Murder in Massachusetts

The Phone Call

Faced with growing evidence that she knew more than she had originally told police, on December 6, 2005, Amanda Robinson came forward and gave police a third statement, "without any threats or promises" by police, she said, which seemed to further tighten the noose around her mother's neck.

Amanda wanted to set the record straight. There was a phone call between Amanda and her imprisoned boyfriend that she had no idea had been recorded by prison officials—which made it clear to law enforcement that Amanda was holding even more information back. The phone call explained, in part, that Patricia may have been involved in her husband's death. During that recorded call, on the night of January 10, 2005, Amanda told her boyfriend, "That thing [went down] that my brother said, 'It was going to happen tonight,' and my mother said if it doesn't happen, 'She's gone.' ..."

Further into the call, Amanda explained how "shocked" she was that the murder had taken place. She never thought it would actually happen.

"I told [my boyfriend]," Amanda recalled to police after they confronted her with the recorded call, "that my mother was asking me to find someone to murder Neil Olsen. ... I can't give a timeline as to when my mom started talking about wanting to have Neil murdered. After a while, that became the main topic of my mom's conversations with me ... It's not that I wanted him dead like my mother did. I felt that I was being pressured by my mother to help her. My mother would talk to me about it morning, noon, and night. It wasn't easy living in that house. It was the only thing she seemed to want to talk about."

Someone close to Amanda, Christopher and Patricia told me later that Amanda "lied about a lot of things" to protect herself from prosecution. That same source also claimed Amanda later denied her entire statement to police and today "feels guilty" about it. The source said Amanda and Christopher had dredged up this terrible lie about Patricia to "get back at her" for the way Neil treated them. They were upset, this source further stated, because their mother allowed Neil's severe disciplinary tactics to incapacitate their lives and Patricia never stood up for them.

Nevertheless, during the early part of 2005, days after her husband's brutal murder, the pieces of a conspiracy to kill Neil Olsen were fitting together. It seemed that the more police spoke to Amanda, the more she remembered—and the more those words made it appear that Patricia Olsen had not only sanctioned the murder of her husband, but that she financed and initiated it as well.