Keep Her Safe

by Sophie Hannah

  I gasp as the answer hits me: because of me. I might have ruined everything by seeing her, seeing Poggy, hearing her say the name . . .

  “You okay back there, missy?” asks my driver.

  Missy?

  “Yes, thanks. Fine.”

  I’m getting carried away. It makes sense, though. If Melody was here at Swallowtail, then she was here secretly. A girl who’s supposed to be dead wouldn’t openly parade herself around a holiday resort—it would be too risky.

  And she ran away in the middle of the night after you saw her with Poggy because to stay suddenly became too risky. Her cover was blown.

  “Cara Burrows—is she safe?”

  Hairy Chest Man must have written that. Except . . . if he and Melody left Swallowtail in the middle of the night when the crystal grotto and spa were closed, how is that possible?

  At the main reception desk I’m offered help by a man with a receding hairline and a thin straight line of mustache. He looks about my age and is wearing a badge that says DANE WILLIAMSON, RESORT MANAGER. More senior than Riyonna, then. Good. He’ll do.

  “There were two detectives here before, about a possible sighting of Melody Chapa,” I say, as if all this is normal. “Are they still here?”

  “I . . . ah . . . I think you must be mistaken, ma’am.” His smile is ferocious.

  “I’m not. I met them before, with Riyonna, then I saw one of them again at the spa just now. A guest called Mrs. McNair—”

  “Yes, yes, I see.” He shushes me with his hands. “Why don’t we go through to my office where we can talk in private?”

  “First I need to talk to the detectives.”

  “They left five minutes ago. But I’ll do my very best to—”

  “I’m happy to talk to you, but first you need to call the police and tell them to come back. Ring them now. They can’t have got far.”

  “Please,” Williamson says, gesturing toward a closed door behind the reception desk. I assume it’s his office.

  “Please what?” I’m not moving until he does as I ask. “Are you going to ring the police? It’s not only Mrs. McNair. I saw Melody Chapa, too. Is that how you pronounce it—Chapper? She was here at Swallowtail, last night.”

  Williamson’s smile falls a little lower on his face. “If you know who Melody Chapa is—was—then you know it’s impossible that anyone saw her here last night. Right?” He pronounces it Chah-pah.

  “I know why it ought to be impossible. I also know what I saw.” I explain that I was sent by mistake to a room that was already occupied. To protect Riyonna—because Dane Williamson strikes me as a man who might enjoy firing better people than himself—I say “a receptionist” made a mistake, and don’t name her. I tell him about Mrs. McNair and what I overheard her say earlier, including the part about her having “that creature” with her.

  “The girl I met in the hotel room had Melody’s favorite toy with her—Poggy. Part pig, part dog. I saw it with my own eyes, and I heard her refer to it as Poggy. Also, Melody had a sister—sort of, an already-dead sister—called Emory.” I tell Williamson about the piece of paper I pulled out of the silver pot in the crystal grotto.

  “Oh, my.” He seems more shocked by this than by my sighting of a murdered girl. “Ma’am, the crystal grotto is a place for guests to privately—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! Yes, I violated the privacy of other guests—but they chose to leave personal details lying around in a public place. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it, okay? The point is, the detectives can look and see for themselves what Melody wrote: not only a reference to Emory, but to a sibling called Emory. I mean, come on.”

  Williamson upgrades his smile. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll be sure to pass on the information you’ve given me.”

  “Good. Thank you. So . . . what should I do?”

  “No need for you to do anything, ma’am—just go about your regular business.”

  “Where’s Riyonna? Can I speak to her?”

  “As I say, there’s no need for you to worry about anything. I’ll take care of it. You make sure to enjoy the rest of your vacation.” He smiles again and gives me a wave, then disappears into the back office, closing the door behind him.

  “Notice he didn’t ask your name, room number, cell number,” a woman’s voice says. “He has no intention of calling any detectives.”

  I turn. It’s Badass Mom. There’s no sign of her daughter.

  “You heard all that?”

  “Most of it. By the way—the pot in the grotto? Don’t worry about it. I snooped, too—who could resist? Boy, are people dull! Right? When I looked there was one that said ‘Loan’—just the one word. Whoever wrote that must be a real raconteur, huh?”

  “You mean ‘Loan/debt’?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” She grins. “You saw it too, huh?”

