More than five feet eight, Ellen, a onetime tomboy, has a strong jaw and cleft chin, a wide, mobile mouth, and gray hair to her shoulders. That day she cut a mannish figure in jeans, zip-front fleece jacket, and black leather sneakers. Chip told me that customers at the Hobby Lobby, where Ellen worked as a cashier, approached her saying, “Excuse me, sir.” Then they’d take a closer look and say, “Oh, sorry, ma’am.” Sometimes, the other way around. I snuck a glance at Ellen to see if she was taking offense, but her baby-blue eyes were crinkled in amusement. With the loquacious Chip around to entertain me, she could relax.
They met—where else?—online, on a gaming website offering Monopoly, Risk, card games, puzzles of all kinds. They played Keno. You could chat in real time with other players. What did Glass say that attracted Ellen’s attention? He laughed. “Oh, ma’am, we don’t even want to get into that.” Being called “ma’am” usually drives me crazy, but from Chip it was charming. “There was a bunch of us that were joking around and stuff,” Ellen explained. “I’m always flirting and carrying on in there,” Glass said. “She just took it serious.”
What clinched Ellen’s move from Texas to Mississippi was a photo she sent Chip of herself in waders, displaying two ten-pound redfish like slick, speckled torpedoes. Ellen had regularly fished Christmas Bay off Galveston until one day a gar—she thinks it was a gar, scaly and needle-nosed with a mouthful of sharp teeth—as big as a canoe circled her lazily. She froze, hardly daring to breathe, until it swam away. Chip also liked to fish. “I just want something I can fight with for a half hour and not marry,” he quipped.
Chip was her backbone, Ellen averred. She’d show him a case and see if he thought her match was worthy. Chip looked at his hands and said Ellen was the one who put in all the hard work. Chip told me proudly that Ellen helped identify missing Pittsburgh teen Jean-Marie Stewart, whose remains had lain nameless in a Florida morgue for twenty-seven years.
The girl’s abduction and murder, the length of time she remained unidentified, and the nature of her relationship with a woman who dedicated her own web database to finding her would fuel some heated exchanges within the web sleuth community for years.
“If police in Florida had Jean’s dental records, if the remains of a young woman with an overbite were discovered only a few miles from where Jean disappeared a year later, why did it take more than a quarter-century for a volunteer advocate to put two and two together?” wrote a reporter in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Chip’s version was more colorful: How come a couple of boofunkles from Mississippi solved this case before law enforcement did?
I’d never heard the term “boofunkle” but I heard it again within an hour: it’s what Chip and Ellen named their stocky mixed-breed rescue dog, who bounded to greet us at their modest ranch in a subdivision off busy Route 49.
For a time, Ellen had parked a 1968 Cadillac hearse out front. She had picked it up at a Texas auction for a dollar. Its jet-black finish gleamed in the sun; its elongated landau roof sported a metal detail like the Nike swoosh. With a few new parts its oversized engine purred. Ellen’s brother stowed a fake casket in the back and she and Chip propped two plastic skeletons up front. The car had been a hit in Texas, drawing openmouthed stares, whistles, and admiring grins.
Mississippians’ reactions were different. On Halloween, Chip and Ellen noticed that trick-or-treaters avoided their house. At the drive-in, they never got served with the skeletons in tow. A neighbor who ran a hair salon out of her home complained that her customers were being scared off. Mississippi mechanics were too superstitious to work on it. After nine years of owning the iconic car, Ellen was forced to sell it.
Before we walked inside the house, Chip and Ellen warned me about the cats: there was Stinky, rescued from fueling the bloodlust of thirteen fight-to-the-death pit bulls; diabetic Francis, who needed injections twice a day; gray six-toed Grasshopper; Cali, a calico bequeathed to Chip by an elderly lady entering a nursing home; and Solo, a tailless white fluff ball prone to ambushing people’s feet. In addition to the cats and Boofunkle, since Ellen had moved in, the couple had nursed three-legged lizards, one-eyed fish, and a shepherd who lost three legs to bone cancer.
