Evidence of Love

by John Bloom

  It was not the first time that Jackie would be confused by Betty’s behavior. Jackie would go long periods without seeing Betty at all—except at church, of course—and then Betty would burst into the room like they were old friends. Little did Jackie know the real cause of Betty’s on-again, off-again friendship. It would have surprised her: Betty admired Jackie above all other women.

  Betty was not a great deal different from the other women who admired Jackie. They all loved her, to greater or lesser degrees, in part because they knew what she had gone through in order to put her life in order. That it was in order they had no doubt, because Jackie was the strong and wise one, the woman with purpose. Betty had sensed this quality in Jackie on the Gores’ first visit to Lucas Church in the fall of 1977. They had visited on the recommendation of the Garlingtons, but the main reason they stayed was the presence of Jackie, with whom Betty instantly felt a kinship. Then, when Jackie came to the Gore home to tell them about her divorce, Betty had been the first to say how she understood completely and would try to help Jackie through the difficult time. Perhaps it was her natural shyness, or the way she expressed her sympathy, but somehow the admiration was lost on Jackie, who found Betty a casual friend but nothing more. Betty was simply never one of the gals.

  The year 1978 should have been the grandest, most successful yet for Lucas Methodist Church, and by all outward appearances it was. Membership reached an all-time high, so much so that some of the “old-timers” (who had been there all of eighteen months) grew concerned that the church was in danger of losing its close-knit character. The choir grew and prospered as Elaine Williams, the new organist and director, continued to recruit any member who had the semblance of a singing voice. (Pat Montgomery became an especially prized chorister, not only for his voice but for his ability to read music and conduct in Elaine’s absence.) Allan Gore helped organize volleyball and softball teams that summer—the first time Lucas Methodist had ever taken part in the church athletic leagues. The daily coffee klatsches of the church women expanded to include children’s birthday parties, baby-sitting co-ops, teas, luncheons, and the like. Jackie’s abilities as a public speaker showed marked improvement, as she became more natural and less intellectual in her weekly sermons. There were more and more evening committee meetings as the church took on responsibilities for community social work, foreign missions, and exchanges with other churches. And preliminary plans were drawn up for a new church building.

  Still, behind all the gaiety and activity, things were beginning to fray. When the church formed a “couples” volleyball league, Jackie started showing up at games with a man named Chuck, her boyfriend at the time, whom she had no intention of marrying. This was less than pleasing to the older church members, who expected a greater degree of modesty from their pastor. Chuck wasn’t the only boyfriend, either. Jackie had several, much to the consternation of those who weren’t supposed to know. That same summer the church lost its organist and choir director to divorce: David and Elaine Williams had separated in April after six years of marriage, and by July their divorce was final. Elaine decided that she couldn’t support her two children unless she gave up the choir job, and so she resigned and went to work as a technical writer and product developer at Texas Instruments. Richard and JoAnn Garlington, one of the activist couples in the church, spent a weekend at a motel in Dallas going through an intensive therapy program called Marriage Encounter, and as soon as they returned they started proselytizing for the program among other couples. They also started holding hands at all times and remaining entwined in each other’s arms throughout church services—a public display of affection that amused some and upset others.

  Betty Gore went through a period of despondency that summer, when her initial enthusiasm for the state foster parents program was shattered by a rebellious eight-year-old boy named Danny, who had been abused by his parents, shuffled from place to place by the courts, and arrived at the Gore home with a monumental chip on his shoulder. Betty and Danny were constantly at odds. Danny so frequently disobeyed orders and taunted Alisa that after a while Betty refused to have much to do with him at all; she would go for days without saying anything kind, loving, or even courteous to him. The hatred between Betty and the foster child grew so intense that, on two occasions, Allan sat Betty down and asked her to stop nagging and ordering Danny around because he was “basically a good kid.” Betty refused to believe it. Their battle of wills reached an all-time low that fall, when Danny asked Betty if he could have a birthday party. Betty said okay, wrote up six or seven invitations, and told Danny to deliver them at school—but she never followed up by calling the children’s parents. On Danny’s birthday, only one boy showed up—evidence, Betty said, of how unpopular the boy was. Allan blamed Betty for the fiasco. Soon thereafter, Betty started demanding that the state take Danny back.

