by John Coston
Burgoon listened as Ellen recited the routine of the morning in question. She had to take Steven out with her when she drove to her mother’s house, to tell her mother that she didn’t have to baby-sit that day after school. Ellen then described the stop at Kare Drugs where she bought some children’s Tylenol, and their stopover at Taco Bell at Spring and Gravois. Ellen omitted the fact that she had called her office with an alarming story about Steven being taken to the hospital, and she left out the part about visiting David’s grave at Trinity Cemetery. When she described the scene back at the house, with Steven lying on the sofa watching Sesame Street as she did dishes in the kitchen, Burgoon asked again about the time of day. Ellen said it was about noon. Burgoon made a note to himself. He would want to verify that Sesame Street was being aired at that time on KETC-Channel 9, so it would fit.
When she described her panic upon finding Steven, Joe found Ellen very convincing as she told of running from apartment to apartment, calling for help.
He asked about Steven’s medical history, and Ellen’s only response was that he had an ear infection and a cold in July. The doctor wrote her a prescription for Amoxicillin. Then, she said, he was hospitalized in April the year before with what doctors thought was low blood sugar that triggered a seizure.
None of this amounted to much for Burgoon. He didn’t probe the circumstances of the first boy’s death, and Ellen didn’t offer any information about it. He did ask general questions about Ellen’s family history and about whether she was married, divorced, or single.
The picture Ellen painted of her life was a sorry one. Her husband had abandoned her when she was pregnant with her second son, David, and had never paid any child support. Ellen made a point of telling Burgoon that the father hadn’t come to either funeral. Paul Boehm was interested only in notifying child support about David’s death so that he would be off the hook, she said.
When she told Burgoon that she had had a difficult time finding Paul to notify him about Steven’s death, claiming that she had worked through the Red Cross in Tucson, Arizona, Ellen was beginning to wind up. This was blatantly false. The last comment she had to make about her former husband served to muddy the medical waters. She explained that Paul had a lot of medical problems, and that at one time he suspected that he was suffering from past exposure to Agent Orange. While they were married, she said, Paul had had an EKG done to determine if he suffered from any heart problems.
“Did you have any life insurance?” Burgoon asked.
Ellen was quite forthright. “Yes, I have four policies. One with State Farm, Aetna from work, Shelter Insurance, and United of Omaha.”
“Have you been contacted by anyone else regarding this incident?”
“Yeah, I heard from a Ms. Turner from Family Services,” Ellen said.
Burgoon made a note of that and concluded the interview. Ellen had done much of the talking, and Burgoon did most of the thinking.
Up to now Burgoon was unaware of the hair dryer incident. In fact, the only authority who had found out about it was Ms. Turner at Family Services, and it was reported to her more or less as a rumor.
A week later, Ellen called her old friend Deanne. Despite their long-standing friendship, the two women had not talked to each other more than twice since Steven’s death. It wasn’t that Deanne had dropped her because of whatever suspicions she had. Deanne had just had enough of Ellen’s lies and of her apparent lack of grief over Steven’s death.
On the night he died, when Ellen had made the curious statement that he had died during the day, not the night before, they had closed off their conversation with Deanne asking Ellen to be sure and let her know about the funeral arrangements. Ellen said she would call her back and let her know.
It was a week later when Deanne called back, wanting to know where and when the funeral would be. Ellen told her that she had left a message about the funeral arrangements on Deanne’s answering machine at the office.
Deanne couldn’t believe what she was hearing: more of Ellen’s B.S.
Deanne hung up on her.
Later when she checked, she wasn’t at all surprised to discover that there was no message from Ellen, and from that point on she had no intention of calling Ellen again, for any reason. Then, about two weeks later, Ellen called her. She wanted help remembering the last name of a wrestling promoter in Memphis. Deanne told her his name, then hung up on her again.
Now it was mid-December, and Ellen was calling again. Deanne said hello and did her best to be polite.
“Listen, I thought you would want to know,” Ellen said, “that I just learned the boys died from electrical rhythms of the heart.”
