by Fred Rosen
Then suddenly, the whole tone of the conversation switched.
“Well, Jan,” said Mary rationally, “I just really want to be your friend. Why don’t we just do coffee? Call me.”
“I don’t think so right now. No, I don’t want to be your friend right now.”
Mary left. Angry and hurt, Janyce slammed the door behind her. Janyce stood there and fumed. The nerve of that woman, coming here when Aaron …
“Oh, my God!”
Had Mary just said, “I am so sorry for having Aaron killed”? No, wait a sec, that can’t be.
All night, and into the following morning, Janyce questioned what she had heard. And if she had heard what she thought she had, what should she do? By morning she had decided. She went down to police headquarters to the Violent Crimes Squad.
“Jim,” she began, and told Michaud of her conversation the previous night with Mary.
Michaud was surprised that Mary had slipped up, but in eighteen years as a cop he had seen other con men make crucial mistakes that brought them down. He had recently worked a case of a major jewel thief and con man named Thomas Moran, who had operated up and down the 1–5 corridor, who thought he could continue getting away with his crimes, until Michaud got on his trail and, like a bloodhound, wouldn’t get off it till Moran began to make mistakes. Michaud was there all right, ready to pounce.
Maybe that was going on here. Maybe the pressure was finally getting to Mary.
“Are you sure about what Mary said?” Michaud asked.
“I heard what I heard. Yes, I’m sure,” Janyce answered.
“All right, Janyce, look …” Michaud grabbed both her hands and stared into her eyes. “I need to tell you, this woman is more involved than you or I can ever imagine. Now, no more talking to her. Do not put yourself out there for her and definitely do not meet her for coffee. Oh, and one more thing.”
“What?”
“I’m going to get her.”
DECEMBER 19, 1994
Janyce Iturra looked at the space that used to be her son Aaron’s bedroom. When she and the kids moved back in, she’d cleaned up. Gone were the blood-stains and the bloody mattress. When you looked around, it seemed like he’d be home any minute. But of course, that was just a fantasy. She turned, went out into the garage and got into her car.
As she drove, she thought she should be at work. Janyce still worked the early morning shift at the department store. Her employer had been nice enough to give her the time off for the court proceedings she needed to attend.
By the time she reached downtown, her mind had turned to the place it felt most comfortable with lately: revenge. Revenge was on Janyce’s mind when she entered court for Jim Elstad’s sentencing. Sure, revenge wouldn’t put food in her children’s mouths, nor would it bring Aaron back. But it felt good.
“Mrs. Iturra, this is your opportunity to make a statement, and if you would like to come up and sit in the chair next to Mr. Skelton, please feel free,” began court reporter Hugh Wheeler.
Steve Skelton looked up from his seat at the prosecutor’s table as Janyce walked around it and sat down next to him. Janyce looked down at her notes, shuffled them in her hand, then looked up.
Janyce made her statement coldly and methodically, reviewing the way the murder of her son had been carried out. Years from now, when the parole board reviewed the file to make a decision about whether or not Jim Elstad got out on parole, she wanted to be sure they knew what a cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch he really was.
“I would like you to look at his senior picture,” Janyce said to Jim Elstad. She extended it to Elstad, and Wheeler, the court reporter, came over and took it. Then he handed it to Elstad, who gazed at it.
“I just got it a couple days after he died. That was your friend, and you held his life in your hand just like you’re holding his picture now. You had choices. He was a human being, and in that seven minutes that it took you to go from your house to my home, you committed the most cruelest crime on Aaron, on me and my family, your friend.
“What you robbed my three girls of, and my surviving son of, was an uncle for their children, a best man at their wedding, a companion in old age. You robbed me of grandchildren.”
Then she described how she came to discover his injured body, and holding him in her arms. “There was blood everywhere. Too much. There was brain matter there. I did not know what it was until later. And I still knew my son was going to make it because he was the strongest person I knew.”
