The Skeleton Crew

by Deborah Halber

  * * *

  In 2007, Ellen Leach was still energized from her successful identification of Greg May, the murder victim whose head had been encased in a bucket of concrete. The coldest of cold cases still called to her. One such case was that of Jean Marie Stewart.

  Halleck recalled that in 1980 the Florida police believed Jean Marie had run away, although that never made much sense to the family. Why wouldn’t she have taken her money with her?

  Two years would go by before law enforcement changed her status to “endangered.”

  At various times, there was incremental movement on the case. Pittsburgh police sent Stewart’s dental records to Florida authorities. Halleck told me that True Detective magazine featured a NCMEC projection of what the curly-haired teen might look like as an adult. A Florida volunteer who sought to raise awareness about missing children succeeded in spurring Miami-Dade to reopen the case in 2004. Around the same time, as part of a routine look at cold cases, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement asked Miami-Dade police to track down Jean Marie’s parents and obtain DNA samples.

  Twenty-seven years after Stewart went missing, Ellen Leach spotted a posting on the Doe Network about unidentified remains that had been located years earlier in Florida. Digging deeper, she pored over a report that had surfaced on the Florida Unidentified Decedents Database, known as FLUIDDB.com. Created in 2002, the site followed closely on the heels of coroner Mike Murphy’s Las Vegas Unidentified, but it was taking years for the Florida medical examiner to populate it with the department’s backlog of cases.

  Case number 1981-01253 described the unidentified remains of a young woman found April 20, 1981, in a remote field in Hialeah. No reconstruction provided a face for the skeleton. Many web sleuths relied on such images, but Ellen had other tactics. When I had met her in Gulfport, Ellen told me, “I go by distance a lot of times. Distance is your key, believe it or not. The closer they are from where they went missing, the more likely it’s them.” Ellen checked a map. The field off West Twenty-Eighth Avenue in Hialeah was around five miles from where Jean Marie Stewart was last seen in Miami Lakes. Then Ellen noted that the remains, like the missing teen, had an overbite.

  Ellen posted on Porchlight on November sixteenth that she had sent faxes to detectives in Dade County and Hialeah indicating her belief that the Hialeah remains belonged to Jean Marie Stewart.

  Only forty-five minutes after Ellen’s faxes went through, she received a phone call from a Detective Robert, who told Ellen she had been unaware of the remains and was excited about Leach’s proposed match. She said she’d let Ellen know if they found out anything.

  Robert did find something: Jean Marie’s dental records. She sent them along to the Miami–Dade County medical examiner for comparison with the Hialeah remains. Two weeks later, on December 5, 2007, Jean Marie Stewart was positively identified.

  Accolades and congratulations from fellow web sleuths immediately poured in. One posted, “Good catch, Ell . . . again :)”

  * * *

  In 2008, Jean Marie was buried in Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh Post-­Gazette tracked down Jean Marie’s parents, both in their seventies. Her mother had always suspected that something horrific had happened to her daughter. Robert Stewart was glad to finally know where Jean Marie was. Jean Marie’s brother held out the hope that his sister’s killer would be caught and brought to justice.

  A Pittsburgh TV station reported that her death had been ruled a homicide and her former boyfriend, David Nolle, was considered a suspect. A newspaper article said Jean Marie’s father had learned from Nolle’s mother that on the night Jean Marie disappeared, Nolle and Jean Marie had argued, and she ran out of the car when he stopped to buy cigarettes. Jean Marie’s father had heard that the relationship between the two had soured; during a phone call the day she disappeared, Robert Stewart later relayed to a reporter, David Nolle had made it clear he wanted Jean Marie to move back to Pittsburgh.

  Other reports referred to a gunshot wound. Dinorah Perry, the missing-­person advocate who claimed to have helped keep Jean Marie’s case active, told a reporter that the teen’s family received a “box of bones” with a “bullet in the skull.”

  The Florida police never explained why it took twenty-seven years to identify the body.

