by John Bloom
The only person from Lucas church whom Allan really wanted to see that day was Candy Montgomery. He couldn’t think of anyone who knew him better or would be more comforting at such a time. He picked up the phone and called her.
“Candy, I was getting a little nervous wondering about who’s going to bring the food today. Do you know who’s going to be handling it?”
“As a matter of fact, Allan, I was just about to call you. Barbara Green just called and said the person who was supposed to help her with the food can’t do it, so could I?”
“Oh, good, that makes me feel much better.”
“And she also wanted me to ask you whether you would like us to stay when we bring the food or just drop off the food and leave the family alone.”
“Please stay, just for a little while, I think I’d like having you here.”
Candy was relieved and a little anxious at the same time. She was relieved to be able to do anything for Allan that might make him feel better, but she was filled with foreboding at the idea of meeting Betty’s family. There was another thought gnawing away at her, too, but at such a deep unconscious level that she pretended it wasn’t there: she wasn’t sure what would happen when she reentered Betty’s house.
It was not nearly as bad as she expected, though, perhaps because they were surrounded by people as soon as they went inside. Barbara Green was more nervous than Candy. Barbara was a good friend, and one of her most appealing qualities was a sensitivity to the feelings of others. She couldn’t stand to see suffering; in this case, it was almost too much for her. Barbara was also a sheltered person in some ways, unable or unwilling to comprehend how something so awful could happen to someone like Betty. During the drive down to Wylie, she had turned to Candy and said, “I’m just so glad that you weren’t in the house, too.”
“What?”
“You and Alisa could have been there, too, when Betty was killed. Thank God for that.”
Now Barbara seemed a little tense as Allan introduced the two women to all the members of Betty’s family. Candy and Barbara didn’t stay to chat, but went straight into the kitchen with the food and started putting it away. They worked silently for a while, only stopping to ask Allan questions about what the family might like to eat that night, and then Barbara paused.
“Candy, some of this food has to be put in the freezer,” she said, “and I’m afraid I can’t go into that utility room.”
Candy felt an involuntary chill. She had avoided thinking of it until then. She had averted her eyes from the moment they entered the house. She hadn’t even looked at the firmly closed door.
“Would you mind taking the food in?” Barbara said.
Candy knew Barbara was seriously upset.
“Okay,” she said weakly.
Candy steeled herself, cradled a couple of Tupperware dishes in her left arm, and opened the utility room door. But as soon as she took her first step, she heard the wild, frenzied sound of mad dogs. She froze; a horrible image momentarily flashed through her mind, and then she turned and looked toward the far end of the room. There she saw the window. She had forgotten, but now it came back to her. There was a window that, due to the uneven slope of the lot, came within a foot and a half of ground level in the backyard. The curtains on the window usually remained open, as they were now, and on the other side of the pane she could see Betty’s two cocker spaniels, rearing and jumping and incessantly barking, as though they were engaged in a death battle. At the same time an unpleasant odor swelled into her nostrils, an odor of something sickly sweet and inescapable and wretched. Candy clenched her teeth. She felt naked and alone and wondered whether she should turn and go back to the kitchen.
“Don’t worry about those dogs.”
The voice came from the adjoining living room. It was Betty’s mother, trying to soothe Candy’s nerves. “Anytime anyone goes in that room, the dogs bark like that,” she said. “They’ll quit in a minute.”
Candy hurriedly opened the freezer door and made room for the dishes. Her heart was racing.
“Thank you for doing that,” said Barbara when she returned.
The church services were to be at two that day, and Allan asked Barbara and Candy to stay with him until then. So the two women sat in the living room and talked about nothing in particular, and even Bertha seemed to perk up a little. She liked both visitors; Barbara and Candy were concerned and comforting and completely gracious. Bertha especially liked Candy’s ease among strangers, which was much like her own. Candy didn’t say much, but she got up periodically to take care of the dirty dishes and other minor household chores.
“Aren’t dishwashers wonderful?” Candy said at one point as she returned to the living room. “I just don’t know how I’d get along without one.”
“Not me,” said Bertha. “I never did ever want one. Some of my fondest times were washing the dishes with Betty after we’d have supper.”
It was one of the few times that Bertha was able to talk about Betty at all.
It was odd, but true, that the most nervous person at the memorial service for Betty Gore was the minister who conducted it, Ron Adams. Ron had not particularly liked Betty, not least because she detested him. There was no sense in saying anything about that now, but it had to be in the back of the minds of those who were close to Lucas church. Ron was only there because he was still technically Betty’s minister, and because there was no one else to conduct the service. But the service was difficult for him in another way, too. Ron was only twenty-five years old, just starting his ministerial career, and he found nothing in his training to prepare himself for the enormity of these duties. He knew how to conduct a funeral, but he didn’t know how to deal with such a horrible death. On Sunday night he had worked a long time on his sermon, afraid that many people would want to treat Betty’s death as evidence that God was indifferent or cruel. Ron understood the feeling; he could hardly accept the killing himself. He didn’t understand how such a senseless murder could truly be God’s will, but he was determined to be comforting to others even though he had no good explanation for them. The hardest part was finding words to describe Betty. “Loving mother,” “faithful wife,” “committed person of faith”—these were the proper things to say, and he would say them.