She talked about how it took a while to find out that he had been shot in the head and the embarrassment she and her kids went through when, “We were made prisoners in our own home. We were checked for gunpowder residue on our hands. We couldn’t leave.
“Do you know how long I had to wait before I could leave and see my son? Eight thirty. Seven hours after you shot him. I lost seven hours with my son, seven of his last hours on earth, because you shot him. You! I finally got down there and you know how many hours I had left? Two. He died at ten thirty, Jim. From what I understand, it was at the same time your sister was having her baby. Congratulations on being an uncle,” she said sarcastically.
Janyce paused and took a drink out of a paper cup of water, then continued.
“The first time I got to kiss him was at the funeral. A little late, don’t you think?”
Elstad didn’t answer, just stared at her. What was there to say? No psychological evaluation had been done on him, but from the description of the way he committed the crime and his lack of guilt afterwards, and even as Janyce poured her heart out, it sounded like he was probably a psychopath.
Elstad didn’t feel guilt. He just did what made him feel good. Like shooting a defenseless teenager in the back of his head as he slept.
“It’s going to be ten years, fifteen years before you see your little niece. But it will be a lifetime before my kids ever see their brother. It will be when they’re passing. And the one thing that I’m going to sentence you to is that every night you go to sleep, the last thing you see, is my son sleeping before you shot him. And that every breath you breathe is a breath you took from him. And you remember that for the rest of your miserable life, because I can’t give you any worse sentence than that.”
She sat down and the judge sentenced Jim Elstad to fifteen years behind bars. The guards led him away into the bowels of the prison system, away from his family, away from society. Maybe he’d turn his life around in prison. Maybe he’d get an education there. Maybe he’d realize the horror of what he had done and begin to feel.
Like the “bad guys” on “NYPD Blue.” Not!
Michaud had been watching from the back of the courtroom. Good, he thought. One less murderer to worry about. And now he’s gone. Two down and one to go. The one who set the whole thing up and continues to walk free.
Mary Thompson.
THREE
The Wire
TEN
Mary was born November 23, 1954, in Massillon, Ohio. Her mother, Ethyl Fockler, was a nurse with three children. Her brothers at the time of her birth were twelve and seventeen, while her sister was sixteen. Mary’s, though, wasn’t a planned birth. In fact, Ethyl figured she was too old to have any more kids. She was wrong.
Marriage and family therapists today quickly pinpoint where family dynamics go wrong and a child follows the wrong path. A child brought into the world unplanned may get the message that her birth was a burden to her family and as a consequence, begin to act out. In Mary’s case, it is hard to tell what she learned subliminally. While her father, a steelworker in one of the local mills, loved her dearly, her sister would later recall that as she matured, Mary became a bully, acting out with tantrums and violence.
“Yeah, I was pretty spoiled,” Mary Thompson recalled during an interview in 1996. “Judy [her sister] couldn’t handle that. None of them could. I remember one time the ice cream truck came around and my dad said, ‘What kind do you want?’ and I said, ‘Cherry, raspberry, banana,’ several fl
avors, and he got them all for me.
“Then my brother Joel said, ‘Can I have a bit of one of those?’ And I went ‘Noooooooooooo!’” Mary continued, sounding like Red Skelton’s greedy character “The Mean Widdle Kid.”
Her other brother Bobby was more into Italian food than ice cream. Sometime in 1967, Bobby was driven by his brother Joel to the pizza place where his wife worked. Bobby walked in, pulled a gun and shot his wife dead. Sentenced to prison, by the summer of 1968 he was serving his time in the Ohio Correctional Facility when inmates started a riot. Watching the riot coverage on TV at home, his father became alarmed. Would his son be safe? The old man worried so much for his son’s safety that he had a heart attack.
“All I know was that dad was on the floor, and I just wanted everybody to shut up and just deal with it,” instead of the confusion which reigned, Mary recalled. When her father died a month later, it was as much from a broken heart as anything else. He was the parent of one murderer, with another still to come.
