If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  Where is Cherry?

  Still, after thinking about Cherry in a more positive light, they considered that perhaps she had simply decided not to call. Cherry was entitled to her own life. Plus, she could be absentminded like that once in a while. Cherry had suffered from “learning disabilities” all her life and had just gone off to live on her own. She was almost thirty-nine, her birthday four months away. Clinically classified as MR, “mentally retarded,” by her doctors, with all the progress she’d made recently, what was the big deal with a missed call home once in a while?

  That Sunday morning (which also happened to be Father’s Day), as Gethry and Rueon, Cherry’s stepmother, got ready for church, Rueon started to wonder once again why Cherry had not called. She would always call before church to check in or ask what time the van was coming to pick her up. But as the morning wore on, there had still not been any word from Cherry. Almost two full days now and not a peep.

  Totally out of character for Cherry.

  Rueon fixed her hair and figured the church van, which Cherry’s brother drove, had picked her up for services and they’d meet Cherry at Temple Love. She told Gethry not to fret. It would all be okay. They’d go to church and run into Cherry there. No worries. Rueon could kindly scold Cherry and tell her she had forgotten to call not only the day before, but that morning, and she was well aware that calling Rueon and Gethry once a day, if not every other day, was what they expected from her. They could talk about it, remind Cherry she needed to take responsibility, be done with it, and enjoy Sunday service praising Jesus.

  Gethry and Rueon looked for Cherry as they walked into Temple Love, but they did not see her. Cherry had her favorite seat down in the front row of pews, her name on it. But when Rueon reached the front of the building by the altar, she looked around and Cherry was nowhere to be found.

  Rueon sought out Cherry’s brother. “Where’s your sister?” He had driven the van.

  “I thought she was with y’all,” he said.

  “No, we thought she was coming with you.”

  Throughout that Sunday service, as anxiety turned more into a genuine concern for Cherry’s well-being, Rueon started to call Cherry at her apartment and on Cherry’s cell phone.

  “We got no response,” Rueon said later.

  If there was one thing about Cherry that Rueon and Gethry, and anybody close to Cherry knew, the girl did not go anywhere without two things: her money purse and cell phone. These two items were part of her, attached.

  For Rueon and Gethry, it was easy to write off any fears or bad feelings by telling themselves, Cherry probably just went to church with someone else.

  “She sometimes did,” Rueon explained later.

  When Rueon and Gethry got home, Rueon called Cherry several more times, but there was no response.

  “You know,” she told Gethry, “I’m going to git her.”

  It was so unusual—the not knowing. Cherry had struggled, but worked hard, and she’d managed to overcome many difficulties and disabilities to carve out a life for herself with a small studio apartment across town in Tyler, not far from Rueon and Gethry’s home. She’d had help from an aide, who came to see her every day, but Cherry was living on her own, doing things for herself. There was no explanation they could think of that would put Cherry in a position of not calling them for this long a period of time. It just did not make sense.

  “Call her again,” Gethry suggested.

  There was no answer.

  “Let’s go eat, and if we don’t hear from her by the time we’re done, then we can stop by Cherry’s apartment and check in on her,” Rueon suggested.

  Gethry nodded in agreement.

  They ate lunch and still had not heard a word from Cherry. Leaving the restaurant, they stopped back at home to grab the spare key to Cherry’s apartment and headed out to West Houston Street in Tyler, the Citadel apartment complex.

  Rueon walked in first. She couldn’t believe it. The place was in “disarray,” which was entirely unlike Cherry, who was a neat freak and was even fixated on cleaning and cleaning supplies in an obsessive-compulsive manner. She’d never, under her own will, leave her apartment with “everything” all over the place. “Her ironing board was up. . . . Her bed was unmade . . . and things were just kind of scatter-y,” one source later recalled.

  “This is not Cherry, ain’t it, Gethry?”

  “Sure ain’t,” he said.

