BATON ROUGE, La. — A lawsuit claims a Baton Rouge man improperly collected a $500,000 payout from his business partner’s life insurance policy after the partner gunned down his estranged wife and shot and killed himself in Killingworth, Connecticut last year.
A federal judge on Monday ordered the U.S. Marshals Service to seize money that Todd Hines received from the policy for his deceased business partner, Billy Wayne Newman.
Beebe’s family had sued Hines on Friday to recover the money, which they argued should have gone to the couple’s two young children. Their suit claimed Hines improperly collected the proceeds after Newman illegally replaced Beebe as the policy’s beneficiary with Hines less than two weeks before Newman killed her and himself on Nov. 25. Beebe had filed for divorce earlier in the month.
Hines said after the ruling that he did nothing wrong. During an interview at his home Monday, Hines said he hasn’t spent any of the policy proceeds and doesn’t want to profit from the “tragedy” that cost him two friends. But he said he has honored Billy Wayne Newman’s decision to make him the policy’s beneficiary after Beebe filed for divorce.
Hines says he never saw any warning signs before the shootings and still can’t make sense of what happened.
