—
“Like most Emporians, we love a bit of juicy gossip now and then,” an editorial in the Gazette said a month or so after Tom Bird’s conviction. “But in recent weeks here, the saturation point for rumors has been reached and innocent people are being hurt.” The Gazette mentioned some rumors about the possibility that “the defendant in a recent sensational trial had remarried.” There were also further rumors about Lorna Anderson, who had moved back to Hutchinson, and about what might be revealed in her trial. Time had swollen accounts of the list. “At first the list was said to contain 20 names,” the Gazette said. “Now the number has grown to 110 and includes ‘bankers, lawyers and other professional men.’ This is a case of gross exaggeration.” The Gazette thought it necessary to inform its readers that a professional man who had recently left town had not, in fact, fled because he was on the list and feared exposure.
The Gazette had begun a campaign to have the rumors surrounding Sandra Bird’s death tested in a court of law. “Was it only coincidence that Mr. Bird’s wife died in the manner and in the place that the minister had suggested for the murder of Mr. Anderson?” its editorial on the verdict in Tom Bird’s trial asked. Two Gazette reporters, Roberta Birk and Nancy Horst, pounded away at the Sandra Bird case with stories carrying headlines such as CIRCUMSTANCES OF DEATH RAISE SUSPICIONS and TROOPER THOUGHT DEATH NOT ACCIDENT. The Gazette made a reward fund available for information on the case and ran a series of stories about contributions to the fund from Sandra Bird’s friends and family. In a sheriff’s election that November, the Gazette editorialized against the incumbent partly on the ground that he had bungled the original investigation of Sandra Bird’s death, and he was defeated. Eventually, Sandra Bird’s body was exhumed, a second autopsy was performed, and a grand jury began investigating the case. In February of 1985, the grand jury handed up an indictment against Tom Bird for the murder of his wife.
The Gazette’s campaign angered the people in Emporia who continued to believe in Bird’s innocence. In the months since the headline CONGREGATION RALLIES AROUND PASTOR, of course, their ranks had suffered serious attrition. Some supporters had dropped away as they heard more and more about the relationship between Tom Bird and Lorna Anderson. A lot more had defected after the revelations of the trial or after the guilty verdict. But there remained people in the Faith Lutheran congregation who believed that the verdict was just wrong—a result of Darrel Carter’s perfidy and the judge’s perverse refusal to move the trial out of a community that had convicted Tom Bird before any witnesses took the stand. The Bird supporters who remained could point out inconsistencies in prosecution testimony. But basically they believed Bird was innocent partly because they thought he was incapable of the deeds he was accused of and partly because he said he was innocent. “He told me that he swears before God he’s innocent,” one of the lay ministers has said. “I have to believe him. I don’t think he would say that if he were guilty.”
Almost everybody else in Emporia tended to believe that Bird was guilty not only of plotting to kill Martin Anderson but also of murdering his own wife. According to a survey taken for Bird’s lawyer to support a motion to move his murder trial out of Emporia, virtually everyone in town was familiar with the case, and more than ninety percent of those who had made up their minds about it believed that he was guilty. The motion was denied. In July of 1985, the familiar cast of characters gathered once again in Lyon County District Court—Tom Bird and his parents, the family of Sandra Bird, the small band of Faith Lutheran members who remained loyal to Bird, County Attorney Rodney H. Symmonds, Darrel Carter, the TV crews from Topeka and Wichita. As the trial got under way, though, what most Emporia residents seemed to be discussing was not any revelation from the witness stand but news from Hutchinson that Lorna Anderson, whose trial was finally scheduled to begin later in the summer, had remarried. The bridegroom was a Hutchinson man named Randy Eldridge, someone she had known for years. In answer to reporters’ questions, Eldridge said he believed that his new wife was innocent. She said that he was “a wonderful, Christian person”—someone who, it turned out, was a member of a gospel-singing sextet in his spare time. That fact and the rumors that both Eldridges were quite active in an Assembly of God church in Hutchinson had some people in Emporia concerned. It looked as if Lorna Anderson Eldridge might be planning to come to court as an upstanding Christian wife and mother who couldn’t have had anything to do with plotting murder—and presumably the prosecution might attempt to destroy that picture of probity by calling to the stand any number of men from the list.
