Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  The noise, Robert later speculated, was probably his sister’s corpse falling over.

  Theresa got out of bed and knocked on the bathroom door. Instead of going to work, Bill followed his mother’s instructions. He went down the hallway and opened the door to the linen closet to see where the stench was coming from. Bill peered inside and saw his half sister, naked except for a pair of underwear. Her hands remained tied behind her back, and her knees were pulled into her chest, in a fetal position.

  Theresa told Bill to remove the closet door and set it against a wall heater in the hallway so that he and his brother could get their sister out.

  “And there was a sort of pine-cone-looking pattern that started halfway down her legs, and then it got darker and darker and got sort of almost purple at the bottom,” said Bill.

  “It looked like what they show in the movies … like, blood settles and stuff. And I was like, I was completely in shock. I’d never seen anything like that before.… My mom hit me in the back of the head and says, ‘Pick her up.’ And me and Robert grabbed her out of the closet.”

  The horror was far from over. When the two boys tried hefting their sister’s corpse out of her prison, her rotting flesh stuck to the floor of the closet.

  “William said that she had no nose when he first looked at her inside the closet,” said Robert. “He wouldn’t go into any other detail on it.”

  As they pulled her out of the closet the sounds and smells seared themselves into the two boys’ memories.

  “She made, like, a pulling sound, like sweat off of a car seat,” said Bill.

  Years later the two brothers remained at odds over the amount of blood they found on the linen-closet floor.

  “It wasn’t like when you cut your finger really bad and it bleeds like all over the place,” said Bill. “But there was some blood. Just a little bit toward the face and maybe on the neck side of her shoulder, you know. But it wasn’t like a puddle or anything like that.”

  Not so, said Robert.

  “There was a lot of blood on the closet floor and on the walls of the closet,” he said. “When she was carried out, there was a gurgling sound and her neck was really wet and she was obviously dead. She was really limp. I think it was possible she was killed. I think it was possible she had her throat cut.”

  Regardless of how their sister died, it was evident that she had been dead for days. While Terry shrank back into a corner, watching her worst nightmare repeat itself in stinking, horrifying color, her mother began calling out orders to her paralyzed sons.

  “And she brought out this sort of large … moving box,” said Bill. “She said, ‘Put her in here.’ So we went to put her in, and she says, ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop!’ Okay, and we held her over the box for a minute or two.”

  Theresa lined the box with a pair of pillowcases, but not until she had carefully examined them both for hairs that might be traceable to the family. When she was satisfied, she had the boys lower their sister’s corpse into the box. They taped the box shut with silver duct tape and carried it out to the trunk of the LTD.

  “One of the things my mom asked while this was going on was what we were thinking at the time,” said Robert. “William said that it was like a Stephen King movie. You know: special effects. It wasn’t real.

  “For some reason, I told her that some words from a Kool and the Gang song kept running through my head. The song was ‘She’s Fresh.’ I guess it was a kind of reaction to what was going on. I think the smell was one of the things that affected me the most. I guess it was my mind trying to compensate, although at the time I thought it was pretty morbid. But I couldn’t get the damn song out of my head.”

  The nightmare ride from a year earlier repeated itself, only this time Sheila was in the trunk of the LTD. Again, Terry remained at home alone. Bill sat in the front seat with his mother driving while Robert sat in the backseat, and they drove “straight away up Highway 80,” according to Bill. This time he was not so silent as the car crawled through the dark over the Donner Pass and down into the Tahoe basin.

  “I’m like, ‘Well, what the hell happened here?’ And my mom goes, ‘I don’t know,’” said Bill. “I went, ‘What are you talking about, you don’t know? She’s laying here.’ She’s like, ‘Well, she was in the closet and she started moaning and then I heard a crash and there she was.’ I go, ‘What was she doing in the closet?’ ‘Well, you just never mind …’”

  Theresa missed the Highway 89 turnoff and drove on toward Nevada, but when she saw a suitable place by the side of the road and not much traffic she pulled over. Bill and Robert had shovels out and were starting to dig a hole to bury the box when a squad car pulled up behind them.

