The Last Scoop

by R. G. Belsky

  I decided to use that as an angle, too. I’d talk about how this young girl’s life had changed irrevocably on that terrible day she discovered her friend Becky Bluso brutally murdered. How she and her family left town immediately afterward. How no one ever knew what happened to Teresa Lofton after that. It certainly added a bit more drama and emotion to my story.

  While I was working on all this, Gary Weddle came into my office. He said all the right things about the story screwup not being my fault to try to make me feel better. I told him about what I was planning to do on the air tonight, and he seemed to like it. But things had been a bit awkward between us since the night I left him so abruptly—interrupting our plans for sex. I wondered again if he had found out about the background between me and Manning, the FBI agent I said I had to rush off to meet. Or if Weddle was just disappointed that our plan for a night of romance hadn’t worked out. But, for whatever reason, he’d kept his distance from me since then, and I’d done the same with him. I suppose we were both trying to figure out where this relationship was going.

  The truth is, I didn’t know. I didn’t know where the relationship with Weddle was going. I didn’t know where my relationship with my daughter in Winchester, Virginia, was going, either. And I didn’t know where this damn story I was working on was going.

  I didn’t know a lot of things right now.

  At 6 p.m., I was on the air telling it all to the Channel 10 audience.

  ME: Now that the news of The Wanderer murders has become public, Channel 10 News can reveal that we have exclusively been a part of the FBI investigation into the killings. We first alerted the FBI to the potential links between the murders—as many as twenty over a thirty-year period, occurring in every part of the country. And we have been with the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit team every step of the way as they try to apprehend this fiend.

  I went through the details of the murders and the links that had been discovered between them, then focused on the one I wanted to play up the most for our broadcast: the Becky Bluso murder.

  ME: Seventeen-year-old Becky Bluso was stabbed to death in broad daylight inside her house on this bucolic street in the Midwestern town of Eckersville, Indiana, on August 23, 1990. It is believed—even though there is no direct evidence yet to confirm this—that Becky Bluso may have been the first victim of The Wanderer. The first woman out of at least 20 to die at the hands of this monster.

  A picture of the old Bluso house—and the rest of the street—went up on the screen.

  ME: Becky Bluso was one of the most popular girls at Eckersville High School. She was an honor student. She was a cheerleader. She was on the Student Council. But, on this afternoon, someone came into her home and brutally butchered her to death.

  Parkman came on the screen then to talk about the investigation into the case, all the leads the police had chased over the years without success. “We will never give up,” Parkman said, as he’d told me when I was in his office. “No matter how long it takes, we are determined to bring the person who committed this unspeakable crime to justice.”

  This was followed by the interview with Becky’s sister. Betty Bluso talked about the things she remembered about her younger sister. About the shock of learning what had happened to her. And about the destruction of the Bluso family in the wake of that tragedy.

  ME: Robert and Elizabeth Bluso died of natural causes after their daughter’s murder. But there are many in Eckersville who believe they died of broken hearts. This is a tragedy that touched—and forever changed the lives—of many people in this peaceful Indiana community.

  I then segued into the story of Teresa Lofton, the teenaged neighborhood girl who found Becky’s body. I went through the account of how she showed up at the house to meet Becky, went inside when she saw the door was open, and then discovered the bloody scene upstairs.

  ME: Teresa Lofton was so traumatized by what she saw that day that she and her family left town soon afterward. She never returned to Eckersville. One can only imagine the horror of what this young girl had to live through, and remember, from that horrendous scene. That was 30 years ago, but the nightmare continues. And it won’t end until the murderer of Becky Bluso, who is now believed to be the murderer of all these other women, too, is finally caught. Channel 10 will continue to keep you up to date on this breaking story both in our newscasts and in our “The News Never Stops” website coverage.

  My phone was ringing when I got back to my office after the broadcast.

  I thought it might be Manning. Or someone else from the FBI task force like Wharton who wanted to talk about what I’d just reported on air. But it wasn’t. It was Terri Hartwell.

  “What the hell is going on?” Hartwell asked.

  She sounded upset.

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” I said.

  “That Becky Bluso story you did on the air. This whole Wanderer thing you were talking about. Where did that all come from? Why didn’t you ever tell me anything about all this?”

  I still didn’t get it. None of the murders had taken place in New York City. They wouldn’t have anything to do with Hartwell or her office. I pointed that out to her. I asked her exactly what it was she was asking about.

  “Teresa Lofton,” she said.

  “Right. The girl from next door who found Becky Bluso’s body after the murder, then moved away from Eckersville right after that. So what?”

  “That’s me,” Hartwell said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  And then, even before she said anything else, it all came together for me.

  Teresa Lofton.

  Terri was a shortened name for Teresa.

  And Hartwell was her married name.

  “I’m Teresa Lofton,” Terri Hartwell said.

  PART IV

  THE LAST SCOOP

  CHAPTER 49

  TERRI HARTWELL HAD been a part of this story from the very beginning. She was the first name Marty talked about with me that day back in my office. But I’d never made the connection.

