She stayed in touch with her parents, who made it clear they still loved her but despised Meek. In the spring of 1984 she and Meek decided to return to Alaska. Page left a good-bye note for her coworkers, using a quote from D. H. Lawrence.
Dear Pilot friends:
I leave you with these words of wisdom. There is no point in work unless it absorbs you like an absorbing game. If it doesn’t absorb you, it isn’t fun, don’t do it. “All that we have while we live is life. If you don’t live during your life, all you are is a piece of dung.” Fare ye well, Page.
But the relationship was beginning to erode and crumble. Fewer than six months after returning to Alaska, Meek and Jennings headed south again. They broke up in Seattle and Page returned to Rockport, Texas, in September 1984, then went back to New England. She visited a psychiatrist, then decided to accompany her brother Christopher to Gainesville, Florida, where he had landed a job with the Gainesville Sun.
Page Jennings got a job as a waitress at the Stacks restaurant in the Gainesville downtown Holiday Inn. Soon afterward, around December 4, 1984, Glyde Earl Meek appeared and persuaded Page to let him move in with her, sharing her bedroom in the apartment where she was living with her brother Chris.
Chris Jennings was disgusted and infuriated. Not only was the loathsome Meek back in his sister’s life again, he was squatting under the selfsame roof now. Chris was on the threshold of a new career and was trying to help his sister get her life straightened out. But Meek wouldn’t let go, and Page seemed unable to find the backbone to break up with him. Life in the little apartment became unendurable for all three. Page found herself vacillating hopelessly between two men who detested each other.
“It always seemed like, when there was a conflict, Page ended up getting hurt. I was trying to find a way to make him feel hurt. I didn’t like him because he was pulling Page one way and my parents were pulling her another,” Chris Jennings said later.
“Her brother who was ‘helping’ her got to pressuring her thoughts into telling me to leave forever. She couldn’t tell him to hurt him or me to hurt me. She kept it all inside and it became too much for her,” Meek had written in the longer suicide note.
“She was a real nice girl but she had a lot of problems,” a waiter named John Hughes told reporters after the deaths. “I think she wanted to get away from the guy, but she didn’t know how and was scared to.”
Another worker at the Stacks restaurant, Kenneth Denman, recounted afterward how he saw Meek several times when he came to pick up Page after her shift at the Holiday Inn. He described Meek as “rough-looking.” He remembered how Meek would sit in a booth and drink coffee, wearing a red and white baseball hat with the word “Page” stenciled across the bill.
Throughout late December and early January, Meek came and went on mysterious business trips. Police have traced his movements to Louisiana, Texas and Jacksonville, Florida, where he bought the blue Fiat later found in the field beside the burned cabin. He seems to have stolen another Fiat, this one painted silver, in Corpus Christi, Texas, on January 5.
Page decided not to go home for Christmas 1984. Her parents were bitterly disappointed. This decision may have played a part in the tragic denouement, now only days away.
On January 5, 1985, after an ugly three-way quarrel, Page Jennings and Glyde Earl Meek moved out of the apartment she shared with her brother Chris. Chris told her she would have to leave unless she renounced Meek, in which case she would be welcome to stay.
Page chose Meek. The couple took a room at the Gator Court Motel in Gainesville. Meek rented a storage space in a mini-ware house named Atkins Storage. On January 11, Page went back to collect her half of the apartment deposit. It was the last time her brother saw her alive.
Now Meek headed north alone, on an errand of murder. On January 12 he booked a room at a motel in Brattleboro, North Carolina. The next night he checked into the Bridgeport Motor Inn in Connecticut.
On January 14, Meek was seen in Hartford, Connecticut, attempting to pawn some jewelry. The pawnbroker recalled that Meek had said the jewelry belonged to his daughter, who had died in a skiing accident. Later in the same conversation he switched stories, saying his daughter had died in a car accident.
