by John Bloom
On the left side of the face he found three horizontal blows of various sizes, suggesting they were struck, unlike the six vertical ones, while the head was still alive and moving. On the right side of the head, near the top, he found a couple of odd-shaped, curved wounds, not especially deep, again indicating they resulted from glancing blows struck during a struggle. He still hadn’t found a wound that looked fatal.
With the next wound, all became clear. Near the curious curved wounds was a huge gaping wound that ran almost all the way across the top of the head, from ear to ear. After cleaning away the hair and blood, he could see that it had been produced by at least seven blows. They were so deep, and had been struck with such force, that they had penetrated the skull and gone all the way into the cranial vault, causing a good portion of Betty Gore’s brain to seep out onto the floor.
DiMaio now had two groups of blows that could have killed Betty Gore, but he was still not finished. Turning the body over, he found a group of three more deep chop wounds across the back of the head. And for the first time that morning, his skin crawled. Two of the wounds were pointed at the top, but squared off at the bottom. DiMaio could think of only one explanation: the ax had been swung with such force that it stuck inside the head. That meant the killer would have had to wiggle it back and forth, as one does when chopping wood, to remove it from the bone before swinging again. The third blow was so deep, and aimed at such a soft part of the skull, that it had invaded the cerebellum and could have killed by itself.
The rest of the autopsy was anticlimactic. DiMaio found contusions across the front of Betty Gore’s neck—as in the case of the forehead bruise, it seemed odd to find wounds from a blunt instrument in the midst of so much hacking—and then he made the usual examinations of internal organs. None of the organs showed anything out of the ordinary, except the endometrium, which was swollen: Betty Gore had been on the verge of having her menstrual period.
Five hours after he began, DiMaio faced a conundrum. The cause of death was obvious—massive head injuries, from any one of three groups of blows—but the pattern of the injuries didn’t fit any of the standard motives. If he had to render an opinion, he would still guess it was a sex crime, mainly because the ax is a weapon of passion (it’s clumsy and not really as effective as other weapons), because the face was so mutilated for no apparent reason, and because the woman had been chopped so much more than necessary to kill her. But the main thing DiMaio noticed about Betty Gore’s body was more foreboding. He could tell that, even though the body was covered with more than forty ax wounds, almost all of them had been inflicted while the heart was still beating. It was a thought that gave even the hardened scientist a temporary chill.
7 Mourning
Candy Montgomery slept for three hours and then got up, alone, to fix breakfast. Pat and the children and Alisa Gore were all still sleeping. The kids didn’t know yet, of course. She and Pat had stayed up talking about Betty for a while, but when Pat was unable to get any information from the police, they gave up and lay staring at the ceiling. Then they tried to sleep. Pat fell asleep first, but Candy kept thinking about the last phone call from Allan. After telling them Betty had been shot, he had called again, the fifth time that night, mainly to give them his flight schedule. But before hanging up, he had said something else.
“I’ve talked to the police and I mentioned that you were over there, so they’ll probably be calling.”
It was the first time she had thought about it.
“Yeah, okay,” she had said. “Be glad to.”
Candy got the breakfast going—Pat would be up early today because he wanted to work in the yard—and then she sat by the kitchen table and looked out the sliding door at the cool gray luminosity, the predawn quiet. The air was still this morning. When the sun rose it would come fiercely and broil the earth again. From her vantage point, Candy could see nothing but the black shapes of shaggy oak trees and the vague outline of the redundant horse corral that ringed the back yard. She felt very much alone.
After a few minutes she reached for the wall phone over the counter and absentmindedly dialed the number for Ron Adams. She had to hear a reaction; the pastor of the church needed to know anyway.
“Hello.”
He would recognize her voice. “Ron, have you heard about Betty Gore?”
“No.”
“She got killed yesterday. They say she was shot.”
Ron seemed less shocked by the news than troubled by its implications. Betty and Ron had never liked each other. The Gores had left the church. Ron wondered what he should do.
She explained that Allan was out of town.
“When will he be back? Perhaps I should meet him?”
“This morning.” She gave him the flight number, and Ron hung up, perplexed by his dilemma.
Candy turned back to fixing breakfast, and after a while Pat came downstairs. He sat down to have his cereal.
“Kids aren’t up?”
“Not yet.”
“Darn, I wanted to get out there and mow today.”
Candy continued to go through the ritualized movements of a housewife, making the bed, putting away a few toys left out from the night before. She called softly to the kids when it was time for them to get up, and when they limped down the stairs she started a second round of breakfasts.
As soon as the kids were ranged around the breakfast table, alert enough to be arguing about The Empire Strikes Back, Pat went outside. After a few moments, they heard the roar of the lawnmower as the engine caught.
“Now when you go outside this morning stay away from where Daddy is until he’s finished.”
The kids wolfed down their breakfasts and scrambled back upstairs to put on their swimsuits. They wanted to play in the spray from the lawn sprinkler.
The phone rang. It was one of the women from the church.
“Candy, have you heard?”
“About Betty? Just that she was shot.”
