by John Coston
The two detectives had little else to ask Ms. Sumokowski, and they thanked her for her time. Before they left the Riverbend Apartments, they stopped in at the office of Karen Grimes. Once again she corroborated what the others had said, that Ellen was oddly calm following the deaths of both boys. They also learned of a janitor, who had become very friendly with Ellen. In fact, he sometimes had spent the night in Ellen’s apartment. His name was Robert E. Brown, Jr., known as “Bobbie.” He had changed jobs in October, and was now employed at a nursing home.
It seemed like a promising lead, and the detectives pounced on it. They got on the radio to Joe, who immediately dispatched Detective Waggoner to find Brown. It didn’t take any time at all, but the lead turned out to be less than exciting.
Mr. Brown was full of information about Ellen. He had been employed at Riverbend for about three years before he had left in the fall. He knew that Ellen had moved there in August 1988, and that she had previously lived in a house on Wyoming. He knew that she had been married, and he said that as far as he knew, she was seeing a bus driver named Bob.
Brown further stated that he and Ellen had become more than just friends, and that on at least three occasions, they had had sex, and that he had visited her even after he left the Riverbend Apartments.
As Detective Waggoner listened, he became more and more surprised. Ellen had fabricated an entire string of boyfriends. Mr. Brown said that Ellen was also seeing the manager of the Road Warriors, a professional wrestling tag team, and that he thought his name was Paul Ellering. Ellen had told him that Ellering would call her frequently. She also said she was seeing the manager of a local take-out pizzeria, Elicia’s Pizza, and that whenever she ordered pizza, he would often deliver it himself. Then there was a phantom boyfriend who drove a blue Saab equipped with a car phone. The man, Mr. Brown said, supposedly stayed with Ellen from about January to June 1989, but because he would arrive late at night and leave early in the morning, no one actually had seen him. Mr. Brown said Ellen once called him and told him she was calling from the car phone. By the summer of 1989, Ellen announced that she was no longer seeing this man, explaining that things just didn’t work out.
The last time he had seen Ellen was a couple of months ago, when he stopped at her apartment to say hello. Ellen told him about Steven’s death, though she seemed unmoved by it all, he said, just the way she had been after David died. As he was making his move to leave, Ellen pleaded with him to stay the night, but he declined. This was part of the pattern: Ellen wanted to have sex more often, and he didn’t. Only when the mystery man with the Saab was hanging around had she been sexually uninterested in him, though they still maintained a close relationship.
Mr. Brown had given Detective Waggoner an earful, but he saved a disturbing detail for last. Explaining that Ellen had been fairly open with him, lingering with him in discussions about life, sex, other men, and a variety of topics, she also had told him that her father had tried to sexually abuse her.
Later that day, the task force reviewed what it had learned about Ellen Kay Booker Boehm. First of all, everyone who had observed Ellen over any period of time had concluded that she rarely displayed normal human emotion. How could any parent not be profoundly struck by the death of her own child? How could any mother even hold herself together if death had taken two of her children? It also appeared that Ms. Fenton was a very credible witness, and that what she saw and heard was true: that Ellen hadn’t even told her own mother about Stacy’s bathtub scare.
What was more confusing was the picture that Ellen was projecting of herself as a woman in great demand. They knew that she was short and fat, and not particularly pretty. How could all these men be after her? Could this be tied into the report that her father had tried to sexually abuse her? The disclosure was packed with meaning, they knew.
Joe said he would make an attempt to run down the bus driver named Bob the next day. Then he and Detective Waggoner would interview their informant again, to get a better picture of this woman who seemed not to care that her children had died, while possibly also indulging in what sounded like fantastic stories about all the men in her life.
The hearsay about Ellen dating the manager of Elicia’s certainly would prove to be false. Mike Romay’s only relationship with Ellen was as her boss. In fact, Mr. Romay had met all of Ellen’s children, but that was only because she had been a customer when they lived on Wyoming, and then an employee for more than five years. Mr. Romay didn’t know much about Ellen’s private life. She just came to work and did her job.