In a garage converted to a spare room, Chip’s and Ellen’s computers sat on adjacent desks, Chip’s covered with overflowing ashtrays, video feeds from a security camera aimed at the driveway, wallets, lighters, sticks of incense, vitamins in bottles, and a ragged bouquet of pens in an old flowerpot. Cali sprawled on my lap and Ellen started poking the power button of her Hewlett-Packard like a parrot pecking a tough nut. In front of her were two monitors that allowed her to compare, side by side, a missing-person report with details about unidentified remains.
A few years earlier Ellen had been at her computer, the predecessor of the one with the balky monitor, perusing the Doe Network. She spotted a photo of a bust. At the time, she didn’t know that forensic artist Frank Bender was legendary for his uncanny representations of the dead based on nothing more than a skull. This one, created from a skull found at a Missouri truck stop embedded in a bucket of concrete, depicted the head and shoulders of a kindly-looking middle-aged gentleman. It was so lifelike it could have been done from a living model. Ellen had sat back in her chair, absentmindedly stroking one of the cats.
She knew the case wouldn’t appeal to your everyday web sleuth, who tended to scrutinize identifiers such as height, weight, hair color, eye color, tattoos, personal effects, broken bones, and previous surgeries. Without a body, there was no quantifiable description for this victim; almost everything Bender had done was a guess. No self-respecting web sleuth would waste time on just a skull. It was crazy. It was so crazy, such a stupendous long shot, that Ellen was instantly intrigued. She liked the challenging cases. She adopted them like abandoned kittens.
* * *
By mid-January 2001, Greg May’s son, Don, was worried. The last time Don saw his father had been at his grandfather’s funeral in Chicago the previous April. Don lived in California, but father, son, daughter, and ex-wife were in frequent contact. Don and his sister, Shannon, both in their thirties, hadn’t heard from their father in more than two weeks. They changed their phone answering machines to say, “Dad, if this is you, leave us a message.” It wasn’t unheard-of for Greg May to be temporarily out of touch. He led a nomadic existence, living in forty or fifty different places in his lifetime. It wasn’t uncommon for his children to get a message listing yet another new number and address. He often traveled the country seeking out Civil War treasures.
In addition, he’d told friends he was considering moving to Florida. Bellevue had turned down his request to open a tattoo shop; perhaps he was unreachable because he was scouting out other potential locations, or driving south. But Don couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. The last straw came in mid-February. Greg May’s phone was disconnected. Don and Shannon May flew from Santa Monica to Iowa to file a missing-person report with the Bellevue police.
* * *
Soon after the grisly discovery of the skull in the bucket, Kearney police enlisted cadaver-sniffing dogs to scour the Kearney truck stop. They didn’t locate any other body parts. Later, dogs trained to pick up the scent of human cadavers would detect such a scent in an older-model black Volvo, but that car was hundreds of miles away, waiting to be junked; it would be years before it came to anyone’s attention.
Kearney police sent the skull to a forensic odontologist and anthropologist, who hoped the face had left an impression in the contours of the concrete. No such luck: the head had been covered with a stocking cap. They were able to determine the skull belonged to a forty- to sixty-year-old man with existing teeth in good condition and extensive dental work.
* * *
In his garage turned study in Gulfport, Chip took over pushing the power button on Ellen’s recalcitrant computer. None of the web sleuths I’d met had gleaming, state-of-the-art MacBooks. Not the least bit w
ealthy, the volunteers all owned clunkers that needed to be wrestled into submission. Ellen’s screen flickered. She was lucky, not only because her boyfriend supported her addiction, but also because Glass, a cable TV technician, knew his way around electronics. We watched him wedge his stocky frame underneath the desk. Ellen and I looked on the way the driver of a disabled car hovers helplessly while a mechanic pokes around under the hood. We heard muttering, something about “power distribution . . . source code . . . video card.”
“Still won’t come up?” Ellen asked after a few minutes.
“Negative,” Chip responded.
“I knew something else was going to go wrong.” Ellen turned to me despairingly. “I wanted your visit to be perfect.”