“I called as soon as I heard, because I thought you said you were keeping Alisa.”
“We are.”
“Well, don’t turn on a radio where she can hear. I haven’t heard it, but I understand it’s all over the news.”
“Oh is it?” Candy felt a twinge; she stared straight ahead. “Thank you for letting us know.”
Candy sat down at the kitchen table. Why was there no one to talk to?
I’ve talked to the police. They’ll probably be calling.
She grabbed the phone and dialed Sherry Cleckler.
“Have you heard? Betty has been shot.”
“Betty Gore?”
“Yes.”
“How terrible. How did it happen?”
“No one knows. The police won’t tell us anything.” Candy’s voice sounded disembodied, empty.
“Are you okay? You sound upset.”
“Oh, I’m fine. Just shaken by the news. We’re keeping Alisa and Allan’s out of town.”
“Well, you don’t sound fine. After I get all these relations out of my house, I’m coming over and we’ll drink a pot of coffee and talk, okay?”
“That’s what I need.”
“Gimme ’til Monday.”
The phone rang again almost as soon as Candy hung it up. Since it was Saturday morning, everyone was home, listening to radios and trading information by phone.
“Candy—JoAnn. Do you know Betty’s dead?”
“We heard last night. It’s so awful.”
“The police just left—they say she was murdered—with an ax. I wanted to call Jackie, but I don’t know where she is.”
The sense of dread descended again. “An ax?”
“It must have been some very sick person.”
“How horrible.”
“It’s just so terrible, and just when they were getting ready to go to Europe. Betty told me it was going to be their second honeymoon.”
“I didn’t know they were going to Europe.”
“They were planning to leave Wed
nesday.”
“I think Jackie is in New York.”
After Candy hung up, she started mechanically cleaning up the breakfast dishes.
An ax … it must have been some very sick person.
The phone rang again. Another woman from church.
“Candy, have you heard about Betty?”
“Yes.”
“It must have been one of those maniac weirdos.”
Candy replaced the receiver and walked out in the yard. As Pat rounded a corner, she waved and shouted to get his attention over the roar of the mower, then motioned for him to shut it off. When the blade stopped whirring, she said, “Pat, they say Betty was killed with an ax.”
“Oh God, how horrible.”
“They say the police just left.”
Pat shook his head and grimaced. He looked into Candy’s eyes, as though to say “I guess we were all thinking it could have been something this bad,” and then he restarted the mower. Candy went back into the house, where the phone was ringing again.
“I’ve been listening on the radio, and they say there were bloody footprints all over the house. How could this happen to someone like Betty?”
“They were planning a vacation, too.”
Another call, another exclamation. The phone was ringing constantly.
I mentioned that you were over there.
Candy couldn’t stand the phone any longer. She went back out into the yard and looked for something to do. She got the hedge trimmers out of the garage and started clipping the shrubbery around the white fence. It was hard, messy work, but she pitched into it wholeheartedly, rubbing blisters on her hand from pressing the clippers so hard. Pat finished the mowing and told Candy he was going down the street to tell the Greens what had happened. A few minutes later Barbara Green walked over, and Candy put on a pot of coffee. The idea of having a visitor relaxed her a little.
Mainly Barbara just wanted to be certain that Candy would take the news all right. She knew that Candy and Betty had once sung in the choir together, and she assumed they had been good friends. Barbara wanted to offer whatever emotional support she could.
“Wasn’t it a fortunate thing that Alisa was here with you?” said Barbara. “Whoever did this might have killed her as well.”
“I guess so,” said Candy.
The two women talked about Betty in the past tense, and Candy was surprised to find how easy that was. Betty had had her problems at church, but she was basically a good person. She was a hard person to know. I wonder how Allan is taking it. How will the kids be told? They talked about all the things people talk about when young friends meet tragic ends.
“What is the world coming to, that something like this can happen in a woman’s own home?” said Barbara.
“Isn’t it frightening?” said Candy.
After Barbara left, Candy fielded a few more calls, many of them from shocked church members who would naturally call the woman who always seemed to know what was going on.
“We went to see The Shining last night and now I wish we hadn’t. Who could have such a diseased mind, to use a weapon like that?”
“If they ever catch the person who did this, there’s nothing they could do to him that would be punishment enough.”
“I just hate it that Betty suffered.”
“They say they have a bloody footprint.”
After a while Candy left the phone and went into the hall bathroom. Pat came in from his yardwork, passed the open door, and stopped: Candy had her foot up on the sink, and was applying peroxide to it.
“What did you do to your toe?”
“I cut it on that damned door.”
Pat had been meaning to fix the metal storm-door facing that was sharp and jagged at the bottom.
“Is it deep?”
“Not too bad,” she said. “I wonder if I need a new tetanus shot, though.”
A little later the pastor called again to confirm Allan’s flight plans; he had decided to go to the airport to meet him. Candy was beginning to see that the whole weekend would be consumed with trying to deal with Betty’s death—church members were obviously taking it very hard—and so she called Sue Wright to cancel their plans for the next day. She and Sue were supposed to take two of the church youth groups to Six Flags Over Texas, the amusement park, but this was obviously not the weekend to do it.
