by Ann Rule
The only likely “ear witness” was Dr. Staunton, Chuck’s chiropractor friend who lived next door. There seemed to be no eyewitnesses at all.
Brad Pince talked to Theresa Leonard, who had deep suspicions about who had killed her brother. She didn’t want to know what her gut was telling her. She told Pince that she thought Teresa was crazy and left it at that.
“I knew,” she said years later. “I just knew Teresa had done it. I did tell our parents that, but it was hard for them to accept.”
“You really think she could have done it?” Pince asked.
“I don’t know. … She’s weird—that’s all I can tell you for sure.”
Initially, Teresa made attempts to bond more closely with Chuck’s family. She wanted them to get together and go to the cemetery with Morgan four days after the murder. His father had just had shoulder surgery and wasn’t up to going. A week later, Teresa and her father-in-law and Chuck’s stepmother had lunch together. When Theresa showed up, too, the new widow was taken off guard; Chuck’s sister hadn’t been invited.
For the first time Caroline Leonard, Theresa’s stepmother, understood her suspicions about Teresa. She watched, shocked, at the way Teresa glared at “Aunt Theresa.”
Later, she said, “Boy! She really hates you!”
Theresa tried to see Morgan and asked if she could take her for a visit for a while.
“No!” Teresa said. “She can’t.”
A few days later, there was a memorial for Chuck organized by his school, and hundreds of people came, including many former students who eulogized him for making their lives better and for being there when they needed a friend and counselor.
This could have been something that Morgan would remember her whole life, that would make her proud of her father. But Teresa refused to let her attend, telling her that children weren’t allowed. That wasn’t true: other people’s children and teenagers attended the memorial service. When it became too crowded inside, they stood outside, listening as Chuck was praised for his devotion to children.
Many had tears running down their cheeks.
Joyce Lilly worried incessantly about what would become of Morgan, whom she loved dearly. But Joyce had worries of her own. She considered Teresa Leonard her best friend and believed sincerely that their devotion went both ways. Joyce was divorced, Teresa had been separated for two years, and as two women alone, they shared many things in common.
The investigators learned that Teresa was not only popular with men; there were some women who liked her, too. Those who worked for her at her consignment shop adored her.
Then again, there were females who detested her and said so. But not her close friends or her staff.
“She’s just the sweetest little thing,” one salesclerk told reporters—asking that her name not be revealed. “She’s just a nice girl.”
Joyce felt the same way, although she had seen glimpses of another side of Teresa that sometimes disturbed her. Teresa was far more confident than she was, and the life she lived sometimes gave Joyce pause.
Now, Joyce had a problem that she didn’t think she could discuss with anyone. Usually, she talked things over with Teresa—but that was clearly impossible: Teresa was the problem. Teresa had used Joyce as a sounding board, a patient and supportive friend. She always seemed to be embroiled in one messy incident or another. But Joyce didn’t want to get involved in them any longer, although she feared she might already be, and that scared her.
Up until the night of February 19, listening to Teresa’s problems had been akin to watching a suspense movie. Joyce had listened, fascinated, and then become a part of Teresa’s secret life when they traveled several times to Hawaii so her best friend could have a rendezvous with Nick Callas.
Teresa’s life wasn’t intriguing now. It was fraught with danger and the possibility that she would have to pay the piper for always taking what she wanted.
Chapter Five
Teresa might have had good reasons for wanting to escape Louisiana and her early years. According to her older sister Lois, she, Teresa, and their younger sister lived a “life of fear.”
“Our family looked just like the typical family,” the special-education teacher confided. “Everything looked good on the outside.”
No one can see what goes on behind closed doors, and the Joneses—mother and three daughters—were afraid of their husband and father, a steamship captain. Their older brother had seemingly escaped unscathed, leaving home as soon as he could get away. The sisters were grateful when their father was gone, but he always came home, and he apparently wielded power over all of them.
