Love Me or Else

by Colin McEvoy

  The surgery did not go well and Alice ended up in a coma. She remained in the hospital for four months following her surgery. Hospitals made Ed Fonder uncomfortable, but Mary Jane made sure to visit her mother every single day.

  On September 7, 1992, Alice Fonder’s breathing tube malfunctioned. Doctors believed either food got stuck in the tube, or that Alice herself damaged it while trying to pull it out. She died that day.

  * * *

  Ed Fonder was devastated by his wife’s death, and he expressed his depression through anger and fussiness toward his caretaker, Mary Jane. He became more and more difficult to live with, and fighting became a regular occurrence between the two.

  The tension came to a boiling point the following July, when two of Ed Fonder’s elderly cousins visited from the Philadelphia area. They brought with them a cake to celebrate his birthday. But what they really came for was to give the family a hard time, Mary Jane claimed.

  Shortly after they arrived, the cousins started talking about how terrible they felt the world was today. Before long, their criticisms were being directed squarely at Mary Jane, as they went on about how poorly she treated her father and how she never took him on any trips. The words deeply hurt Mary Jane, and both she and her brother felt her father was deeply affected by the visit as well.

  “It was an unforgivable thing and it blew our family apart,” Mary Jane’s brother was quoted as telling The Morning Call newspaper in 1994.

  After that visit, Ed Fonder just seemed different, according to Mary Jane. He didn’t speak much to her anymore. Aside from the occasional nasty remark, he would just give her cold looks and ignore her for long periods of time.

  Previously almost entirely confined to the house because of his physical difficulties, the eighty-year-old now started to walk more. At times he would walk without his cane up the back steps, something he previously couldn’t do. He started spending more time outside, wandering around the twelve acres of woods on their property, Mary Jane later told police. Sometimes he’d wander a little too far, and Mary Jane claimed she’d have to catch up to him and bring him back.

  Mary Jane said August 26, 1993, was a day like any other: She had gotten up that morning around 7 o’clock, came out to the kitchen, and set the table for breakfast for her father. She recalled that she went back into her bedroom to lie down a bit and, at one point, heard the front door open. She thought nothing of it, assuming her father had gone outside to get the newspaper as he often did.

  Mary Jane said she dozed off for a bit after that. When she got out of bed later, around 11 o’clock, she came out and found her father was gone. She stepped outside and found the newspaper still sitting on the ground in front of her house, her father nowhere to be seen. Mary Jane called out his name, but he did not respond and she couldn’t find him anywhere. She called the police, as well as some of her Winding Road neighbors to ask for their help.

  Jim and Rosalie Schnell came right over and stayed past midnight to help in the search. Neighbors Sue and John Brunner also came, bringing their own dog to help the police in the search of the large property. Sue had just been over to the Fonder house two days prior, and remembered there seemed to be a lot of tension between Mary Jane and her father, who were being gruff with each other and making snippy remarks.

  The search lasted for hours, but it proved fruitless. Police dogs tracked Ed Fonder’s scent down to the end of the driveway and just across the road, but nowhere else. Along with the Brunners’ dog, the police walked most of the Fonder property with their bloodhounds, but they didn’t find Ed’s scent or any other clues elsewhere on the land.

  Theories began to form about what could have happened. Mary Jane thought someone must have picked him up at the end of the driveway: a taxi driver, or perhaps one of the cousins who had just visited. Mary Jane also thought he could have returned to their old Philadelphia neighborhood or, since he had a strong interest in horticulture, had gone to the Fort Washington flower show that was being held around that time.

  Through the course of their investigation, police discovered that Ed Fonder had been talking to a phone sex operator in the months before he disappeared. Maybe he had paid her to come and pick him up, some thought. But the theory was investigated and proved a dead end.

