by John L. Work
JW: How’d the divorce go? Any big issues over money or property, the custody of the kids?
JM: (clears voice) We didn’t fight over anything. I gave her our home in the settlement, signed a quit claim deed. Our construction business did really well and I left her a good sized bank account. We agreed to joint custody of our girls. So, I guess as divorces go, it went pretty smoothly. We never argued. I just can’t believe this has happened. Who could do this to her? The girls (sobs) (inaudible) without their mother. (sobs) (blows nose).
JW: Where were you last weekend?
JM: Marnie and I went to see her parents down in Trinidad. We got there at about five o’clock Friday afternoon and we came home late Sunday evening, maybe about eleven o’clock.
JW: When was the last time you spoke with Sheila?
JM: I called her last Wednesday, I think.
JW: What’d you talk about?
JM: We were making arrangements for the kids to come down for an Air Force football game in September. We’d have to shift our visitation schedule around.
JW: Any argument about that?
JM: No. She was always really flexible with the custody and visitation schedule and so was I. We tried to make things as good as possible for our girls.
JW: Who was her closest friend?
JM: Janet Rogers. They went to college together. She’s a loan officer at the First Colonial American Bank of Denver. It’s on Speer Boulevard.
JW: Did Sheila tell you about any problems she might be having with anyone? How’d she sound on the phone?
JM: She was fine. She sounded happy. She didn’t say she had any problems. She was easy to get along with and everyone who met her liked her.
JW: Do you have any idea who might have wanted Sheila dead? Did she have anyone in her life who might’ve had a grudge against her? Was there a jealous boyfriend or ex-boyfriend in the picture? Did she owe money to anyone?
JM: No. I don’t know who’d want her dead. If she had a boyfriend, she didn’t tell me about him. She had plenty of money from our divorce settlement and she had a good job with Bob Stafford, so I can’t imagine that she owed anyone anything. Her mortgage was paid off. Everyone who met her liked her. She didn’t make any enemies. She made friends.
JW: What about drugs or alcohol use?
JM: No. She only drank at holidays, and then only one or two. She never used any drugs that I knew of. She told me she’d never even tried pot, even at college. And I believed her. She was a straight arrow.
JW: Was there any violence during your marriage?
JM: No.
JW: You told me earlier that you two were having some problems. What kinds of problems were you talking about?
JM: She, ah, she kind of lost interest in sex. Maybe it was menopause or not dealing very well with her parents’ deaths or something else. I don’t know. That was the root of it. I wanted more than she was willing to give. I sort of wandered away and found Marnie.
JW: Do you know who killed Sheila?
JM: No. I want you to find out who did it.
JW: Did you kill her?
JM: No.
JW: Did you arrange to have her killed?
JM: No. Hell, no. Now you’re pissing me off.
JW: Is there anything else you can tell me that you think I should know about?
JM: No. But I want you to find whoever did this. You find him. My kids don’t have their mother now. They didn’t deserve this. Sheila didn’t deserve this. You find him.
JW: I’ll end the interview. The time is 0915 hours.
End of Interview
10
Welch had observed Jim McCowell to be a physically imposing man who looked younger than his years. His face was deeply tanned and he had broad shoulders. With just a hint of gray at his temples there was a distinguished look about him – and a look of great physical strength. He stood well over six feet in height and weighed about two hundred pounds by Welch’s best estimate. His nose looked like it had been broken a time or two, but he didn’t look coarse or rough. His manner was well spoken and confident. He seemed like a man very able to take charge of situations, which would explain his tremendous success in the construction business.
Welch escorted Jim out to the lobby and brought his fiancé, Marnie, back into the interview room. Interviews should always be conducted separately, so that the officer gets the best independent recollection of each witness. Marnie confirmed Jim’s alibi. She told Welch that they left Colorado Springs at about four o’clock p.m. on Friday the 9th, drove to her parents’ home in Trinidad and arrived back at their home at eleven-thirty on Sunday evening. They had taken her parents out to dinner on Saturday night. Marnie took her mother shopping on Sunday, leaving Jim and her father at home to watch the Rockies’ baseball game.
