by Colin McEvoy
Rhonda Smith wasn’t at church the week the stranger was there, Shreaves said. He described the man as about 5 feet 10 inches tall, medium build, white, with long salt-and-pepper hair and a gray and white beard. He had wire frame glasses on and was wearing what Shreaves called “rugged casual” clothing. He wasn’t dirty, Shreaves said (although the man’s appearance was getting filthier and filthier as the gossip around the church continued to build).
Shreaves didn’t think the stranger had anything to do with Rhonda’s death, and he couldn’t help but feel a bit of annoyance at his fellow parishioners, some of whom were so convinced of this man’s guilt that they believed they had solved the case. It’s stupid, Shreaves thought. There’s no way in hell it could be him. It doesn’t make any sense. What motivation would this guy have to come in here and kill somebody out of the blue?
Shreaves thought there were two options that were much more likely. One was that it was some sort of gang initiation; some young kids on a dare to rob the church that ended with a terrible, senseless killing. The idea stemmed from the previous shooting of another Trinity Evangelical member. Back in the fall of 2006, the man had pulled over at an Interstate 78 exit near Newark to answer his cell phone, when somebody shot him in the face. The bullet went clean through his jaw, but he survived. It was a dangerous neighborhood, and word was that the shooting was some sort of gang dare.
The other theory weighing on Shreaves’s mind was that it was one of Rhonda’s old flames that had tracked her down and killed her based on some old grudge. During the few instances Shreaves had provided counseling for Rhonda, the talk of her ex-boyfriends had given him the unsettling feeling that Rhonda had a darker side to her, as if she was living a second life outside her realm of family and friends at the church. Shreaves never got the feeling Rhonda was a danger to others in any way, just that she was living in a kind of world the pastor knew little about.
That possibility frightened Shreaves even more than the idea of some random gang-related shooting. Maybe there’s some boyfriend out there looking to kill me because they thought I was involved with Rhonda. Even though he was no closer to Rhonda than most of his parishioners, and there was certainly nothing romantic between them, the thought had been weighing on the pastor, to the point that he could no longer sleep comfortably in his own house.
Shreaves expressed to the police, as well as his fellow congregants, that he thought the stranger had nothing to do with Rhonda’s death, but the troopers investigated it anyway. Greg Langston spoke to Bob Gerstenberg, who said the stranger had told him he had just finished school and was trying to figure out what to do with his life. The man had told Gerstenberg he was from Oklahoma, but strangely, told other congregants he was from Illinois, and told yet others he was from Nebraska. However, when he left the church, he drove away in a white four-door car with an Iowa license plate.
The conflicting reports about where he was from were far from the last thing that made the church members suspicious of the man. The police spoke to several parishioners about the stranger, most of whom spoke of his unkempt appearance and generally unusual behavior. Dolores Keller, who sat behind him during church, said he didn’t take a church bulletin like everyone else, but simply sat alone in the pew and looked around at the stained-glass windows, seemingly uninterested in the service itself. James Nilsen, one of the church council members, told police the stranger seemed to be taking in every detail of the church, and looked out of place.
Like many small congregations, the members of Trinity Evangelical tended to pay close attention to anyone new at their services. But this man in particular had stood out for reasons beyond his appearance. Like everyone else, the stranger took communion, where wine is administered to parishioners with a glass. But when he was finished, the man allegedly tried to pocket the glass. When Bob Gerstenberg confronted him, the man simply said he was planning to keep it as a souvenir. “We don’t do that here,” Gerstenberg had replied, and the man handed the glass over.
Even more unnerving was a statement the stranger made, seemingly out of the blue, to church member Eileen Catino. The two were talking after the service ended when the man, glancing around at the details of the church building, suddenly said, “This would be a good place to rob.” The enigmatic statement did much to fuel talk after the shooting among church members who felt the stranger was a prime suspect.