  In addition, Cherry would have never walked out of her apartment without taking a bath, changing her clothes—all of which needed to be ironed before she’d wear them—or tidying up. Just wasn’t in her DNA. Everything in her apartment had its place, and there was a place for everything. That was how Cherry lived her life.

  Structure.

  Focus.

  Detail.

  “This was the first thing I noticed,” Rueon later explained. “And you just kind of get a feeling, you know.”

  A sense. That sinking pit in your gut. A parent’s intuition that something, as horrible as it felt to admit, was off.

  Rueon looked in Cherry’s closet. In her kitchen. All over. She searched for Cherry’s cell phone or that specific coin purse Cherry always carried with her. Not finding either gave Rueon a bit of comfort, actually, because there was no chance Cherry would ever leave the house without either of them. With both being gone, there was a bit of relief in knowing that she wasn’t whisked away in some sort of home invasion or kidnapping.

  Still, walking around the apartment, Rueon couldn’t shake the feeling: Something’s wrong.

  Indeed, comb on the vanity counter, mouthwash there by the faucet, spray bottle of tile cleanser on the floor by the shower, where Cherry always left it, the smiling kitty cats on the ironing board apron underneath a pair of socks waiting to be ironed, two cases of Pure Life and Ozark water on the floor by the waste basket can, a roll of paper towels on the kitchen table, Cherry’s favorite poster—from the horror film Shutter—taped to her wall, her velvety red chair against the wall, stacks and stacks of DVDs, mainly horror or soft-core porn (Beyond the Busty Stags and Night of Perverted Pleasures and Experiment in Torture, among them) around the television, the TV remote sitting on the bed.

  Everything in Cherry’s life was there waiting for her, but she was missing.

  Rueon didn’t see it then, but on a calendar on Cherry’s wall, two dates in particular stuck out: June 18, the previous Friday (which had passed), and the following Wednesday, June 23 (which had not come to pass). Somebody had written Babysit in pen on both days.

  Cherry was babysitting? Who would hire her? Who was she babysitting?

  This was odd.

  One other possibility existed here, Rueon thought as she walked around the apartment on that Sunday afternoon. One of Cherry’s closest friends or even her caseworker, Paula Wheeler, a woman who saw Cherry almost every day, had come by and picked her up to go out to eat or shopping. Rueon had been getting on Cherry lately, in a motherly way, “Girl, you know . . . you’re [thirty-eight years old] now, and, you know, you need to grow up.”

  They had been trying to show Cherry what Rueon called “hard love,” based partially on the idea that Rueon and Gethry could not be with Cherry forever—she’d need to spread her wings and go off on her own. Was this Cherry doing that very thing: going it alone? Had she taken Rueon’s advice? You look at Cherry’s collection of DVDs and it was clear she was growing up rather quickly—that is, if she had led a sheltered life Rueon and Gethry had supposed she had while under their roof back at home.

  There was another side of Cherry that Rueon and Gethry worried about, however. Cherry might have been thirty-eight; she might have watched soft porn and gruesome horror films, such as Saw, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and her absolute favorite, Paranormal Activity, but she also played with children’s toys and could not read or write much more than her name and a few numbers and letters. She was very much a child in an adult’s body.

  Rueon and Gethry decided to go home and wait (a
nd hope) for Cherry to call. It was early afternoon, Sunday, June 20, 2010. Why grow sick with worry now, they decided. After all, wasn’t the entire point of Cherry renting her own apartment and moving out of the house was so she could become a responsible, independent woman?

  CHAPTER 2

  HE WAS ON HIS way back to work. Such a common, routine task that millions—perhaps billions—of people throughout the world submit to each day. Waking up, heading off to a job, collecting that paycheck on Friday, and enjoying a weekend of rest and relaxation.

  On Saturday, June 19, 2010, Bobby Lewis was driving along an area near Smith County Road, known locally as the CR 2191, in Whitehouse. This is a small town north of Houston, east of Dallas, just outside Tyler, directly west of Lake Tyler, a rather massive body of water shaped like a herd of clouds.