Deanne had almost no reaction, and she waited for Ellen to continue. She couldn’t bring herself to hang up this time. Of course, Deanne didn’t know it, but no such cause of death had yet been determined.
By the time Ellen had realized she was becoming the target of questions about her sons’ deaths, she was turning to a more sympathetic ear than Deanne had to offer. Deanne knew Ellen too well, anyway, in ways that Elizabeth Pratt didn’t.
It started with a routine call from Elizabeth to her husband, William, at the office, and since William Pratt was the manager in Ellen’s department, there was nothing unusual about the fact that Ellen fielded the call. His wife would often get Ellen first when she called, and it wasn’t long before Ellen and Elizabeth formed a kind of friendship that moved well beyond the bounds of casual telephone chitchat.
In the same summer that Deanne had moved across the river to Illinois, the Pratts had arrived in St. Louis from Europe. Stanley was transferred from Andersen offices there, and while the contact between him and Ellen, a word processor in his department, was limited in his first six months on the job, the tragic death of Ellen’s son, David, changed their relationship. To the Pratts, the little boy’s death was one of the first major events since they had moved to town, and it galvanized a closeness between Ellen and Elizabeth.
Part of the reason for this was that Elizabeth was herself pregnant when David died, and she and William also had a four-year-old daughter. It was Elizabeth, not William, who had the greatest amount of empathy for Ellen after David’s death, and her feelings became the driving force that allowed what was merely a telephone acquaintanceship to become more social.
In May 1989, the Pratts had invited Ellen to William’s birthday party at their house in St. Charles, a city-suburb of St. Louis west of downtown and across the Missouri River. Others from the office were also invited. To William and Elizabeth, Ellen seemed to be a good and kind person, and she seemed to fit right in at the gathering. Later that summer, Ellen was invited again to the house for a dinner party that was held for a smaller group. By this time Elizabeth and Ellen had become well acquainted. In fact, because the Pratt’s daughter liked to play with Ellen’s daughter, Stacy, they often arranged for Ellen to baby-sit, or Ellen would just come over to the Pratts’. The little girl also stayed overnight with Stacy at Ellen’s apartment.
Though Ellen visited the Pratts’ home numerous times, Elizabeth thought it was a little strange that Ellen never invited them to her apartment. Maybe, she thought, it was because Ellen was ashamed of her furniture, or her housekeeping. Or, she also knew, some people, for whatever reason, were just reluctant to have people in their homes.
The budding relationship between Elizabeth and Ellen was not based on any true common intellectual ground. Elizabeth, an attorney, was filling the role of a Missouri housewife at the time, and the death of the second boy triggered even deeper sympathy in her. The tragedy of it all obscured any suspicion Elizabeth might have had, even when Ellen talked about her life insurance on the children.
In late summer of 1989, only a few weeks before Steven died, Ellen complained to the Pratts that she had never been paid the death benefit that was due upon David’s death. Ellen had mentioned, too, that she had taken the policy on David shortly before he died, freely discussing the facts as if to cast her misfortune in a
n ironic, rather than suspicious light. Then, after Steven’s death, Ellen told William about the hefty life insurance she carried on him, and almost bragged that she would be getting the money soon.
Perhaps playing for sympathy, Ellen later told William and Elizabeth that she had bought a new sofa for the living room, because the old one brought back too many bad memories of the boys. In truth, Ellen never bought a new sofa. Her living room setup was pretty much the same, and the rose-colored cushions she had used to smother her boys were still there, memories and all. She also told them that she bought a new car with some of the money.
To the Pratts, all that mattered was that Ellen was a hard worker who had been dealt a crummy hand. As the month of December came to a close, and everyone started to talk about their New Year’s Eve plans, the Pratts invited Ellen to go out with them to Laclede’s Landing on that night. It had been only three months since Steven had died, and the Pratts felt sorry for Ellen when they picked her up in front of her building, hoping for a night of celebration. They noticed right away that Ellen’s spirit was missing. The three revelers drove to the restaurant, but after a short while William could see that Ellen really wasn’t up for it. He offered to drive her home and she accepted. She spent the last night of the year alone.