Heart attacks, murder, chaos, confusion. It was more than enough to cope with. Joel, though, couldn’t cope and a month after his dad died, he tried to take his own life by shooting himself in the chest with a rifle. It was, apparently, his way of coping with the shame of having driven Bobby to his rendezvous with murder.
Unfortunately, Joel was rather ineffectual as a suicide. Not only did he fail to kill himself, the bullet hit his spinal cord and paralyzed him from the waist down.
“Before Joel came back home, they put him in a rehabilitation hospital in Cleveland,” Mary recalls. “On Saturday, we’d go visit Joel at the hospital and on Sunday, we’d go visit Bobby at the pen. That’s pretty functional, isn’t it?”
If you want to tell a lie, the way to get it over is by including some truth to it. Likewise, if you want to explain inexplicable actions, like murder, take some responsibility and then lay on the soft stuff. It was a lesson Mary would use time and again to manipulate those around her.
“My mother was a wonderful person. There wasn’t anything in the world she couldn’t do for you. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for Mary,” her sister Judy recalls. And yet Mary, who as a child was a cute flower girl at Judy’s wedding, thought of her mother as “a neurotic idiot.” As for Judy, Mary hated her because of her conventional lifestyle: happy marriage, successful business and three kids. Everything Mary didn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, have because of her emotional makeup.
Mary had so charmed her mother into believing that her youngest daughter was a wonderful human being and credit to the human race that the hard-working Ethyl bought her a brand new sports car, a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, for one of her birthdays. How’s that for spoiling your kid? But gradually, as she got older, Mary Fockler’s true personality as a liar and a cheat came out.
She managed to convince her mother to let her use her credit cards before the poor woman went into the operating room for surgery. Her sister maintains that Mary, on numerous occasions, wrote bad checks on Ethyl’s account. Judy even had to close off her mom’s home to Mary because Mary had been stealing the furniture!
After adolescence, Mary Fockler made attempts to go straight, attending various colleges, but every time, she would drop out. She began hanging out with the wrong type of crowd, amoral bikers and other types of degenerates. Recognizing the seriousness of her sister’s problems, Judy pleaded with Mary to get counseling. Why not go to a psychiatrist who could help her? Mary demurred but eventually she was forced to see one; Mary tried to kill herself by cutting her wrists and in the aftermath, Judy committed her to a psychiatric hospital for a short stay that was interrupted when Mary got a Legal Aid lawyer to get her out of the “loony bin.”
Mary Fockler had failed at everything she had attempted: school, familial relations, the basic adjustments and socialization that every child goes through on the way to maturity. Figuring life might be better in the military, Mary enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps and became a WAC.
Wacky was more like it. Mary couldn’t adjust to the Army any more than she could to civilian life. Eventually, she was given a psychological discharge.
After surviving two strokes, Ethyl died on February 14, 1976. Some said Mary’s behavior drove her to her grave. Ethyl had always liked to see Mary in dresses, but for the funeral, Mary showed up wearing jeans and a denim jacket. It was her way of showing respect.
Soon after the funeral, her gang career with the Hells Angels began.
Throughout the next few months following the trials, Ric Raynor, the gang cop, continued to speak sporadically with Mary Thompson. He still felt that she had been lured into the gang lifestyle and had not intended to become a gangster.
Within the Eugene Police Department, Raynor was not the only one who ascribed to this theory. The police chief himself felt Mary was not the monster that Michaud believed her to be. Even Beau Flynn’s former parole officer had an opinion counter to Michaud’s.
Virginia Newby was an Oregon Youth Authority parole officer who was assigned to fourteen-year-old Beau Flynn’s case back in 1992. At that time, he was committed to the MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility. She recalled Beau claiming to be a “Crip.” Newby felt that his behavior revealed “… his fascination with guns, the weapons that escalated him from a punk kid to a dangerous felon.”