  “When did you look? How many were in there?”

  “First day here. So that’d be . . . four days ago. There were only two, both as boring as each other: ‘Loan/debt’ and then one about . . . ugh, I can’t even remember. Someone had invited someone, or not invited someone, and there was a date—”

  “Was it Vanessa, who made Paul do her dirty work?”

  “I honestly couldn’t tell you.” Badass Mom peers at me as if I’m a peculiar specimen. “Why do you care?”

  “Was a specific date mentioned—the twenty-third?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. It was so achingly boring, I nearly passed out.”

  “You’re sure there were no others in the pot, just the two?”

  “Oh, yeah. I scraped those sides, baby.” She laughs. “The one you told that pompous creep about, with Emory in it? No sign of that, so it must have been more recent.”

  “Was there one that said, ‘Cara Burrows—is she safe?’”

  “There was not.” Badass Mom gives me a sharp look. “I’d have loved to find that one. Sounds juicy. Who’s Cara Burrows, and why might she not be safe?”

  “Because last night she walked into the wrong hotel room and saw a dead girl—one who was supposedly murdered seven years ago.” It’s weird, talking so freely to this woman whose eye I’ve been studiously avoiding all day.

  “Cara Burrows is me,” I tell her.

  Melody Chapa—the Full Story

  An Overview

  The Murder of Melody Chapa: Part 1–Melody Disappears

  (All ages given are as per March 2, 2010)

  Before she went missing on March 2, 2010, Melody Grace Chapa (2003–2010)—who has been dubbed “America’s most famous murder victim” by some media commentators—was an ordinary seven-year-old girl living in Philadelphia, PA, with her parents, Annette Connolly Chapa (39) and Naldo Enrique Chapa (38). At the time, Annette ran a marketing company, and Naldo was an actuarial analyst at the Reliance Standard Life Insurance Company in Philadelphia. Melody was their second daughter. In February 2002, Annette lost a baby at twenty-four weeks gestation. The baby, who died in utero after the placenta broke down, was named Emory Laurel Chapa. She was buried at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Center City, Philadelphia, on March 18, 2002.

  When Annette Chapa arrived at Hoade Godley Elementary School on the afternoon of March 2, 2010, to pick up Melody, she was told by teachers that Melody had not been seen at all that day. She had never arrived in the morning, and the woman who normally dropped her off, Kristie Reville, had phoned the school office to say that Melody would not be in because she had been vomiting. When asked, however, Kristie Reville denied making this call and claimed she had dropped Melody at school as usual and had watched her walk into the building. The school secretary could not confirm that it was Kristie who called her, she later said, only that the woman identified herself as Kristie Reville.

  No one seemed to have any idea where Melody was. The last time she had been seen for certain was at seven thirty on the morning of March 2, 2010, when, according to both women, Annette Chapa had dropped her off with Kristie Reville to be taken to s
chool. At ten o’clock the following morning, Melody Chapa was declared officially missing.

  Kristie Luanne Reville (40) and her husband Jeff Reville (42) were the next-door neighbors of Annette and Naldo Chapa. With no children of their own, they were said to be “like another set of parents to Melody.” Jeff Reville was an art teacher at Barbara Duchenne Center City High School and Kristie Reville was an aspiring artist with no paid employment apart from babysitting Melody occasionally, which she did when Annette and Naldo Chapa were busy with work and needed her help, usually during school vacation periods, or for school dropoffs and pickups. Kristie and Jeff also used to look after Melody for free on a regular basis. She was in the habit of staying at their house one night each weekend so that Annette and Naldo Chapa could have some time alone together as a couple.

  The local area was extensively searched by police and by teams of volunteers. At first no trace of Melody was found. Detectives were initially suspicious of Kristie and Jeff Reville. No parents or teachers who had been at the school gates or in the playground the day Melody disappeared had any memory of seeing either Melody or Kristie that particular morning, and police started to wonder if Kristie was lying about having stood in the playground and watched Melody walk safely into the building.