—
In Tom Bird’s trial for murder, there was even more testimony about his relationship with his secretary than there had been in the previous trial. The prosecution called witnesses, Sandra Bird’s mother among them, who testified that the pastor’s wife had been so distraught over the relationship that she had been unable to eat. But a lot of the testimony was rather technical—testimony from pathologists and accident-reconstruction specialists—and there were days when finding a seat in the spectators section was no problem. The prosecution called expert witnesses to testify that neither the injuries to Sandra Bird nor the damage to the car was consistent with an accident; the defense called expert witnesses to testify the opposite. By pointing out inconsistencies in Tom Bird’s account of that evening and presenting some physical evidence, such as the presence of bloodstains on the bridge, the prosecutor suggested that Bird had beaten his wife, thrown her off the Rocky Ford Bridge, run their car off the embankment, and dragged her body over to it in order to create the appearance of an accident. The defense argued that inconsistencies were to be expected from a man who had been up half the night worrying about where his wife was and had had to start the day by telling his children that their mother was dead. Tom Bird was on trial not for how he ran his personal life, his lawyer said, but for the crime of murder, and “there’s no evidence that a crime of any kind was committed.” The testimony required twelve days. After that, the jury deliberated for six hours and found Tom Bird guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.
“Even a lot of people who thought he was guilty didn’t think the trial proved it,” a supporter of Bird’s said after it was over. It is true, at least, that the prosecutor was not able to provide an eyewitness, as he had done in the criminal-solicitation case. It is also true that he went into the trial holding the advantage of Bird’s conviction for plotting Martin Anderson’s murder. Among people familiar with the case, it is taken for granted that without the earlier conviction Bird would never have been brought to trial for his wife’s murder. Discussing the astonishing chain of events that transformed Tom Bird from a popular young minister to a lifer convicted of killing his wife, a lot of people in Emporia continue to say, “If only he had admitted the affair.”
—
A month after Bird’s second conviction, Lorna Anderson Eldridge sat in the same courtroom—neatly dressed, composed, almost cheerful—and said, “I believe it was in June, 1983, Thomas Bird and I met with Darrel Carter at the Faith Lutheran Church. During that meeting we discussed various ways of murdering my husband, Martin Anderson.” In a last-minute plea bargain, she had agreed to plead guilty to two counts of criminal solicitation to commit first-degree murder and to tell the authorities anything she knew about a case that had presumably already been decided—the death of Sandra Bird. In her plea, she said that Tom Bird had also been involved later in trying to hire a hit man through Danny Carter, and had, in fact, furnished the five thousand dollars. Lorna Eldridge’s lawyer said she wanted to purge her soul. A month later, she was sentenced to a term of five and a half to eighteen years in state prison.
Her plea was a blow to those who had continued to believe in Tom Bird, but it did not significantly reduce their ranks. At one point, one of them has said, Bird had told his supporters, “There are very few left. They are falling away. And sooner or later you, too, will be gone.” As it turned out, the people who h
ad stuck with Tom Bird even through the murder trial did not fall away just because Lorna Anderson stated in open court that what the prosecution said about Tom Bird was true. They figured that she might be lying because she thought a plea bargain was in her best interests, or that she might be lying simply because she liked to lie. They continue to believe that someday something—a large criminal operation like a drug ring, perhaps—will come to light to explain events that the state has explained with accusations against Tom Bird. At times, they sound like early Christians who manage to shake off constant challenges to their faith. “Questions come up,” one of them has said. “And I stop and think. But I always work it out.” Tom Bird, when asked by a visitor to the Kansas State Penitentiary about the loyalty of his supporters, also explained their support in religious terms—as the action of Christians who understand that we are all sinners and that it is not our role to judge others. “They’ve grown in their faith,” he said.