  “I think it was Nevada police that came over and asked why the car was off the side of the road,” said Bill.

  Robert nearly dropped his shovel as one of the police officers snapped on his flashlight and began crunching through the gravel toward the driver’s side of the LTD. Bill and his brother hustled back to the car where they set the shovels inside the trunk before the second cop meandered over to see what they were up to. Bill figured the stench from Sheila’s cardboard crypt would surely give them away.

  “I just remember just kinda stopping and freezing ’cause it was stinking,” said Bill. “It was smelling. I didn’t notice in the house, but I was noticing it when the police pulled up. You know, it smelled really bad.”

  Theresa handled the situation calmly, explaining that she had to pull to the side of the road because the boys needed to take a leak. Bill was certain the cops would get a whiff of the box before he got the trunk shut, but the clear mountain air and the midnight temperatures were enough of a cover. By the time the officer got to the boys, they had already closed the trunk and were scrambling to get back inside the car. When their mother had finished her explanation and the patrolman questioning Theresa finally opened his mouth, Bill and Robert held their breath.

  “He goes, ‘Okay. You’re not allowed to be out here. I need you to turn back around, get back on the highway, and go where you’re going,’” Bill remembered. “And she goes, ‘Okay.’ And we turn around, got back on the highway, and continued on.”

  Theresa drove back through Truckee and headed south, toward Tahoe, as she had done the year before. This time she took a road that wound through a mountain meadow where Martis Creek forms a shallow lake before it feeds into the Truckee River. She made a left turn onto a gravel road and drove down to the edge of the lake, near a campground. She stopped when she came to the end of the road.

  “I don’t even know where we’d gone to,” said Bill. “And she says, ‘Okay, get her out.’ And she popped the trunk from the inside and me and Robert got out, dropped off the box probably ten feet from the car, jumped back in the car, and drove off again.”

  Theresa had no idea where she was either. It took them three hours to get back to the apartment.

  XV

  “He went down to the lake first thing in the morning, like he always did, and saw this box,” recalled Hazel Barber, remembering daybreak of June 21, 1985, when her husband, Elmer, made his early-morning rounds at the Martis Creek Campground.

  As the camp’s official caretakers, the Barbers were used to people dumping their trash on their grounds. Martis Creek was close enough to the main highway to be convenient, but far enough removed to be a free county dump for people who were too cheap to pay a few bucks to get rid of their garbage and didn’t give a damn about messing up the environment for everyone else. One of the Barbers’ less pleasant duties was getting rid of other people’s trash. When Elmer came across the box down by the lake, he figured it was one more dump job he’d have to clean up before that day’s quota of fishermen, hikers, and campers rolled in.

  “Cardboard box, about the size of a TV set,” said Hazel Barber. “Maybe three feet by two. And he walked over into the bush and he opened it up.

  “And arms just flew out at him! That’s stuffing somebody, really stuffing ’em
in tight. That was one stinky mess, and that’s an understatement.”

  Elmer and Hazel should have been enjoying breakfast two hours later, but instead they found themselves guiding a half-dozen Nevada County sheriff’s deputies around the spot where the decomposing body had been found.

  There was almost no way to make a positive identification of the young woman found in the box. It was even hard to tell how long the box had been there. It had been sitting in the sun long enough for the flies to get to her. Maggots up to six millimeters long crawled in and out of the crevices of her five-foot-four-inch frame.

  When she had been alive, Jane Doe #6607-85 had probably weighed between 105 and 120 pounds, the police concluded. She had dark hair and pierced ears and must have been right around twenty years old, according to the coroner. She was wearing only hip-hugger panties and a pair of white athletic socks when she’d been hog-tied with Ace-bandage material and stuffed inside the box. There were a couple of pillowcases inside the box with her, but nothing else.

  It appeared as though she might have been hit in the head and suffered a possible slash of two to four inches in length across the center of her chest, but Jane Doe #6607-85 was in such an advanced state of decomposition that it was impossible to say with any certainty that either of those wounds caused her death. After examination and reexamination, Dr. A. V. Cunha had to write undetermined under the heading CAUSE OF DEATH in his final autopsy report.

