Mayhem, Mystery and Murder Read online

  The state pathologist’s opinion coincided with Doc Grady’s. Francene had been shot four times, and any of the wounds to the chest and throat would have been fatal. There were no signs of rape or sexual molestation. In her comments on the written report, the pathologist had noted murder following rape was unlikely to involve a shooting. Bludgeoning or strangling was more typical, and there were no signs of any trauma other than the gunshot wounds. Date of death was impossible to establish for sure. At least six weeks. Perhaps as long as three months. The pathologist picked the beginning of March as the most likely time.

  Robbery as a motive was out. Francene had had no watch, no ring and no purse. Her book bag, found under her body at the scene, had a notebook and a wallet containing a crumpled dollar. Morrison was also convinced a high school student in a small rural community was a very unlikely target for a robbery. And he almost completely dismissed the likelihood of a stranger being the perpetrator. The evidence against the possibility was convincing. With no sign of rape or robbery, only a mad serial killer would have committed such a crime, and there were no reports of any similar deaths within hundreds of miles of the scene.

  A painstaking search of the surroundings had finally produced the murder weapon, a small caliber revolver, evidently tossed into the brambles, eventually becoming half-buried in mud and slime. After all that time exposed to the unfriendly elements, fingerprints were out, of course. But ownership wasn’t.

  Peter Faulks readily admitted to being the owner, saying the gun had been stolen from his house months before, “Maybe around the first of the year, sometime.” Asked why he had never reported the theft, the old man shrugged, “Wouldn’t a done no good. I reported a horse stole, back couple years ago. Never got him back. A horse is a damn sight easier to find than a revolver.”

  Questioning of high school students produced interesting leads, though the Sheriff wasn’t too sure where they were leading. Francene had been an ex-girlfriend of the very person who had discovered her body. Lester, a senior at the high school, had a well-established reputation as a “lady killer.” The sheriff wondered whether the description shouldn’t be taken more literally than intended. Even more interesting was the information concerning Lester’s current flame, Cher McPherson, who had developed a reputation of her own—possessive, hot-tempered and violently jealous. The Sheriff had put Spradley, a fairly recent graduate of the local high school, to work on finding out what he could about the victim as well as about both Lester and Cher.

  The other deputy working on the case he assigned to follow up on Peter Faulks, the owner of the murder weapon.

  Morrison had already discussed the case numerous times with Spradley and Ash. They had agreed young Lester, his girlfriend and Faulks were by far the most likely suspects, and today’s meeting was to bring everyone up to date.

  “Faulks still insists the gun was stolen months ago,” Ash said. “He claims he didn’t know Francene. He did know Lester, though. Says Lester’s family used to live a couple of places down from his patch of land back a couple of years ago, and the kid packed in some groceries for him a couple of times when he had a bad back. His house is quite the place, by the way. It’s overrun with dogs. Oh yeah. That’s something else. He says Lester came early on the day he discovered the body wanting to borrow one of the dogs to go hunting with him.”

  “Strange,” Morrison commented. “I thought Lester said it was his dog.”

  Ash broke in, “Yeah, I remember he said something like, ‘My dog found the body.’ But I guess that was just his way of talking about the mutt.”

  “Even so, Tim, see what more you can find out about the relationship between Lester and Faulks. Find out if Lester was around there about the time Francene disappeared. See if he could have lifted the gun—assuming Faulks is telling the truth. Also, check every possible way to find out if Faulks knew Francene, if he was ever seen talking to her, if she had ever been around his house—you know what I mean.

  “What have you got to report, Bill?”

  “I thought we had someone with a motive—Cher—but the more I talk to the students who know her and Lester, the more convinced I am the motive I figured on just isn’t there.”

  “Jealousy?”

  Spradley nodded. “It looks like Lester met his match in Cher. He’s got a reputation for playing the field. Francene was just one of many. Then he took up with Cher around Christmastime. She was the one who broke up with him a couple of months later—one of the few of his girlfriends who ever did—and from what I can make out, he’s been going wild trying to make up with her.”

  “OK. Keep at it. Find out whatever you can about the Francene-Lester-Cher affair. And keep good notes—both of you. If you can get their OK, record what they have to say, but be careful not to scare them off with the tape recorder. Tapes are sure nice to have, though. Sometimes when you go over and over what a person said, things pop up you weren’t aware of when you first talked to them. But if they won’t talk when you turn on the tape, shut it off.

  “Unless there’s a break in the case before then, let’s figure on getting together on this—day after tomorrow.”

  After the deputies left, Morrison sat back in his chair to give further thought to the case. Could Cher be hiding her jealousy? A girl killing another girl over a boy was not unheard of. Could the old bachelor, Faulks, have stalked Francene and been rebuffed by her? If he had, how did he entice her back into the woods? Or did he kill her somewhere else, put her body into his old pickup and drive her out to that mass of weeds and blackberry bushes? And would he have just tossed his gun into the brambles? It seemed unlikely, but he might have panicked after he killed her. Morrison made a note to check Faulks’ old pickup, and cursed himself for not thinking about doing it earlier. He consoled himself with the thought of the months of rain which would have washed any and all evidence from the bed of the pickup, anyway.

