Marianne Flippo has revealed that her father-in-law was a convicted wife-murderer while arguing with the man she accuses of scamming her out of millions.
Flippo, 49, made the bombshell disclosure during a July 7 confrontation in her attorney’s Manhattan office with silver-haired Greggory Starr, according to audio transcripts filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. The meeting brought together the wealthy widow, the male escort she claims drained her fortune, and her lawyer Larry Hutcher.
The West Virginia woman told Hutcher that her deceased husband’s father had been a pastor who killed his own wife. “My deceased husband, his father, who’s a pastor of a church… he was a murderer,” Flippo said, according to the transcript.
That father-in-law was James Michael Flippo, a pastor who brutally bludgeoned his wife Cheryl to death in a remote state-park cabin back in 1996. The killing made him infamous in West Virginia, though his connection to the current Manhattan court battle had not previously surfaced.
Flippo dropped the family secret while pushing back against Starr, a West Point and law school graduate whom she has accused of exercising what she has described as “Svengali-like control” over her. She insisted she was not intimidated by him.
“I slept in the same house with him,” Flippo continued, according to the court-filed transcript. “He’d already murdered his wife. I had to sleep under the same roof with him and he had already threatened to murder me… I’m not afraid.”
The widow also claimed the murderous father-in-law had threatened to kill her too, adding another layer of danger to her past living situation.
The confrontation in Hutcher’s office came as Flippo’s legal battle against Starr intensified. She accuses him of milking her out of $6 million following the suicide of her wealthy husband, a programmer for the online gaming platform Roblox. The husband’s death left her vulnerable and alone, a loneliness that she has said Starr exploited.
Starr has pushed back against her claims in the ongoing litigation. The July 7 meeting was evidently tense enough that Flippo felt compelled to establish her toughness by drawing on her family history of violence.
The 1996 murder by James Michael Flippo remains one of West Virginia’s more notorious domestic killings. He bludgeoned his wife Cheryl in a state-park cabin, a crime that earned him infamy and, eventually, a conviction. That his son would go on to become a wealthy Roblox programmer and marry a woman now at the center of a Manhattan scam lawsuit adds a strange coda to the family saga.
Flippo’s decision to invoke her father-in-law’s crime suggests she is determined to cast herself as a survivor rather than a victim in her dealings with Starr. Whether the revelation sways the court remains to be seen as the case continues through Manhattan Supreme Court.