It is possible that the challenges to their faith in Tom Bird are not at an end. It is not known yet precisely what, if anything, Lorna Anderson Eldridge had to tell the prosecutors about the death of Sandra Bird. So far, nobody has been charged with the murder of Martin Anderson. In Geary County, though, investigators believe that they have made considerable progress. Presumably acting on information provided by Lorna Anderson Eldridge, the Geary County Sheriff’s Department drained several farm ponds and eventually found the gun it believes was used in the killing. It is said that the gun belonged to Martin Anderson. Shortly after the sheriff began draining farm ponds, Tom Bird was taken to Junction City from prison to answer questions. Each step in the investigation in Geary County set off ripples of speculation in Lyon County. Will Tom Bird be charged with another murder? Had one of the murder schemes already uncovered by the authorities resulted in Anderson’s death after all? Or could it be that little old Emporia had three hit men?
—
To some extent, Lorna Anderson Eldridge’s guilty plea meant that William Allen White’s hometown could get back to normal. Faith Lutheran Church, which had absorbed a fearful blow, has begun to recover. Nobody claims that it has regained the momentum of its early days, but the new pastor—another athletic and personable man with several children—believes that the church has come through its crisis into a period of consolidation. The Lord’s Lambs Preschool is back to its routine. So are the Optimist basketball games and the laboratory at Newman Hospital and the front page of the Gazette. Presumably, Mrs. Eldridge’s guilty pleas brought a great sense of relief to those residents of Emporia who had reason to look with some trepidation on the prospect of her coming to trial. There was now less danger that what the Gazette called “the most sordid case in Emporia’s history” would extend to sworn testimony about the sexual escapades of prominent citizens.
One change in Emporia is that two families are no longer there. The adults are dead or imprisoned, the children living in other cities. (The Anderson children have been adopted by Randy Eldridge; the Bird children are living in Arkansas with Tom Bird’s parents, who are in the midst of a custody suit brought by the family of Sandra Bird.) Also, there are some people who believe that what happened to the Birds and the Andersons has to have changed what Emporians think of their town and their neighbors. People who have long taken the guilt of Tom Bird and Lorna Anderson for granted are still left with questions about how they could have brought themselves to do such awful deeds. Was Lorna Anderson a temptress who merely used Tom Bird to help get rid of her husband? Or did the death of Sandra Bird—perhaps caused by her husband in some fit of rage—lead inevitably to the death of Martin Anderson? If Tom Bird and Lorna Anderson were bound together, were they bound together by love or by guilty knowledge? Lately, there has been more talk in Emporia about the possibility that what happened can be explained through some sort of mental illness. In a 1984 story about the background of the Birds, Dana Mullin of The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that Tom Bird was once hospitalized with severe heatstroke after a six-mile run in Arkansas and that such heat strokes have been known to cause brain damage. Putting that information together with some of the bizarre behavior attributed to Lorna Anderson even before her husband’s death, some people in Emporia have theorized that perhaps Tom Bird and his secretary, who seemed so much like their neighbors, had mental difficulties that somehow meshed to result in deeds their neighbors consider unthinkable.
What was sordid about Emporia’s most sordid case, of course, was not simply the crimes but the lives they revealed—lives full of hatred and maybe wife-beating and certainly casual, apparently joyless liaisons. (When Daniel Carter testified that his affair with Lorna Anderson had ended because she seemed to want more from him than he was willing to offer, the prosecutor asked what he had been willing to offer. “Nothing,” Carter said.) Although the Gazette may have criticized rumors about a hundred-and-ten-man list as a “gross exaggeration,” the prosecutors have never denied that a list, perhaps of more modest size, existed—assembled, it is assumed, in case the state of the Andersons’ marriage became an issue. A jury had concluded that an Emporia minister beat his wife until she was unconscious or dead and threw her body off a bridge. A church secretary acknowledged involvement in plans to get rid of her husband, who was murdered virtually in front of their own children. What now seems remarkable about the outrageous rumors that gripped Emporia for so long is that so many of them turned out to be true.