I’ve known women like Ellen Leach. They worry. They plan ahead. They try to think of everything. Before I flew to Mississippi, Ellen had kindly helped me book a room in an ancient white-pillared former mansion on an isolated, rural side road just past what appeared to be defunct railroad tracks. At night, the motel-like strip of rooms in the rear of the antebellum-style main building was eerily silent, apparently hosting no other guests except some peacocks and ducks paddling around in a stream opposite my door. Writers need solitude, Ellen said. She didn’t seem to know that former New Yorkers sleep better with the wail of sirens outside their windows. I passed a sleepless night thinking about ax murderers.
* * *
May moved between two worlds, a friend told the Los Angeles Times.
He had an eagle tattooed on one shoulder and a clipper ship on the other. Although his collection of Civil War rifles, swords, uniforms, muskets, Western movie posters, photographs, and documents was valuable, he wasn’t a flashy dresser, given instead to straw cowboy hats, denim jackets, and “gentleman’s loafers,” as Shannon put it. The Times reported that May strolled Bellevue’s Riverview Street with Duke, also known as Moose, who was tattooed from arms to thighs. The two eventually found jobs in a tattoo parlor across the river in Illinois. They would shoot pool at night and swing by the Frontier Cafe for breakfast. Waitresses remembered May as quiet, friendly, but reserved. Duke was the boisterous one, always cracking jokes. They stayed pretty much to themselves.
After Duke’s girlfriend, Julie Johnson, came to town and moved in with them, waitresses noticed a change in Duke: he would sit alone in a corner with Johnson, looking somber and quiet.
“My father did not mince words,” Don May told me years later. “He described Julie as a sneaky bitch, and that’s a lot coming from a man who did not use profanity.” Don had, as a teenager, met Duke (or Moose) back in Kenosha and recalled him as a sketchy character who could turn from jovial to sharp-tongued without warning. Don suspected his father felt sorry for Duke. Greg May’s son had long known about his father’s trusting nature and occasionally misguided generosity.
Although Greg May grew up in Lake Forest, a swanky Chicago suburb, and moved easily among the largely conservative crowd of Civil War buffs who frequented antique shows and museums, his love of tattooing sucked in ex-cons like Duke. Many tattoo artists are secretive about their craft, but May taught Duke about shading and coloring, showed him the machines that drove tiny inked needles like pile drivers deep into the dermis; showed him how to sterilize the needles in an autoclave, how to push the foot pedal with just the right amount of pressure to pierce the skin with even, solid lines of color and no so-called holidays, or gaps, but not so deeply as to cause excessive pain and bleeding. Finally, May would have shown him how to gently dab away drops of blood or plasma and bandage the new, raw tattoo with clean gauze.
Besides the occasional game of pool and their shared love of tattooing, May and Duke sometimes went fishing together. They used a white plastic bucket to carry their bait.
* * *
On January sixteenth, five days after Jan left May’s house for the last time, one of Greg May’s neighbors saw the woman Jan Buman knew as Julie Ann Johnson loading some of May’s antiques into a yellow Ford Ryder moving truck. An acquaintance helped Duke carry a large replica of a clipper ship from the house. Into the truck went bayonets, canteens, 140-year-old newspapers, vintage and modern guns, medals, and engravings. Duke told the landlord he and May were breaking their lease and leaving town. He gave away May’s furniture to neighbors. Then he and Julie drove off.
* * *
Crime in Bellevue, Iowa, in the late 1990s consisted primarily of small-time thefts and traffic violations. With Dan and Shannon May insisting something bad had happened to their father, the local police chief called in the state Division of Criminal Investigation.
They found no record of a Julie and Doug Johnson, which was how Julie and Duke were known around town. The police had no plates to run on the Ford Ryder truck the neighbors had noticed outside May’s house, but they did get a lead on Greg May’s missing car. A 1996 red Chevy Blazer with Wisconsin plates had turned up abandoned in a parking lot 145 miles away, in a suburb of Chicago called Aurora, Illinois. Police found May’s keys and wallet inside.
They tracked Duke through a part-time job he had held for a time in a Galena, Illinois, tattoo shop and learned his real name was Douglas DeBruin and he was on parole for weapons possession and domestic assault in Wisconsin.
