by John Bloom
Once the sting had worn off, however, Betty redoubled her efforts to get her own classroom, as though something fundamental were at stake. Her desire to be a teacher dated back more than ten years, to her grade-school days, and now she knew she had to do it, if for no other reason than to show the Plano administration how wrong they were. For one semester she stayed at home with Alisa, but in the spring of 1976 she got a substitute teaching job at an elementary school in Wylie, a much smaller town than Plano, about ten miles to the east. By that summer she had been accepted for a permanent position, and for a stretch of five months she had no medical problems whatsoever.
But it couldn’t last. First there were problems at the church, beginning when Weldon Haynes left for another assignment and was replaced, after a six-month interregnum, by a man named Jack Gorham. Reverend Gorham was a former African missionary, a conservative, and a firm believer in the historical structure of the Methodist church, which tended to be autocratic and rigidly hierarchical. His very presence was a signal that the church management, formerly left to the lay committees, was being taken back by the clergy. JoAnn Garlington was so disturbed with the new order that she quarrelled openly with him and at one point said, “He preaches to us like he’s still in Africa and we’re a bunch of natives.” The Gores agreed, if less openly, and so did a number of other families.
In October 1976 Allan resigned the chairmanship of the Council on Ministries, not only because of the growing disenchantment with Gorham but also because he had finally been freed by Rockwell from the drudgery of telephone message-switching systems. This meant both more responsibility and more out-of-town travel. And one of his very first assignments was to install a very complicated software system in Zurich, Switzerland; it would take six weeks. By that time Betty was teaching sixth grade in Wylie as well. Whereas in Plano she considered the students too young for her, now she considered them too old. They were undisciplined and sometimes mean; they were hard to control. Some were even bold enough to call her names. Now Allan was about to leave town for six weeks; they had stopped going to church; she was commuting long distances every day; and suddenly she was back in her doctor’s office, with a fresh list of ailments.
That fall Betty was treated for stomach problems, back muscle problems, headache, nausea, “flu syndrome,” infected sinuses, a bladder infection, and a genital infection common to women who do not have sexual intercourse often enough. Because of Allan’s trip to Zurich, Betty and Alisa went to Kansas for Thanksgiving without him, but the Pomeroys noticed nothing out of the ordinary about their daughter. As soon as Allan returned, however, Betty began to complain: “How long is this going to go on?” For once even Allan was beginning to heed the complaints; he could tell that this was more than just whining. Betty did become physically upset whenever he was absent overnight; and although a part of him resented that because he had always wanted to travel, another part of him knew that something would have to give sooner or later.
So when it became apparent in December that Allan would need to return to Switzerland to finish the job, he tried to make it up to Betty by asking her to come along with him for the week before the spring semester. For the rest of their marriage, they would both remember it as one of the happiest weeks they ever spent together. They rode tram cars in the Alps and stayed at quaint hotels and ate exotic foods and made love every night. On New Year’s Eve, they got off the train in Munich and, with no place to go, bought a cheap bottle of wine and went up to a cold hotel room. The wine was awful, there were no sheets on the bed, and they had to make do all through the midwinter’s night with a single comforter. But they clung tightly together and felt more in love than ever before.
Betty cried a little when the week was up and she had to get on the plane back to Dallas, but Allan assured her that he would join her soon, that the job was almost finished. When Betty landed at the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport, though, she found herself in the middle of one of the worst ice storms in Texas history. The streets were glazed for miles around. Even after she managed to convince a taxi driver to take her home, the trip took six hours, and she was terrified all the way. All of a sudden she felt more helpless than ever and almost wanted to cry out: Why isn’t my husband here to take care of me? For the next two weeks, she kept her recurrent depression bottled up, but finally she couldn’t stand it any longer. She called Allan’s boss at Rockwell and all but begged him to let him come home. Allan called her from Switzerland. At first amazed that she would be bold enough to call his boss, he finally decided that something was seriously wrong and arranged to cut his trip short and turn the work over to someone else.