Outdoor Life
* * *
Sisters, Oregon
AUGUST 1986
Central Oregon is an outdoor sort of place. Edwin Dyer, who moved to a Central Oregon town called Sisters in 1969, was an outdoor sort of guy. He had grown up in cities—mainly Portland, and then Eugene, where his father worked as a printer for the University of Oregon—but he always felt attached to the country. When Dyer was in his mid-forties and his children were getting nearly old enough to think about families of their own, he wrote down some of what he remembered from his childhood, and all he had to say about Portland, where he lived all but a few of the first fifteen years of his life, was that he had hated it. His reminiscences about his childhood concentrated on the summers he had spent on his grandparents’ farm, near Yamhill, Oregon—an old-fashioned farm where the plowing was done behind a team of draft horses, butter was churned in the parlor in the evenings, baths were taken in a washtub in the kitchen, the beef was butchered right out in the farmyard, and Grandpa’s way of announcing a trip to the outhouse was to say, “I’m going to see Mrs. Murphy.” What Ed Dyer tended to recall about his boyhood was hunting and fishing and horseback riding and Boy Scout hikes. What he remembered about high school was shop class and the rifle club. After high school and a hitch in the Navy, he got married—he and his wife, Tona, met at a Mormon church function—and got a job with an organization that could offer a career in the outdoors, the U.S. Forest Service. When he moved to Central Oregon, six years after joining the service, it was to work at the Sisters Ranger Station, which is responsible for the trees and wilderness trails and campgrounds and mountain lakes in the northwest quarter of a vast and magnificent patch of the outdoors called the Deschutes National Forest.
Sisters is the first town travelers come to when they drive through the central pass of the Cascade Range from what people in Oregon call the Valley—the Willamette River valley, where most of the state’s population is concentrated in a string of cities that includes Portland and Salem and Eugene. When the Dyers moved to Sisters, it was a quiet old logging town of six hundred people, known to a lot of travelers in Oregon as the place they stopped for gasoline and a short chat about the rigors of mountain driving, but it was beginning to change. In the seventies, outdoor sorts of places like Central Oregon were beginning to appeal to a lot of people from places like the Valley and the coastal cities of California—people who talked about getting out of the rat race or finding a slower pace of life or trading some income for convenience to a wilderness trail and a mountain lake. A number of people who had p
assed through Sisters on their way to ski on a nearby mountain or to camp in one of the national forests started thinking about moving there. It’s practically inside the Deschutes National Forest. From just about anywhere in town, you can look across pastureland or ponderosa pines and see the snowy peaks of the spectacular mountains known as the Three Sisters. In the mid-seventies, the commercial district of Sisters, which had always consisted of the nondescript hodgepodge of stores customarily found in old western towns, began to take on a look that a lot of visitors found attractive. When Black Butte Ranch, a huge tract of private land that cuts into the national forest about eight miles west of town, was developed into an expensive vacation-home complex, the developer, as an alternative to putting in a shopping center, financed the wooden façades and rough-cedar posts and board-and-batten siding and ersatz balconies that can transform a place from what old western towns usually look like into what people think old western towns ought to look like—a process now known in the West as westernization.
Sooner or later, the shops behind the western façades had names like Cook’s Nook and The Hen’s Tooth and Nancy’s Fancy’s and The Elegant Dromedary. Partly because a large ranch just outside town has found some customers right in the area for the exotic and costly beasts it breeds, the animals seen grazing in the pastureland around Sisters include not just the customary Herefords and Black Angus but also llamas. The developer of the Black Butte Ranch complex eventually completed a more modest development on the edge of Sisters called Tollgate—it was named not for a thruway exit but for the nineteenth-century toll operation that provided the money to keep the mountain pass clear—and gave its streets names like Oxbow and Lariat and Saddle Horn and Stagecoach. Some of the old-timers in Sisters have grumbled a bit about the fancying up and the summer tourists and the parking problem. Some people in Sisters like to ask exactly what you’d do with a llama worth twenty thousand dollars. (“You sell it to someone who’s willing to pay twenty thousand dollars for a llama.”) Still, considering the changes Sisters has seen, it is not a place where people seem to dwell on contention. What they tend to talk about is whether to go cross-country skiing after work or how their dogs did at field-obedience class or when the wilderness trails might be dry enough for horse-packing trips. They talk about the outdoors. When they’re asked why they live in Sisters—why they took a pay cut to move from Los Angeles, why they came over from the Valley before they were certain a suitable job was available—they are likely to answer by making a sweeping gesture toward the Cascades and saying something about “the quality of life.”
Killings Page 26