  I assumed all along that Marty started out investigating the building corruption scandal because of his son-in-law’s questionable business activities in the real estate business, but then happened to get curious about the first big murder case he ever covered and went back to Indiana where he uncovered the link to the serial killings.

  They were always two separate stories—first Terri Hartwell and the building scandal, then Becky Bluso and the other murders.

  Or so I thought.

  But I was wrong.

  Marty had been working on one story.

  “The biggest story of my life,” he’d said.

  And it was all centered around Terri Hartwell.

  “I always hated the name Teresa,” Terri Hartwell said to me now. “Made me sound like a nun. But my parents gave me the name, and I was stuck with it growing up and all through high school. Later, after I left Eckersville, I started using Terri. Then I got married and became Terri Hartwell, not Teresa Lofton. I changed my hair color from brunette to red, I changed the way I dressed, I changed the way I acted. I never told anyone about being Teresa Lofton or growing up in Eckersville or any of the rest about what happened there. I became Terri Hartwell. I liked Terri Hartwell better than I liked Teresa Lofton. Too many bad memories associated with Teresa Lofton.”

  We were sitting in her office again at Foley Square. She was still stunned by the revelation that the long-ago murder of Becky Bluso might be linked to a series of other murders being actively investigated by the FBI.

  “Becky and I grew up together,” she said. “We lived nearly next door to each other. We played together, we went to school together, we were inseparable for a long time. Becky and I were almost like sisters. I had dark hair then—just like her—and people sometimes said I looked more like Becky’s sister than her real sisters did.

  “We were very close, Becky and I. But we were also competitive. We both wanted the same things. Cheerleader squad. Honor
roll. Student government office. And boys, of course. At the end, we had a pretty bad falling-out over … well, a boy.

  “Becky and I hadn’t even spoken to each other in weeks. But we were trying to patch it up. She’d reached out and asked me to come over to her house that afternoon. That’s why I was meeting her. We’d decided to get together and try to be friends again. Like the old days. Except …”

  Her voice trailed off.

  All this bad feeling between the two girls brought up an obvious question. Could she have killed Becky herself? I didn’t know a good way to ask Terri Hartwell that question. But I went ahead and did it anyway. I asked her if the police had ever questioned her as a possible suspect.

  “Sure, they did. They questioned me. They questioned everybody. Everyone was a suspect, at first. But they were just flailing around. They never had any real clue about what happened. Still don’t, from what you say. To be honest, the Eckersville police department simply wasn’t equipped to handle a major murder investigation. I realize that now after my years in law enforcement. Maybe things would have been different if they’d done a better job. Maybe some of these other women might not be dead.”

  “We still don’t know Becky Bluso’s murder is connected to the others,” I pointed out. “It’s the only one where there’s no forensic or DNA evidence that matches any of the other murders.”

  “I kind of hope it does turn out to have been a serial killer who murdered Becky. I like the idea of The Wanderer or whoever he is randomly picking the victims. Because the alternative is Becky’s killer was …”

  “Someone she knew,” I said.

  “Someone she knew,” Hartwell repeated.

  I asked her about why she and her family moved away from Eckersville so quickly after the murder.

  “I was terribly traumatized by what I’d seen in Becky’s house—her blood-covered body and all the rest of that horrible scene. My parents decided that was the best thing to do. They were right. I never went back to Eckersville after that. I tried to forget about Becky Bluso and Teresa Lofton and Eckersville.”

  There was still something I didn’t understand. Well, there were a lot of things I didn’t understand. But this one was a simple question.

  “Did my friend Marty Barlow ever come to you to talk about you being Teresa Lofton or about the Becky Bluso murder?”

  “No, I never met Barlow.”

  “He did talk to Chad Enright.”

  “I didn’t know that either until later.”

  “Except he only asked Enright about the housing scandal questions, not about you and Becky Bluso.”

  “That’s what Chad says. And he doesn’t have any reason to lie now. He’s telling authorities everything he can in hopes of getting some kind of break in a plea bargain deal.”

  Why hadn’t Marty asked about the Bluso murder? I could only theorize an answer for that now. But it was a logical one. Marty hadn’t made the Terri Hartwell/Teresa Lofton connection yet when he talked to Enright. He was still looking for information on the housing scandal. Then, at some point, when he was digging into that and the possibility of the DA’s office being involved in a payoff scheme, he recognized who Terri Hartwell was. Teresa Lofton, the next-door neighbor in the first big murder story he covered as a young journalist in Indiana. That must have sparked his curiosity in the old case. He changed direction and began looking into the Becky Bluso murder again. And that, for reasons still unknown, led him to the string of other murders he believed were connected to the Bluso case.

  If all this was true, he would have gone to Hartwell eventually. But I knew how Marty worked. He liked to get all his facts in order before interviewing a key participant in a story. That’s what he’d been doing with Terri Hartwell. Making sure he’d accumulated all the facts he could before talking to Hartwell about Becky Bluso. Only Marty ran out of time before he could do that.