In February 1977, Allan met with his boss and asked to be transferred to a position that would allow him to work exclusively in Dallas. His request was granted. Two months later, Allan put the Plano house up for sale and signed the contract for a house on Dogwood Street in Wylie. That way Betty wouldn’t have to commute any longer. In the fall the Gores transferred their church membership to a little church ten miles up the highway from Wylie, on the advice of Betty’s best friend, JoAnn Garlington. Betty managed to get moved from the sixth grade to the fifth that year.
Allan felt like they were starting over, and sometimes he even thought it was all for the best.
6 General Alarm
Without exception, each man who saw the lifeless body of Betty Gore the night of June 13 reflexively averted his eyes. Even those who already knew what lay beyond the utility room door were never bold enough to look for more than a moment before closing the door again. Few looked at the head at all—the sight was too horrible—so the early reports as to the manner of death were all conflicting, and usually wrong.
It was a small room, no more than twelve feet long by six feet wide, made smaller by the presence of a washer, a dryer, a freezer, and a small cabinet where Betty had kept toys and knickknacks. In one corner was a brand-new toy wagon and a child’s training toilet. Closer to the center of the room, where the freezer stood against one wall, were two dog-food dishes and a bruised book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. The book had a white cover, which stood out in sharp relief, because in the harsh overhead light that glared off the harvest-gold linoleum, it was one of the few objects in the room not coated in blood.
Much of the blood was not red but black, or perhaps the blood was mixed with some other fluid that had flowed out of one of the gaping wounds in the body. It was difficult to tell because there was so much of it. Betty lay face up, her head next to a front corner of the freezer, her legs stretched out rigidly, pointed toward the far end of the room. The knees were locked, as though she had died at attention and then been laid carefully on the floor. She was dressed in a yellow short-sleeved pullover, so saturated in blood that most of it had turned brown, and red denim pants that rode high on the thigh and were creased horizontally from their extremely tight fit. Her legs were streaked with blood and crisscrossed with slender incisions. The toenails on her bare feet were painted bright red.
Her left arm was the first thing they noticed after opening the door. It lay in a pool of blood and fluid so thick that the arm appeared to be floating above the linoleum. The elbow had a cut so wide and deep that at first glance the arm appeared to be severed. The inside of the cut had turned into something hard and black and shiny. Just below the shoulder, there were three or four equally grisly wounds, as though she had been sliced open with a dull instrument and the blood had long ago run out onto the floor.
To get a look at her face, the men at the scene had to walk around the ocean of red and black and get closer. What they saw was even more unsettling. Her lips were parted, showing her front teeth, the mouth fashioned into a half-grin. Her hair radiated in all directions, a tangled, soaked mass of glistening black. And Betty’s left eye was wide open, staring directly down at the gaping black craters in her arm. As to her right eye—she appeared not to have one. The entire right half of her face appeared to be gone.
A few feet from Betty’s head, half-concealed
under the freezer, was a heavy, wooden-handled, three-foot-long ax.
Officer Johnney Lee Bridgefarmer, a tall, rangy country boy who was patrolling that night in one of Wylie’s three official squad cars, was the first man at the scene. He got his orders at 11:18—the dispatcher said two women had called, one of them going on hysterically about a suicide, the other one reporting that the top of a woman’s head was blown off at 410 Dogwood. Johnney Lee had been a policeman for less than a year and had never had to investigate anything more serious than a domestic disturbance. So he asked the dispatcher to send his friend and fellow officer, Jim Grindele, to back him up. Less than a minute later he was at the Gore house.
Richard Parker, gun in hand, met Johnney Lee at the door and told him where the body was. Richard had grown even more nervous after the discovery of the corpse and had crawled into the attic, his gun poised to shoot, thinking the murderer might still be somewhere nearby. Johnney Lee strode to the utility room, opened the door, took one look and closed it again. By the time the ambulance arrived, red lights spinning and siren blaring, Johnney Lee was on the phone to his boss, Royce Abbott. Even before the chief could get there, a crowd had started to gather.
