by Ann Rule
While Joyce believed that Chuck had been abusive to Teresa and she felt sorry for her, that was no reason to kill the man. That’s what “whack” meant, she thought; she’d heard it on gangster television shows.
But why? Teresa wasn’t in danger anymore; she and Chuck didn’t live together any longer. They were both involved with other people, and, until last November, Teresa said she hadn’t even been in Chuck’s house at the lake for a couple of years.
Joyce knew better than to try to talk Teresa out of any plans she made. And besides, she couldn’t believe that Teresa would really kill Chuck. She often behaved
dramatically—that was part of what made her an interesting friend. Being with Teresa was a little like being in the center of a soap opera.
Telling herself it would be okay, Joyce Lilly was able to get to sleep on Wednesday night. But in the wee hours of February 20, her phone trilled and she woke up instantly, her heart thumping. It was Teresa, and she sounded very upset. She begged Joyce to come to her apartment.
As she always did, Joyce said she’d be there as soon as she could. Teresa hung up before she could ask her any questions. It took her an hour to get dressed and arrive at Teresa’s. When Joyce got there, Teresa was smoking and drinking scotch. “She was very shaken—almost quivering,” Joyce said, “and Teresa’s always in control—always.”
Teresa immediately handed her a white plastic bag that was tightly tied at the top.
“I want you to put this in the trunk of your car,” she said.
“What’s in it?”
“Just do it, and I’ll tell you when you come back in.”
“You did it?” Rick Lilly asked, disgust and alarm in his voice. “What happened then?”
“I did it. Teresa said, ‘I shot Chuck. Three times.’ And I asked her ‘What?’ ” Joyce said, sobbing.
Teresa said she’d found Chuck alone, sound asleep in his bed. She had fired two or three times at him and hit him in the chest.
“He got up out of bed and chased me,” Teresa recalled, shivering. At one point, Chuck had gotten close enough to her at the top of the stairs to grab her by the ankle, but then his grip loosened.
“At the top of the stairs, he gasped,” Teresa said, “and then he made a noise and fell—”
“What did you do?” Joyce asked. “Did he look at you? Did he look in your eyes?”
“I ran,” Teresa said. “Yes … he looked in my eyes.”
Teresa told her good friend that she didn’t know if Chuck was dead. She thought he was alive. “He’s so strong,” she breathed. “He’s so strong …”
She didn’t seem to know just what time it was when she shot Chuck, but she was sure she was back in her apartment by five in the morning.
Joyce Lilly didn’t want to believe Teresa. Teresa was always full of drama and exaggeration. Surely this was another of her fantasies—like the night she dressed in her “camouflage” outfit.
“Where did you get a gun?” Joyce had asked in a doubtful voice.
“I bought it from some guy in a bar,” Teresa had said, with a hint of pride in her voice. “It was just like a TV thing.”
Joyce Lilly drove home with the white plastic bag in the trunk of her car. Teresa had also given Joyce the key to Chuck’s house, even though Joyce didn’t want it.
“Well, I can’t have it, you need to take it,” Teresa said imperiously.
Joyce threw the key away by tossing it in a planter barrel at a Jack in the Box restaurant on her way home.
She was horrified the next morning when the news that Chuck Leonard had been murdered circulated among their friends, and then was on the top of the radio and television news shows around Seattle and Everett.
Still, Joyce didn’t look in the bag. She didn’t want to know what was in it. It stayed in her car trunk, like a poisonous snake or a time bomb, while she worried about what she should do. She decided, finally, to move it to her garage.
Joyce admitted now to Brad Pince and Jim Scharf that she had known that Teresa was lying to them on the night of February 20 when they came to her house to question Teresa. She told them about Teresa’s hair appointment that day, and how she had hidden Teresa’s car in her own garage at her request. This was the first time that had ever happened.
She repeated Teresa’s statement on the day of Chuck’s murder when she said she planned to “whack” him.
