“So did I.”
We went back through the now dog-eared collection of papers Todd Hatcher had amassed for us the day we started closing in on the truth. Searching through them all, we came up with nothing more than “died unexpectedly in his home.” A call to the Ann Arbor Police Department didn’t add much to what we’d already surmised. Armand P. Bowdin had committed suicide by taking an overdose of prescription medications.
“That doesn’t change the fact that his picture is here,” Mel said determinedly.
And off we went on the trail of Anita Bowdin’s mother Rachel. It took time for us to bring her to ground. Widowed for a second time, Rachel A. Trasker lived in a retirement compound near Tampa, Florida.
“This is about my daughter?” Rachel asked warily once we finally had her on the phone. “If you’re a reporter…”
Clearly we weren’t the first people to make the connection between Mrs. Trasker and her errant daughter.
“I’m definitely not a reporter,” Mel corrected. “I’m an investigator for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. We’re calling about your husband-your first husband.”
Mel’s remark was followed by a long period of dead silence. “What about him?” Rachel asked finally.
“Did he commit suicide?”
“Why do you ask?” Rachel wanted to know.
“Did he?” Mel insisted.
There was another long pause. “What if she comes after me?” Rachel asked finally.
“What if Anita comes after you?” Mel clarified.
“She always said she would. If I ever told anyone, she said she’d get rid of me, too. I happen to believe her.”
“Your daughter is an accused serial murderer. She’s jail awaiting trial on twelve cases of homicide. She isn’t getting out anytime soon.”
“Armand never did any of the things Anita said,” Rachel declared after a time. “He wouldn’t. He was a nice man. She tried to tell me that he did things to her, messed with her, touched her. It was just too crazy. I never believed a word of it. But she told me she gave him a choice, either take the pills or she’d go to the police. She told me she sat right there and watched him do it. How could her father and I have raised such a monster?”
Unfortunately, the answer to that question was all too apparent-to everyone but Anita Bowdin’s mother. And now we knew why Armand’s picture was the very first entry on Anita’s scorecard.
Meanwhile the case kept grinding on in other people’s hands. In the end, Yolanda Andrade turned out to be the weakest link. She had come to the crime lab with a phonied-up resume after being fired from working at CODIS, the national DNA database. With her expertise it had been simple enough for her to make inroads into Washington State’s far less secure DNA database-the shortcomings of which Ross Connors is even now working to fix.
I think it was shocking for the whole law enforcement to realize that this invaluable crime-fighting tool, DNA profiling, had been perverted into a targeting device for murder. But once Yolanda confessed to her part in the scheme and agreed to testify against the others, other guilty pleas started falling into place. Eventually Destry and Anita will either cop pleas as well or else stand trial. When that will happen is anyone’s guess.
As the investigators closest to the case, Mel and I were put in charge of victim and family notifications. Every single case was one of justice denied. Talking to those folks was grueling, emotional work-some of the hardest police work I’ve ever done. With the notable exceptions of Richard Matthews and LaShawn Tompkins, all the victims were either convicted sexual predators or else convicted felons. That made them a less than sympathetic lot, but the same wasn’t true of their survivors. For the parents or grandparents or siblings or wives or girlfriends of all these bad boys, the murdered victim was still their very own bad boy. Regardless of what crimes he may have committed as an adult, he had been little once-little, innocent, and loved.
Of all of those family notifications, the hardest for me was the one with Etta Mae Tompkins. In the intervening months she had become far frailer. She sat quietly in her corner chair and listened to what I had to say. When I finished, she nodded.
“It’s all right,” she said. “My Shawny’s in heaven now. I pray to Jesus every night that he’ll come soon and take me, too. With LaShawn gone, I’ve got nothing else to live for.”
I felt honor-bound to go back to King Street Mission to tell Pastor Mark I had been wrong and he was off the hook as far as LaShawn Tompkins’s murder was concerned. When I got there, though, the building was gone-demolished. What I found instead was a hole in the ground with a construction crane parked in the middle of it. I never found Pastor Mark again, and I never found Sister Elaine Manning, either.
Then there was the matter of dealing with the victims of all those long-ago, never-solved rapes. As the rape kits were tested, or rather, as they were retested, results led back to one or another of Mel’s dead sexual offenders. And one by one we located the rape victims involved to let them know that their cases were now considered solved and closed, even though they would never have the benefit of a trial to help put the attacks behind them.
For a long time I wondered if LaShawn Tompkins’s case would ever surface. One of the last profiles developed was that of a fourteen-year-old rape victim, Jonelle Lenora DeVry, who claimed she had been attacked and raped on her way home from school by an unidentified gangbanger.
It took us a while to track down Jonelle DeVry Jackson, but we finally did. That was how, two months later, Mel and I came to be sitting across from a young black woman in the neat living room of a small house on the outskirts of Ellensburg, Washington, where Jonelle now works in the admissions office for Central Washington University.
“We wanted you to know the case is finally resolved,” Mel said tentatively. “That we’ve finally learned the identity of the boy who raped you.”
Jonelle studied Mel for a long hard minute. “Is this going to come out in the newspapers?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Not at all. You were a juvenile at the time. There’s no reason to reveal your name now.”
“Good,” Jonelle said with a relieved sigh. “I always knew who raped me,” she added. “And it wasn’t rape, either. LaShawn Tompkins was five years older than me, but I loved him to distraction, and I thought he loved me, too. I told my parents it was somebody else because I knew my daddy would have killed LaShawn if he’d known. And then, about the same time, LaShawn got caught up in that other case…”
“The one he went to prison for?” Mel asked.
Jonelle nodded. “Yes,” she answered. “But once he went to jail for that, I knew not telling had been the right thing to do. And it still is. DeShawn has no idea who his father was. I want to keep it that way.”
That stopped me. “DeShawn?” I repeated. “You had LaShawn’s baby and kept him? You named him after LaShawn, but you raised him without ever telling him who his father is?”
“My parents raised him,” Jonelle corrected. “They raised both of us. They helped me get through school, the same way I’m helping DeShawn right now. It hasn’t been easy, but he’s a smart boy. He earned a full scholarship to Gonzaga. He’s studying premed. With all that, what was the point of telling him his father was in prison? And by the time LaShawn was released…” She paused and shrugged. “There wasn’t any point then, either.”
“You knew LaShawn was raised by his grandmother?”
“I knew Etta Mae,” Jonelle replied. “Our old house is gone now. They tore it down and built an apartment building there, but we lived on Church Street, too. Etta Mae and my mother were good friends.”
“You knew LaShawn turned his life around while he was in prison?”
“I guess,” Jonelle said.
“And Etta Mae stood by him the whole time, believing in him, loving him.”
A single tear slid out of the corner of Jonelle DeVry’s eye and trickled down her cheek. “She would do,” she said. “That’s Etta Mae.”