  At the police’s suggestion, Naldo and Annette Chapa appeared on the Jessica Sabisky show on March 5, 2010, where they were supposed to make a heartfelt appeal to whoever might have taken Melody. Annette stuck to the script given to her by detectives, saying that she had already lost one precious child—Emory—and could not bear to lose another. She was later accused by media and online commentators of sounding wooden and unemotional and reciting words she had memorized in advance. Naldo Chapa did not use the agreed wording of his preprepared statement: “Please, whoever has our darling Melody, bring her home safely.” Instead, he broke down and controversially said, “I’m going to hunt down whoever’s killed my daughter and kill them with my bare hands.” Annette Chapa followed this by saying, “Whoever you are, if you’re the person who’s done this, we will ask for the death penalty to be taken off the table if you admit you murdered our daughter and tell us where her body is.”

  This live-on-air appeal attracted a considerable amount of publicity and attention, most of it negative. News feeds had been created on multiple networks, and many online chat groups devoted to discussing the case sprang up at around this time. Annette Chapa was thought by many to be too detached, and her husband too vindictive. Shock was expressed about the obvious assumption by the Chapas that their daughter was already dead when there was no evidence to suggest that she was.

  Some who saw the appeal were more sympathetic. Celebrity psychotherapist Ingrid Allwood said that to reach for the worst-case scenario and assume it’s true is a common defense mechanism in traumatic situations. On March 9, 2010, Allwood defended this position on the popular NBC show Justice with Bonnie, claiming that many people would not allow themselves to hope for fear of potential disappointment. She said, “The Chapas might superstitiously believe that by assuming the worst has happened, they’re encouraging fate to prove them wrong.”

  The host of Justice with Bonnie, legal commentator Bonnie Juno, did her best to demolish Allwood’s arguments, stating that, as a former prosecutor, she had met hundreds of victims of serious crime and it was highly unusual—and therefore suspicious—for parents with a missing child, especially one who had gone missing so recently, to have apparently no hope of getting their daughter back alive.

  On that episode of Justice with Bonnie, Juno strongly implied that she believed Annette and Naldo Chapa had murdered their daughter. She received widespread condemnation for this, and was accused of having no evidence to support her theory. At that stage, no one else had pointed the finger at Melody’s parents, probably because the media was full of all the evidence that was stacking up to implicate Kristie Reville.

  Kristie was in the habit of picking up her husband, Jeff, after work on any weekday afternoon that she was not picking up Melody from school. On March 2, 2010, Annette was due to pick up her daughter, so Kristie went to pick up her husband, who doesn’t drive.

  A colleague of Jeff Reville, Nate Appleyard (56), happened to see Jeff and Kristie in their car, a red Toyota Camry, in the parking lot of Barbara Duchenne school that afternoon. He remembered something he needed to tell Jeff and hurried over to the car. He later told police that Kristie had been visibly upset and gasped with shock when she saw him. Clearly, he said, she had not expected that she and Jeff would be disturbed inside their car. Her eyes were puffy and red and she had clearly been crying. “I asked her if she was okay,” Appleyard told detectives, “but she was trying not to look at me. She was fiddling with buttons on the side of her seat, maybe trying to adjust it. I don’t know what made me look down to where her hand was, between the seat and the door, but I saw she had blood on her lower arm, just above her wrist: a streak of blood. Then I wondered if she was pushing her arm down between the seat and the door to try and hide the blood.”

  Appleyard told police that he wondered if he should ask Kristie Reville if she needed help, and almost did, but both she and Jeff were avoiding eye contact and in the end he decided not to embarrass them. As he was taking his leave of them, he noticed something on the floor of the car beyond Kristie’s feet: a child’s white lace-topped sock with bloodstains visible on it. Later, interviewed on Justice with Bonnie, Appleyard said, “Kristie seemed to see the blood-soaked sock the same time I did. It was lying a few inches in front of her foot. Soon as I saw it I thought, ‘Woah, something ain’t right here.’ I opened my mouth to ask, but before I could get the words out, she’d slid her seat all the way forward and the sock wasn’t visible anymore. I’ll tell you one thing for nothing: whatever Kristie knew that day, whatever she’d done, whatever she was trying to hide, Jeff knew it, too. He was acting peculiar—they both were. I started to ask about the sock, but they drove away while I was talking. I’ll be honest. I thought, ‘There’s two people with something to hide.’”