As she spoke, Welch also sized her up. During interviews he was always taking people’s measure, watching their mannerisms, looking at their physical appearances and getting a feel for their personalities. At twenty-five years of age she wasn’t too tall, maybe five feet four inches, and looked to weigh about a hundred thirty pounds. Obviously an athlete, she carried that weight well, a lot of it in her broad shoulders and solid legs. Her arms were well muscled, but not overly defined and her belly was flat. She had dark hair and narrow hips. Welch could tell at first glance that this woman was a physically fit specimen, and while she had a pretty face that was made remarkable by large blue eyes and very dark eyebrows, she wasn’t overly feminine in her manner. When she spoke, it was in a contralto voice, surprisingly low in pitch. She wasn’t loud at all, but talked firmly and articulately. And, as she answered his questions she looked at Welch, directly into his eyes.
She told the detective that she’d never married. She’d worked in a large twenty-four hour fitness center as a personal trainer for about two years when Jim McCowell approached her and began to draw her into conversations. He hired her as his personal trainer. She knew after a few exchanges that he was married and, even so, agreed to meet him over coffee a few times at a little restaurant a few blocks from the gym. They began an affair, meeting in upscale motels on Friday afternoons when he could break away from construction sites. Eventually they were in love and he decided to leave Sheila.
Marnie expressed credible shock at Sheila’s murder. She said she had no clue as to who could have done the killing. Welch asked her if she knew of any ongoing problems between Sheila and Jim as a result of fallout from the divorce. She said she knew of no such problem and that Jim’s daughters had accepted her own relationship with their father – although they did occasionally tease her about the fact that Marnie was only about eight years older than they were. Sometimes they called her their big sister. She grew up in Trinidad, Colorado, and after her high school graduation she went to the community college there for two years. She got a certificate in personal fitness training and built a pretty good sized clientele at the gym in Denver. Most of her clients were females, but she worked with a few men. She stayed away from teaching any aerobics classes and concentrated on weight training. From one look at her Welch had already figured out that much.
Toward the end of their conversation he asked, “Do you and Jim have your finances together yet?”
She raised her brows, looked at him for just a quick moment with those captivating eyes and answered, “Yes. We have a common bank account and I’m the beneficiary of his investment portfolio. We’re going to get married soon. Why do you ask?”
“It’s not important. Just a routine question. I’m trying to get the picture of people’s life situations. It’s all part of doing a thorough investigation.”
He was intentionally being a little evasive in his answer to her question.
Visibly stiffening her posture, Marnie asked, “Oh. Do you have some reason to believe that Jim is involved in Sheila’s murder? He wouldn’t do that. He didn’t kill her. I know this man.”
She was almost bristling and she’d put a sharp edge on that rather deep voice. Her eyes had stop
ped blinking.
“No, no, none at all. I have no reason to think that’s even a remote possibility. Please understand that at this point I’m sort of flying blind and I have to gather as much preliminary information as I can about all the people involved in Sheila’s world. This could be a very difficult crime to solve. First I have to clear everyone from suspicion who couldn’t have done it. Surely, you’ve watched enough television shows to know that the first person the police have to look at in a woman’s murder is the victim’s husband, ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. It’s very common to do that in police work. Actually, if I didn’t ask the questions I’ve asked both of you today, you’d have every right to question my competence as a detective, and be justifiably worried that I might not have the skills to find Sheila’s killer. So, right now, my task is to clear Jim from suspicion. I hope you’re not offended by my questions.”
She seemed satisfied with that and her posture told him she’d relaxed a little. After the interview Welch walked her out to the lobby of the substation where Jim was seated in a chair. He shook hands with both of them and said he’d be in touch as soon as any relevant information surfaced. The couple walked to the exit door, hand in hand, and left the detective to his work. At this juncture, all doors were open in the investigation and there was no way to know which one to walk through in order to find Sheila McCowell’s killer.
He was pretty comfortable with Jim McCowell’s response to his ex wife’s murder. He’d cried real tears for his children’s loss, and became very angry when Welch asked him if he murdered Sheila – a reaction indicative of an innocent man. He couldn’t help wondering how long McCowell expected a young, energetic woman like Marnie Sullivan to stay with him, given their age differences. At twenty three years her senior, he’d be an old man of seventy when she hit age forty-seven, still in the prime of her life. She’d be in the last decade of her youth and he could be heading for a nursing home – if he was still alive by that time. Knowing human nature as he did after nineteen years of police work, Welch could only think of one reason that a vibrant woman of Marnie’s age would stay with an old man – a pre-nuptial marriage agreement that would cut her out of McCowell’s estate if they divorced. That made him stop to think for a second or two – then he dismissed the thought. It was far too complicated for the moment.
It did not escape his attention that there was one small conflict between the couple’s independent stories. Each had claimed that the other initiated their relationship in the health club. Welch stored that one away for future reference and study. It could be nothing, and it could later become significant. Time and unfolding events might tell him.