Lois said her father had abused her sexually and that she had tried her best to protect her mother from spousal abuse and her younger sisters from going through what she had. There was a terrible night when she heard her mother crying hysterically. She forced her way into their bedroom and found Ervin Jones choking his wife. She stood up to him and probably saved her mother.
None of the females in their family talked about what was happening, not even to each other. They were in deep denial. “It was really tense in our home. It was very tense. You didn’t talk about [such] things. No one knew.”
They did their best, according to Lois, to stay out of their brutal father’s way, tiptoeing around, hoping he wouldn’t notice them.
But secret things went on. Lois and Teresa’s baby sister, Macie, often slipped into her room late at night to crawl in bed with Lois.
“She would be crying.”
But none of the girls told each other what was happening to them, so the dark secrets continued. Although Lois may have suspected that Teresa was being molested, too, she was never convinced until the summer of 1997, long after Teresa had left Chuck. The three sisters, adults now, had sought out a therapist and Lois said Teresa had finally confessed that their father had sexually abused her.
When she talked about their childhood, Lois cried, her mind going back to a time when they were all helpless to do anything about their situation and their mother was too frightened and weak to protect them.
If her memories were true, that might explain why Teresa hated some men, distrusted others, and continually tried to better her situation by seeking out men she thought had a lot of money. If Lois was embroidering the truth, she might only be the protective big sister who had always done whatever she could to shelter her younger siblings from stress and unhappiness.
But, of course, she couldn’t do that. In any murder probe, detectives look first at those closest to the victim or victims. Despite their digging, they had found no one who had a grudge against Chuck Leonard—no one but Teresa, his estranged wife.
Still, the two detectives found it difficult to believe that a small woman would go so far as to sneak into a house she hadn’t entered in two years, creep through the dark, and have the nerve to fire into the sleeping man who was at least twice as strong as she was. After all, Chuck could have been awake; she no longer kept track of his habits.
And they had parented a child together, a little girl who loved both of them. If Teresa loved Morgan as much as her sisters and friends said she did, how could she even think of taking her father away from her?
Teresa’s plans didn’t make a lot of sense; she was basing her future on an almost impossible scenario. Everything—even things that seemed impossible—would have to fall precisely into place for a surrogate to carry Nick’s natural child, and for him to leave his wealthy wife and the boy he had adopted, a boy he loved.
Infamous female criminals like Susan Smith, Casey Anthony, and Diane Downs have devised similar schemes, building castles in the sky out of diaphanous threads hooked to weak foundations. They all murdered their own children, sacrificing them to get what they wanted, to find perfect love. And there have been scores more women without conscience who have killed people who trusted them to achieve what they think will make them happy.
Joyce Lilly had heard Teresa’s stories about how cruel Chuck was to her. She sai
d that he hadn’t been happy at all when she became pregnant. She said he even suggested that she get an abortion because he “didn’t need little monsters running around.”
Later, detectives who talked with Joyce sometimes wondered if she had been present when Chuck allegedly was mean to Teresa, or if she was going by what Teresa had told her. He was a natural flirt—he always had been, and some of Teresa’s friends thought he was coming on to them. Teresa agreed with them that he probably was. That only deepened their suspicion that poor Teresa was living a life of terror and abuse. Whether she told them about her childhood abuse isn’t clear, but her staunch supporters gathered around her as sheriff’s detectives asked more and more probing questions.
Rick Lilly,* Joyce’s ex-husband, called her at 9:30 a.m. on February 20, a few hours after Chuck’s body was found but before his death had been reported on the news. Joyce was moving to a smaller place, and Rick had agreed to buy some of her furniture.
Rick had never approved of Joyce’s tight friendship with Teresa. He didn’t trust Teresa, and thought she was too controlling with Joyce. But he hadn’t yet heard that Chuck Leonard was dead, so when Joyce’s answering machine picked up the call, he left a brief message asking her to call him back.
She didn’t return his call until about four in the afternoon, saying she had slept in because she had been up until three in the morning. “There were some police officers here,” she said in a worried voice.