  Bobby had the radio on. The windows rolled down. That familiar hot, heavy, and wet Texas air was blowing into Bobby’s face as he drove. By all accounts, it was a peaceful ride on a lovely day—and should have been nothing more than that.

  Somewhere just before three o’clock on that afternoon, however, Bobby’s rather predictable life took a turn into the Twilight Zone. He worked at Domino’s Pizza in Tyler. He was in Whitehouse this afternoon to pick up a coworker before heading back into the restaurant for more deliveries.

  Passing the 15900 block of CR 2191, after pulling into a driveway and turning his car around, thinking he was lost, Bobby saw something off to the side of the road.

  What in the hell?

  So he pulled over and stopped his vehicle.

  Bobby got out. There was a dirt area, “overgrown with weeds,” in what was a thickly settled part of town, mostly red clay, some sand, trees and forest on all sides, save for several buildings and a few homes to the southwest, including a driveway in which Bobby had just turned around. It was a semisecluded area, just to the west of that famed Piney Woods section of the state. Whitehouse is small-town America, or very close to it: About seven thousand souls resided there in 2010. The medium household income fell in the neighborhood of about seventy thousand dollars per year, with Texas, overall, coming in at about fifty thousand. So there was some money here in Whitehouse. Most people, eighty-five percent of whom the recent census termed as “white,” weren’t poor by any means.

  From his vehicle, Bobby Lewis saw a black, charred patch of land. After stepping out of his car, curious, he walked closer. It was probably some kids burning up an old mattress or a campfire for a keg party that got a little out of hand and had been left unattended. Maybe even a load of trash some knuckleheaded litterer had tossed out and set on fire. The charred remains spread over a small area of the sandy and red clay ground. The pile had not burned entirely, however, and there was something different about it, the pizza man noticed, that beckoned a closer look.

  Bobby Lewis went in for a more personal view.

  Getting within about fifteen feet of the debris, Bobby could clearly see that, in fact, it wasn’t a pile of trash, an old campfire, or other remnants of furniture or household items that had been lit on fire and abandoned, after all. Bobby Lewis was looking at something entirely different.

  Approaching the pile from about three yards away, Bobby did not want to get any closer, he later told police, because it was in that moment when he realized what, in fact, he was looking at.

  Holy shit.

  A bit of anxiety throbbed as Bobby stepped back, pulled out his cell phone, and, with index finger shaking, dialed 911.

  CHAPTER 3

  SHE WAS LYING FACEDOWN about fifty feet off the side of CR 2191, where pizza deliveryman Bobby Lewis now stood and waited for police to arrive. As Bobby had approached the pile of charred debris and stood about five yards away, “I already knew what it was,” he said later. “So there was no need to go any closer.”

  It was a dead body (DB)—probably a female, by the look of what little clothing was left and the feminine shape of her body. It was difficult to say for certain because the person was lying on her stomach. Still, the contour appeared to be that of a large female.

  The DB had one arm at her side pointed downward, the other pointed up above her head slightly, as though she was raising her hand in class to ask a question. Her legs were spaced apart about a foot, toes pointed into the dirt. She wore black Capri pants (what was left of them from the fire), white sneakers—with black oily stains and (notably) zero dirt on the bottoms, indicating to anyone interested in that sort of forensic-based information that she had not walked to this location on her own, but had been dumped here. (Otherwise, her tennis shoes would have been caked with the same red clay from on the ground, all over the place.)

  It was unclear what type of shirt she had on, because it had melted to her terribly charred skin, which had peeled and creased in some sections, spotted in others, burned entirely off in small sections, blistered and gruesome. The shirt, best Bobby could tell from the small pieces still intact, was green with a floral pattern—another indication that the body was female. Even more horrifying: all of her hair was gone; her face, pushed into the ground, appeared to be nearly burned off. Notably, the entire area of her neck was burned. She was unrecognizable. In fact, Bobby did not know from looking at her how old she possibly could be. Best estimate from him was that she was young, maybe late teens to early thirties.

  But again, that was an educated guess by a man who had been out delivering pizza and picking up a coworker.