11
A few days later it was time for a little summation of the information gathered to that point. No valuables had been taken from Sheila’s home. It wasn’t a robbery. The dog was dead. That was significant. Dogs are very territorial and protective, so that made it a probability that someone not familiar to Maxie had entered the home. But how? None of the locks had been forced, the windows were all intact, and the door jams were in perfect condition. So, whoever got into Sheila’s home did so with apparent ease and without breaking anything in the process. He asked himself a few questions – wrote them down on a note pad and then answered them.
Q: Did she know the person who killed her and allow him to come in?
A: Possibly.
Q: Did she go willingly with him?
A: Maybe. But it wasn’t likely, if it was an intruder who took her to her death.
Q: Did she mistakenly leave a door unlocked for a burglar to open and surprise her?
A: Probably not. When the cops arrived at the house on the day her boss reported her missing, all of the doors were secured. The kids said she always locked everything.
Q: Who else had a key?
A: Both of Sheila’s daughters did.
Kim and Adrienne were adamant that they had never given a house key to anyone else. Their mother had been very stern in her instructions to them about that. They weren’t allowed to have any friends come over with them after school until Sheila arrived at home, and from the way they related their compliance with their mother’s commands, Welch believed them. They were good kids, well spoken, had good manners and they were very intelligent. Both were straight-A students at County High School.
There was no evidence of a sexual assault. The Coroner’s Medical Examiner had taken vaginal and rectal swabs during the autopsy. He found no semen within, or trauma to, those orifices. All of the damage was to her neck, head and face. There was a tiny bit of skin tissue beneath two of her fingernails, but without a suspect to match it to, it was just an item of evidence to store in a freezer for who knew how long.
The forensics team came up empty-handed inside the house, except for a .32 caliber bullet the veterinarian who did the necropsy removed from the black Labrador’s body. It was a copper jacketed slug, not a hollow point. He examined the dog’s teeth and mouth for any human tissue that might have been present from biting someone. He found nothing. But there was some fresh meat in the dog’s stomach. The kids said that all Maxie ever got to eat was dry kibble. So, whoever killed her probably used the fresh meat to befriend her and led her down to the basement. One gunshot killed her.
Inside the house there were no latent prints that didn’t belong to Sheila and her daughters. After the body had been found up in the picnic area, criminalists Jack Swain and Michelle Kuchtar even sprayed the walls, furniture and carpets with Luminol. They turned on the fluorescent lighting to see if any blood had been spilled during a struggle. The Luminol would have revealed bodily fluids that might have originally been present and cleaned up during the weekend, after the murder. They vacuumed the floors and sent the debris to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation crime lab for analysis. All of the hairs in the paper vacuum bags were later found to be either from Sheila and the kids – or the dog. There was nothing of solid evidentiary value from the home – no foreign prints, no human blood, no hairs, and no unusual fibers. It was a very clean crime scene, which was troubling to the detective. It’s rare, if not impossible, for a criminal to enter and leave someplace without depositing something he brought in from the outside. So, how the hell did whoever did this pull this one off?
The BMW was clean, too. There was nothing of evidentiary significance on the windows, mirrors, on the seats or in the trunk. That led Welch to form one conclusion. Whoever got into the house, killed the dog and took Sheila away either really knew what he was doing or had very good instruction from someone else who did.
Welch took Sheila’s personal computer and the one from her office. He gave them to a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who specialized in electronics work, like building bugging devices or searching hard drive files and email. Her cell phone was missing and he’d have to get a warrant or a subpoena for her call records. Kim McCowell gave Welch her mother’s mobile phone number. He contacted the District Attorney’s Office to arrange for a subpoena duces tecum, which would command the phone company to produce the records.
12
On August 14 he went to meet Sheila’s best friend, Janet Rogers, at the First Colonial American Bank. He introduced himself to a very attractive receptionist whose ID tag said her name was Sammie Newsom. He took a seat while she rang Janet’s extension to let her know she had a visitor. Momentarily, Janet came out of an office door down at the far end of the lobby and she walked up to him.
Tall and just a little on the buxom side with short frosted medium blonde hair, she wore no wedding ring on her left hand. She had a very pleasant smile, highlighted by a dimple on her left cheek. Her voice was confident and she was dressed in a conservative grey striped pant suit that sported an attractive lapel pin. After shaking hands, she and Welch sat in the conference room. He set up his tape recorder on the long table and they started.