“What are police officers doing at your house?” Rick asked incredulously.
She explained that Teresa’s husband had been shot to death, and that the detectives were asking Teresa questions. “I was mostly upstairs with Morgan, playing games and coloring and—”
“Why was Teresa at your house?” he asked next.
“She doesn’t have anyone else but me,” Joyce said. “I’m the only friend she has, and she’s going through a terrible time right now. I’m helping her with whatever I can.”
Rick listened, shaking his head. Joyce was such a patsy, always acting without thinking, and now she might have herself in a hell of a mess. Joyce went on talking, and he listened, trying to come up with a way she could detach herself from her good friend, Teresa.
Joyce was trying to do that herself; she wasn’t answering or returning calls or pages from either Teresa or Nick Callas.
Rick called her back the next morning. He had thought about Chuck Leonard’s murder overnight, and he asked his ex-wife point-blank: “Joyce, do you think that Teresa might be ‘dirty’?”
“What do you mean by ‘dirty’?”
“You know what I mean. Do you think that she did it?”
“You don’t know Teresa the way I know her,” Joyce lied frantically. “She couldn’t do anything like this.”
“Well, okay, but keep clear of her—this thing doesn’t have a good smell to it.”
Joyce wanted to tell her ex-husband that Teresa had told her she was the one who had shot Chuck, and that she hadn’t shown any grief or remorse over it. Now she didn’t know what she should do. But she was afraid. She was more afraid after hearing his questions.
Rick Lilly dropped by to see her a few days later. He was taunting her, making up a story—but he was very close to the truth. “They’ve arrested your pal,” he said. “She’s in the jailhouse now.”
“No, they haven’t,” Joyce said. “They didn’t arrest her. Don’t say that.”
“Don’t you listen to the radio?” he asked, taunting her still more as Joyce kept protesting. Rick wasn’t looking at her, but when he turned around, he saw that she had burst into tears, and he apologized.
“I’m just kidding you, Joyce,” Rick said. “I was only joking. Teresa didn’t get arrested.”
Joyce was close to hysteria, sobbing as she gasped, “She killed him, she killed him, oh, why would she tell me? Why? You don’t know the story like I do.”
And now as she poured out her worries to Rick, he was the one who had a hard time believing her. She told Rick that Teresa had described shooting Chuck three times in the chest. She made him promise not to tell anyone—it would ruin Morgan’s life. Joyce couldn’t bear for her to be hurt anymore.
Joyce said that she’d moved a white bag that Teresa gave her only hours after Chuck’s murder from her car trunk into her garage, hiding it behind some boxes. A few days later as she was cleaning the garage, she reached up to move the bag and it hit a pier support. She heard a dull “clunk.”
Trembling, she’d untied the top of the bag and looked in. There was a heavy handgun inside, and some of Teresa’s clothes, stiff with dried blood.
“Where’s the bag now?” Rick asked, still doubting Joyce.
“I hid it. I don’t want to hurt my best friend, but I’m frightened to death. I could go to jail, myself,” Joyce cried. “But I had nothing to do with Chuck Leonard’s murder. I don’t know what to do. Teresa’s been calling me every hour, but I don’t answer.”
Joyce’s ex-husband looked at her incredulously as she detailed for him what had her so jittery. Tears leaked from her eyes as she spoke, and her hands shook. She hadn’t been able to sleep more than a few hours at night.
Rick shook his head in disbelief: how could she have been so dumb? Every day that had gone by while she hid evidence for her precious Teresa, she had been risking her own reputation, not to mention her freedom. He told Joyce that she could very well go to jail for hiding evidence, and for being an “accessory after the fact.”
He wasn’t very sympathetic, but he gave her good advice. “You’re a fool if you don’t call a lawyer right now and tell the police everything you know. I’ll go with you.”
They had some difficulty finding an attorney who practiced criminal law. Rick’s own attorneys said they did not, and they recommended George Cody. But when he called, Rick learned that Cody was already representing Teresa Leonard.
