The Nobody Girls (Kendra Dillon Cold Case Thriller Book 3)

by Rebecca Rane

  That’s what brought Barbara Hawkins Woodside out the front door before Kendra could knock.

  “I told you to bring the cans into the garage, not almost into the garage!” She was yelling at someone Kendra didn’t see at the moment.

  Barb stopped and looked embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry, I’m screaming at my teenager. It’s his first language.”

  Barb Hawkins was charming from the outset and pretty. Kendra knew she was in her early fifties, but she looked ten years younger.

  “I understand. I’m Kendra Dillon, and I’m doing a story on your mother for a podcast and I just wondered if we could talk? Even for a few minutes.”

  The woman’s warm smile evaporated. She stared at Kendra, and Kendra could feel her window of opportunity. This was the moment she pushed Barb from a no to a yes.

  “I am trying to highlight the people that were murdered. The stories you’re going to see, have seen, are all about this man, Ned Wayne Ewald, who’s emerging as a serial killer, one who hadn’t been identified as such by the media until now. It isn’t fair that he’s the one people will remember instead of your mom. I am trying like hell to change it.”

  “Your producer called. I hung up because I don’t talk about this.”

  “Your dad told me your mother loved to sew.”

  Barb Hawkins closed her eyes and seemed to be accessing something—memory, resolve, patience, Kendra didn’t know.

  Kendra waited now, letting the woman decide to talk or not.

  “Okay, I have twenty minutes, tops. Where do you want to do this?”

  “Kitchen table works.”

  “Come in, ignore the mess. We’ve given up. Maybe when the kids go off to college, I’ll stand a chance.”

  “It’s fine.” Kendra made quick work of her recording device. And did her best to explain her mission. “I tell the stories of cold cases, if I can, through the eyes of the victims or their families.”

  “Ha, well, you must have a lot of material with Ewald. How many people did he kill, do they think?”

  “Eight victims that they believe can be connected to his activities.”

  “Hmm.” Barb lightly touched her eyebrows with her index fingers. She then ran it quickly down her cheeks and across her lower lip.

  “What do you remember about your mother?”

  “A lot, I had her for twelve years.”

  “Can you share a memory with me?”

  Barb Hawkins glanced at the ceiling. She brought her eyes to Kendra and cocked her head left and right. Kendra could see how hard this was. Talking about this wasn’t in her nature. This was what she’d moved beyond. Or had tried to.

  “My mother liked to sing, how about that?”

  “That’s nice.”

  “She thought she was pretty good. She reminded me a lot that she had the lead in Annie Get Your Gun in high school.”

  “That’s sweet,” Kendra said.

  “I guess.”

  “Did she sing to you?”

  “She performed for us, all the time.”

  The memories weren’t tinged with affection. There was an edge to them. An edge that wasn’t visible in Barb Hawkins Woodside until she started recalling her mother.

  Kendra tried another line of conversation, the one that had first opened Barb up.

  “Your Dad said she liked to sew, that she was quite the seamstress.”

  “Liked it?” Barb bit her lip. The story from her perspective wasn’t the one Kendra had thought she was telling.

  “Didn’t she? She made the curtains at your dad’s house and Halloween costumes. Your sister says he struggles with his memory, but he remembered that about your mom. I thought it was sweet.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you want me to say. That does sound sweet.”

  “But you don’t remember it that way?”

  “No, I guess I don’t. My sister was a toddler, my dad was, well, gone then too, just back then it was voluntary.”

  “Your memories of that time, of her, they’re important, to tell her story.”

  “Just because a victim of a crime is a victim, doesn’t mean they were all perfect, and Julie Andrews before.”

  “I get that.”

  And Kendra did. She was supposed to have been a saintly child. A perfectly good student, and then she was snatched! As though her good behavior prior to the kidnapping meant she deserved it less. All kinds of people were victimized by all kinds of abusers, but none of it made it right.

  “A crime is a crime,” Kendra said to Barb, “and your mother was a real person, not a character. It’s just that you’re one of the few people who can help me tell that part of the story. No one else remembers.”

