by John Scanlan
As far as the immediate family went, alibis would still need to be obtained, but no one stood out as a possible suspect. With that in mind, Jim and Dan decided to speak with work associates first. Dan spoke with Lisa’s coworkers at the dentist’s office, a small practice, and everyone there had nothing but kind words to say about Lisa and Tom both. The four employees, as well as the dentist, gave no indication that they had any involvement in Ashley’s disappearance or knew of anyone who might have. Many of them wept as they spoke with Dan. As for Lisa, they painted her as charismatic and funny, someone who made not only the patients enjoy being there but the staff as well. They all agreed that her family meant the world to her and that she and Tom seemed to have the perfect marriage.
While Dan was talking with Lisa’s co-workers, Jim was sitting down with Tom’s only other employee, Rick Tardo. Rick Tardo was, simply put, a computer nerd. He had dark black hair, which had always been kept short on the sides and a bit longer than it should have been on the top. His head was very large with his forehead accounting for the majority of it. His brown eyes were covered with large eyeglasses. They looked similar to aviator style sunglasses without the sunglass tint. Black beard stubble covered his ghostly white cheeks and chin despite the fact that he shaved every morning.
Rick admitted to Jim that he had heard of Ashley’s disappearance on the news and had tried to get in touch with Tom but was unsuccessful. He was extremely nervous as Jim interviewed him, never once making eye contact, something Jim took note of. Rick explained to Jim the various aspects of his relationship with Tom, both personal and work related. He spoke very highly of Tom, both as a boss and a person. He told Jim that Lisa had always treated him very well and that Ashley always said hello to him when she would come visit her dad. He had even been invited to several barbecues at the Wooten home and the family always seemed very happy together.
Jim began pressing the pedal down. Based solely on body language at that point, he felt like there was a chance Rick could be involved. The fact that Rick was so nervous made an impression on Jim, though he felt confident Rick probably got that way when he spoke with anyone. When Jim finally asked the all-important question of what Rick’s alibi was for the time Ashley was taken, Rick, still looking down at the table through his large glasses, seemed surprised.
“Wow, uh . . . I was home all day.” He said, raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes wide.
“Why ‘wow’? What is ‘wow’ supposed to mean?” Jim asked in an agitated tone.
“Just surprised you’re asking me that. Implying you think I may have been involved.”
“Were you?”
“No, and I take offense that you would even suggest it.” Rick had a hurt look on his face as he looked down.
“Why won’t you look at me, Rick? Are you hiding something?” Jim used a softer voice this time, as if he was trying to coax an admission out of Rick very gently.
“I’m certainly not hiding anything. I’m a non-confrontational person and you’re very intimidating.” Rick seemed closer and closer to tears with every word.
“Look at me, Rick, look at me,” Jim said softly and was finally able to get Rick’s eyelevel to rise to his own. “If you did something, now is the time to get in front of it before it’s too late. Don’t let things go too far to where you can’t get out from under what you’ve done.” Rick began sobbing.
“I didn't do anything!” he shouted, his voice cracking as tears filled his eyes. “Tom is one of two friends I've ever had in this world! I would never do that to him!” Rick sniffed hard and took a deep breath. “That little girl was his world. He loved her more than anything. He hated going on so many repair calls late at night because he missed spending time with her. She was a nice little girl, always said hello to me. Most people who see me dismiss me or laugh at me because of how I look or how I act. She was nice to me. They all were nice to me.” He began uncontrollably weeping. Jim looked down at his watch for the first time all day. He was genuinely surprised that it read seven-twenty p.m. He knew he was due home over two hours ago and there were still a few things he wanted to do before he left for the day.
“OK, Rick, before I go, would you mind allowing me to look through your room real quick?”
“Why?” Rick asked as the tears began to subside.
“Why?” Jim replied back, the soft, gentile tone was gone from his voice. “Why do you think? If you want me to exclude you as a suspect I need to make sure Ashley isn’t here now and has never been here.” Rick paused as he again looked down at the table.
“I just don’t understa—” Rick’s words were interrupted by Jim’s cell phone ringing.
“Hold that thought.” Jim said as he pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and answered it. Almost immediately his face turned ashen. His heart sank. He could barely muster enough of his voice to reply to the person on the other end that he would be right there. He slowly raised himself from the seat at the kitchen table, looking dazed. Rick looked up at him confused and scared. “We will have to continue this later,” Jim said in a tone that was barely recognizable to either of them. Jim exited the house the way he had come in.
Where he was headed wasn’t a very long drive, but it seemed that way. Jim had the car am/fm radio turned off and just listened to his own inner monologue the entire way. He played out several different scenarios in his mind and what he would do if each one of them came up. Finally he arrived at the location Sergeant Phillips had described and parked on the side of the road behind an array of police cars, both marked and unmarked. He scaled a guardrail with relative ease and began his slow descent down the side of the hill toward the group of police personnel that were gathered on the side of a canal.