Lilly’s civil attorneys next suggested George Bowden. Bowden agreed to meet them. So it was that Friday evening, February 28, eight days after Chuck Leonard’s murder, Joyce and Rick walked into George Bowden’s Everett office carrying a box of evidence—all the items Teresa had told Joyce to hide.
Joyce poured out her story to Bowden, and he said he would represent her. The sheriff’s Major Crimes Unit was closed this late on a Friday night, but Bowden promised her he would go to talk with detectives early Saturday morning. In the meantime, he would lock up the white plastic bag with the .45-caliber handgun, Teresa’s clothes and bloodied boots, and other items Teresa had given Joyce in his office.
On Saturday, March 1, 1997, Brad Pince talked to a “very upset” Joyce Lilly. She turned over the bag of evidence. For homicide detectives, it was a bonanza, something they never imagined they would find. More than the physical evidence, they had a witness who could tell them what had happened nine days earlier. While she hadn’t actually been present when Chuck was shot, they had the next thing to it in Joyce Lilly.
If she was about to tell them the truth, the deadly puzzle would be solved. That was, of course, a big “if.”
Aware now that he and Jim Scharf hadn’t heard the whole truth on the evening after Chuck Leonard died, Pince asked Joyce Lilly if she had been honest with them. Tears rolling down her cheeks, she shook her head. She admitted that she’d known then who killed Chuck, but that she had lied for Teresa. As the days passed, Joyce Lilly said she couldn’t sleep, and she was close to having a panic attack when she turned to her former husband for advice. Although they were no longer married, she trusted his opinion and she had to talk to someone.
“One night back in November, a couple of months before somebody shot Chuck,” Joyce began “Teresa came by to leave Morgan with me to babysit. She was dressed strangely, wearing black sweatpants, a dark fuzzy jacket, and boots.”
“It was almost winter, wasn’t it?” Scharf asked. “Why was it strange for her to dress like that?”
“It wasn’t Teresa’s style—not at all,” Joyce’s words tumbled out. “She said ‘How
do you like my outfit?’ ”
Joyce closed her eyes, remembering the incident. “I said, ‘It doesn’t look like you.’ ”
“That’s the point,” Teresa had said succinctly.
Joyce said she’d stared at Teresa, baffled. And then she was shocked when Teresa told her that she would have killed Chuck that night if she’d only had enough time.
That didn’t even seem possible, and she had finally decided that Teresa was engaging in some kind of black humor.
“But she seemed serious, even though she didn’t mention killing Chuck again. And then the holidays came and nothing happened, and Teresa’s custody of Morgan—sharing with Chuck, you know—went on just like before. One week with Teresa, one week with Chuck—”
Except for the week that included February 17–20, 1997, when Morgan had her dental work done.
On Wednesday, February 19, Teresa told Joyce something unbelievable: “I’m going to whack Chuck tonight.”
Joyce had just stared at her friend, open-mouthed. Teresa had that same icy look on her face that she’d had back in November when she’d showed up in her all-black outfit.
While Joyce believed that Chuck had been abusive to Teresa and she felt sorry for her, that was no reason to kill the man. That’s what “whack” meant, she thought; she’d heard it on gangster television shows.
But why? Teresa wasn’t in danger anymore; she and Chuck didn’t live together any longer. They were both involved with other people, and, until last November, Teresa said she hadn’t even been in Chuck’s house at the lake for a couple of years.
Joyce knew better than to try to talk Teresa out of any plans she made. And besides, she couldn’t believe that Teresa would really kill Chuck. She often behaved
dramatically—that was part of what made her an interesting friend. Being with Teresa was a little like being in the center of a soap opera.
Telling herself it would be okay, Joyce Lilly was able to get to sleep on Wednesday night. But in the wee hours of February 20, her phone trilled and she woke up instantly, her heart thumping. It was Teresa, and she sounded very upset. She begged Joyce to come to her apartment.