Ellen had good reason to be glum, because the New Year was upon her, and though she would have no way of knowing what lay ahead, things weren’t going exactly the way she had planned. A certain detective from Homicide was asking a lot of questions.
A Mother Carries On
Through the last days of December, Joe barely had time to shop for Christmas presents. He was running all over town, between the South Side and downtown, and across town to the hospitals, getting as many facts about this case as he could. He was working overtime to draw some kind of preliminary conclusion. All he knew was that two young boys had mysteriously died. In a case like this, the mother would of course be suspect, if only because she had been the last one to see both children alive. But there was no physical evidence. The doctors were diligently pursuing theories about heart arrhythmia, and the medical examiner had ordered more laboratory tests. But Joe needed something more, and both he and Dr. Graham were having sinking thoughts about the little girl, Stacy, who was still living with her mother. If Ellen had done it, how much time did they have?
One of the first people he interviewed was Ellen’s neighbor, Todd Andrews, who lived in Apartment 503. Todd was the medical student who had come to Ellen’s aid and tried to revive Steven with CPR. It wasn’t a long interview. In short order, Todd corroborated Ellen’s version of events. He also told the detective that the Boehm children always appeared to be happy when he saw them with their mother. Yes, it was just as Ellen had said, she had come knocking on his door shortly after noontime, panicked because her son wasn’t breathing. He attempted artificial respiration, but it didn’t work.
Joe then found the manager of Riverbend Apartments. It was meant to be a nuts-and-bolts, fact-checking interview, but it would be more than that. Karen Grimes, Sergeant Burgoon would be pleased to learn, was one of the last people to see Steven alive. She, too, was pleased to see Sergeant Burgoon because she wanted to unburden herself of something that was troubling her.
A woman in her late thirties who lived across the river in Illinois, Karen was sweet on children, and when she bumped into Ellen and Steven in the hallway on the morning of September 25th, she tried to strike up a conversation with the four-year-old.
“Hey, there,” she said, “I hear you had a birthday.”
Steven merely looked back at her, not responding.
“What did you get? Did you have a cake?”
Steven nodded.
Karen noticed that Steven seemed a little tired, and she didn’t press him any more.
Ellen jumped in with an explanation. “He’s feeling a little ill. He got some shots at the doctor. That’s why I’m staying home with him.”
They parted in the hall, and Karen went back to her office. She told Joe that it was only about forty minutes later that Karen saw the ambulance pull up in front of the building, and she experienced an eerie sensation that the call was for little Steven.
Burgoon hadn’t gained much from the anecdote, but he perked up as she mentioned the hair dryer incident. Karen had heard about it from the building custodian, who had overheard another tenant mentioning it to Ellen’s mother one day in the play yard. Still, it was just a random incident, chalked up as just another of the many unpredictable dangers that children face growing up. If Karen spent any of her time wondering about Ellen, it was only to consider how sad it must have been for her to lose her son, David. In fact, Karen had been somewhat stunned by Ellen’s cavalier attitude following David’s death. She just didn’t seem to take it the way one would expect. She didn’t seem to care.
How could anyone know what it was like for Ellen? How could she judge a mother’s behavior, given the enormous tragedy of the loss of a child? And, otherwise, Karen had little trouble with Ellen as a tenant, except that Ellen had bounced so many rent checks in the past that she was no longer permitted to pay her rent with a personal check.
On that Monday, when the ambulance pulled up, and Karen saw that it was for Steven, she immediately offered to help, and she wasn’t the only one. Pauline Sumokowski, who would help out later by picking Stacy up after school, chimed in with Karen in offering to pick up Ellen’s mother and take her to the hospital. The point they were trying to make was that Ellen should be free to ride in the ambulance with Steven.
“No,” Ellen said flatly, “I’ll get my mother.”