  Even Candy Montgomery, normally the most carefree and high-spirited of the women in the church, fell into a depression that summer. For months she had been offering her shoulder to Jackie as a prop when things seemed bleakest. Now Jackie was starting to come alive again; she was seeing men now and then, and an old college girl friend named Jeanine had moved into the parsonage to live with her. Just at the moment when Jackie started to put things together, Candy started to fall apart. It was a nameless sort of depression, a sense that something was wrong, that perhaps she had chosen the wrong life. “I’ve done all the things a wife is supposed to,” she would tell Jackie. “The house, the kids, the fancy meals. And then one day I wake up and I say, ‘Where’s the payback?’ And it isn’t there.” For the first time, Candy started talking to Jackie frankly about extramarital affairs. Candy had it all figured out. She wanted sex without any emotional commitment. She wanted sex on her terms. She wanted sex that wouldn’t interfere in any way with her marriage or home life. She wanted sex better than any she had ever had before—the kind women have in Gothic romances, with fireworks and the earth moving and the total loss of control. Jackie didn’t take Candy’s intentions lightly; she agonized over exactly what to say, and finally said that as a minister she couldn’t condone it, but it was a decision Candy would have to make on her own. Most of her warnings were to the effect that “something bad will come of it.” She encouraged Candy to talk to Jeanine, who had once had an affair herself and had a healthy perspective on the matter. Candy did talk to Jeanine. Afterwards Jackie asked Jeanine what had happened.

  “There’s nothing I can tell her,” said Jeanine. “She’s already made up her mind.”

  Shortly thereafter, Candy decided to join the church volleyball team even though Pat didn’t intend to play that fall.

  10 Crowded Pews

  There were no prayers spoken for Betty Gore that Sunday at Lucas Methodist, and yet her death was the one inescapable fact of the day. Perhaps the Reverend Ron Adams thought it indelicate to lead the mourning for a woman who had openly despised him; perhaps he felt embarrassed by the fact that the Gores had abandoned the church several weeks before. At any rate, there was no real need to announce the fearful news. That morning the Dallas newspapers had given the first full accounts of the case, sketchy though details were at the time. The chilling words “ax murder” made certain the news would appear on the front page, complete with lurid approximations of what the body must have looked like. “Think of yourself lying on your back and someone smashing an ax through your head three times,” Justice of the Peace Buddy Newton told one reporter. Then, for emphasis, he added, “She was damn near dismembered.” It was too sudden and too enormous a crime to be fully real yet. Mostly it was fuel for ghastly speculation. The killer, after all, was “still out there,” and it was the kind of thing that could “happen to anybody.” One of the newspapers had surmised that the murderer “calmly took a shower” before leaving the Gore home, judging by the blood samples found in the bathroom. The television reports of the crime, which received prominent attention Saturday night on the four Dallas stations, suggested psychotic behavior or worse.
The shaded lanes of rural Collin County were not accustomed to such images, and people were suddenly frightened. There had been a run on heavy door locks that weekend, and locksmiths were working overtime to handle the demand for instant installation.

  Later no one would be able to remember the sermon of that Sunday morning, not even the man who gave it, for the congregation was stunned to the point of being comatose. They were all like Candy Montgomery, who arrived at the church early that morning to teach a Sunday School class, sat solemnly through the services, and then loitered afterwards in the foyer of the sanctuary, chatting concernedly with the other congregants to find out who knew what.

