by John L. Work
They worked their way completely through the upstairs and arrived at the stairwell to the basement. Simmons went down the stairs first and turned quickly left at the bottom, his weapon always pointed in the direction he looked. He spotted the dead dog and keyed his radio microphone. It looked like a gunshot just behind the left shoulder. He called his dispatcher to send someone with a camera and requested the on-call detective to be paged. There was no car in the garage. This did not look good, at all.
5
Detective J.D. Welch’s pager went off as he was about to bite into a thick double bacon cheeseburger. He was famished because he’d slept through the morning alarm and skipped making breakfast so he could get to work on time. He put the burger back onto his plate, took out his cell phone and rang through to the dispatcher.
“Communications.”
“Hey, Rosie. It’s Welch here. You paged me.”
“Hang on. One thirteen, copy. Sorry, J.D. Andy Simmons asked us to page you. He’s out of the car at 1535 Edgewood Circle with Al Gonzales on a missing person report. The last known contact with her was last Friday afternoon when she left her job at about sixteen thirty hours. The family dog has been shot dead. The R/P is on scene with one of the missing person’s children. His name is Stafford. He’s the missing person’s boss. She didn’t call in sick and the R/P suspects foul play. We’ve got a camera on the way to the home at Simmons’ request.”
“Okay. Can you also send along the crime scene forensic team? I’ll be en-route momentarily.”
He picked up the burger and drink, and took them with him to the cash register to pay for his meal. The fries would have to wait for another time. He ate in the car on his way to the call and, as was his custom while eating and driving, spilled some diet Pepsi on his new tie.
6
Other than deputies Andy Simmons and Al Gonzales, no one had been inside the home. Welch wanted to be sure it stayed that way. If this situation ended badly later on and they were all eventually called into a Court of Law, he didn’t want any contaminated crime scene problem coming up during a motions hearing or at a trial. The basic crime scene investigation idea is to always move the people out of the area and leave the things in place for photographing and, later on, collection as evidence. Move the people, leave the things. He walked through the place with Simmons, then called for some more patrol officers to come out and help with the logistics. As the first detective to arrive, he temporarily outranked everyone in the Sheriff’s Office. It was a matter of policy. That also made him responsible for everything that went right or wrong during the investigation. Welch assigned Gonzales to the front door with instructions to begin keeping a crime scene log, accounting for every person who went into the house and who came out – and at what times they arrived and departed. Anyone who entered would automatically become an endorsed witness, if it came to Courtroom criminal proceedings. Besides maintaining crime scene integrity, it was an effective tool to keep upper level police administrators out of the way. If the higher ups knew that they’d be put on a subpoena list just for showing up and tramping through the place just to be able to say they’d been there, they tended to stay in their offices.
At the moment all Welch had for sure were two problems – a misdemeanor animal cruelty case and a missing forty-six year old divorced mother of two teenagers. He suspected that this scenario was going to get much more complicated than what was at first apparent. With no sign of forced entry, a burglary was rather iffy, but not impossible. There were lots of possibilities – some of them really grim. One was a kidnapping.
The other was murder.
One of the backup deputies took Kim McCowell to the sheriff’s sub-station for a statement. Another officer preliminarily interviewed Bob Stafford outside Sheila’s home as they sat inside a squad car which was parked on the street. As he stood outside the open police car’s door, Welch got to hear some of Stafford’s information. A third cop had been dispatched to County High School to pick up Kim’s sister, Adrienne. The forensics team arrived as the yellow plastic police crime scene ribbon went up around the entire premises. Welch briefed his crime scene specialist, Jack Swain, and left the processing for latent prints, hair, fibers, blood, and photography to him and his assistant, Michelle Kuchtar. With what Stafford had told Deputy Tom Davis about Sheila McCowell’s solid employment history, punctuality, and dependability, the detective thought that this situation didn’t promise to have a very happy ending. Stafford strongly emphasized to Davis that his office manager wouldn’t have failed to show up without first calling in and talking with her boss. He was genuinely worried that something terrible had happened to her.
Welch authorized the search of the home without a warrant because, with Sheila McCowell missing, time was of the essence. A five or six hour delay that would be necessary to write an affidavit, get it okayed by the District Attorney’s Office, have a secretary type the warrant and find a judge at the Courthouse to sign it, might mean the difference between life and death for their missing person. Such a situation is called one of exigent circumstances and Welch believed they existed right here. He was willing to roll the dice on a warrantless search of her home to save her life. Besides, they weren’t searching a criminal defendant’s home. From all appearances, Sheila McCowell was probably a victim. And the elder daughter, who was an adult resident of the home, had voluntarily given them a key with which to lawfully enter.