  Rumors were spreading throughout Mary Jane’s neighborhood. Some neighbors heard that the garbage man had made a comment while taking away the Fonders’ trash that the garbage bags were unusually heavy and smelly. This led to talk that Ed’s body was in the trash. The rumor kept changing with time. Some said the garbage man had called the police to report it, but nothing ever came of it. Others said it was the garbage truck that struck Ed, and the trash collectors had thrown his body away to cover it up.

  There were several reports from people who thought they saw Ed Fonder after his disappearance. People reported seeing him in Quakertown, Allentown, Philadelphia, and on a bus to Atlantic City. But the authorities checked out every sighting, and none of the leads panned out.

  Rosalie Schnell would call Mary Jane whenever she heard on the news that a dead body had been found in Philadelphia. None of those ended up being Ed Fonder, either.

  In April 1994, nearly a year after his disappearance, Ed Fonder’s wallet was found in an Allentown mailbox, its contents still intact. That got people thinking: How could he be surviving without any money, and without his medication, which he had left behind at the house? He hadn’t taken any clothes or other personal items with him, either.

  Ed Fonder’s doctor told police the elderly man would likely not live ten days without his medication, but Ed Fonder IV theorized his father could be obtaining medication under a false name.

  “The reason I believe my father is still alive is that he doesn’t get around well on foot, so if he died it would almost have to be close to a road. He couldn’t go cross-country on his own,” Ed Fonder IV told The Morning Call in February 1994.

  On the one-year anniversary of her father’s disappearance, Mary Jane took out an advertisement in the paper asking her father to come home.

  Mary Jane was very depressed during this period. Following her father’s disappearance, Mary Jane started leaving rambling messages on Jim and Rosalie Schnell’s answering machine, often about how she was afraid living alone on the large, secluded property. She feared there were demons on the property, and perhaps the Devil had taken her father.

  Some started to suspect Mary Jane herself had a hand in her father’s disappearance. Some pointed to the smelly garbage theory and speculated that Mary Jane had killed the old man herself. Others talked about an old well on the back of the Fonder property that Mary Jane allegedly didn’t let the police go near. Maybe she had pushed him down into it, some people said.

  John and Sue Brunner certainly had their suspicions. Mary Jane had always been friendly toward them, even overly gracious at times, showing up with gifts of food or other trinkets, but her explanation that he could have walked away didn’t make sense to them. Ed Fonder wasn’t very mobile in his later days, and the closest towns of Coopersburg, Hellertown, and Quakertown were all about ten miles away.

  The Springfield Township police investigation was headed up by Kimberly Triol, a five-year officer and, as assistant chief, the second-in-command of the small department. Triol had interviewed Mary Jane several times, and started to grow suspicious from early on.

  On the day that Mary Jane first reported her father missing, she told Triol he started wandering off the property right after the cousins visited. Mary Jane explained that on that very day, Ed Fonder had disappeared for about an hour and a half, and that she had called several family members looking for him before finding him in a field behind their property.

  The story confused Triol. She asked Mary Jane why she didn’t report him missing back then, and she shrugged and replied simply, “Because I found him.” But Triol didn’t understand why Mary Jane immediately reported her father missing the day he disappeared, but didn’t do so even after ninety minutes
the last time.

  During that first interview, Triol noticed several items piled atop each other inside Mary Jane’s house. The items—which included milk crates, oil cans, windshield wiper fluid, blankets, and an oil jacket—had obviously come from the trunk of a car. Mary Jane agreed to show Triol her trunk, which had been completely emptied.

  Upon seeing it, Triol suspected Mary Jane had placed her father inside and taken him away.

  In another early interview, Triol glanced into Mary Jane’s bathroom and noticed a bucket filled with pinkish water, alongside towels and a mop. When Triol asked what it was, Mary Jane explained that her dog had gotten sick. Triol knew she should have investigated it further, but she suddenly became very nervous being in the house alone with Mary Jane. She let it go, something that bothered the officer for years to come.

  During another interview, Triol discovered the corpse of a dog that had been wrapped in plastic and placed inside Mary Jane’s freezer. When Triol asked what happened, Mary Jane simply explained it was her father’s dog, and that it died. Later, after an autopsy, it was discovered that the dog had consumed some of Ed Fonder’s diabetes medicine and died of poisoning.