Still half-expecting to go to jail, Joyce was reassured when that didn’t happen. As she left the sheriff’s office, she wasn’t confident that it wouldn’t occur in the following days and she shuddered every time her phone rang or there was a knock on her door. When days passed and she wasn’t arrested, she began to feel somewhat more at ease.
As Joyce continued to clean out her garage, she came across something that she knew she hadn’t put there. It was an almost-full box of .45-caliber ammunition.
Again through her lawyer, Joyce Lilly contacted the investigators at the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. She was a lot calmer than she was the first time she talked to them. And she revealed more hidden things.
“I loaned Teresa a small handgun in October—last fall,” she said. “She told me that she needed a gun because she and Morgan lived alone in an apartment and she had no protection. Rick gave it to me a few years ago for the same reason, taught me how to use it, and I fired it once or twice—but I never used it. It made me nervous to have it in my house.”
“Do you know what caliber it was?” Pince asked.
“I’m not sure what a caliber is. It was a small silver gun. It seems as though it might have been a .25 or .22, something like that. Teresa took it out in the backyard and fired it into the ground—to see if it worked.
“I haven’t seen it since October. It was after she borrowed it that she told me that she had been in Chuck’s house one night.”
“Do you know when?” Pince asked.
She shook her head. “It would have been a few months ago—before Christmas. Teresa told me she saw Chuck and his girlfriend in bed, so she left.”
That would jibe with what Michelle Conley told detectives about the November intruder that she’d followed in her car. But she had lost the intruder in the dark. At the time, she believed it was Teresa’s car. However, Chuck had decided not to report the matter to police.
Joyce said she wasn’t sure where Teresa was at the moment. She had been avoiding Teresa.
Armed with the new information from Joyce Lilly, Michael Downes, a senior deputy prosecution attorney for Snohomish County, filed an affidavit of probable cause. He asked for the arrest of Teresa Gaethe-Leonard on first-degree-murder charges. It was granted almost immediately.
On Sunday night, March 2, ten days after Chuck Leonard died, Teresa appeared at the Snohomish County Courthouse in Everett. She did not, however, walk in under her own power to be booked. She was accompanied by her defense attorney, George Cody, who had driven her there, but she was passed out in the backseat of his car, far too intoxicated—or possibly under the influence of drugs—to walk. Cody was very worried about her condition. At length, Cody and Detectives Jim Scharf and John Padilla managed to rouse her and support her as they walked her into the booking area. She was arraigned the next day in district court.
Cody told reporters that she would plead not guilty to the charges against her. He explained that her surrender “doesn’t mean she confessed. It means she didn’t try to run. She has not made any admission whatsoever to the police in any way of being involved in Chuck Leonard’s death.”
The judge wasn’t so sure that Teresa wouldn’t try to run in the days ahead, so he set her bail at $500,000 and directed that it be cash only. This would assure that Teresa would remain behind bars for two more weeks. At that time, Michael Downes would have to refile the case against her in Superior Court.
Teresa was not without support. Her employees asserted that she was still a nice little woman and they didn’t believe she was capable of shooting anyone. They sent word that they would keep
her shop open for her and help in any way they could. Even her new lawyer found her vulnerable and sweet. He felt sorry for her. Like so many middle-aged men before him, George Cody was already stepping into Teresa Gaethe-Leonard’s circle of devoted admirers.
Nick Callas didn’t really know what was going on. Teresa had phoned him in Hawaii and told him that Chuck had died suddenly.
“What happened?” Nick asked her at the time.
“They don’t know,” she’d said. “Some kind of profound trauma—”
Nick said later that his mind had flashed to an automobile accident, and he’d pictured Chuck Leonard hitting a tree or telephone pole while driving one of his sports cars. Teresa hadn’t said anything about a gun or murder—
nothing but “profound trauma.”
Even though he and Teresa had been lovers since 1987, years before Teresa met and married Chuck, Nick Callas knew very little about her life. They had made a pact that they wouldn’t talk about unhappy things or her family background. For Nick, Teresa had always been sexy, fun, a woman without problems.