  Dr. Cunha, who acted as medical examiner for Nevada County where the body was found, as well as for neighboring Placer County, saw nothing to connect Jane Doe #6607-85 with a young woman still known as Jane Doe #4858-84, who had been found a few miles away just one year earlier in Placer County. Cunha had conducted the autopsy on that corpse, too. But the Placer County woman had been blond, big-boned, and large-breasted, and had died of flash burns. The Nevada County Jane Doe was brunette, tiny, with small breasts, and could have died from any of a half-dozen causes, burning not being among them.

  At first, Nevada County Sheriff’s Deputy Elizabeth Rehkop had little to go on with Jane Doe #6607-85. Nothing showed up on missing-persons reports over the next few weeks that could be positively matched with the body. The autopsy didn’t yield much. There had been some dental work done on the young woman’s teeth that might be used to identify her if the department were ever fortunate enough to narrow her identity down to a handful of possible victims. But that possibility was a long way off. The teeth and jaws were packaged and sent off to a forensic dentist for safekeeping until detectives could come up with dental X rays of someone—anyone—who might match their victim.

  Meanwhile Jane Doe #6607-85 was so decomposed that it didn’t look like the detectives would even be able to get a usable set of fingerprints from the body. When Dr. Cunha tried to take prints from the corpse, the skin slipped off the bones of the hand, like plastic gloves. Nevertheless, Detective Rehkop kept the fingers and palm skin following the autopsy, along with samples of the woman’s hair and her clothing. Like her teeth, they might be used in the future for identification purposes.

  Despite the doubtful findings, officials remained optimistic. Through the FBI, Nevada County was tied in via computer to a national network that kept tabs on suspects and their possible victims. By feeding in raw data about a victim, the FBI was often able to help local authorities track down a killer hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.

  And so it happened with Jane Doe #6607-85.

  “The sheriff’s office sent us a letter about six months later saying they caught the murderer,” said Hazel Barber. “But we were surprised that they never did say why the girl was murdered and what became of the body afterward. They had it in a mortuary in Truckee for a long time waiting for somebody to claim it. No one did while we were there.”

  Even though they’d found the killer, the authorities were never able to identify the girl, said Mrs. Barber. “They had an idea that she was picked up—that she was one of those streetwalkers who got into an argument with some guy. They seemed to think it was just this one fellow—broke her arms and legs and stuffed her in this box and sealed it.”

  The one fellow the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office believed was responsible for the murder was a forty-two-year-old long-distance Texas truck driver named Benjamin Herbert Boyle.

  Boyle had been arrested and charged with the rape and murder of a twenty-year-old Amarillo woman on October 17, 1985, just four months after Jane Doe’s body had been found near Truckee.

  Boyle, a philanderer with a bad temper from Canute, Oklahoma, had a long-standing reputation of using his truck routes to pick up young women and cheat on his wife. He had a sleeper cab built into his cherry-red Peterbilt, ostensibly for catching a little shut-eye whenever he was on a desolate stretch of highway, or needed to stay overnight at a truck stop.

  But Boyle, who used the handle Mr. Whipple, found that the compartment could accommodate two people just as easily as one, and he began using it for purposes other than taking a nap. In the case of Gail Lenore Smith, who caught a ride with him on Interstate 287 from Fort Worth on her way to Amarillo, Boyle’s purpose was kidnapping, rape, and murder. Her naked body was found north of the Canadian River, just fourteen miles outside of Amarillo, trussed up and taped into a fetal position, not unlike that of Jane Doe #6607-85.

  Boyle had also been accused of the abduction and rape of another woman several months earlier during one of his trucking runs through Missouri. And as far back as 1979, Boyle had been convicted of attempting to kidnap a Colorado Springs woman who managed to stab him and get away.