  “The first time I found out about any of this was when I saw your broadcast,” Hartwell said. “It completely blew me away. That’s when I called you to tell you about me. You have a reputation as a dogged reporter. I knew you’d figure out about me, sooner or later. I decided it was better to deal with it sooner. What are you going to do now?”

  “This is a big story. And your involvement—even if you were only a teenager back then—is a part of the story.”

  “Does it have to be?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve spent my entire life trying to put Eckersville and Teresa Lofton behind me. I understand you’ve got a job to do. But I’m not really relevant to the story you’re working on. I’m only a sidelight.”

  “A helluva interesting sidelight.”

  “I offered you a job. Are you still considering that?”

  “I haven’t made a decision,” I said.

  “Sure, you have.”

  “Okay, I’m not going to come work for you. I wasn’t when you first offered it—and I’m certainly not going to do it now.”

  “I can’t use that for leverage then, I guess.”

  There was something very wrong here. Terri Hartwell, like any politician, was always looking for media publicity. And there was nothing in this to make her look bad. In fact, it might make her even more sympathetic to the voters. The crime-fighter who had to deal with her traumatic crime experience as a young girl. But here she was doing everything she could—even practically trying to bribe me with a job offer—to keep me quiet.

  I also had the feeling that she was not telling me everything. That she was holding something back.

  “Who was the boy?” I asked.

  “What boy?”

  “The boy you and Becky were fighting over.”

  “That’s not important now.”

  “Who was the boy?” I repeated.

  “Why does it matter after all this time?”

  “He could be a suspect.”

  “Everyone was a suspect back then. I told you that.”

  “It won’t take me much time to find out who it was,” I said. “I’ll go back and talk to people in Eckersville who went to high school then. Sooner or later, probably sooner, I’ll get his name. And then I’ll talk to him. Wouldn’t it be easier for you to tell me who he is right now?”

  “You can’t talk to him. He’s dead.”

  “What happened?”

  “He joined the Army and was killed about a year later. I heard about it after I left Eckersville. I never knew much more about it. I wanted to put everything there behind me. I hadn’t even thought about any of this in a long time until you brought the subject up again.”

  “So why won’t you talk to me about what was going on back then between him and you and Becky?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got plenty of time.”

  And then she told me about Dale Blanchard …

  CHAPTER 50

  “DALE BLANCHARD WAS my first love,” Terri Hartwell said. “You never forget your first love. Oh, I’d had crushes on boys in high school before him. A few dates, too. But he was the one. The boy I wanted to marry. Or so I thought back then. I fell head over heels in love with Dale.”

  She described Blanchard in glowing terms even after all these years. Good-looking, sexy guy. Drove a cool car. Was a big athlete—played football, basketball, and track. All the girls in school had a thing for Blanchard, she said. But he was smitten with her, the way she was with him. They went to school dances together. They went to movies together. And they did even more than that together.

  “He was the first man I ever had sex with. Christ, I was only seventeen, barely legal. I’d hardly even been kissed before Dale. But he was older—a year ahead of me in high school, he was a senior that year when I was a junior—and he’d clearly had experience with other women before me.

  “We did it in his car sometimes. We did it in the park a few times during that summer. And we’d even go back to my house on Oak Park Drive and do it in my bedroom when my parents weren’t home. If they were gone for the
afternoon, I’d call up Dale and we’d make love in my bed and laugh about what my parents would say if they had any idea what we were doing.

  “Every girl in school was envious of me. Including Becky. That’s what led to the falling-out between us. She was jealous of me and Dale. She tried to come on to him a few times, but he rebuffed her—and she blamed me. We’d grown up together as best friends, but now we weren’t even talking.”

  Hartwell had told me about a guy in her life—someone she’d never really gotten over—the last time we talked over dinner. It happened when I was telling her about how I still had this thing for Scott Manning even though I knew he made no sense for me in any kind of a real relationship. “We all have an unrequited love in our life, Clare,” she’d said. “A guy that makes no sense for us. On any level. But somehow, we can’t forget about him. I love my husband, but I knew someone like that, too.”

  That guy had been Dale Blanchard for her, she told me now.

  “My family wasn’t happy about it at all. My mother and father didn’t like Dale and wanted me to stop seeing him. He’d already graduated high school that June and had no real plan about what to do next. They said he was all wrong for me. But the more they said that, the more exciting it was for me to be with him.

  “He was the bad boy. I’d always been the good girl, but now I could be the bad girl when I was with him. I know that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it did for a confused teenaged girl in Eckersville, Indiana, still trying to figure out what she wanted out of life. What I wanted was Dale. At first. And then … well, everything changed.”

  I asked Hartwell what she meant by that. She hesitated at first, clearly troubled by the memory of something from back then. I got the feeling it was something else she had tried to forget over the years—to sublimate deep in her mind—even if she hadn’t been entirely successful at it.