Wylie was not a large town—the Chamber of Commerce optimistically listed its population as four thousand—and despite its close proximity to Dallas, it had the look and feel of a country crossroads. By 11:30, just fifteen minutes after the neighbors found Betty’s body, a woman who lived on another street a block away was informed of the murder by a neighbor who was spreading the news by car. The wives of Richard Parker, Jerry McMahan, and Lester Gayler all called friends to let them know. Dick Sewell, a dentist who knew Allan Gore only casually, immediately drove to the scene, questioned Richard Parker, and then went inside the Gore home, where he joined three Wylie police officers, the three neighbors who had discovered the body, three ambulance attendants, and Buddy Newton, the local justice of the peace who was called to make out the death certificate. Added to the neighbors who were milling around on the Gores’ front lawn, the assemblage looked like a mob scene by the time Royce Abbott arrived.
Royce Abbott, who had been Wylie police chief exactly one month at the time he was called to investigate the biggest homicide of his eighteen-year career, was a crusty, garrulous cop who always had a well-chewed toothpick in the corner of his mouth and who looked, people said, exactly like Warren Oates, the Hollywood cowboy who always played the sinister but slightly comic villain. Chief Abbott parked his car amid the growing traffic jam of official vehicles on Dogwood Street and was met by Johnney Lee Bridgefarmer, who took him straight to the utility room. The chief took a long hard look at the body as the men in the Gore living room craned their necks to see from a distance.
“And look over here, chief,” one of the officers said.
Chief Abbott reclosed the utility room door and went into the kitchen, where one of his men pointed at the table. There, spread out next to the remnants of the breakfast dishes, was the Dallas Morning News, opened to the entertainment section and folded so as to emphasize a single article, a movie review. The movie was “The Shining.” It was the story of a psychopathic ax murderer.
“Looks like one of them cult deals,” said Abbott under his breath.
“Call the sheriff,” he told Johnney Lee. “We gotta have backup.”
The word continued to spread through Wylie, and with it a sense of general alarm. After a few minutes, the original reports of a woman who had blown her head off were changed abruptly to stories of a woman brutally hacked to death in her own home by a psychopathic killer. The residents of Dogwood and surrounding streets double-locked their doors or, in some cases, went searching for children who were still out on Friday-night dates. This was not only a murder; it was the first murder in Wylie in living memory. Even the men inside the Gore home were wary. In the back of their minds was the fear that whoever killed Betty Gore was probably crazy enough to still be in the neighborhood. Abbott dispatched two or three officers to patrol the surrounding streets, looking for suspicious characters. Those men were soon joined by police officers from Sachse, a neighboring town even smaller than Wylie, who had picked up the frenzied radio traffic. As the crowd continued to gather on the front lawn, Abbott questioned Richard Parker and had him repeat the sequence of events leading up to the discovery of the body. Abbott was intrigued by a couple of things Parker said. First, the husband of the dead woman was out of town, but no one had known it until he called. And second, the garage door was wide open all night, when ordinarily it was supposed to be closed—and the garage had a door leading directly into the utility room.
Abbott called the Wylie dispatcher and told her to have the Collin County Sheriff’s office bring a camera and fingerprinting equipment. Then he went to the bathroom, which leads from the front hallway, and considered the most terrifying evidence yet: there were blood stains on the bathmat, the soap dish, the wall tiles, and the tub. The killer had had enough composure to take a shower before leaving. Now Abbott, like everyone else, was really thinking about psychos.
The phone rang. “I’ll get it,” said Abbott.
“Hello.”
“This is Allan Gore.”
“Mr. Gore, I’m Chief Abbott of the Wylie PD. Can you tell me what you know about what happened here tonight?”
“I understand that Betty’s been shot?”
“That’s correct,” said Abbott, observing the unwritten rule of police investigations: never indicate to a suspect what or how much you know until you’ve heard his entire story.