  By the time police searched Kristie Reville’s Toyota Camry, there was no bloodstained sock inside it, but forensic testing found Melody’s blood in the car, despite clear attempts to scrub it clean. Jeff Reville had an alibi—he had gotten a ride with a colleague that day and had already left for work when Annette Chapa brought Melody to his house and left her with Kristie, and he was with people at work for the whole of that day.

  Kristie Reville at first offered no alibi. She insisted she was innocent of harming Melody and knew nothing of the child’s whereabouts. When asked how she had spent March 2, 2010, between dropping Melody at school at 8:15 A.M. and picking up Jeff from work at 4:30 P.M., Kristie claimed she had “gone for a long walk.” She was unable to produce any witnesses who could verify her activities that day.

  On March 7, 2010, a local gas station owner came forward to say that the Revilles had stopped at his gas station on March 2, the day Melody disappeared, and that Kristie had had blood on her hand and arm. She’d used his bathroom to wash it off, he told detectives; when she came out of the bathroom, her arm and hand were clean. This was enough for the police, who took Jeff and Kristie Reville into custody.

  The area around the gas station had not yet been searched, but now it was, and a bag was found in a wild, overgrown patch of grass nearby. This turned out to be Melody’s schoolbag, and contained her pencil case, books and the remains of a packed lunch in an airtight plastic container. Surprisingly to detectives, the bag did not contain Melody’s cherished soft toy, Poggy, which she took to school with her every day and hid in her bag so as not to appear babyish to her friends. Neither the toy nor Melody’s body was ever found.

  The bag was stained both inside and out with blood that DNA testing revealed to be Melody’s. It contained one bloodstained white lace-topped sock that Annette and Naldo Chapa later identified as Melody’s and that Nate Appleyard confirmed looked identical to the one he’d seen in Kristie’s car.

 
Socks, of course, come in pairs—and one interesting feature of this story is that, in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, there might have been no way of being sure that the bloodstained sock Nate Appleyard saw in Kristie Reville’s car was the same one that later turned up in Melody’s schoolbag. However, both Annette Chapa and Kristie Reville separately told detectives that it had proved impossible to find Melody a matching pair of socks that morning, and so, for the first time in her life, Melody set off to school wearing only one sock with a border of lace around the top of it. The other sock she wore that day was white and ribbed, with no lace. Hence, detectives were able to conclude that the sock that turned up in the schoolbag was very likely to be the same one Nate Appleyard had seen in Kristie Reville’s car.

  There were also strands of Melody’s hair in her schoolbag, and lots of dead blowflies and larvae from the same species—one that’s known as the coffin fly on account of it regularly being found in close proximity to corpses. Tests on the strands of Melody’s hair revealed that she had been subject to arsenic poisoning for a period of at least three months.

  On May 22, 2010, the day the case was put before a grand jury to see whether Kristie Reville should stand trial for murder, Bonnie Juno interviewed Annette and Naldo Chapa live on Justice with Bonnie. Melody’s parents won over many Americans by insisting that Jeff and Kristie Reville could not possibly have abducted or hurt their daughter. Most people by this point believed that Kristie Reville had murdered Melody and hidden her body, and that Jeff was covering for her. Nevertheless, the Chapas’ determination to believe in the goodness of their trusted neighbors and friends endeared them to the nation. Bonnie Juno told the Chapas that she understood only too well why they believed the Revilles to be innocent, strongly implying again that they themselves were guilty. Annette Chapa broke down, and she and her husband walked off the set, ending the interview prematurely.

  Bonnie Juno, by now as unpopular as Kristie Reville, was attacked extensively across all media platforms. Juno is six feet tall and sturdily built, and she was accused by legal commentator Mark Johnston of being “a rancid, vindictive transvestite-drag-act bitch”—an insult for which Johnston later publicly apologized under threat of legal action. Juno’s former husband, renowned defense attorney Raoul Juno, promoted his new book with an interview with his ex-wife’s professional rival, HLN’s Nancy Grace, in which he went into detail about the problems that had ended their marriage and revealed much that was embarrassing to Juno. Her attempt to sue him for his revelations was unsuccessful, and on June 18, 2010, she was arrested for causing a disturbance of the peace outside Raoul Juno’s home. After this incident, Bonnie Juno was absent from her own show for two months. When she returned on August 21, it was to announce that she would soon have the privilege of interviewing, live on Justice with Bonnie, a guest whose testimony would change everything in the Melody Chapa case.