  After working what he claimed were hundreds of homicides, Matt Wingo said he, like other veteran investigators, had developed a feel—a sixth sense—for perpetrators and the circumstances of crimes. He was curious about Stewart’s murder and wondered about Halleck’s radio silence after the discovery of Jean as a homicide victim. Where were the outraged posts about the insipid investigation, the impassioned call for the killer’s capture? He never got an answer, but, like others, he aired his suspicions publicly and, at times, vindictively.

  Halleck told me her brother had been cleared as a suspect and suggested that Jean Marie was a victim of “Beauty Queen Killer” Christopher Wilder. In the 1970s and ’80s, Wilder was living in Boynton Beach, not far from Miami Lakes. Wilder’s eight known victims were killed in Florida in early 1984. His suspected victims included young women whose remains were found around Florida in areas he was known to frequent. His modus operandi was to lure young women, sometimes from shopping centers and parking lots, into his truck on the pretense of photographing them for a modeling contract. Wilder killed himself during a scuffle with police in 1984, and his ties to other possible victims disappeared with him.

  When I met Halleck five years after she had learned Jean Marie’s fate, she still seemed to grieve. She felt she owed Ellen Leach an enormous debt of gratitude for revealing that Jean Marie was, as she put it, at peace. As we sat together, tears welled in Halleck’s eyes and spilled down her wizened apple cheeks. It wasn’t lost on Halleck that Ellen’s identification of Jean Marie was Porchlight’s first official solve. Halleck had founded Porchlight in Jean’s honor and she intended to work on it as long as her failing health allowed, she vowed, so that Jean’s life, although tragically short, would continue to make a difference to others. Halleck looked beaten and tired that day, an old woman who’d faced perhaps more than her share of struggles. She looked like a soft touch for a misfit mastiff, a lame pony, a doomed kitten—or a wayward teen who’d ended up dead in a field.

  14

  THE OLDEST UNSOLVED CASE IN MASSACHUSETTS

  In Quincy, Massachusetts, in 2012, Bobby Lingoes, retired from web sleuthing, was counting down the months—around forty-eight—­before he could retire with a pension from his job as a dispatcher. He fielded 911 calls most nights at the Quincy police station, played his sax during the day, and spent time with his wife, Debbie, a blond bartender with a quick smile, and their black-and-white Kitty Cat, so cute he needed two names. (“I stole that joke off of George Carlin,” Bobby admitted.)

  After thirty-plus tumultuous years in the projects, the horror of his nephew’s murder, and his sister’s premature demise, Bobby finally seemed to have found peace of mind.

  I thought his respite from delving into death through the Internet well deserved. Bobby was one of the Doe Network’s first and most successful web sleuths, as well as a former regional area administrator for the organization. I got it when Bobby told me he was burned-out on unidentified bodies. But I needed him to come out of retirement.

  I reached Bobby close to midnight, just as he arrived for his shift. He sounded only mildly surprised by my request: Would he help me search for the Lady of the Dunes’s identity?

  I didn’t remind him that the case was thirty-eight years old and there had never been a match found for the victim’s DNA or for her elaborate dental work. I didn’t point out that no one had ever found her severed hands, or recognized her enigmatic, manufactured smile. Like many web sleuths, he was easy to entice. “I’m sure it can be done,” he rasped, sounding as street-tough Boston as I remembered. I figured he meant he was sure we could look; surely he couldn’t be foolish enough to think we had
any chance of success.

  Bobby said he’d have to clear my visit with the Quincy top brass again, but sure, I could come in to the station. Did I want to meet him at the beginning of his all-night shift or closer to the end, near dawn? I chose six a.m. I figured there wouldn’t be much traffic.

  * * *

  In the months following the murder in 1974, media coverage of the Lady of the Dunes exploded. The Provincetown Banner, the Cape Cod Times, The Boston Globe, and the Boston Herald ran story after story. These dwindled over time to an annual wrap-up written by reporters who hadn’t been born when the Lady of the Dunes died.

  Like other cold cases, hers would be reincarnated on the Web. In 2005 the first posts about the Lady of the Dunes started popping up.

  On Websleuths—the same board that featured the thread about missing California teen Liz Ernstein, who for a time was thought to be Tent Girl—Richard, mysteriew, upallnite, PonderingThings, and maima speculated about the Provincetown murder.