Florida was riddled with small canals and waterways throughout the state, and Palm Beach County was no different. This particular canal was rather large, roughly fifty yards across, and was right on the border of Palm Beach and Broward County. Roads paralleled it on either side, however, the Broward county side had virtually no houses near it and the road that ran beside it was much less traveled. The roads on either side of the canal were raised, with a rusted guardrail separating the blacktop, in some places dirt, from a twenty foot sloped decline to the canal.
Jim cautiously approached the group of police officers and crime scene techs that formed a semi-circle from the water’s edge. The group consisted of four uniformed Broward County Sherriff’s deputies, two men in suits Jim didn’t recognize, Dan, Sergeant Phillips, and several crime scene technicians from Broward County. He knew what he was about to see--he had known he would most likely see it at some point from the minute he realized he was working a legitimate abduction--he just had hoped he wouldn’t. He knew he needed to brace himself for an image that he would most likely remember for the rest of his life.
The group still stood in a semi-circle, backs turned to Jim when he placed his hand on Dan’s shoulder. Dan turned around with a look of disappointment and sorrow, then stepped aside and let his partner in on the discovery. Jim let out a deep breath and began inspecting.
Strawberry blonde hair lay tangled and uncombed as it partially covered her shoulders and her forehead. The collar of her white shirt was flipped up, the three small buttons unbuttoned. The front of the shirt remained mostly white, but mud stains from the back protruded from both of her sides. Dampness covered the bottom of the shirt from her belly button down, as well as her back. Her blue jeans were buttoned and intact, however, they were soaked from front to back and covered in mud. Her right foot was exposed, and her left was covered by a shoe. A patent leather shoe, that at one time was white, but now was stained by mud. Her milky white skin still looked like that of a porcelain doll, but mud spots and blades of grass dulled it slightly. Her eyes were closed and if it wasn’t for a large red line going around her neck she would have appeared to have been napping right there on the grass.
No one said a word as Jim took in the heartbreaking sight. He had only seen her in one picture befo
re, but as he looked at her now he knew she must have been so full of life only a short time ago, such a bright light. Her skin, her hair, everything about her just seemed faded. The few white areas left on her shirt and shoes seemed brilliant in comparison. The grass beneath and around her seemed so bright green. He thought of the point in the movie The Wizard of Oz when the screen bursts with color from what had been just gray, dull imagery. Everything around her seemed to burst with color, to burst with life, while she remained gray.
Jim began to slowly accept what he was seeing and get past the sorrow he felt in his heart for a little girl who would remain frozen in time at the age of five. He started gathering facts on how Ashley’s body was discovered and anything else that would be useful to the case, which had suddenly gone from a kidnapping to a homicide. Jim was told that roughly an hour before he arrived the sheriff’s office had received a 9-1-1 call about a little girl’s body being found on the bank of the canal, partially submerged in the water. The caller seemed shaken but certain it was “the little girl who was missing” and urged the dispatcher to send someone quickly, then abruptly hung up.
Two deputies arrived shortly after the call was received and found Ashley’s body. She was lying on her back, much like she was when Jim saw her. However, her lower torso was submerged in water up to just above her belly button, and the deputies made the decision to carefully pull her back out of and away from the water.
Jim was directed to the caller, who he had passed as he walked along the bank on his way to Ashley’s body but never noticed. He was an older, short, heavyset black man wearing dirty blue jeans and a white short sleeved t-shirt. He sat on the hillside holding a fishing pole in one hand and a black tackle box in the other. The man’s name was William Henderson. He told Jim that he fished the canal often, several times every week. He said he hadn’t noticed the body when he first arrived, even though he was fishing only a couple hundred feet from it.
After being there for about a half hour he decided to walk down the canal a bit to try to find a better spot, and that was when he saw Ashley. His voice cracked as he spoke. William said he ran to the little girl and recognized her face immediately. He said he lived in Boca Raton and had seen the news story on her abduction. He checked for a pulse but he couldn’t find one. William told Jim he wasn’t even sure if he had done it right, but that her skin was cold and her body was lifeless and he just had a feeling she was dead. William said he panicked after that conclusion entered his mind. He ran to his tackle box and retrieved his cell phone and placed his 9-1-1 call.
“I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know if I should pull her out, I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know,” he wept. “Please tell me I couldn’t have saved her. Oh Lord, please tell me that.”
“You couldn’t have saved her, sir. You did your best.” In a time of great agitation for Jim, this was a rare moment of compassion. He didn’t allow his compassion to linger, however, as he quickly requested William’s address and phone number in case a follow up interview was needed.
“I don’t know how the gators didn’t take her,” he said as he wrote his information on Jim’s notebook paper. His voice was a bit sturdier and calmer now. “They out here, all over the place. Sometimes I have to drop my pole and get back cause I afraid they gonna jump out the water and snap at me. It was like God wanted someone to find her. Like God wanted her to be brought back to her parents. There really is no reason why a gator wouldn’t have taken her, ‘cept for God.”