Matters now moved to mortal conclusions. On January 16, in New Hampshire, Malcolm and Betty Jennings were found murdered in their blazing hotel. They had been tied up with nylon rope in separate bedrooms before being stabbed to death. Their son Chris was notified by police and left for New Hampshire immediately. This act of filial piety probably saved his life, because police later found a second suicide note, also dated January 18 and signed by Meek, in Chris Jennings’s apartment.
In his first suicide note, found near the scene, Meek seemed to describe the anxieties of traveling up to New Hampshire to murder Page’s parents and setting fire to their inn.
In the past week we have talked over plans that were brought up many times when ever she was depressed. At first we would go together and “make them pay.” It finally came to me going while she waited for me to get back and we’d die together by cremation…. Sometimes, as I drove up and back, I think she thought I would get up there, do what we wanted and get caught coming back all that time and distance. Only one road out and a fire would attract immediate attention so would be reported quickly….
Later, after the burned cabin and the skeletons were discovered near High Springs, police visited Chris Jennings’s apartment seeking evidence. They found a desperate message from Chris to Page taped to the door of the apartment. Written moments after Chris had been notified of the murders of his parents and was en route to New Hampshire, the note gave Page three emergency telephone numbers to call. The rest of the message read:
PAGE!
I REALLY NEED YOU!
LOVE,
CHRIS
But there was a heavy scrawl in another hand defacing this note. The “you!” at the end of the first line had been crossed out and a huge NO! had been scrawled over it and underlined many times.
Inside the apartment, on two sheets of Gainesville Sun stationery in the same handwriting as that used in the long suicide note found in the Fiat, Meek had written his last, angry message to Chris Jennings. This note spoke clearly of the New Hampshire murders, referring to the older Jenningses as “Mal” and “Betty”:
Friday 18 Jan 1985
This and the note telling Page to take the “eggs, milk, flour, onions, cheese—etc did it Bucko. We are together now always and forever. Mike.
“Right will prevail” as you wrote in your scheeming letter to Page in Alaska about taking the bus, or flying, or riding down to Seattle or riding down to Texas and then pretending to go home for a couple weeks. You bastard—!
“Daniels is a dead man” if he comes here, you wrote.
You live with it all now, Bucko—Mal, Betty and us. Meddling fools.
Page is so bitter that this is the only way she can see how we can be together forever. Cremation.
Call the police—they have some letters and information for you or whatever.
This second note is unsigned, save for the name “Mike,” after the first paragraph, presumably derived from Meek’s alias, Daniel Mikel Daniels, the same name he used in the second, longer suicide note.
Both suicide notes are dated January 18 and it appears the old abandoned cabin was set on fire that day. The Jenningses were buried in New Hampshire on January 19, and Chris Jennings spoke the eulogy. He still believed his sister was alive. “I’m sure she’s just off playing and will be devastated when she hears the news,” he said to reporters.
On January 28 the fire-wasted cabin and the calcined skeletons were discovered near High Springs. Two days later the remains were delivered over to me for examination.
My feelings upon seeing the thousands of commingled bone fragments pour out of the vinyl body bag in a chalky cascade are impossible to convey. Nothing in the entire range of my professional experience approached the daunting complexities of th
is problem. These bones had not merely been broken; they had been ground up as if by some grim apothecary’s pestle. How could I hope to make sense of them?
Although the powdery and jumbled condition of the remains before me looked hopeless, there were some encouraging aspects of the case. True, the medical examiner’s investigator had collected all the bones in a single bag, but before this happened Alachua County Sheriffs Department investigators had taken good, clear photographs of the crime scene. The department provided me with large, clear blowups of these photographs, nearly three feet high and very detailed. In them the disposition of the remains, precisely as they were found, could be seen with considerable clarity.
There was the wire mesh, there was the shotgun barrel, there were the bone fragments, lying in distinct little heaps, just as they had been found, untouched. Some of the larger pieces be fore me could be assigned to one or the other of the two piles. It soon became clear that we were dealing with a pair of adult human remains, one male, one female, both Caucasoid. The female was very likely between the ages of twenty and twenty-five years. The male was probably between forty-five and sixty years of age.