  “What I find most intriguing is the removal of the hands. Conventional thought is that was done to ‘conceal the identity of the victim,’ but to what end? Most likely that translates into concealing the identity of the murderer since he/she is most likely to be a friend or family member,” one user wrote.

  Onetime Provincetown resident Andy Towle posted on his blog an early sketch, more crudely drawn than later versions, of the wide-eyed, ponytailed victim. Towle noted that a rookie on the Provincetown police force once described P-town as wild in the 1970s. “Lots of drugs, lots of bikers.”

  The web sleuths, picking up on that comment, focused on a woman missing from Florida since March 1974 who was last seen riding off on the back of a motorcycle. “I took a look at Amy Billig’s picture and that is an uncanny resemblance,” mysteriew agreed.

  Others suggested the Lady of the Dunes could be a British woman, Elizabeth Swann, who was last seen in the UK in early 1974.

  Some marked the thirty-seventh anniversary of the day the girl—who would now be in her fifties—and her dog found the corpse. There had been more than seven thousand murders in Massachusetts since 1974, but being the oldest unsolved case gave the Lady of the Dunes notoriety. The fact that she was unidentified fueled people’s imaginations. A web sleuth named Shecky wrote, “This is a Jane Doe case that has always haunted me.”

  * * *

  Over the years, Provincetown investigators chased down lead after lead. Chief Jimmy Meads checked with contacts in Rhode Island to see if the murder might have been a mob hit. In Providence, he quizzed prostitutes about whether they knew her. Authorities contacted every dentist in Massachusetts and published photos of her crowns in two dental journals. Investigators enlisted the help of Interpol.

  Reporters interviewed Meads about the case so many times, fellow cops ribbed him that he got more publicity out of an unsolved murder than others did from apprehending suspects. When TV news crews traveled to P-town to gather footage of the spot where she was found deep in the dunes, a beleaguered Meads started escorting them to a more accessible pine grove. “This is it,” he told Dan Rather, among others, but apparently none of the reporters suspected they weren’t viewing the real crime scene.

  Meads kept scouring the case files to see if he had missed anything. The notion that an important, unseen clue lurked in that massive heap of paperwork haunted him. If the case were ever solved, he swore, he’d dig back through all the files and if the clue had been there all the time, he’d cry from sheer frustration.

  One of the most promising leads involved a young woman named Rory Gene Kesinger. A runaway at fifteen, she robbed banks under five aliases. In 1974, at age twenty-five, Kesinger attempted to shoot a police officer during a drug bust. She escaped from jail and was never heard from again. The body on the dunes, between five-six and five-eight, matched Kesinger’s height. She looked like the sketches. Meads and the Provincetown sergeant who took over the investigation were sure for a time that Kesinger was their victim, but a DNA sample from the body did not match a sample taken from Kesinger’s mother.

  Serial killer Hadden Clark told Alec Wilkinson, a journalist and onetime Wellfleet police officer, that he was vacationing on Cape Cod in 1974 at his grandfather’s place in Wellfleet and came across a beautiful girl that he lured into the dunes and smacked on the head with a surf-casting pole. After she was dead, he removed her clothes, folded them neatly, and put them under her body.

  He claimed he then went back to his truck for a saw, cut off her hands, and stuffed her arms into the sand as if she were doing push-ups. “Then I took her hands and put them in her purse, like a beach bag. I cut off a couple of her fingers and used them for fishing bait. I buried her hands in a different place. I didn’t bury her because I was making a statement. I don’t know why I was doing it; maybe if you were a trained psychologist you could tell me.” But Clark could have read the details about the folded clothing and the severed hands in the newspaper, and his confessions to other murders hadn’t panned out.

  The body was exhumed in 1980, in 2000, and again, in cloak-and-­dagger style, on May 6, 2013. I had spent that morning talking to locals and then drove down Winslow Street, planning to seek out the small granite marker carved with the words “Unidentified Female Body Found Race Point Dunes.”

  The cemetery was not as deserted as I had anticipated.