  At his trial in Amarillo a year after Jane Doe’s body was found, no one spoke in Boyle’s defense except his mother. She tearfully praised him for helping her raise his younger siblings after Boyle’s father died, and pointed out that he had once been a volunteer for the Boy Scouts.

  Everyone else who knew him, from his wife and daughter to his employer and a wide array of acquaintances, agreed that “Mr. Whipple” was mean, deceitful, perverted, and predatory.

  “I’m very scared of the man right now, and I have been for quite some time,” testified his daughter, Mrs. Connie Smith.

  So when FBI Special Agent Michael Malone flew in from Washington, D.C., was sworn in, and testified that a fiber found on the body of Truckee’s Jane Doe #6607-85 matched fibers from a blanket found in Boyle’s house in Canute, Oklahoma, nobody said or did much to refute him. Tests also revealed that rope fibers found near Jane Doe matched rope fibers in Boyle’s truck.

  Detective Elizabeth Rehkop flew in, too, from Truckee, California. She explained to the court that Jane Doe had been found in a box five miles south of Truckee at about the same time that Boyle had been driving through the area. An Amarillo police detective followed Detective Rehkop to the stand and confirmed that long-distance phone records and receipts showed that Boyle had indeed been in or near Truckee at the time Jane Doe’s body was dumped.

  Though Judge Don Emerson listened closely to the evidence, he did not allow the jury into the courtroom during the Jane Doe testimony. The jurors already had plenty of damning evidence to consider with just the Gail Lenore Smith murder, including two eyewitnesses who watched the woman climb into his cab and drive off to her death down Interstate 287.

  Boyle was subsequently convicted and sentenced to die in Texas State Prison at Huntsville for the murder of Gail Smith, but not for the murder of Jane Doe #6607-85.

  Nevertheless, the crime had been solved in the view of the Nevada County Sheriff’s Department. There was no further need to pour investigators’ time or resources into it. They might not know the identity of the victim, but they knew who the killer was, and that was all that really mattered now.

  The day after Theresa and her sons returned from Truckee, they washed all of Sheila’s clothes and gave them to Good Will.

  “Her cowboy hat was black, like velour or velvet, and it had a big feather decoration on the front,” Terry recalled. “And she loved that hat, and it was a personal bel
onging. I mean really personal.

  “So my mother got rid of that hat. She thought that as long as my sister’s belongings were there, that my sister’s spirit would still be there. So she had to get rid of the belongings.”

  All of Sheila’s treasures went to Dumpsters at Winchell’s Donuts, Raley’s Supermarket, or the Red Lion Inn on Fulton Avenue where Robert worked as a busboy.

  And then, there was the matter of the linen closet to consider.

  “In the closet itself, there was a lot of blood, which is why I don’t go along with the presumption that she died of starvation,” said Robert. Though the decomposing body authorities found showed no sign of a slashed throat, there was evidence of a four-inch stab wound to her right breast as well as a bloody wound on the left side of her scalp.

  “Mom believed later on that Sheila had tried to stand up and get out of the closet,” he said. “The shelves were stacked on little wooden runners … and the shelves were relatively heavy. So she thought that maybe Sheila had stood up and knocked the shelves down on top of herself.”

  It fell to Terry to clean the closet. There she found chunks of her sister’s flesh sticking to the floor.

  “She made me scrub the floor, clean the blood and everything out of it,” said Terry. “I remember we were trying to drink grape Crush sodas ’cause it was hot. And I was trying to drink a soda and all I could smell was the decomposing smell … the soda tasted like that because it had permeated.”

  Her mother didn’t talk about the ride up the mountain much, but she did seem to remain fixated on Sheila even longer than she had on Suesan. She stayed up nights brooding. She read the Bible.

  Down the hall from the linen closet, next to the bathroom, was the room where Robert and William slept. From the doorway, the linen closet could be seen easily, even in the dark. The door that Bill had removed from the closet in order to get Sheila’s body out had been cut up and tossed in a Dumpster. With its door off the hinges, the closet now resembled the square entrance to a cave set deep in the apartment’s shadows. It was eerie. Bill didn’t want to look at it ever again.