“Have you heard about Betty Gore?” asked Candy.
“Yes, I’m just glad you had Alisa with you.”
“I know. I was calling to say I don’t think we should go tomorrow. I just don’t think it’s the respectful thing to do. I’m not in any shape to go anyway. I just don’t feel like having a big party.”
Sue agreed that the outing should be called off and promised to make the necessary phone calls. They talked for a while about the murder, including the fact of the bloody footprint, which was fast becoming the sole detail of the crime known to every person in Collin County.
The police will be calling. A bloody footprint.
Around lunchtime the calls began to dwindle for the first time. JoAnn called once more to report that Allan was home, but that when he was told that Betty was killed with an ax, he almost collapsed.
“Oh no,” said Candy. She repeated the news to Pat, who pressed her for more information.
“I don’t know anything else. I guess he’ll call us when he’s recovered enough to handle the kids.”
Pat went outside again to finish his work in the yard. Candy sat in a chair by the kitchen table, phone cradled between her chin and shoulder, a pair of garden shears in her hands. As she spoke, she began to work the shears back and forth, pressing with all her might as the metal blades cut through the soles of a pair of rubber sandals. She continued her work for several minutes, long enough for the shears to destroy all semblance of pattern on the sole and to render the shoes into a messy little heap of rubber. Hanging up the phone, she gathered up the scraps she had made and carried them to an outside garbage can.
8 Condolences
The first reporters Allan Gore saw were standing on his front lawn. There were four or five of them, clutching notebooks and tape recorders and holding miniature cameras, a contingency he hadn’t considered until the moment he returned home. Something was out of kilter. There was something he didn’t know. He got out of a friend’s car—his colleagues from work had shown up at the airport and insisted on bringing him home—and then looked around, not knowing what to expect. The first familiar face in view was Dick Sewell. Sewell, the curious dentist who had been among the neighbors at the house the night before, had returned that morning to organize a utility-room cleanup operation. Everyone agreed that Allan shouldn’t see the condition of that room, nor of the blood-stained bathroom. Now Dick Sewell was the first person to greet Allan at his own door.
“How did it happen?” asked Allan.
“What all do you know?” said Dick warily.
“Just that she was shot.”
“Well, that’s wrong. The weapon was an ax, and it was very brutal. The crime lab was here until six this morning.”
Allan blanched and his knees started to give. He groped for support and found his way inside to a chair. After thirteen hours of turning the news over and over in his mind, of waiting on planes and wondering whether he would ever know Betty’s last thoughts, the reality of what had happened was like a final cruel twist that almost broke him. He could feel tears welling up from somewhere deep inside, and for a while he didn’t know whether they were tears of grief or of guilt. He hadn’t been there. Betty had always said he should be there. Then, at the moment she had been more frightened than at any time in her life, he hadn’t been there.
Allan tried to focus on the things that needed to be done. Stay active, stay occupied, that was what got him through. After he had gotten the news the night before, he had done all the right things, made all the correct calls. He had told his parents, he had talked to the police, and he had made the most difficult call of all—to Betty’s parents
, in Norwich. Bertha had almost gotten hysterical, until Bob calmed her down and came on the line himself. Suicide had lodged in some part of Allan’s mind as a possibility that he didn’t want to consider on any conscious level, and when he talked to Bob Pomeroy, he knew Betty’s family would never understand that. Later he had felt comforted by the harmless presence in the motel room of Tom Tansil. “You must go home soon,” Tom had said, and Allan had nodded and allowed Tom to make the reservations. Allan was so anxious to do the correct thing, to maintain control of himself, that later that night he insisted on going over the 3M project file with Tom, because, after all, they were going to have to carry on without him. When he had reached Dallas, there had been more friends waiting. Even Ron was there, the Methodist pastor from Lucas whom Betty couldn’t stand. As Allan thought back on it, Ron had done an odd thing: at the airport, he had given Allan a business card.
Now there was yet another group of friends at the house, including Dick Sewell, who was doing his best to make things easier. Neighbors had started arriving with food; thank goodness Dick was there to take the covered dishes and put them away. Allan felt too tired to face all the decisions. He needed to get his head straight. He needed a sympathetic ear, someone who would understand what he was going through. He went to the phone and called Candy Montgomery.
“Candy, would you and Pat keep Alisa for a few more hours? I just got here, and everything’s pretty hectic.”
“Sure, Allan, don’t worry about her. Just call us whenever you want us to bring her home.”
“She doesn’t know, does she?”
“No, we’ve kept her away from the radio.”
“I don’t want to tell her until everything’s quieted down. I need to talk to the police and make some funeral arrangements and get these people out of the house. Why don’t you bring her home around 3:30?”
“Okay. Allan, please tell us if there’s anything else we can do—help with the arrangements or something.”
“No, it’s fine, the neighbors are all helping.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. A little shaken up, but mostly just tired.”