Bob Pomeroy had heard his daughter complain about Ron Adams, but as soon as the service began he could tell that this was a different man. Even Ron’s own parishioners were surprised. To the 250 people crowded into the little Methodist church off the main street of Wylie, Ron was strong and authoritative and comforting. Normally Ron was a terrible public speaker, slurring his phrases and staring down at his text and occasionally interjecting an “uh” or an “ah” at the most inopportune times. But today he was transformed, as though the tragedy had forced him to grow up overnight. Afterwards none of Betty’s friends complained, as expected, that Ron was chosen to lead the service. His voice had been resonant, his prayers deeply affecting.
“How can a thing like this happen?” Ron had said at one point in his funeral sermon. “How can it happen to a person who is so needed by her family? A mother so needed by her children, a daughter so loved by her parents?… Why do things like this happen?
“When death comes by some more normal method, whether organic, by aging, or even accident, it is difficult enough, but an act of violence seems simply incomprehensible. No one has the answers to all the questions of life.… Perhaps there will be those who look to God and say that He has some eternal purpose in all this. But surely we can’t accept that notion. The notion that God would ‘will’ something like this upon anyone is intolerable. God does not will evil on His people in this fashion.… Occasionally His will becomes thwarted by the actions and behavior of humanity which He has elected not to intervene in the processes of. When things like this happen His will and purposes then change to His ultimate will, so that as Paul puts it, ‘everything works to the good, to them that love God.’”
One person who heard Ron’s words, and w
ould never forget them, was Candy Montgomery. She and Pat sat together near the Pomeroy family, and Pat was so overcome by the sermon that he started to cry, grasping Candy’s hand for support. Candy was red-eyed but she never broke down; she was stiff and remote, still thinking about what Ron had said. The act was “unnatural.” It was not God’s will. It was evil.
Everyone had trouble getting out of the church because of the TV reporters outside, with their minicams and mobile vans. The police were there, too, snapping pictures as people emerged from the sanctuary and recording the numbers on license plates. A group of women joined hands in a circle on the church steps and said a prayer for Betty. Ronnie Pomeroy got so infuriated by one of the TV cameramen that he intentionally backed into the lens of the camera to black it out, causing a brief commotion. Everyone was on edge anyway, especially when they realized that the police were looking for the killer at the church. Two sheriff’s deputies shielded Allan and the Pomeroys from reporters and then helped them into the car. Shortly before they drove away, Candy Montgomery approached Bertha Pomeroy and offered one last word of consolation.
“I just wish there was something I could do for you,” she said.
13 Secrets
Friday, June 13, was not a good day to be poor and alone in the vicinity of Dallas. Once the newspapers and radio and television stations had latched onto the story—it was quickly becoming the murder case of the year—it was open season on every mental patient, drug addict, or lowlife petty criminal who happened to have been seen by the wrong person or noticed in the wrong place on the day of the crime. Chief Abbott had been devoid of leads on Saturday; by Monday he was swimming in a sea of names, addresses, times, descriptions, and amateur theories, and his phone was still ringing at the rate of once every minute. In Denison, some fifty miles to the north, someone reported a female hitchhiker dressed in blue jeans, halter top, leather vest, and sandals who showed up at Rusty’s Paint and Body Shop with dried blood on her vest and feet. A state police officer spent a full day tracing the woman’s movements—only to discover that she had been seen by several other people, all of whom noticed no blood. A mental patient in Dallas wanted to confess to the crime, until an officer determined that he had been confined at Parkland Hospital at the time of the killing. A local justice of the peace called to report a strange man following him around and taking his picture; he had to be told that the “strange” man was an undercover officer, acting under orders to take everyone’s picture at the memorial service for Betty Gore. Another informant called to report the exact location of the murderer: Room 151 of a Holiday Inn in Dallas. Two officers investigated, and found that the man had aroused suspicion by walking into the dining room on Friday covered with bruises and abrasions. The injuries had nothing to do with the case; he had simply been beaten up.
The collective law enforcement minds of Collin County felt beaten up, too. Now actively involved in the case were the Wylie Police Department, the Collin County Sheriff’s Office, the Dallas Police Department, the Texas Department of Public Safety criminal intelligence division, the Texas Rangers, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office, and the Dallas Institute of Forensic Sciences. Chief Abbott was welcoming one and all, so there were no real battles over jurisdiction, as so often happens when small-town police departments try to deal with big-city crimes. But so far the concentrated manpower hadn’t done him much good. Policemen continued to comb the neighborhoods surrounding the Gore house, questioning anyone who might have seen something suspicious on the day of the crime. Others patiently checked out every anonymous phone call, no matter how absurd the tip sounded. With the help of Candy Montgomery and Allan Gore, the investigators had been able to find everyone who had contact with Betty in the twenty-four hours before her death, and they were interviewing those people one by one.