  With that, something broke free for a second in Barb Hawkins Woodside. A sob ripped out of her chest. A dam threatened to break. Kendra watched the woman collect herself. Sobs usually tumbled out of a person in huge ragged chunks. And once the thing that was caught in your throat escaped, it was hard to stop. Falling apart was not something that Barb Hawkins Woodside did. She would not do it now, either. She pulled it together. Kendra saw the woman steel herself.

  And then she began to speak.

  “I’ll tell you what I know, what I remember, and you can decide what to do with it. I did love my mother. I do. But the story, well, the story is different.”

  “I’m not here to judge it, just tell it. There’s no right story.”

  “So, yeah, my mother singing was a performance, it was her on stage, for an audience of one. She reminded me many times that her pregnancy with me killed her future.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, very nice, eh? She didn’t love motherhood or my dad. Though with my dad, I guess that was understandable. He worked all the time, went out after work with the boys, he’d say, and come home drunk. So here she was, not yet thirty, two kids, a husband like my dad, and frustrated by life. Cooped up. She sewed because my dad wouldn’t give her money for clothes for herself or us. She didn’t love it. It didn’t make her happy. It was just another thing she had to do. A chore. That said, she was very good at it. She may not have liked to sew, but she did it. She made our costumes, cute dresses, and kept herself looking damn good, now that I look back on that time. There’s a picture of her in 1981, in this cream suit. It was fancy. She wore it on Easter. She looked great.”

  “Do you have that picture?”

  “Yeah, up in the attic, in a box. I don’t unpack it, ever, you know?”

  “I do know.”

  “I am not sure if I should tell you the next part. This is the part that my sister didn’t want to hear. Maybe it shouldn’t be out there, but oh, hell with it. My mother was having an affair at the time she died. She didn’t disappear out of nowhere. She was off, meeting her boyfriend. How’s that for a Julie Andrews upbringing?”

  “How do you know about the affair?”

  “I saw her with the guy. I was waiting in the car, and she met him at the truck stop.”

  It was Kendra’s turn to gasp.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I only saw him the one time, but I’ll tell you, one hundred percent, that the man they’re showing on the news, he did it. He killed her, probably a lover’s quarrel or something disgusting.”

  “You’re saying your mother knew Ewald, that he didn’t just randomly run into her on the road or at some restaurant?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Does the FBI know this?”

  “You’re the only one who knows it, except my dad, who probably forgot, and my sister, who wouldn’t listen to me explain it. She’s under the impression that an angel sang her to sleep every night.”

  “But that’s not the case.”

  “Well, someone did sing her to sleep when she was a toddler, but that was me.”

  Kendra wanted to cry for this woman, for the little girl she had been.

  “You need to tell the FBI,” Kendra said. “This is the first direct link from Ewald to a victim.”

/>   Kendra felt they’d help make a huge link. That there was something concrete that put Ewald with one of the victims, after all this time.

  “Will it change the situation?” Barb asked. “He’s in prison, and from what I read, he’s going to die in there.”

  “I think I have to tell this part of the story too.”

  Kendra was conflicted, though. She didn’t want to be the cause of suffering, but what had emerged was a truer picture. And even more than that, Barb Hawkins had game-changing evidence in the case against Ewald. All of a sudden, there was the possibility of real evidence that he killed not only Cynthia Hawkins but the others.

  “You do what you have to do. I said my part, and if the FBI calls, I’ll say it again. I was twelve. It was forty years ago. I’m not exactly airtight witness testimony. I guess it would be different if he was out there, but he’s not. He’s where he’s supposed to be.”

  “But it could help. I don’t even know in what way, but it’s important.”

  “Who does it help? Not my mom, not the other seven women that man killed.”

  Kendra knew she’d have to report this. She’d have to report it all. And it was up to the authorities to decide if they were going to act on it. It was part of Cynthia Hawkins’ story, and it explained why she was out back in 1982. She was having an affair with Ned Wayne Ewald.