  “You’re okay on the road. You can’t get any closer,” a Provincetown cop said as he waved me off the grounds to the far side of yellow crime scene tape. Across a stretch of lawn, Department of Public Works employees clad in T-shirts, white face masks, and stretchy blue gloves leaned on shovels. A Provincetown cruiser blocked a narrow paved path leading to the site at the bottom of a bluff where a row of headstones were lined up below a small, gray-shingled chapel bearing a simple verdigris cross. The sky was a brilliant blue; it was a picture-perfect, bucolic New England scene, except for the coffin-sized hole in the ground.

  A woman in street clothes and purple latex gloves handed, like a surgeon’s assistant, a vial and other items to a tall, solid figure in a hooded blue paper suit. The blue-suited figure climbed out of the hole and deposited things I couldn’t make out into the purple-gloved lady’s clear plastic bins, which were about the type and size you’d use to stow a pair of shoes or carry cupcakes. They were apparently collecting fragments of the Lady of the Dunes’s weathered bones.

  At the grave, a white pickup and a blue sedan blocked the view from where I sat on the grass, around the length of a soccer field from the action. Leaning against a cement post that had long since lost its wooden struts, I clicked away on my laptop, aware I was the sole uninvited spectator to a bit of local history. In 2000, TV cameras and reporters had thronged the site where I now sat. Except for the occasional rumble of a car on the street behind me and the squawk of the cops’ walkie-talkies, it was a quiet day at the St. Peter the Apostle cemetery. The silence and relative calm didn’t jibe with the urgency of the situation; I realized this exhumation might be investigators’ last remaining maneuver to gain some traction on a case that had managed to slip away from so many.

  NCMEC, based in Alexandria, Virginia, staffed with retired police officers and FBI agents, doesn’t normally investigate cases in which the victim is older than twenty-one, but in 2010, Provincetown police chief Jeff Jaran convinced the organization to try. Using a three-dimensional CAT scan of the victim’s skull, long perched on former Provincetown police chief Jimmy Meads’s desk and then moved to the state medical examiner’s office in Boston, Smithsonian Institution anthropologists worked with NCMEC to create a computer rendition of what the young woman would have looked like at the time of her death. It was those images, in The Boston Globe, that had induced me to go on the Web the day I first came across the Doe Network.

  Around a year and a half after I had sat with Jimmy Meads at a maple dining table in his wood-paneled dining room with its brick fireplace, the dim, cool room soaking up
the day’s bright sunlight, talking about the case that had consumed him for most of his professional life, Meads died suddenly on Christmas 2011, surrounded by his family. After thirty-two years with the Provincetown police, ten as a cop and twenty-two as chief, he had never stopped hoping that the Lady of the Dunes would be identified in his lifetime. Now his successors had taken over his pet case, and they seemed to be starting from scratch.

  At the Lady of the Dunes’s gravesite, the purple-gloved lady tucked the plastic bins into a canvas tote and spirited them away. Blue Suit dropped a black trash bag into the sedan’s open trunk, shed the gloves, and peeled back the suit to reveal a sweatshirt stretched over a chest bump and khakis with a holster strapped across the hip. She—I could see now that Blue Suit was a she—had short, wavy salt-and-pepper hair and a police officer’s splay-footed strut. Donning a vest and sunglasses to complete the Cool Hand Luke look, she tossed a clipboard inside the car and climbed into the driver’s seat. Uniformed cops slid in and slammed the doors. Three of the men in the face masks started hoisting shovelfuls of grass-studded dirt into the hole. One blew away excess earth with a leaf blower and another neatened up with a broom; within minutes, nothing indicated that a grave had ever been gaping open at their feet.

  The cruisers and other cars—I figured those belonged to the purple-­gloved lady and state medical examiner’s staff—pulled out in single file like a funeral procession, leaving the yellow police tape fluttering in the breeze. I, too, got in my car and wound my way through Provincetown’s narrow streets, past the granite Pilgrim Monument tower, Commercial Street’s touristy shops, and the entrance to Race Point Beach, where the victim had been discovered all those years ago. I had just pulled onto Route 6, flanked by the windswept dunes, and was settling in for the two-hour drive back to Boston when an unfamiliar number with a local area code popped up on my car’s Bluetooth phone display. I tapped the “yes” button.