The brainpan of the male skeleton had several lumps of heavy buckshot, molten and fused to the inner lining of the skull. There were minute traces of lead on the male lower jaw. Clearly a shotgun barrel had been inserted into the mouth of the male and the weapon had been fired before the fire consumed both his body and the wooden parts of the gun that killed him. I have already mentioned how the Ithaca shotgun barrel, with its breech welded shut by the fire, was found near the feet of the male remains.
In the days before x-rays, the means of identifying unknown dead bodies were few and fallible. Confronted with a badly decomposed body or some skeletal remains, you could only identify the deceased by his or her possessions: clothes, jewelry, personal effects. The clothing of Glyde Earl Meek and Page Jennings had been found in the trunk of the Fiat parked nearby. Not a shred of fabric, apart from a small swatch of old, charred burlap unrelated to the skeletons, was found in the ruins of the cabin. Nor were any personal effects found amid the skeletal remains.
The long, rambling suicide notes found in the Fiat and in Chris Jennings’s apartment in Gainesville had an air of the theatrical about them. Their extraordinary length was unusual. The fact that they were signed only by Meek/Daniels was odd—why hadn’t Page Jennings contributed to the notes, or at least signed them? The fervent protestations of undying love that she supposedly made to Meek just before he choked her sounded false, coming from a girl who was deeply soul-divided between her lover and her family. Her supposed joy at beholding her funeral pyre seemed too ridiculous for words. There was no record of Meek’s ever having checked into the Gainesville Hilton Hotel, where he allegedly wrote one note. The bungled strangling, followed by the brutal braining with a rock, jarred sharply with the tender sentiments of romance Meek insists he shared with Page.
My study is of bones, not souls. Suicide notes lie outside my purview. Even today I am bound to say that I do not attach the psychological importance to this note that others have. But I freely confess it is a very strange thing.
Others were piqued more strongly by the note. Dr. Curtis Mertz, a well-known forensic dentist working on the case, went so far as to ask several experts to study it: a forensic psychiatrist, an experienced psychologist and a graphologist, or handwriting expert, with a psychological background. All three believed the note was false. “Artificial,” “not believable,” “fishy,” “too theatrical,” were some of their comments. One asked openly the question that bothered us all: “Why didn’t Page Jennings write the note?”
Here are some of the psychological conclusions that emerged from the note:
The male has a narcissistic histrionic personality, illusions of grandeur and great self-importance, very self-centered with unrealistic goals, is in love with himself, has a fantasy of IDEAL LOVE, shows increased confusion as the letter progresses and may have had a major depression in the past.
The female: has a passive aggressive personality, lacks self-confidence and is dependent on others, has a separation anxiety. She wants to get back with her family, I THINK THIS IS A FAKE SUICIDE NOTE.
The graphologist agreed, with some reservations:
The male is a person able to lie and deceive, is threatened by his insecurities, tends to put off things. His ego comes through like a club. Has a clever demeanor. He is bluffing in the last page about the fire. It is possible, but not likely, that this is a real suicide note.
Thus were planted the seeds of doubt. What if the skeletons in the cabin were not those of Glyde Earl Meek and Page Jennings? What if the pair were alive and the murder-suicide pact were staged, with two substitute bodies? More sinister still, what if Page Jennings had indeed been murdered by a jealous lover fearful of losing her? What if Meek had covered his tracks by substituting another male corpse to lie beside her body in the burning shack? Was all the purple passion about wanting to be with her forever, mingling his ashes with hers for all eternity—were all those sighs the clever counterfeitings of a cunning murderer? Whose bones were these that lay upon my table?
More mischief was to come. A forensic anthropologist can usually find a firm footing in the study of the remains themselves, their careful analysis and comparison. Bones may riddle us, but they never lie. Yet in the Meek-Jennings case even this calm, clear haven of physical evidence became treacherous ground, swept by ambushes and betrayals.