  “I’m going to put your mother’s story together as best I can, your memories, your sisters, and your dad’s,” Kendra told Bard. “Is there anything else you want me to know about her?”

  This time tears did escape. She didn’t try to will them away.

  “My mother’s voice was pretty. She was pretty. She used to make the best snicker doodle cookies. I loved them. She claimed it was her unique recipe. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. She was trying to figure out life the best she could, I guess. I don’t agree with her choices, but maybe they weren’t choices for her. She didn’t have options, in her mind.”

  “Tell me about the last time you saw your mother.”

  Barb Hawkins Woodside clenched her jaw and then unclenched it. Kendra could see what Cynthia might have looked like if she had lived. They were both pretty women.

  “She hustled us off to bed, early. I was mad about that. I hated going to bed before ten, especially then, and still now, I’m a night owl. Anyway, I sat up in bed, mad at her. She turned on a nightlight for my sister. That’s sweet, isn’t it? Turning on a nightlight. Anyway, she turned on the nightlight and closed the door on us. Left us in the room we shared. I knew she left. I didn’t see headlights or anything. I just felt that change in air pressure when a door opens in the house and then closes again. The door closed. That was it. That was the last time. Until they showed us the picture of her body when they figured out what they had at High Timbers.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate you opening up to me, telling me this part of the story.”

  Barb nodded. There wasn’t anything more to say, Kendra figured. And then, on a whim, she asked one more question.

  “Do you remember what she sang to you?”

  Barb looked away again and then back at Kendra.

  “Moonshine Lullaby, from that show, Annie Get Your Gun. That was a favorite. And Barry Manilow, ‘Mandy.’ She named my sister after that song.”

  “Thank you.”

  A teenage boy, taller by almost a foot than his mother, bounced into the kitchen. His appearance was an entrance, like Kramer on Seinfeld. He immediately filled up space. His youth and energy were magnetic.

  “Ooops, uh, where are the cookies you said you made?”

  “It’s okay. We’re done here,” Barb said. “Did you hear me about the garbage cans? They need to be inside the garage, or it’s really only half the job.”

  “I got it, rolled them in on my way in here, mother.” He emphasized ‘mother’ in that exasperated way only a teenager can.

  Barb Hawkins’ expression changed. A smile played behind her eyes. She’d achieved her own happy ending in moments like this, Kendra was sure.

  Barb walked over to the counter. She slid a Tupperware container across the surface to her son.

  He grabbed two fistfuls and then turned to Kendra. “My friends and I love her cookies, like crack.”

  Barb swatted her son’s shoulder, and he bounded back out of the kitchen. “He eats all the time and can’t put on weight. It must be nice, eh?”

  Barb lifted the container of cookies and offered them to Kendra. She looked inside. Dozens of neatly displayed cookies, all uniform in size and carefully sprinkled with brown sugar, filled the Tupperware.

  They were snicker doodles.

  Chapter 24

  Kendra wrote Cynthia Hawkins’ story as best and as balanced as she could. She used Mandy’s perspective, Barb’s, and then also a tiny snippet of Ewald’s denial. She had to since Barb had placed Ewald with her mother. This was the bombshell of this season.

  It was a delicate episode to present. For a podcast that specialized in the horrific stories of crime victims, that was saying a lot.

  But, when Kendra recorded the narration that she and Shoop wrote, she felt they’d done their best:

  It appears a fair amount of the sweet things that Mandy Hawkins conveyed to me about her mother, a mother she was too young to remember, are because she had a big sister. Barb Hawkins sang songs to her baby sister. She watched over the toddler’s crib. She provided a story that was more fairytale than true to her young sister.

  But that’s what small children need, and that was what a good big sister provided.

  There is a strength in Barb Hawkins that is like steel, just under the surface of her yoga pants and a hooded sweatshirt. At the age of twelve, she stepped in as a mother for Mandy.

  The memories Barb Hawkins has aren’t fairytales. They’re real recollections of a not-so-perfect childhood. But make no mistake, Barb provided as perfect a childhood as she could muster for her little sister.