  Don Crowder probably wouldn’t have noticed Candy if she hadn’t sought him out. After the church service, Don stood on the sidewalk outside and rambled on and on about his theories of “the murder” to anyone within listening range. As the church’s sole lawyer, he considered it his prerogative, even though Don had never tried a criminal case in his life and had no intention of doing so. Don was one of the church’s chief supporters, not because he was a particularly religious man (he would often bolt from the sanctuary early if the Dallas Cowboys were on television that day), but because he loved the little town of Lucas and thought a strong church made for a strong town. He was also the most garrulous member of the church, with a talent for nonstop speaking that served him well on this day.

  Oddly enough, Don told his audience, he had been leaving the movie The Shining when he first heard about Betty’s death. It was Saturday afternoon, and his family had decided to go to see the film on the way home from the boys’ track meet. On the way out of the theater, Don’s wife had stopped to call the baby sitter at home and reported back the shocking news. All the way home and for the rest of the day, Don had gone on and on about the case. He had known Betty casually, through the church, but that was not what interested him. It was the weapon: such a crude, strange, terrifying weapon. “It had to be a drifter, a transient,” he kept telling his family. “How else would you have a weapon like an ax? During the day? In Wylie? Yeah, it had to be a drifter.”

  Continuing his speculation at church the next morning, he had made a few adjustments—it had to be a big man, he had decided, and it was probably either a sex criminal or a burglar caught in the act—but he was still holding to his original assessment. It was a “drifter.” Whoever it was was probably a thousand miles away by now.

  Just as Don was explaining how they’d probably never find the killer, Candy Montgomery walked up to him.

  “Can I talk to you?” she asked, indicating that she wanted to see him alone.

  “Sure.” Don noticed that she seemed a little distracted.

  Candy led Don out to the gravel parking lot. As they walked, she said, “I guess you know about Betty.”

  Don started to explain his “drifter” theory all over again, but Candy stopped him. “I guess you know I was there that morning,” she said. “I was probably the last one to see her alive.”

  “Yeah, whoever it was couldn’t have been from around here, or he wouldn’t have tried a crime like that in the middle …”

  Candy broke in abruptly with an urgent tone in her voice. “Don, I’m supposed to go talk to the police this afternoon. Is there any reason I should be worried?”

  “Shoot, no,” said Don. “That’s just routine stuff. Whoever did that had to be a very big man.”

  “You don’t think I’m a suspect?”

  “No way, Candy, they talk to everybody in a case like this. You just tell ’em whatever they want to know. Tell ’em anything. You got nothing to worry about.”

  It was another scorching hot day, almost a hundred degrees, and Don didn’t like standing out in a gravel parking lot wearing a coat and tie. Even though he would have liked to discuss his “drifter” theory some more, he started thinking about how he wanted to strip off his clothes and lie by his pool the rest of the day.

  “You got nothing to worry about, Candy,” he said. And with that he ended the conversation, called his family over to his brand-new black El Dorado, and drove away. Candy felt comforted by the advice, brief as it was, and began looking around for Pat and the kids. She had to get home to cook dinner.

  11 Father’s Day

  Father’s Day was duly celebrated each year in the Montgomery household, and despite the aura of gloom surrounding Betty’s death, Candy was determined to make June 15 a festive occasion. When Pat woke up that morning, he had been greeted downstairs with the cards everyone had picked out for him on Friday at Wal-Mart. Then after church, Pat’s seventy-seven-year-old father, Jewel, came by the house with his lady friend, Ima Jean, and they all had a lavish Sunday dinner together. Normally Jewel was not a very talkative man, but when Pat told him about the death of Betty, he went on for some time about old murder cases he was familiar with from his days back in Cleburne, Texas. After dinner, everybody except Candy went into the living room to play dominoes and “visit.” It was a drowsy, leisurely afternoon, until Candy came downstairs to announce she was on her way to the Wylie Police Department.