Chuck Leonard had his army of supporters, too. He wasn’t a man to talk about his problems either—except to very close friends. He was witty and funny and kind. Everyone had liked Chuck—with the possible exception of Teresa and the friends she had told about his “brutality” toward her.
Somehow, Teresa had managed to keep her juggling act of a life together for years. Of all people, the archaic mystery writer’s term “a tissue of lies” fit Teresa. She’d kept her wealthy lover, married Chuck, given birth to Morgan, and managed to convince any number of people that Chuck was abusive toward her. Those who knew him couldn’t believe it—any more than Teresa’s allies could believe that she would shoot a man to death as he slept.
News stories proliferated each day with more and more shocking details about the Leonards’ marriage, and his fatal shooting. The Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office said that they believed Teresa had taken a bead on her estranged husband as he lay sound asleep, and started firing. “He was hit in the arm and twice more in the chest,” Michael Downes told District Judge Thomas Kelly. “One of those .45-caliber bullets penetrated his chest—and that was the wound that killed him.”
On autopsy, Dr. Selove had found that Chuck had died of exsanguination: he had bleed to death after being shot.
The public had no idea what motive Teresa might have had to kill her husband. The affidavit for probable cause remained sealed.
There were still many secrets about Teresa. She told people that she was thirty-three and that was what her driver’s license said, but her divorce papers listed her as thirty-seven.
Her attorney, George Cody, sat beside Teresa in an attorney-client room in the Snohomish County Jail and communicated with the court through a closed-circuit video hookup as he asked for a reduction in her bail. Teresa said nothing.
Cody asked that her bail be lowered to $100,000, since she had willingly talked to detectives at least four times before she surrendered just before midnight on the previous Sunday. “If she was going to flee,” he pointed out, “she already would have done so.”
Downes argued against a bail reduction. The prisoner had, after all, proven herself a community threat when she shot Chuck Leonard, and had no particular ties to the community: her family was in Louisiana and her wealthy boyfriend was in Hawaii.
Judge Thomas Kelly took both sides into consideration and lowered Teresa’s bail to $200,000.
Close to a dozen of Chuck Leonard’s relatives and friends observed these arguments about bail. Two of them were attractive women who identified themselves as his former girlfriends. Even though they had long since ended romantic attachments to him, they had remained platonic friends. The group watched and listened and dabbed at the tears that often filled their eyes. What did money matter now that Chuck was gone?
But it did. Enough cash could get Teresa out of jail. The Snohomish County detectives were extremely uneasy about that possibility, fearing that she would “rabbit” on them and disappear.
When she was charged with first-degree murder in Snohomish County Superior Court a week later, her bail was once more raised to $500,000.
Deputy Prosecutor Downes had little difficulty convincing Judge Kathryn Trumbull that Teresa, for all her demure appearance, was a danger to the community, and a flight risk with access to money, and that she might well take six-year-old Morgan and disappear.
Someone was already inquiring about how to wire money to bail her out, someone who didn’t seem at all abashed that it would take almost $200,000 to gain her release. The man, who called the sheriff’s office from Hawaii, asked to have his name kept private.
It was, of course, Teresa’s wealthy lover, Nick Callas. He said he was prepared to wire the money. Callas didn’t want to leave Hawaii, and he only grudgingly agreed to meet with Michael Downes, Brad Pince, and John Padilla if they flew to Maui to talk to him.
Michael Downes was not only concerned that Teresa might leave Washington State, but he felt that Joyce Lilly’s life might be in danger. If Joyce hadn’t gone to the sheriff, Teresa might well have walked away scot-free: no jail, no bail, no trial. And Downes feared that Joyce—who was probably going to be the State’s prime witness against her former friend—might seem expendable to Teresa. In the prosecutor’s view, Chuck Leonard had gotten in the way of Teresa’s plans to move to Hawaii—and he was dead. Joyce was now a serious impediment to the defendant’s freedom and the life she visualized. Although detectives in the sheriff’s office were keeping an eye on Joyce, they couldn’t be with her all the time.