Nevertheless, police also gathered statements that seemed to contradict the portrait parishioners had painted of the man. Dolores Keller said he was very friendly to everyone he spoke to after the service, and Bob Gerstenberg’s wife, Patricia, said she saw him put ten dollars into the offering plate.
Langston contacted the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole in Allentown seeking information on all interstate parolees from Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. It took five days to produce a list of the parolees, dating from August 2000 to present, but none of them proved relevant to the Rhonda Smith case. Langston also called the Bucks County Adult Probation Office to see if anyone had been transferred to or from one of those states. The only promising lead was that of a man from the Telford, Pennsylvania, area who traveled back and forth to Iowa on business. But he was on parole for drunk driving and had a suspended license, and no car.
Langston called the office of District Magistrate C. Robert Roth in Quakertown and asked about any criminal citations for men from any of the four states. The detective was told the citations could not be automatically searched by state and would have to be checked individually, which would entail browsing through hundreds and hundreds of files. The process took about four days, after which Langston was informed nobody met the stranger’s description.
Langston hit another roadblock when he called a Bucks County non-profit organization that provides overnight rooms to the needy. He was told the office could not provide any information about their tenants without a name. The detective called the owners of several hotels and motels in the Quakertown and Bethlehem areas, none of which could produce any information about a man matching the stranger’s description.
After more than a week of searching, the police were unable to find any information about the stranger. He was never seen or heard from again, and where he went after leaving Trinity Evangelical remained just as big a mystery as where he came from in the first place.
* * *
In death investigations, it’s commonplace for police to run a background check on the victim, in addition to the suspects. In this case, finding out about Rhonda fell to Trooper William Ortiz.
A criminal history check on Rhonda came back empty, as did a search of gun records. Her driving record was nearly as sparse—she had been a passenger in a car crash in 1986, and in 2006, she was cited for driving without her headlights on, but was found not guilty.
Ortiz called police in Hellertown, a small town of about fifty-six hundred people where Rhonda was living in a small apartment building on Main Street. The dispatcher recognized Rhonda’s name right away—she had called the department fairly regularly for mental health incidents. The dispatcher recalled one incident in particular from June 2007. Rhonda had called the police department saying she planned to go to a local gun range and kill herself. Ortiz asked for a copy of that report and any other incident reports the department had involving Rhonda.
Ortiz received the reports the next day, and police reports also were collected from neighboring Lower Saucon Township, where Rhonda had lived with her parents on-and-off. The reports showed two police interactions in 2001 and then almost a dozen calls over the last three years. The reports detailed an argument between Rhonda and her ex-boyfriend, three fights with her parents, and three threats of suicide. Ortiz found that Rhonda had been committed to the hospital twice, once in 2001 and once in 2007.
A check of the church’s phone records also led police to investigate further into Rhonda’s past suicidal threats. The records showed a call had been made to the Northampton County Crisis Center the day Rhonda had died. The ca
ll at 10:11 a.m. had lasted a minute and eight seconds.
Trooper Raymond Judge was assigned to find out more about Rhonda’s call to the crisis center. On January 30, he met with three center staff members and learned Rhonda had called the center four times in the week before she died.
The first had been January 18, when she called crying uncontrollably, saying she hadn’t been sleeping and felt like a failure. Caseworkers Rafael Rodriguez and Sharon Santiago, who Trooper Judge met with, followed up on Rhonda’s call with a home visit that day. Rhonda again spoke of feeling like a failure, and Sharon had suggested she enroll in Hope House, a five-day inpatient counseling program. Rhonda had said she wanted to put off any program until she had finished working at her church, Sharon said.
Rhonda called the center two days later, again crying and saying she couldn’t get out of bed. Caseworker Jane Newman visited Rhonda that afternoon and suggested she sign up for an intensive care manager, a counselor that would meet with her on a regular basis. Rhonda seemed interested, but two days later, she called the center again, reporting that she was feeling anxious. That was the day before she died.