If worse came to worst and a defense attorney later argued that a Judge should throw out any evidence seized during the warrantless search of the victim’s home, Welch figured that the District Attorney’s Office would have to worry about refuting that motion via exigent circumstances in a suppression hearing. The detective’s primary concern was to find any useful evidence, trace or otherwise, as soon as possible, in the hope of saving Sheila McCowell’s life. Besides, she owned the place. At least that was his best information at the moment. How could the cops be violating her rights if she were found dead somewhere else?
At the substation, Welch briefed his sergeant, Bill Jackson, and enlisted two other detectives to talk with the McCowell sisters while he started a computerized background check on Sheila. Later, he met with his two investigators and got the thumbnail sketch of what was going on in her life. There wasn’t much help forthcoming from the kids’ statements in unraveling the mystery. Kim had last spoken to her mother by phone on the past Friday at lunchtime. At that time everything seemed okay to the older daughter. During the conversation, Sheila wasn’t upset or overly concerned with anything and said she was looking forward to the weekend. Neither daughter knew that their mother had any special plans made for her days off.
After their weekend sleepovers with separate friends, the girls both had softball practice right after school. Their mother knew they wouldn’t be home until about six-thirty in the evening. Kim had tried to call again on Sunday afternoon, but when the call went straight to Sheila’s voice messaging, she figured the phone was turned off. Sheila had no enemies that the kids knew of and no boyfriend. The girls spent every other weekend and three weeks during the summer with their father and his fiancé in Colorado Springs. Mom and Dad seemed to get along well. Both girls liked their dad’s fiancé, Marnie. Sheila’s closest friend was Janet Rogers, a loan officer at the First Colonial American Bank in Denver. Welch wrote down the name and phone number. That was it for the preliminaries.
He contacted the Department of Social Services to arrange for the girls to be taken to their father’s home in Colorado Springs. He spoke briefly by telephone with Jim McCowell, explaining that his ex-wife had failed to show up for work and was missing. Jim said he hadn’t heard from Sheila for about a week. Welch asked for a face-to-face interview with the ex-husband. McCowell seemed genuinely worried about her welfare and readily agreed to drive up from Colorado Springs to Roberts County on the following day to speak with the detective. While an ex-husband is always the first person of interest to the police in a woman’s disappearance, Welch got no
hunches from the phone conversation that McCowell was being evasive or disingenuous. That was good and it could also be bad. If Sheila’s ex was involved in his wife’s disappearance, it would probably truncate and simplify the investigation. If he wasn’t involved, it opened a whole world of suspects and presented in all probability a complex, exhaustive, protracted search to find and arrest whoever was responsible for her disappearance.
Now it was a waiting game, to see if Jack Swain’s and Michelle Kuchtar’s forensics team turned up anything useful from inside Sheila’s home. Then he got another page – from the dispatcher.
7
Jill and Tom McNair were on their way to a fine day in the Rocky Mountains. He drove westbound toward the Pawnee River canyon through the foothills of Roberts County on highway 73. They had both taken Monday off and decided to make it an afternoon on a blanket in the outdoors beneath the pine trees. With their lunch packed inside a cooler that Jim had loaded into their old Ford pickup the day promised them nothing less than a lot of welcome fun and relaxation. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. At twelve o’clock in the afternoon, the temperature at this elevation was already in the mid-seventies. What could be more perfect for the newlyweds of six months?
They decided to stop at an off-the-road picnic area so Jill could use the restroom. This far into the foothills, any bathroom facilities amounted to nothing more than fancy outhouses. There was always one brick building with two doors. The men’s room was on one side, the ladies’ room on the opposite. The floors were solid concrete. The toilets were constructed of stainless steel and didn’t flush. Tom pulled left onto a gravel driveway, drove about one-hundred fifty feet and parked his car on the dirt lot. Jill opened her door, slid down from the seat to the ground and walked toward the restroom building, which was located to their left. He also got out and began to walk to the right, down a steep narrow pathway toward the river. He always loved to watch and listen as the white water rushed over the large boulders that filled the stream bed. After awhile the scenery and sounds were absolutely hypnotizing. He never tired of the roar of the rapids.
A scream shattered the calm.
It was Jill. He’d never heard her make that kind of sound. It was more than fear. It was terror. It was visceral. It was unimaginable. He ran back up the hill toward the women’s restroom. She was leaning against the exterior wall, supporting herself with one hand as she clenched her hair with the other. Her knees buckled and she fell to the ground. She screamed and screamed.
He cautiously walked to the open doorway and looked into the darkness. He stepped inside and waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the filtered sunlight. In the far corner of the stinking room, next to the solitary steel toilet, was a motionless figure on the concrete. It was a woman, laying on her right side. There was blood smeared on the walls, blood on the floor, blood in her auburn hair, blood on her clothes, blood on her face. There was blood everywhere. He saw a large jagged hole on the left side of her forehead, above her eyebrow. There was a bloody piece of toilet tissue stuck into the gaping injury. She had died with her lacerated mouth partially opened. He could see that some of her front teeth were missing. Hundreds of flies were buzzing around the body, landing on the open wounds to eat and lay their eggs. Her left eye was partially popped out of her skull.