  Pat was a little startled when he looked up from the domino table. Candy was stunning. She had been dressed up for church that morning, but now she had changed from those clothes and was even more elegant. She was wearing a black blouse over a white skirt with thin black stripes in it, a pair of stylish high heels, and dark nylon stockings. Pat thought it unusual for her to be so formal, but all he said was, “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?”

  “No, I can drive myself. They said it shouldn’t take long.”

  Candy was cool and collected by the time she arrived at the squat off-white building that serves as headquarters for the four-man police force of Wylie. That’s more than could be said for Royce Abbott, the veteran cop who greeted her. Chief Abbott hadn’t gotten much sleep that weekend. Friday night he’d been the second officer on the scene. He’d handled the initial investigation, stayed there with Dr. Stone through the nitty-gritty of the evidence-gathering, and then been up early Saturday morning to organize a door-to-door canvass of the entire southeast end of Wylie, looking for witnesses. Since the evidence was being analyzed at the forensic labs in Dallas and the autopsy was still not complete, all the investigators had were theories. They’d ruled out robbery, since an officer had found a twenty-dollar bill on Betty’s dresser, but they hadn’t ruled out the possibility of a sex crime or a psycho killing—as Abbott had said when he first saw the body, “one of them cult deals.”

  By late Saturday, for all their work and questioning, the only thing they had come up with was the testimony of a five-year-old child who said she’d seen a woman come out of the Gore home on Friday morning, get into a station wagon, and drive off. Shortly thereafter, the girl had gone to the home, knocked, and gotten no answer. It had disturbed her, she said, because she could hear the baby crying inside. Abbott thought he already knew who the woman was: Candy Montgomery. He knew she had been there from talking to Allan Gore on the phone at the crime scene. Abbott knew he had to talk to Candy Montgomery anyway, because she was apparently the last person to see Betty alive. And by Sunday afternoon, with most of the obvious leads already exhausted, Abbott had decided that Candy Montgomery was his best shot. Maybe he would be able to trigger something in her memory. Maybe she could remember something suspicious about the house, or about Betty’s frame of mind that morning. Abbott was experienced enough to know that criminals who aren’t caught soon after the crime frequently aren’t caught at all—and two full days had already elapsed since Betty Gore was killed. He was smart enough, too, to know that he needed help. Joining him for the interview of Candy Montgomery were Steve Deffibaugh, the Collin County Sheriff’s investigator who had taken all the crime-scene photographs, and Jim Cochran, a distinguished grey-haired gentleman who was a criminal intelligence agent for the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state version of the FBI.

  The woman who sat before the three investigators, all wedged into Abbott’s tiny office,
seemed intelligent, unruffled, and not much affected by the death of her friend. They couldn’t have known that she was a little more reserved than usual, nor could they have known the two questions she feared most.

  “Mrs. Montgomery, we want to know anything you can tell us about your visit to the Gore home on Friday,” said Abbott. “Anything or anybody you saw that might be suspicious.”

  Candy Montgomery’s facial muscles never changed one iota from their expression of cool politeness, but inwardly she relaxed. “Okay, I want to do anything I can to help.”

  “Why did you go to see Mrs. Gore on Friday?”

  “I had been keeping Alisa, their daughter, because she and my daughter spent the night at our house the night before. Then that morning the kids decided they wanted Alisa to stay over another night, and I told them I would check with Betty to see if it was okay. But then I had to go to Betty’s anyway because, if Alisa was going to stay over, then I had to get her swim-suit so we could take her to her lesson that afternoon.”

  “How old is the child?”

  “Alisa is six.”

  “And you were keeping her while Mr. Gore was out of town?”

  “I didn’t know he was out of town, but I found out later that he was when he called me Friday night. He was in Minnesota.”

  “And how long had you been keeping the Gore child?”

  “We picked her up on Thursday afternoon.”

  “And was Mr. Gore gone at that time?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. He wasn’t at home, but it was in the afternoon and he wouldn’t have been home from work.”