So much for a thank-you, they thought.
“What’s the name of the custodian?” Joe asked.
“Caroline Fenton,” Karen said.
He jotted down the name. He would catch up to her later. First he wanted to verify this hair dryer incident through hospital records.
At Cardinal Glennon, Wayne Munkel of the Social Services Department, could find no record of Stacy ever having been treated at that hospital prior to Steven’s death. Mr. Munkel suggested to Sergeant Burgoon that Dr. Tony Scalzo, the physician attending Steven at the time, might be of some help.
Sergeant Burgoon couldn’t verify the hair dryer incident through Dr. Scalzo, but the doctor was quite familiar with the medical investigation surrounding Steven’s death. He had remained in contact with Dr. Graham, the medical examiner. Besides telling Sergeant Burgoon who at St. Louis University Hospital had conducted the toxicology tests, all with negative results, he also informed the detective that Ellen and her daughter were scheduled to undergo a battery of cardiac testing between December 19th and December 21st. The testing, he said, was to establish whether the two dead boys could have been susceptible to a condition known as “Prolonged QT Syndrome.” This condition was prevalent in males, and could result in sudden death. Dr. Burt Brumberg at Cardinal Glennon would conduct the tests. Dr. Scalzo assured Joe that the results of the tests would be made available to him as soon as they were completed.
Ellen had told Sergeant Burgoon that her husband had taken an EKG at the time they were living on Wyoming. Now Burgoon also knew that doctors at Cardinal Glennon were trying to obtain the results of that test to determine what they could about Paul’s heart.
This was beginning to feel like a white-collar investigation. Joe hadn’t pried any slug out of a wall, or found a body dumped by the roadside. He had a little boy’s corpse, and there wasn’t a mark on it. To boot, he was interviewing doctors. Even the neighbor was a medical student. At least next he could canvass the life insurance agents. Perhaps here he would find some firmer ground.
The next few days were spent on the phone. He confirmed through State Farm Insurance that Ellen had obtained a policy on Steven’s life in the amount of $50,000. William Reed was the local agent, and the effective date of the coverage was August 22, 1989. Joe was told claim No. 68-13-0654 had been paid.
Tom Massey at United of Mutual, a subsidiary of Mutual of Omah
a, verified that Ellen Boehm had insured her son’s life for $12,000. He said the policies had been purchased by mail on September 6, 1989. Joe jotted down the policy numbers and the name of the beneficiary, which was Ellen Boehm, and then dialed the number of the Shelter Insurance Company. Sam Bevell, an agent for the company, said he had written two policies for Ellen Boehm in late August 1989, and that he had sent them in a couple of weeks later, on September 11th. The amount of the policy was $30,000. There were two beneficiaries, Ellen and her mother, Catherine Booker.
A brief phone call to Arthur Andersen’s benefits department established that Ellen had received a $5,000 death benefit from the company’s life carrier, Aetna.
By now Joe had determined that Ellen had carried $97,000 in life insurance on Steven. He also knew that she had insured Stacy’s life for the same amount. One of Ellen’s children had suddenly died without explanation within a month of the purchase of all that insurance. The other, it appeared, had had a brush with death. When Joe checked with the Gebken-Benz Mortuary regarding David’s funeral arrangements, he learned another troubling fact: Ellen had never paid the bill, even though she had received $5,000 from the policy at Andersen.
It was time to talk to the grandmother, Catherine Booker. Joe, along with another detective, George Bender, arranged to see Ellen’s mother at two o’clock on December 19th, at her daughter’s apartment.
The sixty-five-year-old widow was cooperative, and related pretty much the same story they both knew about Steven’s death. Catherine said she saw Steven early on the morning of September 25th, when Ellen brought him to her apartment building at approximately 8:30. Typically, she said, Ellen would pick her up in the morning and take her to Ellen’s apartment. Because Catherine didn’t have a phone, Ellen had driven to her apartment on Miami to tell her that Steven was too sick to go to school, and that she was staying home with him.