The first of these I call “Meek’s Last Joke.” This accident, more than anything else, turned what should have been a straightforward case of identification into a Machiavellian hall of mirrors, an ingenious plot to mislead the investigators. It revolved around a single tooth. Meek would have laughed, to know what misery it caused Dr. Mertz and me.
When the police were searching for medical records and tracing the movements, not only of Page Jennings but especially of Glyde Earl Meek, they found a car that had belonged to him in the care of one of his former girlfriends. She allowed investigators to search the car and in the car they found a matchbox. In the matchbox was a healthy normal tooth belonging to Glyde Earl Meek. In the tooth was a filling that clearly identified the tooth as Meek’s, when compared with his dental x-rays.
Another loose tooth had been found among the ashes of the cabin and clearly identified as Meek’s. So the fear took shape that Meek had pulled his own teeth to salt a death scene with identifiable evidence from his own mouth. This second tooth, found in a matchbox hundreds of miles away, was the germ from which a plague of doubt would spread. From this point onward there gradually took shape a blind, irrational mistrust of anything found among the ashes that could be identified as Meek’s. Such objects, it was reasoned, proved nothing. Meek could have put them there to deceive us. Meek would do anything to throw us off the scent. He would yank out his own teeth and cast them into the flames.
What wasn’t found was almost as important as what was. Meek’s dental x-rays showed a prominent gold filling in his lower jaw. Dental gold has a high melting point. Even though the cabin had burned like a torch, the heat would have been insufficient to melt this gold filling. Yet the gold filling was nowhere to be found. The earth had been sifted through ⅛-inch mesh screens and it had not turned up. Thus we were being whipsawed from two directions: the tooth that was found after the fire proved nothing; the filling that was lost proved everything.
But these difficulties paled by comparison with the examination of the female’s upper jaw. Here we had a very badly burned, calcined, chalk-white palate with many of the teeth still attached. Unfortunately it was so small that it seemed to belong to a midget. If you measure a normal palate in a small, unburned female skull, you will find it is about 49–50 millimeters across, something in that neighborhood. This tiny, burned palate was only 43 millimeters wide—fifteen percent smaller than normal. How could we reconcile this miniature palate with Page Jennings, a fully grown twenty-one-year-old woman? Dr. Mertz told me wh
at I already knew: we had a problem.
The third doubt that bedeviled us was the female tibia. Page Jennings, you may recall, had injured a knee at age seventeen, throwing the javelin in high school. She underwent surgery to repair this injury. The surgeon no longer had the relevant x-rays, but she assured me that she had made two incisions in the surface of the tibia and attached the tendon through them. This is called a Hauser procedure, and it leaves definite and characteristic marks: the bone is cut through in two small parallel rectangles and these rectangles remain visible, even after they have healed over, for the rest of the patient’s life.
I had the New Hampshire surgeon sketch the rectangles in pencil on a sample tibia I took up to her. I still have it today. She drew two rectangles on it in pencil at the precise spots where, she insisted, she had cut into Page Jennings’s kneebone. Seeing them, I was deeply perplexed. I knew very well that, on the burned and painstakingly reconstructed portion of female tibia that was lying on a table at the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory in Gainesville, there was absolutely no trace of these surgical scars. I had carefully reassembled this five-inch portion of tibia from thirty-six separate fragments of bone, x-rayed it and pored over it for days. And the scars should have been there, if indeed the burned bone belonged to Page Jennings.
These doubts were incorporated in our report to the New Hampshire state attorney general’s office in 1985. To my vast annoyance, Attorney General Stephen Merrill released all the doubtful points to the press immediately, and the media had a field day. The skeletons in the shack were bogus! Glyde Earl Meek was still alive! Page Jennings couldn’t be identified with the female remains in the shack! A murderer and his love-struck girlfriend were still on the loose! Meek was placed on the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted” list and his photograph was circulated to law enforcement agencies all over America.
Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist Page 19