  And what about Lester? Why kill a girl he evidently no longer was interested in? And, if he did, why go out of his way to discover her body? That made no sense at all.

  On the next meeting day, Spradley had reams of information which he tried to summarize. “I must have talked to fifty students. I checked and cross-checked every story. To make several long stories short, Lester definitely broke off with Francene. He wanted nothing more to do with her. On the other hand, she wasn’t giving up. Claimed Lester had gotten her pregnant. But everyone, including Lester, knew it was a lie, especially after the months went by.

  “Cher was still jealous as hell of Francene, though, and that’s what led to the break that was breaking Lester’s heart. Even after Francene disappeared, Cher told all her friends she just knew Francene and Lester were writing to each other. She insisted Francene had gone to Seattle and was waiting for Lester to join her just as soon as he graduated. Cher made it clear she wasn’t about to go steady with someone who was going to dump her once school was out.”

  “Anything else?” Morrison asked.

  “Nope. Except Lester and Cher are lovey-dovey again. Holding hands and drinking out of the same milk shakes.

  Ash added his report. “I’ve checked every way I could think of—neighbors, acquaintances, friends. The last was easy, because Faulks doesn’t seem to have any friends. He’s got a reputation for being a loner. Maybe if his dogs could talk, I’d have learned a lot more about him. I couldn’t find connection one with Francene. Lester’s been seen around his house, though. I talked to Faulks about when Lester might have been there, but he mostly remembers the day Lester came by to borrow the dog.”

  Ash took out his pocket tape recorder. “I asked if I could tape him. He said sure. This is what he told me about the day Lester discovered the body.”

  Ash pushed the play button, and Faulks voice emerged from the machine. “The kid came by looking like a drowned muskrat and wanted to know if I’d loan him one of my hounds. He said he was going hunting. I thought he was going crazy, tramping through the soaking woods when the rain was coming down in b
uckets. Anyhow, I said sure. Old Banjo was lying there, and I figured a little exercise would do him good. He’s not much of a hunting dog anymore. His eyesight’s going, but he’d still be able to see the tree, even if he couldn’t see the squirrel. He wouldn’t have been much help with rabbits, though. Lost his sense of smell years ago. Wouldn’t be able to find a pair of dirty socks in a basket of fresh laundry. But the kid didn’t know that, and he went off with his rifle and Banjo, just as happy as if he had good sense.”

  Ash’s voice was heard to cut in, and he pushed the off button.

  “Anything else?” Morrison asked.

  “Nothing, except that he now seems to think the gun was stolen right around the end of February.”

  The Sheriff leaned back in his chair. “I think we’ve solved it.”

  The deputies exchanged startled looks. Ash shrugged his shoulders and both of them waited patiently for the sheriff to proceed. “Here’s the scenario. Cher is jealous as all hell. We know that. And who is she jealous of? Francene, of course—who’s still hanging on to Lester like a leech, practically stalking him. And Cher thinks he’s still sweet on Francene. So Lester gets the boot, along with an ultimatum.

  “But Francene keeps coming on strong, and Lester decides the only way he can get Cher back is to get rid of her. Well, he’s been in Faulks’s house and must have seen the pistol there, which is a lot handier than a rifle for what he intended to do. So he steals it, picks up Francene after school, takes her out to the woods and persuades her to go out in the brush with him—for you know what. Maybe it was one of those nice days back in February. He kills her and doesn’t bother trying to hide the body, thinking it will be weeks before it’s found out there in the brush. He’s also smart enough to figure out he won’t need an alibi if time of death can’t be firmly established.

  “And then he goes back to chasing Cher, figuring with Francene gone he’ll be welcomed with open arms. But she still won’t have anything to do with him, because she assumes Francene is still alive and waiting for him in Seattle. Lester keeps thinking someone will be finding the body soon, which will solve his problem with Cher. But he hadn’t counted on the kind of weather we got this spring. After weeks and weeks of rain, with no one out hunting or fishing, the whole countryside is so overgrown it could be fall before anyone discovers what’s left of Francene. The body has to be found—soon! So he decides to find it himself. And that’s where he made his biggest mistake.”

  “What’s that?” Ash asked as both he and Spradley leaned forward, listening intently to the very plausible scenario.

  “He knows it would be mighty suspicious for him to stumble across what’s left of Francene out there in the middle of all those blackberry vines. So he borrows a dog to provide a convenient explanation for finding the body. The only problem is he doesn’t realize the one he borrowed wouldn’t have been able to smell the corpse even if its nose had been pushed into it. Lester, not the dog, found the body. And the only reason he found it was because he put it there.”

  BLOOD TIES

  There were a host of reasons why I became interested in genealogy, but it was a combination of three of them that really accounted for why I did. A car crash by a drunken driver, the death of my wife, and my badly damaged knee. Those all happened at the same time. He was driving an enormous Lincoln, ran a red light and slammed into our Datsun, leaving my wife dead and me in the hospital for over a week. In a way, my own injuries were my salvation, since I was only partially conscious much of the first few days after the accident, and could only half comprehend that my partner of forty-seven years was gone. Recovery was slow. Friends were sympathetic and helpful. We had had no children and, in a way, I was grateful for that. I’m convinced suffering isn’t diminished by being shared.