Deanne Bond was at her desk when the phone rang. It was Sergeant Burgoon.
“Deanne, we’re going to have to have you come in.”
“Oh, no, Joe,” she responded. “I don’t want to do this.”
“You’ve got to,” he said softly.
There was a pause. Deanne knew she didn’t have any choice. In the months since she and her friend had made the original call, they had spent hours on the phone discussing this topic. They couldn’t get it off their minds. They also were becoming frightened that Ellen would somehow discover that someone had called the police. Besides worrying about that, they were also aware of the possibility that it was all one big mistake. Maybe Ellen had nothing to do with this. In fact, Deanne still wished that Dr. Graham, the medical examiner, would suddenly uncover some previously hidden illness that explained the deaths of both David and Steven.
“When is convenient?” Joe asked. “Today.”
“Oh.” Deanne’s thoughts stalled as she telescoped the rest of her day, realizing that she could just as easily leave the office by midafternoon. “Is three okay?”
“Sure, fine.”
At the appointed hour, as Deanne parked her car outside police headquarters on Clark Street, she was shaking so badly she couldn’t get out of the car. So she sat there for a few minutes, controlling her breath and screwing up her courage.
Once inside, she announced herself to the officer at the front desk. “I’m supposed to see a Sergeant Burgoon, from Homicide.”
In no time, she saw the elevator doors in front of her open, and out stepped Joe. He escorted her to the Homicide Section, and she sat down with him and Detective Waggoner, who noted the time: 2:55. Deanne was five minutes early.
The detectives began by asking background questions. When had she first met Ellen? How had they become friends? The answers led Deanne to describe her own marriage and divorce, which turned the discussion to Ellen’s marriage and divorce, and her loss of the house on Wyoming, and then her growing financial problems.
Deanne said the principal connection between her and Ellen was their interest in professional wrestling.
The questions that followed uncovered the relationship centered on the National Wrestling Alliance. Deanne, they learned, was a true-blue fan. She had saved all the ticket stubs from all the matches that she and Ellen had attended. There, before their eyes, was a chronological trail of evidence that showed how between May 1986 and June 1989, Ellen had traveled far and wide, and at considerable expense, to indulge her passion for the sport.
When Deanne touched on the name of the Road Warriors, mentioning that she and Ellen would often try to stay in the same hotel, they stopped her.
“Have the Road Warriors ever been in a motel room with Ellen?”
Deanne was anything but phlegmatic in her response. “If those two men were in my room, I would sure as hell know it! Trust me, the same motel room?”
“Did she ever leave the room? You know, later.”
“Not to my knowledge. I’m such a light sleeper.”
Deanne explained that nine times out of ten, she and Ellen weren’t able to get rooms in the same section or floor of the hotel. The wrestlers would often stay on floors that required a special pass.
“Trust me, I would know.”
Deanne knew that Ellen was crazy about the wrestlers, and she told the detectives so. Ellen had been crazy about Ted DiBiasi for fourteen or fifteen years. One year
, for his birthday, Ellen had gone to K Mart and bought him a burgundy velour shirt that was on sale. She paid $14.95 for it, wrapped it up as a present, and took it with her to the Marriott in St. Louis, the one near the airport, where she presented it to him.
To Deanne, it was bordering on hopeless to give a man who earned six figures a year a gift that represented such outrageous bad taste, but she also knew Ellen might realize it, too. Maybe Ellen was just goofing on the man of her dreams. Still, Deanne was a little shocked that Ellen, who at the time was still very much married to Paul, would give any present at all to another man. She certainly wouldn’t, she knew.
“When they would come to St. Louis,” Deanne said, “I have known her to stay at the Marriott instead of going home.”
Ellen would also call up and ask for adjoining rooms with Ted DiBiasi, and then he would find out about it when he arrived in town and be forced to ask for a room change.
In short, Deanne was making it quite clear to these detectives that Ellen’s statements about romantic involvement with anybody on the professional wrestling circuit were utter fabrication.