Jim returned to Ashley’s location where Dan and Sergeant Phillips still stood. “We have to tell the family. The media is going to be all over this soon,” he said to both of them.
“Yeah, you better get going. Broward isn’t going to give us any problems on this one. They said they will assist with the investigation as needed and that their crime scene will report directly to us. We are going to have to use the Broward M.E. though and they will be taking the body to their headquarters,” Sergeant Phillips said as he continued to look down at Ashley.
“Are you kidding me? These poor people lost their only child and now we are making them drive all the way to Ft. Lauderdale to identify the body? Come on, Chris, that’s ridiculous.” Jim looked into Sergeant Phillips’s eyes, even though they didn’t return the glance.
“I know, I know, but what can we do? It’s a jurisdictional thing, you know that. Procedural. Now you guys need to get going before that news chopper starts flying over.” Sergeant Phillips took a deep breath. “God, it’s fuckin terrible,” he said as he exhaled and looked up at the water.
Jim took one last look at Ashley. The image of his daughter, Amy, superimposed upon her. His thoughts began to head in that direction. What would he do if it were his child? Could he cope with the pain and suffering it would bring him? He quickly cast the thoughts aside and began making his way back up the hill, with Dan close behind.
Ashley’s body had been located on the Broward County side of the canal, making the homicide investigation, at least initially, the responsibility of the Broward County Sherriff’s Office. However, Ashley’s abduction had been news across South Florida and so the deputies who first arrived at the canal were able to quickly identify the body as Ashley’s.
Jim and Dan had driven separately to the canal, and thus they had to drive separately to the Wooten home. Both were affected not just by Ashley’s death, but by physically seeing her dead body. Both had seen dead bodies before on numerous occasions in their careers. They had both been unlucky enough to have seen dead children before, on one occasion each, and it was something that affected them both and was impossible to forget. The children they had seen, however, were victims of a car accident and a drowning. One had physical signs of injury far worse than the few that Ashley had. In those cases, however, there was no before and after. There was no race to save the child. There was never any hope, no matter how slim, that the child may turn out all right. There was only the after, there was only death.
They had an investment in Ashley Wooten, and now they had to change gears from trying to rescue her, as they had rescued Heather Martin, to trying to bring to justice her captor and killer.
Heather Martin. Suddenly that seemed so long ago, though it had only been a little over five hours since they watched her climb into the back of an ambulance and be driven away. They had had mixed emotions at that time as they drove back to Boca Raton, but they both had hoped they could fully celebrate the good they had done when they were able to bring Ashley home. And even though they were bringing her home in a way now, they knew any celebrating or feeling of a job well done would be a long way off.
Both Jim and Dan would have preferred a longer drive to the Wooten home. The news they were bringing wasn’t pleasant by any means, and neither wanted to give it. Dan knew it would be Jim who would ultimately break the news to the family, and he was both relieved to know this and worried about his partner.
Even though he couldn’t relate to the love a parent felt for their child, Dan still knew breaking the news would be hard and that he would have to be strong in doing so. He had done death notifications before, but felt this one would be different given the circumstances. As a police officer, he was the image of strength, of reassurance. If he broke down the perception might be that this horrible thing had overcome everyone and there would be no one to be strong, to try to find answers, to try to find justice.
And in all honesty, Dan didn’t know if he would be able to be that person. He was confident he could be if he didn’t have to give the initial news, if he could stand by and at a later time offer condolences. That seemed different to him. But he was fairly certain he would stammer getting the news out, and it was possible his voice would quiver and crack. He knew Jim wouldn’t have these issues. Though at times Dan did not enjoy being Jim’s partner because he felt shut out by Jim’s domineering nature, in times like these he was glad Jim was his partner for the very same reason.
It was dark by the time Jim and Dan caravanned into the gated
community where the Wootens lived. Jim had phoned Tom while he drove to let him know they would be stopping by to speak with them. Tom just acknowledged Jim’s statement and told him that when they arrived at the gate to dial the numbers one, one, zero, then six into the callbox and the gates would open. Jim again noted to himself Tom’s lack of questions and his seeming reluctance to engage in conversation, however, he also noted Tom’s voice had a worried tone to it.
Jim pulled up in front of the house first, with Dan right behind him. There were two cars in the driveway that Jim did not recall seeing the day before when they had been at the Wooten home. He assumed family members had come to stay with the Wootens, which made what he was about to do both easier and harder at the same time. He would have the assistance of loved ones in comforting Tom and Lisa after he broke the tragic news to them. However, he would also have the burden of having an audience for his notification. Loss made people react in funny ways and the more people that would have to deal with the news of a loss, the more possibilities of someone dealing with it violently. But there was nothing he or Dan could do about that now, and they both gave each other a look as they stood at the front door as if to indicate “this is it.”
Jim rang the doorbell and heard a scramble coming from inside. The door quickly opened and Lisa stood before him. Her eyes were red and puffy. Her hair was uncombed. “Hello,” she said in a soft tone, then sniffled. “Come in, please.”