“I’ve been trying to call Betty all day,” said Allan. “I left for St. Paul on business about 4:30, and I tried to call her before I left but there was no answer. Then I kept trying to get her right up until the time my neighbors told me she was shot.”
“I understand,” said Abbott. “And when was the last time you saw your wife?”
“About eight this morning, when I left for work.”
“And do you know anyone else who might’ve been around the house today?”
“Well, just Candy Montgomery. She’s a friend of ours who was keeping our oldest daughter. She said she came by to pick up a swimming suit this morning.”
“All right, Mr. Gore. I’m gonna need to talk to you when you get back. By the way, which airline did you take up to St. Paul today?”
“Braniff.”
“All right, Mr. Gore, we’re doing everything we can. We’ll give you a full report when you get back.”
“All right. Thank you.”
Royce Abbott pressed down the buttons on the phone and immediately dialed his dispatcher, Kathy Hill.
“Kathy,” he said, “I want you to call DFW Airport Security and find out whether an Allan Gore, G-o-r-e, took Braniff to St. Paul, Minnesota, at 4:30 this afternoon. Call me back as soon as you have an answer.”
A few minutes later the chief, still waiting on the Sheriff’s Office experts, took another phone call. This time the caller was Bob Pomeroy.
“I understand my daughter is dead,” said Bob.
“Well, Mr. Pomeroy, tell me first what you’ve found out so far.”
“I heard she’s been shot.”
“Well, that’s correct. Have you talked to her husband?”
“Yes sir, Allan’s the one who told us.”
“How did he sound when he told you?”
“He sounded shocked, like us.”
“All right, Mr. Pomeroy, we’re doing all we can, but we don’t know any more about it right now.”
“Okay, well, thank you for the information.”
Chief Abbott was still perplexed as he replaced the receiver. Bob Pomeroy was even more perplexed.
As Bob hung up the phone, a thought flashed quickly through his mind: “No, he didn’t. I expected him to, but he really didn’t. Allan didn’t sound shocked at all.”
Steve Deffibaugh was a corpulent, freckled young man with a stringy red mustache who spent much of his time taking the kind of pictures that, dur
ing criminal trials, are always attacked by defense attorneys as “inflammatory and prejudicial.” This is because he was very good at his job: he photographed corpses. Deffibaugh was sleeping when the Collin County dispatcher called him, not that such calls were unusual. Deffibaugh had been a cop in McKinney, the county seat, for six years—four with the local police, the last two as a sheriff’s deputy—and even in that short time the whole character of the county had begun to change from rural to suburban. Especially along the southern rim of the county, where the small towns were now indistinguishable from the Dallas suburbs, there were far fewer farms and far more office buildings than when he had first joined the force. McKinney itself was still a more or less typical rural outpost—the urban sprawl hadn’t reached it yet—but when Deffibaugh got a call to go south, it could be anything. Deffibaugh got those calls more and more often these days, too, since anytime you add people you add crime as well. And Collin County was the second-fastest growing county in Texas.
Deffibaugh assumed it was a routine homicide. He checked his camera gear and discovered he was short on film, but that didn’t bother him a great deal since he could usually make do with what he had. So instead of going downtown to the jail to get more, he just packed what he had and started out on the fifteen-mile drive to Wylie. When he pulled onto Dogwood Street, he started to doubt his wisdom for the first time. Outside it was chaos—cars everywhere, neighbors milling up and down the street, the front lawn of the house full of curiosity seekers. Inside it was worse—wall-to-wall police officers, including some who had no official capacity but had simply heard about the homicide and had come to take a look. In all, Deffibaugh figured at least a dozen cops and ambulance attendants had been in the house, in addition to the three neighbors who found the body, and that bothered him. Even in the most carelessly committed crime, the chances of preserving a fingerprint or a piece of physical evidence are less than an even bet. As soon as he walked in, Deffibaugh could see that this was a messy, complex case that ranged through several rooms of the house, and no telling what had been touched or moved.