Deanne then mentioned that both she and Ellen would write letters and cards to the wrestlers. Ellen took it more seriously, even to the point of sending her friend carbon copies of the letters. The detectives quickly asked if Deanne had any in her possession. Yes, she said, she actually had dropped a lot of them into a file at her desk at work. Yes, she would provide them to the police.
“A lot of it was just B.S. and fantasy. They really weren’t anything. Normally I would just throw that stuff away, but I have a miscellaneous file and I would throw them in there, thinking I would read them later. Sometimes I did.”
“How did these wrestlers, I mean, what was their reaction to these letters, do you know?”
“Oh, Ellering would look for her just the minute he would start down the aisle,” Deanne said. “You know, they’re out on the road all the time, and they start looking for your mail. It’s like a pen-pal thing. They get used to it.
“After they got to know you, and know that you weren’t just arena rats. You really enjoyed wrestling and you enjoyed the show they put on and the work that they did, they loved it. They loved it when we went on the road, following them.
“They put on a hell of a show, because it was nice to put on a show for somebody that really appreciated it.
“Then, when you’d stop, they would really play up to you, because you had stopped writing to them. They knew it couldn’t be that you’d gotten tired of it.”
“Did Ellen ever sleep with DiBiasi?” they asked.
“Never. He never slept with her.”
“What about Paul Ellering?”
Given a chance, Deanne said she believed that Ellen would have gone through with it and slept with any one of the men. But over the last couple of years, as Ellen had tried to get Ellering interested in her sexually, he had tired of her advances and seemed to close her out. Finally he wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence. Ellen, she said, became vindictive about it and began to write nasty letters, or tried to have girlfriends write such letters. She said Ellen signed false names to these letters and would sometimes mail them from other cities. In them, Deanne said, Ellen talked about having sex with Mr. Ellering, among other things.
Deanne also said she knew Ellen had a vivid imagination on this subject, and that her fixation on Paul Ellering had ended abruptly one night at the Marriott in St. Louis, when he turned his back on Ellen at the bar.
“Do you know of any other instances like this?”
Deanne said that since she had known Ellen, she had caught her in numerous lies about dating men. “Ellen got angry at one of the guys at Don Brown Chevrolet, and she asked me what she could do to get back at him,” she recalled. She also said Ellen had lied to her about a guy at Andersen.
Deanne said she would find it difficult to believe much of anything Ellen said when it came to the subject of men. “In fact,” she said, “I have never seen Ellen with a man.”
When the interview was over, Joe walked her back outside to her car. She would never forget what he said to her. She was physically and emotionally spent from the grilling at the hands of some very tough-minded, and sometimes unsympathetic detectives who were also in the room with Joe. She had been kept for almost four hours in a closed room. Outside, Joe thanked her for coming in. He was still holding back somewhat, and when he said she had been very helpful, it was an understatement.
As they crossed Tucker Boulevard, the sergeant spoke.
“You know, I’m ninety-nine percent sure she did it.”
Deanne looked up at him.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
Then she paused for a second, but then didn’t hesitate.
“If she did, then I want you to get her.”
“That’s the one thing I promise you. No matter how long it takes, I will get her.”
In Search of a Man
Robert Jordan was sipping a cup of coffee in the Gateway Cafeteria, a good-enough place for a break from his hours behind the wheel of a bus. Back then, in the early 1980s, he was a driver for Bi-State. The Gateway was right across the street from the South Broadway garage.
As he sat there on his break, someone caught his attention to tell him that there was a phone call for him. Bob, as he is known by his friends, was a big man in his early thirties. He got up, walked to the phone, and said hello.
It was a woman on the line. She said her name was Jeannette Pepper, and she said that she wanted to meet him at the Velvet Freeze on Gravois after he got off work. That was it. The line went dead.