Now the evidence against Teresa was being slowly unveiled. Although her name was not given to reporters, Joyce Lilly had received immunity from prosecution in exchange for her cooperation with sheriff’s investigators.
The white plastic bag that Joyce gave to Brad Pince contained a dark brown polar-fleece jacket with some sort of emblem on the shoulder, a pair of sweatpants, light brown leather boots with a large bloodstain on one toe, bullets, and a magazine for a .45-caliber handgun. The gun itself was at the bottom of the bag. It was securely locked in the evidence room at the sheriff’s office, each item bagged, sealed, dated, and signed by the investigator who had entered it into the chain of evidence.
George Cody objected to this alleged evidence being admitted into any forthcoming trial, saying, “I can’t comment on it because I haven’t seen it. I know what they say they’ve got, but I don’t know what they have.”
Cody pointed out that Teresa had no criminal record or history of making threats. And as far as anything the investigation had turned up so far, that was true. He described her as a dedicated mother who would never leave her daughter. Nor would she close down her business. She needed that income to survive.
Everything in the white bag was going to the Washington State crime lab to be tested for fingerprints, hair, DNA, and rug and fabric fibers that might link to Teresa or to someone else.
The sheriff’s investigators had searched Teresa’s home, her consignment shop, and her car, looking for receipts that might show what she had purchased or where she had been in the days before Chuck’s fatal shooting. She obviously hadn’t had the .45 back in October 1996, when she borrowed Joyce’s handgun, but she had one on the night Chuck died.
Joyce didn’t think Teresa had returned her small handgun. Sometime after Chuck’s murder and Joyce’s accusations about Teresa, Joyce found a backpack in her garage when she was packing to move. At the time she didn’t look inside it, assuming it belonged to her twenty-one-year-old son. But in April 1997, she did look. There she found her .25-caliber gun, wrapped in a woman’s handkerchief, along with a small box of ammunition. She had no idea how it got there. Apparently Teresa had put it in her garage sometime over the past five months.
The Snohomish County detectives didn’t find a receipt for the .45, but they did find a letter from a realtor on Maui, thanking her for her interest in buying property there. Oddly, they found a cr
edit card in the name of Chuck’s mother, Ann, who had been dead for almost five years. The card had been issued after her death, and the address was for Teresa’s consignment shop—where Ann Leonard had never lived.
George Cody said he didn’t find that strange. “It was a cash card that had to be tied to a bank account.” He told the judge that Chuck Leonard had often had mail sent to his wife’s shop when they were together and that the victim had maintained his bank account jointly with his mother long after she was deceased.
But what was Teresa doing with it?
One person that Pince, Scharf, and Downes wanted to talk to was Nick Callas. Initially, he declined to speak with them, saying through his attorney that there was no advantage to him to become involved. But the Washington State lawmen were not going to back off so easily. Michael Downes threatened to legally summon Callas from Hawaii to Everett at county expense, where he would be expected to give a deposition on what he knew about Teresa, her relationship with her estranged husband—and with him—and the murder of Chuck Leonard. Superior Court Judge Anita Farris agreed with Downes’s motion for a subpoena.
Would Callas come? Or would he change his mind about answering questions in Hawaii and decide that that would be a lot easier than a six-hour flight to the Northwest? Actually, Judge Farris had no jurisdiction in Hawaii, but the investigators believed that the rich condo owner might decide that being an “uncooperative witness” was not in his best interest after all. Downes, Pince, and Padilla were still willing to fly to Hawaii to talk with Teresa’s purported lover there.
Teresa had not appeared as yet in court in person, her participation having been accomplished through closed-circuit television. Finally Teresa showed up in the courtroom for the first time in a pretrial hearing. There was a murmur in the courtroom as she was led to her chair at the defense table. She was a pretty woman, more slender than ever after weeks of jail cuisine, and so pale and breakable-looking. There were unshed tears in her eyes. The body language and facial expressions on court watchers signaled what they were thinking: How could this sweet-looking woman kill a man in cold blood?