  Nevertheless, over the course of several interviews, Triol developed a positive rapport with Mary Jane, who called her “Officer Kim.” Triol came over so often that Rosalie Schnell came to the rather bizarre conclusion that Triol was in love with Mary Jane.

  Although Mary Jane enjoyed Triol’s company, she seemed to never forget she was speaking with a cop. Once, after Triol asked her a question, Mary Jane said, “I watch all the cop shows, I know why you’re asking me this. You’re trying to trap me.”

  But the rapport they had fell apart after an interview at Mary Jane’s home on November 29.

  Mary Jane had made no secret of the fact that things changed between her and her father after the cousins’ visit. They were fighting constantly after that point, so much so that Mary Jane contemplated suicide. She was taking a variety of pills to treat her depression, including several that Triol believed should not have been mixed.

  At one point, Mary Jane startled Triol by, out of the blue, pulling out a Taser gun and showing it to the officer.

  “Look what I bought,” Mary Jane said, then flipped it on, creating a blue burst of electricity.

  Triol felt threatened and attempted to end the interview. But, just as the conversation appeared to be winding down, Mary Jane surprised her by returning to the topic of her missing father.

  “Yeah, I don’t think I did anything to my pop,” Mary Jane said. “I swear to God I don’t think I did.”

  Mary Jane stopped talking and looked away, then whispered, “Maybe the drugs did something. Maybe I don’t remember.”

  Triol was shocked. She believed Mary Jane was on the verge of confessing to the murder of her father.

  “Do you want to talk about the drugs during that time? That week?”

  “Yes, we can,” Mary Jane said. “Okay.”

  Triol became nervous that if Mary Jane confessed, and the officer had not read her her Miranda rights, that the confession would be inadmissible in court.

  “Mary Jane, I need to go through with procedure and read you your Miranda warnings,” Triol said.

  “Okay,” Mary Jane replied, but seemed suspicious. “Why? Are you going to try to get me to admit something? Like that black woman on TV?” Mary Jane added, referring to one of her police shows.

  “No,” Triol said, “I just want to talk about the drugs and that week, and I have to read you these warnings.”

  “Oh, okay,” Mary Jane said. “You’re investigating a crime and you’re doing your job.”

  Triol read her the rights, but worried she might be better off with another witness present. She asked whether she would mind if the police chief, Robert Bell, came over to listen to their conversation. Mary Jane agreed, but seemed even more hesitant.

  “Obviously, I don’t have the funds to hire a lawyer,” she said, before adding, “Oh, it’s late.”

  Triol could feel the momentum of the interview fading away. “Do you want to do this some other time?”

  “No, we can do it now,” Mary Jane said, but a moment later, it was over.

  “Well, it is late,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  After that day, Mary Jane’s cooperation with the police had come to an end. She hired a lawyer and insisted she never wanted to see Kimberly Triol again. She told reporters the police were flubbing the investigation into her missing father, and trying to make her confess to something she didn’t do. She claimed, falsely, that she had thrown Triol out of the house and told her to never come back.

  After that, the police knew they no longer had any need to be subtle. Chief Bell asked Mary Jane to take a lie detector test to prove she didn’t hurt her father. Mary Jane refused. Bell spent the next five months trying to convince Mary Jane to take the test, but she wouldn’t budge.

  For his part, Mary Jane’s brother Ed told The Morning Call that he felt the township police had bungled the case and now, in their embarrassment, were trying to pin it on the Fonders.

  “I get the impression that they wanted to dump this. It wasn’t one of their successful cases and they wanted to sweep it under the rug,” Ed told the newspaper. Unlike his sister, he was never approached to take a lie detector test.

