her we needed to see what was going on medically first.”

Van Note presented a health care directive for her father. McCoig said she sent the document to lawyers for examination because of concern that Van Note was listed as next of kin and also as the notary on the document.

That was very unusual, McCoig said, and she asked Van Note about it.

“She said her father hated lawyers,” McCoig said.

McCoig said Van Note shared a story about her brother, who had long, grueling death. Van Note said it was a very hard time on her family.

After deliberation, hospital officials decided to not go by the health care directive, but instead to go with wishes of next of kin. McCoig asked Van Note what she wanted to do.

“She decided to not continue care,” McCoig said.

McCoig went to the ICU after William Van Note was removed from life support.

“Doesn’t he look peaceful?” she quoted Van Note as saying.

Prosecutor Kevin Zoellner had McCoig read parts of the directive. It said in part that William Van Note’s wish was that he not be kept alive unless he could return “to 100 percent of cognitive self. No code blue response. That all procedures to prolong life be discontinued.”

On cross examination, co-defense attorney Tricia Bath had McCoig repeat that the directive ultimately was not the basis for termination of care and that the defendant was the proper person to make that decision.

Investigators noticed that the signatures on the health care directive were not consistent with signatures of William Van Note that had been found during a search of the Van Note house.

Don Lock, a forensic consultant on handwriting analysis, compared the signatures in what he called a close and critical study under a microscope. He found significant dissimilarities, he testified.

The signatures on the health care directive were written slowly and deliberately, with many pen lifts and hesitations, Lock said.

He said he counted 15 pen lifts in one of the signatures. The signer stopped three times on the “W” alone, Lock said.

“It is my opinion that that William Van Note did not sign those signatures,” said Lock, who worked 30 years for the Missouri Highway Patrol crime lab.

The trial is expected to continue into next week.

This story was originally published February 9, 2017 at 11:34 AM with the headline "Susan Van Note video: ‘I hope he wakes up and has something to tell you guys’."