Albert T. Lambert, a 52-year-old emergency room doctor at Florida Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, overdosed on drugs yesterday just before police could arrest him for the murder of his ex-wife, Kimberly Lindsey, a nurse at Bak Middle School of the Arts in West Palm Beach. Police records also mention Lambert working at Raulerson Hospital in Okeechobee, and an online profile says he also worked at Apollo Medical Group in Lauderdale Lakes and Parkland Memorial Hospital and that he graduated from the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1987.
Lambert and Lindsey had been in a contentious divorce that was initiated in 2010 and made final this year. They continued to fight over alimony, child support, and car payments. Lambert, who made more than $200,000 a year, was ordered to pay $7,300 monthly to Lindsey, who had been a stay-a-home mom until the divorce and then made $3,400 a month as a nurse. During a hearing on Friday, October 25, Albert Lambert told the judge he would "disappear or go to jail" before paying monies owed, according to the probable cause affidavit police had prepared as they moved to arrest Albert.
That weekend, Lindsey went to visit one of the couple's three daughters at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. Phone records show she arrived home safely, but when she failed to show up for work Monday, a coworker alerted police. A cop entered her Palm Beach Gardens house that afternoon and found her bed missing its sheets, a shirt and bra on the floor, and a trail of blood from the bed's headboard, down the stairs, into the garage, and on a Toyota Camry in the driveway.
The couple's youngest daughter told police she had spent that weekend with her father. She ate dinner with him and went to bed at 10:30 Sunday night. She said she left the keys to a Camry on a dresser when she went to bed. Her father woke her up at 5 a.m. Monday, and she drove the Camry to school. When she was called out of class after learning of her mother's disappearance, she drove the Camry to her mother's house, where investigators saw the blood on it.
Police could not locate Lambert last Monday, and when they made contact with him via phone Tuesday, he said he was retaining a lawyer but did not do anything wrong. That day, police determined that Lambert had purchased a .22 caliber pistol in West Palm Beach on October 9 and picked it up October 19. Police and family launched a publicity blitz and Facebook campaign to find the missing Lindsey. Then on Wednesday, workers in Hendry County found a body in a canal in a sugar-cane field. The head and fingertips had been cut off and the woman had been shot in the chest with a .22 caliber bullet.
On Thursday, Lambert was seen on video with his sister at his residence. On Friday, through more interviews with the daughters, police learned that Lambert had keys to the Camry and to Lindsey's house. On Saturday, they searched his home and found a towel and clothes with his blood on it. Yesterday, blood tests confirmed that Lindsey's blood was on Lambert's clothes.
Cops had been surveilling Lambert. Yesterday, as they were waiting outside the home of his sister in South Miami and preparing to arrest him, police saw the sister and her boyfriend carrying a white sheet that obviously contained a dead body -- Lambert's. CPR was performed but he could not be revived. Police later said his death was apparently from a drug overdose.
On the Facebook page "Find Kim Lindsey," her daughters were seeking pictures of their mom and people were offering heartfelt messages and condolences. Commenters said that Lindsey, a 49-year-old green-eyed blond, was warm, friendly, and well-loved.
At a news conference yesterday, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said Lambert knew Hendry County well and may have had a girlfriend there. It was unclear whether Lambert's sister and her boyfriend were being investigated or implicated in the case.
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