  Additionally, the Fonder investigation took place at a tumultuous time for the Springfield Township Police Department. The police were often at odds with the board of supervisors, the township’s governing body. Those tensions reached a boiling point in January 1994, when the supervisors voted not to reappoint Bell as police chief during their annual reorganization meeting. The reasons for this action never became public: Aside from one comment about problems with the police computer system, the supervisors never publicly addressed it except to say they had gotten several complaints about the chief. Bell stayed on as chief despite his lack of a reappointment, but morale in the township was low. The township eventually hired a private investigator to look into Bell’s personal and professional activities. But, when the investigator turned up no evidence of misconduct, Bell was reappointed chief—a position he stayed in until 2003—and the matter was put to rest.

  Nevertheless, Triol didn’t feel the politics hindered the investigation. She left the force in June 1994 for personal reasons, leaving Ed Fonder’s disappearance the only unsolved case from her time on the department. Although the case was handed over to the other officers and kept open, Triol believed her departure hindered the investigation.

  She felt guilty for leaving the case unsolved. Although she never knew Ed Fonder Sr., she felt as if she did, and felt that she failed to do right by him by discovering what happened to him.

  “I carry it with me like a burden,” Triol later said of the case. “I don’t have closure on this at all. This is a part of me.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Mary Jane Fonder lost many of the key people in her life between 1992 and 1993. In addition to her mother’s death and her father’s disappearance, Mary Jane’s best friend, Roseanna Schnell, died in 1992.

  After all those losses, Roseanna’s brother Jim and his wife Rosalie became Mary Jane’s closest friends. Though Mary Jane could get a little long winded and overbearing, the sweet-natured Rosalie was very tolerant of her, listening to every word of her sometimes-endless chatter. Even after Jim Schnell died in 2006, Mary Jane and Rosalie continued to get together for a meal or outing on a regular basis.

  A few days after Rhonda Smith’s death, Mary Jane telephoned Rosalie to say she was heading to Quakertown to go to the laundromat. Rosalie mentioned she had planned to go to Quakertown that day, too, to pick up a couple of items at the grocery store. The two women decided to go into town together, and made a day of it by stopping for lunch while Mary Jane’s clothes were drying.

  “How about that murder at your church?” Rosalie said over lunch. “Can you imagine?”

  Rosalie had heard of Rhonda’s death through a n
eighbor. She didn’t attend Trinity Evangelical herself, but the entire Schnell family, including Jim, was buried in the church’s cemetery. The church was only a couple miles away from her home, and it was hard for Rosalie to fathom a murder happening in her quiet township.

  “Well, they don’t know if it was a murder or a suicide,” Mary Jane responded. “They don’t really know what happened there.”

  “Well, I happened to see it on the news,” Rosalie continued, “and they didn’t say anything about a gun or a weapon or anything. She certainly couldn’t have committed suicide and hid the weapon.”

  Mary Jane took a bite of her food before speaking again.

  “Yeah, it’s a shame,” Mary Jane said. “Such a nice family and they don’t know what happened.”

  “I’m sure they’ll find out sooner or later what happened there,” Rosalie concluded.

  * * *

  With the question of whether Rhonda’s death was a homicide or a suicide still hanging in the air, Bob Egan decided the best way to get to the bottom of it was to meet Jim and Dorothy himself. The theory that Jim found Rhonda’s body and cleaned up the scene so it wouldn’t look like a suicide was a reasonable possibility, and certainly not an unprecedented one. But before one could make a leap like that, Egan felt, you had to know the person you’re accusing, and he wanted to look them in their eyes for himself and see if they were lying.

  So, about a week after the murder, Egan and Trooper Patrick McGuire visited the Smiths at their Lower Saucon Township home. They had already been interviewed several times by the police by then, and it would have been understandable for them to be a bit tired of the process, but Jim and Dorothy cordially invited them in and patiently answered all their questions. They recalled the details of that horrible day they lost their daughter: the phone call, their trip to the hospital, being told that their daughter was brain dead. They also reconfirmed, yes, they drove by the church that very morning, and almost went inside to invite Rhonda to lunch with them.