  She had no name.

  No identification.

  No idea where she had come from or who had put her here.

  Better yet, why.

  The only certainty was that she had not gotten to this place on her own and she was not leaving on her own.

  Bobby waited, staring at “the ash all around [the] body,” not touching her or touching anything within what was now, it made sense to him, a crime scene.

  * * *

  Two Whitehouse police (sometimes referred to as “peace”) officers, Joshua Brunt and David Roberson, arrived on scene to speak with Bobby Lewis at 3:03 P.M. They surveyed the scene, secured it, and unspooled a roll of yellow police tape, tacking the plastic rope up around the immediate area, closing most of it off. Preserving a crime scene as quick as possible might be the most important action any cop can take within this type of investigation.

  Outdoor crime scenes pose so many inherent problems from the onset that safeguarding the scene is as important as combing through it with a magnifying glass. There can be no dispute that to have a scene protected from footsteps, passersby, animals, untrained cops, the elements—and anything else that might contaminate the scene and surrounding area—was as imperative this early on as to who was responsible for the crime.

  Officer Roberson, per protocol, started a crime scene log, a notebook detailing everything going on at the scene: time, date, action, and personnel. Soon, the entire area, which had otherwise been barren, quiet, and uninhabited except for the neighborhood youngsters and critters, would be teeming with cops and crime scene investigators (CSIs) and detectives and sheriffs and Texas Rangers. All of these law enforcement members would be looking to assist in trying to unravel what had happened here—that is, after the most important task of the moment began: identifying the girl, contacting family members, and beginning to learn who, what, where, when, and how.

  Whitehouse police officer Rod Langinias arrived and spoke to Roberson and Brunt, all of whom stood with Bobby Lewis, who was a bit shaken up after being told he had stumbled upon a potential murder scene, and talked about how Bobby had come across the scene. The first suspect in any such case was the person that found the body.

  Bobby explained how he had pulled into that driveway, turned his car around, and then—bam!—there she was. He said he didn’t realize at first what he was looking at, but after getting out and surveying the scene, well, it hit him. She was dead. Someone had lit her body on fire.

  No, he had not touched anything, Bobby Lewis told them.

  A sergeant arrived, s
omeone with authority who could take control. After talking to Bobby Lewis, Officer Langinias asked his sergeant, “You want me to take some photos until the boys from [CSI] arrive?” Langinias then mentioned that he had spotted some tire tracks in the red clay and skid marks on the road closest to where the body was located. That sort of stuff was important and needed to be documented before it was contaminated or, even worse, destroyed.

  “Stay out of the crime scene area and wait for the crime scene people to come,” the sergeant ordered.

  “Got it,” Langinias said.

  Langinias and several other officers blocked off the road, so no one could drive down it, toward the scene. There was a rolled-up carpet nearby, some charred ashes just north of the body. In between the victim’s legs was a Dairy Fresh Grade A Homogenized half & half creamer cup, one of those tiny plastic things you get with your coffee at McDonald’s or, in this case, Dairy Queen, it appeared. The item was used, crumpled up, and just sitting there. It had no age to it, as though it had sat out in the elements for more than, say, a day or more.

  Other latent trace was visible right away, mainly those tire tracks and some carpet fibers and other small pieces of what looked to be potentially important evidence. Best thing about red clay was that, for CSIs, it acted as a mold. Footprints and tire tracks had dug into the clay and left solid imprints. There was some sand around the area, too, and they wouldn’t get much in the form of molds from that, but the red clay was a bonus. It might not lead to finding out the identity of the woman, but it would certainly help at some point in the investigation when suspects were located and their cars and shoes were looked at.

  Ultimately, this was a Smith County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) investigation, with the Tyler Police Department (TPD) and the local Whitehouse Police Department (WPD), along with the Texas Rangers acting assistance. Takes a village, they say. In Texas, everyone understands his or her role when solving crimes: to find and arrest the bad guy. You don’t find a lot of hubris and ego and pissing contests going on when crimes as serious as the one they faced here were involved.