That brought police to the phone call Rhonda made to the crisis center the day she died. It turned out she had called to tell Rafael that she was feeling better, but he wasn’t due in until that afternoon. Rhonda said she would call again later.
CHAPTER 9
The Smiths’ phone had been ringing almost nonstop since Rhonda died. There were family and friends sending their condolences, reporters seeking comment, and several calls from people with unhelpful tips about Rhonda’s death. Jim called them the “crackpots” and traced all of their numbers to turn over to the police.
Jim and Dorothy were both home when their phone rang around 5 o’clock on the afternoon of January 25.
“I’m calling from the Lehigh County coroner’s office,” the woman on the other line said. “Your daughter committed suicide and the coroner is going to announce it tomorrow.”
“How do you know that?” Jim asked. “The police haven’t told us that.”
“I just wanted to put your mind at ease,” the woman answered before hanging up.
Jim hit *69 on his telephone, took down the phone number that made the call, and turned it over to the police.
Trooper Dietz later verified the call did not come from the Lehigh County coroner’s office. After getting a warrant, the police conducted a reverse trace and found the number belonged to Sarah Schmid, a Bethlehem woman who had gone to Unity House with Rhonda. Police visited Sarah, who admitted to making the call in an attempt to comfort Rhonda’s family. After hearing her explanation, the authorities did not believe her to be suspicious or consider her a suspect.
* * *
It had been two days since Rhonda’s death, and the police still didn’t have a strong suspect. Nothing substantial was turning up on the stranger and Rhonda’s ex-boyfriends were getting crossed off the list one by one.
Back at the Dublin barracks, while Stumpo and Dietz contemplated what to do next, Stumpo remembered one angle they had yet to cover: it had been mentioned to them that the previous church secretary may have left on bad terms. Asking Pastor Shreaves about the secretary also would give the officers a chance to pick his brain again. It was a strategy Stumpo had successfully used before in cases: go back to the victim’s family or close friends and ask them to go over everything again. Usually something new pops up.
Stumpo and Dietz went over to the pastor’s house, located next to the church, around 2:30 p.m. They asked him about the previous church secretary, who they learned was named Karen Loch. And yes, it had not been a happy parting. Loch had been fired last March because she hadn’t been able to do the job, Shreaves said. Loch was angry over the firing, and Shreaves said he thought she hated him. But she had returned her key when she was fired and hadn’t talked to the pastor since then, he said.
The troopers made a note of this information before continuing. The bitter departure was certainly something to follow up on.
“Is there anything else you can think of?” Stumpo asked. “It might not be anything to you but it might be very important to us.”
Shreaves sat quietly for a good minute before speaking somewhat hesitantly.
“Well, there is this woman who just,” he sighed, “bothers me. She calls me all the time.”
“Well, who is she?” Stumpo asked.
Shreaves paused again. “Well I don’t really want to say anything because it’s just nothing,” he said.
After some more prodding, the troopers got Shreaves to tell them about the woman, a church member named Mary Jane Fonder, who Shreaves believed was infatuated with him. Mary Jane had been calling his house three or four times a week and leaving long, disturbing messages.
“Disturbing?” Stumpo asked, his interest piqued.
“Yeah, like she would call and say her spirits weren’t right today, and things like that. It was disturbing,” Shreaves responded.
It wasn’t the type of behavior Stumpo would describe as disturbing, but some of what Shreaves told him next was certainly noteworthy. Though Shreaves had put a block on Mary Jane’s phone number, she still managed to get through to his line, possibly using her cell phone. Also, Mary Jane had entered his house once when he wasn’t home to put food in his refrigerator. Shreaves had confronted Mary Jane about this unwanted behavior, and the pastor believed that angered her. He had not heard from her in weeks.
Shreaves said he had turned off his answering machine to avoid getting any messages from Mary Jane, but Stumpo asked if he’d be willing to turn it on again so they might be able to hear some of these messages. Shreaves said he didn’t really want to, because he wanted to be done dealing with Mary Jane—but he would for the troopers.