He stepped outside and put his arms around Jill, who by now had gotten to her feet. She was crying hysterically. Tom reached into his front jeans pocket and took out his cell phone. He prayed to God there was wireless service up there and dialed 911.
8
The responding cops figured out that the beating actually started on the opposite side of the building from where Jill McNair had discovered the body. There was a lot of gore on the walls and concrete floor inside the men’s room. They found a bloody softball sized rock just to the right, inside the entrance. There were hairs, small bone fragments and skin tissue stuck to it. They found some teeth scattered on the concrete. From the blood trail and dark red palm prints they traced her death walk. She had somehow gotten to her feet inside the men’s room, made her way out the door, along the south wall, around the corner of the building and into the women’s room. Even with her skull bashed in, she had enough presence of mind to not want to be found inside the men’s room. One of the uniforms radioed to the dispatcher and asked for the on call detective to be paged. The crime scene tape went up around the entire area.
The coroner’s report later said that she was probably blind as she tried to plug the hole in her forehead with toilet tissue. During a private conversation with Detective J.D. Welch, the medical examiner who did the autopsy said, off the record, that the victim, now identified as Sheila McCowell, could have lived for as long as six or eight hours before she died alone on the floor in that stinking shit hole. As he looked at the post-mortem photos of her injuries, Welch felt complete revulsion. And it wasn’t the first set of a murder victim’s images he had ever viewed. Homicide is always a violent, ugly, horrifying act. But this was brutality and cruelty that defied imagination.
On the Thursday morning after the discovery of Sheila McCowell’s dead body, Bill Evans, the owner of a coffee house in a little shopping center just a few miles up the road from the picnic area, got fed up with the fact that that no one had come to remove the abandoned blue BMW from his property. He first noticed it in his rear parking lot on the prior Monday morning, as he parked his own car to begin the day’s work. The Beemer was a nice car – clean, with a beautiful metallic paint job, a late model with tan leather seats. He wouldn’t have minded owning one just like it. He originally figured that maybe the owner left it there and got a ride up into the canyon with a friend – perhaps car-pooling for a fishing trip or to spend a few days in the wilderness at an off road camp ground. This car would be no good on a four wheel drive trail. Evans didn’t think much of its presence in his parking lot until the fourth day. He called for the sheriff’s office to come out and tag it to have it towed from his property.
When the license plate registration check came back to Sheila McCowell, the cops had themselves a third crime scene. Welch drove back up into the canyon to talk with Bill Evans and impounded the Beemer as evidence. Crime scene specialist Jack Swain again paged out Michelle Kuchtar and together they went to work processing the inside and outside of the vehicle. The two forensic specialists had been pretty busy this week.
9
Transcript: Interview with Jim McCowell
JW: Detective John Welch
JM: Jim McCowell
JW: This is Detective John Welch with the Roberts County, Colorado, Sheriff’s Office. The date is August 13, 2001 and the time is 0900 hours. I’m speaking with Mr. James McCowell in reference to case number 01-1933 – the murder of Sheila McCowell. How old are you, Mr. McCowell?
JM: Forty-eight.
JW: How did you know Sheila McCowell? What was your relationship to her?
JM: We were married for eighteen years.
JW: When did you first meet her?
JM: She came to work at her father’s construction company back in Altoona, Pennsylvania. I was a foreman on one of the framing crews. He introduced us. That was right after she got out of college. We got married about a year later.
JW: What’s your background? Tell me about your education and where you’re from.
JM: I was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania and that’s where I lived my entire life until Sheila and I got married and moved out here. After I graduated from high school I went right to work with Sheila’s dad. He taught me the business. Her parents were family friends of my parents. I made foreman after about three years with the company. Her dad was good to me. He was a great guy and I loved her mother. They were the best.
JW: After your marriage where did you live?
JM: We moved out here. In the county, out on the west side on Edgewood Drive, near the foothills. I wanted my own business. Her dad gave us the money to buy our home. I got my general contractor’s license and started the company, building
custom houses. Sheila did the books and the payroll right out of our place. That way she was always there when the kids left for school and when they got home.
JW: You divorced?
JM: Yes. We sort of grew apart after her parents were killed in a car crash. That was about five years ago. (coughs) I met my fiancé, Marnie, at the gym where I work out. She was sort of drawn to me and we started to talk. She always came over to watch me work out. One thing led to another. Sheila and I were having problems. Once Marnie and I got involved it just all fell apart for Sheila and me. I told her about the affair and I moved out about three years ago. Marnie and I live in Colorado Springs now. We’re planning to get married next January.