When Dr. Stone had finished his first review of the evidence and surmised that the killer was an acquaintance of Betty, Abbott had considered Allan Gore the prime suspect. It seemed too much of a coincidence that he had left town on the very day she was killed. But then Abbott had checked and rechecked Allan’s alibi. Allan did indeed have business in St. Paul. There were coworkers with him at all times that day. Everyone attested to his genuine shock and grief upon hearing of Betty’s death. So Abbott returned to square one, looking again for someone who had no acquaintance with Betty but somehow could have gained entry to her house and then, for no apparent reason, decided to kill her. Oddly enough, it was the very brazenness of the crime that made it so difficult to solve; it was a brutally brave act, carried out in daylight, by a killer who cared so little about being caught that he took time to clean himself before leaving and didn’t even bother to destroy the evidence. The more they studied the facts, the more the investigators came back to the inescapable conclusion that they were looking for a psychopathic personality.
They were also hoping for help from the lab. Dr. Stone had promised them a preliminary analysis of the physical evidence he had collected at the scene, although no one held out any great hope for clean fingerprints. What they did receive on Monday was almost as interesting, though: an analysis of the clump of hair that Stone had found in the drain of the bathtub. According to the meticulous doctor, there were exactly 175 strands found in the tub. All but four of them matched the hair of Betty Gore. Two of them were animal hairs, probably dog hairs. The last two were “foreign”—not Betty’s, but human. This meant very little in the absence of a suspect, but it could eventually mean a lot: hair samples were almost as distinctive as fingerprints. (The odds of two strands of hair from different people having the same biological makeup are astronomical. It is possible, though, unlike fingerprints, which are never identical.) In the course of an investigation the hair could be used to narrow the field of suspects, and at a trial it could be the physical evidence needed to prove that the suspect was in the house on the day of the crime.
In the absence of any new information, the thing to do was return to first sources. That’s what Abbott and his colleagues decided, and that’s what they did on the evening of June 16, a few hours after the memorial service, when they called Allan Gore in for a formal interview. Officers had talked to Allan several times over the weekend and learned the essential facts of Betty’s last day. They had also thoroughly checked out his trip to St. Paul. But sometimes in the formal setting of a police interview, a man will remember more than he thinks he knows. They would have to get it all on the record sooner or later anyway. Joining Abbott for the interview of Allan Gore were two Texas Rangers—G. W. Burks and Fred Cummings, who had joined the case over the weekend—and Joe Murphy, head of intelligence for the North Texas region of the Department of Public Safety. Murphy was a rough-hewn, burly man who lived in Wylie and had offered to help because, among other reasons, he was afraid there was a crazy man on the loose in his hometown. Murphy was forty-three years old, with a face like a cinder block and a reputation as one of the toughest interrogators in the DPS. He enjoyed being thought of as a mean man, especially by the paid informants who occasionally tried to bluff him.
On the night when Murphy and his three colleagues gathered in the Wylie City Hall conference room to interview Allan Gore (Abbott’s office was too small), they were strictly gathering information. They had discussed the possibility that Allan Gore might be “involved” somehow, and they intended to look for a murder motive, but mostly they just wanted to listen to his story in the hope of discovering something new.
Captain Burks began the interview by asking Allan to review everything he did on the morning of Betty’s death. Allan told them about Betty’s depression, caused by her fear of pregnancy and the fact that he was leaving for the weekend. He tried to recall everything that had passed between them at breakfast, and said he left for work with Betty still in a “somber” mood. Burks pursued that line awhile, asking whether Betty was normally afraid of being alone, whether she had had any particular “difficulty” with anyone in Wylie. But Allan said she was not really afraid so much as lonesome
, and that the only problems she had ever had were with the students from her sixth-grade class, who disliked her so much that one year they had vandalized the house. Most of the other possible murder motives were eliminated by Allan in a similar manner. Did anyone ever make sexual advances toward Betty? Not that Allan knew of. Was Betty secure about her marriage? At one time she wasn’t, but the marriage was “improving” due to a church program they had enrolled in called Marriage Encounter.
Allan continued to describe his day in great detail, stopping to explain how he had called from the airport to give Betty the traveler’s check numbers, discussed his anxieties with Sid and Tom, continued to call home from his motel room in St. Paul, and finally convinced the neighbors to break into his house. He reviewed all the conversations he had with Candy Montgomery, and all of his movements up until the time he arrived at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Saturday morning. When he had finished, Burks was still fishing for possible scenarios. Who were your closest family friends who visited in your home? The real answer was none, but Allan named about six families who had been in the house at one time or another. What went on at these Marriage Encounter meetings? Allan tried to describe how married couples would get together to socialize every two weeks. Any problems with teenagers? Not really. Anybody suspicious who’s done yard work or home repairs and might know where you kept the ax? A boy fixed the dryer a while back, but I was with him all the time. Have you noticed anything missing from the house? Nothing that I can tell.
The interview went on for a couple of hours, with Burks unable to elicit anything out of the ordinary, at least nothing they didn’t know. Murphy took over the questioning near the end, starting with several technical questions about doors and windows: Would the garage door normally be open? Should the door to the baby’s room be closed? Then, on the slight possibility that the medical examiner was wrong and there could be a sexual motive to the crime, he asked whether Allan knew of any time when Betty might have had an affair with another man.