trial, it was revealed that Rita could not have murdered Cyrus, as she was engaged in a sexual tryst with Roger at the time; with a solid alibi and no motive for wanting Malcolm dead, the jury also found her not guilty of his murder. The events taking place in Waco happened off-camera in 1974 and early 1975, prior to Rita's arrival in Springfield, and during a three-month-long period where Zaslow was absent from the show, so the story was told largely in flashbacks. Rita was exonerated, but at the cost of her budding relationship with Ed, who already hated Roger for his affair with Holly during their brief marriage. (Roger was, in fact the biological father of the child Holly had while married to Ed, Christina, who was born in July 1975; the truth about this came out when Chrissy needed a blood transfusion and Holly couldn't provide it because she had had hepatitis as a child. Roger had also at one point attempted to rape Holly's sister-in-law, Janet Mason Norris). On the rebound from Ed, Rita briefly dated Dr. Peter Chapman, but things did not progress when she realized that he was much more attracted to her nemesis Holly Norris Bauer. For a time, Rita was a subject of a stalker who pushed her down a flight of stairs, tampered with her brakes and set her apartment on fire (while her blind sister Eve was inside; she barely escaped). The stalker turned out to be Cyrus' mentally deranged daughter-in-law, Georgene Belmont Granger, who, regardless of the verdict, still blamed Rita for the deaths of her father-in-law, and her husband. While holding Rita and Eve at gunpoint in their apartment building laundry room in March 1978, Georgene would confess to being the real murderer of Cyrus, as well as being responsible for her husband Malcolm's death. Georgene had killed Cyrus for fear that he would change his will to leave the bulk of his fortune to Rita, unaware that he had, in fact, already done so; her husband Malcolm, admitted to Cedars following a heart attack in late 1976, died as result of a second, fatal heart attack, suffered in the midst of an argument with Georgene (who'd secretly followed him to Springfield), in which she incorrectly accused him of having had an affair with Rita. Ed and Springfield Police Chief Larry Wyatt were hiding outside the laundry room