  What remains for us to know, about the way Cynthia Hawkins touched the lives of her daughters, and her husband, is only a glimpse. It’s a song, a smell of cookies, and a nightlight turned on.

  But that glimpse is one-thousand times clearer than what we have for Margo Kasinski, Krissy Jackson, and Susan Hodges or the two Jane Does, still unnamed.

  It is becoming undeniable that Ned Wayne Ewald was a prolific serial killer that stalked the I-75 corridor. What is not clear are his victims. That’s where we need your help. That’s where I need your help.

  Margo Kasinski attended the former Woodrow Wilson High School. She was in the typing club. If you attended back then, could you reach out to us? We have no more than a blurry yearbook photo.

  Krissy Jackson lived in Forsyth, Georgia, her entire life. We believe her parents are deceased. Surely, there have to be neighbors that remember her.

  Susan Hodges lived in the Cincinnati area. She was the youngest of the victims and might have been a runaway. Did you know her?

  Authorities have told us, grudgingly, that these victims were nicknamed, The Nobody Girls, because they weren’t attached to anyone, to anything, and were hanging on to the lowest rung of the social ladder.

  But we’ve discovered that isn’t true. Their lives impacted the people around them, in small ways and in larger ways.

  You might not have been best friends with any of these victims. Or you might remember something that can tell their story.

  Will what we know of them, will what’s recorded of them, be only, that they fell prey to a serial killer?

  We’re working hard here to make sure that doesn’t happen. Reach out to us, help us tell the stories. Don’t let Ned Wayne Ewald be the one at the center of this.

  Visit the podcast website and reach out with a call or an email if you knew them. Even a small story would be appreciated. A small story from you, since they’re unable to tell their own.

  I’m Kendra Dillon, and this is The Cold Trail.

  “Wow,” Miles said. His voice was in her earphones. />
  “Good episode,” Shoop added.

  Kendra hoped it was. “Did we tell it, okay? Miles, we tried to be balanced, not look like assholes. She was a person, you know?”

  Shoop looked at Miles. Kendra was asking him because she and Shoop had written the script. They’d done a lot of careful work to be sure that it was as accurate and sensitive as they could craft it.

  “She’s not the villain, and she was no saint, I get that. But no matter what she was, she didn’t deserve what she got,” Miles said.

  “Good, I think. I hope,” Kendra replied.

  “Now what?”

  “Now we wait to see if any of this hits anyone. See if we can do better for Margo, Krissy, and Susan.”

  Kendra had no hope for the Jane Does at this point. But at least, with the three names and the increasingly wide audience they were getting on The Cold Trail, someone might hear, might come forward.

  “Okay, that’s a wrap then. I’ll get this edited and get it to Art.”

  “Thanks.”

  Shoop and Kendra walked back to the office.

  Where they found Scott Goodrich, his hands on his hips, and his jaw was set in a firm line.

  “Uh, hi,” Kendra said. She was mystified why he was even here. She had Swisshelm until tomorrow.

  “That’s it, ‘hi’?”

  “Hi…Scott?”

  “You have nothing to say after you let me sit in at O’Shay’s for two hours, no call, no answer to my text.”

  It all came rushing back to Kendra. Dinner with Scott. O’Shay’s. Oh no!

  “Oh, wow, I’m—yes, sorry. It’s Friday? It slipped my mind, and the phone was off because I was taping.”

  She looked at Shoop for backup. Shoop was literally backing up and out of the office, into the hallway.

  “Seriously, after the night we had, I thought we made a breakthrough, and you’re exactly the same.”

  “I was working. I had to work; I got this incredible interview. We had new information on the case, and it was just heartbreaking. I was immersed in it. I totally forgot. I’m so sorry.”

  “Right, I remember this. I remember exactly this. What was I thinking? That you were ready to be a responsible person and hold up your end of the relationship? Well, forget it. I’ll be over to pick up Swissy tomorrow at the normal time.”