At home in Santa Monica, a sharp-eyed friend of his father’s showed Don May a brochure from an auction company in Illinois that specializes in antique firearms and military artifacts. Don was shocked to see more than seventy pieces from his dad’s collection, historic items he had known since his childhood, listed for sale. He knew his father would never auction off such cherished artifacts.
The police questioned the auction house and learned a woman identifying herself as Julie Johnson had said her uncle had died, leaving her and her mother an impressive collection of Confederate swords and Civil War–era uniforms valued at more than seventy thousand dollars. The paperwork putting the items up for sale went to a Mary Klar in Webster, Wisconsin. A little digging unearthed the fact that Mary Klar is the mother of Julie Johnson, whose real name, it turned out, is Julie Miller.
In April 2001, investigators drove seven hours to Wisconsin. They told Klar a man was missing and that her daughter’s boyfriend was a person of interest in his disappearance. Julie, Klar told them, was with DeBruin, living in the back of a Ryder truck in a trailer park in Flagstaff, Arizona.
On April 10, 2001, Miller and DeBruin were arrested in Flagstaff. Their truck contained a notebook with an inventory of May’s collection, Civil War antiques including a rifle worth ten thousand dollars, a Confederate sword valued at fifteen thousand, and other items the pair claimed Greg May had given them. They had “no idea” where May might be. Inside the truck investigators also found a green jacket belonging to DeBruin. There was a suspicious-looking stain on the lower part of the right sleeve.
* * *
Two days later, Gary Chilcote was in his office at the Patee House Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. St. Joseph is around four hundred miles southwest of Bellevue, Iowa, but it’s only an hour’s drive from Kearney, where the head in the bucket showed up at the truck stop. The whole region is Jesse James country.
In an ironic parallel to May’s own fate, in 1882 Jesse James, in what turned out to be a serious misjudgment of character, took in two boarders, brothers Robert and Charlie Ford, and concocted a plan with them to rob the Platte City Bank. Set on collecting a five-thousand-dollar bounty on James’s head, the brothers shot him to death in his home.
Chilcote, a Wild West buff and a fan of James, was especially proud of the museum’s acquisition of the house located a block away where Robert Ford fatally shot James behind the right ear in 1882. Chilcote founded the museum in 1963 and served as its unpaid director. That day in April, he saw that a package had arrived from an establishment called Pack N’ More in Glendale, Arizona.
Inside was a yellowed letter, written in a flowing, handsome script and mounted in a wood frame. Chilcote recognized th
e letter. He’d seen it years earlier, hanging on the wall of his own museum. The owner, a collector from Illinois, had mounted an exhibition of his historic possessions. Written in 1883, the letter is from ex-soldier and alcoholic newspaper editor John Newman Edwards, who is credited with creating the myth that Jesse James was a kind of noble Southern Robin Hood.
The letter offered encouragement to Jesse James’s older brother, Frank, on the eve of Frank’s 1883 trial for murder and robbery. It was a prize worth at least a thousand dollars, one any Civil War–era historian would be proud to own, and particularly significant to Chilcote because of its local connections. In his day, Edwards had worked at the St. Joseph Gazette, the same newspaper where Chilcote had spent forty years as a court reporter, and the letter was written on stationery of the Pacific House, a rival hotel to the Patee House.
Chilcote reached into the package and pulled out what looked like a photocopy of a handwritten note. “I would like to donate this letter,” the note stated. “I’ve read about them and now may contribute to their memory.” The note was signed Greg May. Chilcote told me he didn’t find this too surprising. Things sometimes just showed up at museums. But who was this Greg May? Curious, Chilcote phoned the Illinois collector, who confirmed that he had sold the letter to a Greg May around eighteen months earlier.
That same day, the James Farm Museum in Kearney received a similar package with the same photocopied note. This time the unexpected gift was a letter to Frank James written in 1885 concerning legal wranglings involving a Minnesota robbery. Museum director Elizabeth Beckett told a reporter from the Dubuque Telegraph Herald that although some might consider it odd to receive a valuable historic letter out of the blue, nothing to do with the James brothers surprised her anymore.
The Skeleton Crew Page 21