Newby remembered Mary as a very distraught mother, who “desperately wanted her only son to show her respect.” Beau repaid his mother’s love by betraying her authority. “He had stolen from her and created all sorts of havoc.” How ironic; Beau was just following family tradition, though Newby did not know that.
As for Mary, she felt that her authority had been completely undermined because Beau had become a ward of the state. All she was left with was a photo album full of childhood memories, and a growing sense of guilt.
Newby theorized that “by going public with her story, [it] allowed her to shift the blame for her son’s behavior from her own failures as a mother to the alleged influence of the notorious gangs. No doubt it was a tremendous boost to her ego to be showered with attention as well.”
Mary’s sounding the alarm that “Next, it could be your kid” was her way of focusing attention on herself as a “good mom” wishing to save others from a similar situation.
“In my opinion, her interest did not lie in protecting the community or in saving gang-affected youth,” Newby added. “Instead, I believe Thompson wanted desperately to be seen as a victim of circumstance, a knowledgeable, caring parent in a crusade to save her son.”
Michaud didn’t buy any of it. Mary Thompson was a con woman, first and foremost. Her past showed that, and if he was able to prove that she had put that “contract” out on Aaron, she was going down for a hard fall. But anyone who thought killing Aaron was just a means to save her son was being short-sighted. There were bigger things at stake here.
Frustrated at getting nowhere, Michaud sat at his desk, went out into the field, used all of his resources to try and get conclusive evidence to nail Mary for setting up the Iturra murder. And he was failing. The case was cold, threatening to leap into the “double-wrapped freezer” pile on his desk unless he did something. But what? The practical aspects of the case threatened to shut it down.
Any police investigation over a period of time takes up man-hours. It costs money. And the Thompson case, with Michaud spearheading the investigation, was costing too much in regular man-hours and overtime. Prosecutor Steve Skelton periodically consulted with Michaud, and when he saw a lack of progress in the case, decided to punt.
“Let’s offer Mary a deal. She can plead guilty to a single count of hindering prosecution.” At least they’d get her for something and with a sympathetic judge and a little luck, some jail time.
Michaud was reluctant to make a deal. He knew the woman was a killer and didn’t want to let her get away with murder. But what was he to do? Besides, it wasn’t his choice. He didn’t prosecute; the state did.
There are two types of assistant
district attorneys. One is the young buck, looking to make a name for himself and then take his reputation and go into private practice where he can make big money. The second is the career civil servant, the nameless, faceless sword of justice, the guy who quietly prosecutes felons year after year with little or no fanfare and gets his kicks from the satisfaction of getting scuzbuckets off the street. Steve Skelton, with twenty-two years in the D.A.’s office, fell into the latter category.
Middle-aged and graying, you wouldn’t give him a second look on the street. He didn’t wear Armani or Versace, just rumpled prosecutor gray. But behind his desk in the plain office where he receives visitors, he looks like a dynamic, implacable foe of evil.
It was Skelton who reviewed all the evidence in the “Gang Mom” case that Michaud brought him, and made the decision when to prosecute. And it was Skelton who now summoned Mary Thompson to the district attorney’s office.
We don’t indict people because they have killed somebody, we indict them because we can prove they have killed somebody, Skelton thought. In Mary Thompson’s case, proving murder was just too damn difficult.
When Mary arrived, she took a seat directly in front of Skelton. Off to the side, Michaud silently slouched in his seat. Skelton rose up from behind his desk and offered Mary the deal: Plead to hindering prosecution, the police drop their investigation and it’s all over. Minimum jail time would follow, and then release. If Mary was indeed guilty, it was perfect. She’d be back with her family in no time.
“No,” answered Mary firmly.
Michaud sat up. This was getting interesting.
“No?” Skelton asked in a disbelieving tone. Michaud, meanwhile, felt elated. It isn’t too often in police work that you get a second crack.
“I didn’t do anything wrong. Why should I plead to something I didn’t do?”