  The first day back home I managed with my walker to roam the rooms and to finally sit and start thinking about the future. My attorney had worked out an enormous settlement. It was money I didn’t need and that would never compensate for my loss. Even my major hobby, golf, was now forever beyond me. Though never much of a computer buff, I ended up that day in front of the screen searching for a relative who had sent condolences without including a return address. From there, I stumbled across a genealogy of my mother’s family which was on a site being run by a remote relative. It was only one step from there to a check on my own last name—Lauderford.

  No one on the Internet had done any tracing of the name, so I started out to remedy the deficiency. Within days I was buying software to produce genealogical charts and tables, making e-mail contacts with several people who shared my last name, and relishing the discovery that the few of my father’s cousins whom I knew were actually part of a cluster of Lauderfords in Chesterville, not eighty miles from my home here in California. My chart grew daily, and I found what I considered to be the mother hive of Lauderfords back in Ipswich, Illinois.

  Fascinating as the subject had become, I was a bit disappointed at the absence of anything dramatic in the Lauderford family line. After a month or so of tracking down people, gathering biographies, and just generally recording family gossip, there really wasn’t much that was outstanding. One state senator in Indiana. A rather successful software producer in Seattle. A minor actress on TV. My ancestors were mainly farmers. A few—very few—Lauderfords had scattered off to foreign parts, but their lives were not much different from those of us who had remained behind in America, mostly in Illinois. The rest of my finds for the current generation were, for the most part, staid white-collar workers.

  There was one exception. Her name was Sarah Lauderford, one of the California branch. I actually remembered meeting her on some rare family occasion of relatives visiting relatives and having her described as a cousin. I was five or six at the time and she wasn’t much younger. The only reason I remembered her at all was that Sarah was distinguished by having one brown eye and one blue eye. Even then, I might not have recalled her at all if my oversensitive mother hadn’t called my attention to the phenomenon by warning me not to stare. Beyond that, my memory cell housing Sarah Lauderford was empty.

  The reason I list her as an exception to the rather drab qualities of the Lauderford clan is that she disappeared. On a visit to Chesterville to flesh out my genealogy with some face-to-face contacts, the subject of Sarah was broached almost immediately. Some thirty years before, Sarah left work, went home, packed no more than one small suitcase, climbed into a white car of undetermined make, driven by a white male—no further description available from the neighbor who had seen the departure—and was never heard from again.

  Her parents reported her absence to the police but. since Sarah was well above the age of consent and there was no evidence of foul play, the authorities took little action. My informant, a white-haired octogenarian and an aunt of the missing woman, opined that she had simply run off to live with some man. That all of her household belongings were left behind merely indicated to this lady that passion had swept aside any interest in material possessions.

  I was hard-put to check out the details of the story, since both of her parents were long-since deceased, and the only sibling was a girl some fifteen years younger than Sarah who had married a man named Kulick and moved away, presumably to Texas. I made a note of that, thinking it might be interesting to pursue the lead, but the work on the genealogy distracted me until much later, during my visit to Ipswich.

  What had at first been merely a pastime to take my mind off of my grief and aching knee had become virtually an obsession. Following my visit to Chesterville, where I met first and second cousins and others two or three times removed, my chart had expanded into a mural. And now that I had progressed to a cane, I felt it was not only feasible, but also essential to visit the mother site. Other than my knee, my health was excellent; time was of no importance; money certainly was not an impediment. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t visit the community that my great, great grandfather had left in 1858, especially since I had already established contact with some o
f my relatives back there, and they seemed genuinely interested in meeting me. So, with minimal luggage, one of those ultra-slim laptops to allow me to keep up my e-mail correspondence, and an eagerness to fill in a lot of blank spaces in my list, I left for the Midwest.

  What struck me about Ipswich was that it appeared to be as singularly unexceptional as my relatives. A farming community with all of the usual features found in such places—a bank, restaurants, a school, churches, a hardware and feed store, a railroad station, post office, library, grocery store, a few miscellaneous shops, an auto dealership, a two-story building housing a doctor, a dentist, at least two lawyers, a real estate office and the town newspaper. That was about it. What did stand out, from my viewpoint, was that the Lauderford name was the most common one in town. The first official stop of my visit uncovered that fact, when I learned that the very helpful librarian was named Denise Lauderford. “By marriage,” she assured me, but pitched in to help in my task and, in doing so, located the shaft of a gold mine.

  “Lester Lauderford was caught up in the family genealogy over forty years ago, long before computers came into the picture,” she told me, as she led me back into what passed for an archive section of the Matthias and Mary Lauderford Memorial Library. With the canny unerringness of old-style librarians, Denise zeroed in on an old manila envelope which I’m sure had not been opened in a generation. Within moments I had in my hands some seventy single-spaced, typewritten pages which included information on the Lauderfords going back three generations into Eighteenth Century England’s Dorset country.