As the two troopers left Shreaves’s house, Dietz turned to Stumpo and asked, “What the heck was that?” Sure, this Mary Jane sounded a little unusual, but he didn’t see why Shreaves appeared so rattled by her. He felt the pastor’s reaction to her was downright bizarre.
“He’s really that concerned about a sixty-five-year-old woman leaving him messages?” Dietz said.
The next day, Trooper Patrick McGuire and county Detective Gregory Langston interviewed Karen Loch at her home. While she agreed she left the church on bad terms, the reason she gave for her dismissal differed from Shreaves’s explanation. Loch said Shreaves was a perfectionist, and if work was not done to his liking, he would be verbally abusive toward her. One time, he even threw a stack of papers at her, she said. Another time, she had to miss a meeting because of bad weather and Shreaves sent her a nasty e-mail.
Shreaves tried to get her to quit, Loch said, but she refused. She was later fired by church counsel President Deb Keller, who offered her a $700 severance check if she would sign a statement absolving Shreaves and the church of any wrongdoing. Loch said she refused the deal.
But despite her problems with Shreaves, Loch said she would never do anything to harm the church. She had a new job, at a church in nearby Quakertown. On the day Rhonda was killed, Loch said she was home alone in the morning before having lunch with a friend at Applebee’s in Quakertown around 1:15 that afternoon.
CHAPTER 10
Rhonda Smith was the youngest of three children born to Dorothy and Francis “Jim” Smith. Her brothers were Gary and Perry, of whom Dorothy’s mother would often say, “Why did you name them that? You’re going to get them confused!” They spent their childhoods at the Lower Saucon Township home where Jim and Dorothy still lived more than four decades later. The house was purchased in 1961, five years before Rhonda was born.
Despite the close call at her birth that required an emergency trip to Philadelphia, Rhonda was far from a sickly child growing up. She never seemed to get ill, and throughout Rhonda’s childhood, her parents couldn’t even remember a time when she had to take headache medicine. She “grew like a weed,” her mother liked to say, to the point that strangers would ask her to reach for items on the top sh
elves when she’d go out to the store.
Jim was proud of the courage his green-eyed little girl showed from even a young age. She was four years old when the family first took her to the Center Valley farm where Dorothy had grown up, and while some older children would recoil at the sight of the cows and other animals, Rhonda showed no fear or hesitation. Her nerve was no doubt strengthened from living with two older brothers, especially Perry, who as a middle child tended to tease his kid sister. But Rhonda gave it right back to him, much to the secret amusement and pride of their parents. One day, when Perry came home with a bad report card and started offering up excuses, Rhonda called him out in front of their parents and said, “Oh, you were daydreaming in school and not listening to the teacher!”
But for all her strength, Rhonda was also a shy, reserved child. They had few neighbors and even fewer little girls her age in their rural Northampton County neighborhood; although she got along with her brothers, they tended to run off on their own to play boy games. As a result, Rhonda largely kept to herself, with her pet dogs and guinea pigs substituting for the companionship she lacked from other children. Even as she started to get older, she had few friends, and no boyfriends.
She was a good student, all As and Bs, but didn’t get involved in many sports or extracurricular activities. Since her family couldn’t afford any fancy vacations, she didn’t get to travel much, instead going on fishing trips with her father to Roosevelt State Park near Allentown, or Lake Nockamixon, the largest lake in Bucks County. And, in the absence of friends her age, her mother became Rhonda’s best friend. The two would often take shopping trips, do each other’s makeup or hair, go ice-skating, or cook together. Rhonda would often say, “Mom, no restaurant could beat your cooking!”
Rhonda started coming out of her shell while attending Saucon Valley High School. She developed new interests like basket making, horseback riding, and, especially, acting in the school’s theater department. Standing up in front of an audience was so contrary to her personality, but her parents thought it sparked something inside her, and served as a “turnaround” from her past shyness.