Curiosity more than anything else led him to stop by the place after work. Sure, he would go in for a soda and see what this was all about. In no time, he found out. It was Ellen, who came in with her daughter. It was a setup. But it wouldn’t end without acrimony, because very soon after Ellen and Stacy arrived, Paul Boehm showed, too.
Ellen’s husband launched into a tirade, accusing Bob of going out with his wife. The two men weren’t strangers. Bob and Paul had worked together when Paul drove the Cherokee route for Bi-State. They both drove out of the South Broadway garage and shared another interest. The two of them were budding, amateur photographers.
There was nothing to this rendezvous at the Velvet Freeze, but Paul continued his attack, to the point of inviting Bob outside to fight. They never did, and they all went their separate ways that night, but it wasn’t over yet.
About a week later, Bob received a letter from a woman who said that she had met him on the bus and had talked about wrestling matches. Bob figured this was Ellen’s doing, and he decided to show the letter to Paul. Bob wouldn’t have been able to recognize Ellen’s handwriting, but he was sure her husband would. When Paul saw the handwriting, he didn’t recognize it as Ellen’s, and the two of them were left in the dark about this open-ended letter.
On January 9th, Sgt. Burgoon called Bob Jordan on the phone. It was close to 1 P.M. After Joe had extracted a brief identity and work history from Bob, he wanted to know if he had ever been to Ellen’s apartment. By now the sergeant had certainly begun to get the idea that whatever Ellen had said about men could well be suspect. He was about to collect one more example.
Mr. Jordan said he had visited Ellen’s apartment on two occasions. Once he had gone over because Ellen had called and asked him to take some photographs of her children. He said that after he arrived, Ellen hemmed and hawed about the pictures, and in the end, none were ever taken. The second time, he said, was sometime after Thanksgiving of 1988. At the time he was driving the Alton to St. Louis route for Bi-State, and Ellen met him at the Greyhound Bus Station, which was the turnaround point for his route.
Ellen, he said, invited him to her apartment. Later, when he stopped by, Ellen told him about David’s death, explaining how it had happened without warning. She told him the entire story, from beginning to end, and that version tracked with all of her previous retellings wit
h one exception. This time, Ellen said that she had a girlfriend call the ambulance. Ellen had told everyone else that she had called 911 herself.
Bob Jordan was spellbound, and saddened. He had known Paul and Ellen over the years. This was clearly a tragic blow that had been dealt to Ellen.
Ellen also told Bob that she was planning to transfer her job to Florida, and the two of them sat and talked a few more minutes about the Sunshine State’s balmy climate, and how great it would be to live there, before Bob said his good-bye. That was the last time he either saw Ellen or spoke to her.
Joe Burgoon had initially felt some sympathy for Ellen, especially after he first sat down and talked to her in her living room. To him, it was a sorrowful scene. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away. Ellen had put up a tree, and her daughter, the only remaining child, was obviously excited about all the presents that Santa might bring. His empathy with Ellen derived from his own experience. When his wife had died, she was pregnant, and the newborn had lived only a day, and after Joe had finished talking with Ellen that first time, he felt a heartfelt pity for her as he said good-bye. Anybody who lost a child knew what it was like.
As he started to call around about the insurance policies, his sympathetic view rapidly changed. The interviews that had been conducted so far were supporting his newfound observation that this was a very complicated woman, and that this was turning into a complex case. There was still the one big hole: no evidence. Dr. Graham still didn’t have any, and neither did he.
On January 10th, in an attempt to view some semblance of evidentiary matter, Detectives Jones and Cordia drove down to Ellen’s apartment. It was shortly after 2 o’clock in the afternoon when they knocked on the door of Apartment 501, which was then opened by Ellen’s mother.
The detectives requested her permission to come in and view the bathroom, as well as the hair dryer that had been dropped in the bathtub. Catherine showed them inside. In the cramped bathroom, Detective Cordia made some mental measurements of the distance from the nearest electrical outlet in the hallway outside. She noted that the tub was about three feet from the doorway, and that the outlet on the south wall of the hallway was another foot from the bathroom door.
