by Colin McEvoy
The troopers arrived an hour early for the 7 o’clock practice. The choir director, Steve Wysocki, also was there early and had something for the troopers. Mary Jane had written a sympathy card to the entire church membership, as well as a separate card for Wysocki and his wife, and they both struck the choir director as odd.
Stumpo and Egan thanked Steve for showing them the cards and told him that they hoped to interview choir members in another room. Steve agreed to send members their way as they arrived. The troopers set themselves up in a second floor room typically used for the church’s teen group. The large rectangular room boasted sky-blue cinderblock walls, dusty chalkboards, and second-hand couches and armchairs. They seated themselves on folding chairs at a long table and started reading through the cards Steve provided them, starting with the one written for the entire church congregation:
“To members of Trinity, especially the Trinity choir members, who loved Miss Rhonda so dearly. No words can convey how sad I am for you all.
“Always sweet and nice when she spoke to me, I barely got to know her until I joined the Trinity choir around Christmas time. We all had such a good time singing together. I knew then that Rhonda had problems, too, and you all were helping her.
“I wish I could trade places with her now. And that she could be alive instead of me,” the card continued. “She did not deserve such a terrible end. Nor her loved ones this catastrophe.”
The card to the Wysockis was much of the same: “I was wondering what you all did for Rhonda, I can’t say one bad thing about her. I did see though how sweet and very affectionate she was with everyone. No wonder she was so well loved. When we spoke on many occasions, she appeared very happy to see me or speak with me at those times.
“Yes, I knew Rhonda was ill that way,” it continued. “Disorders of the mind are terrible to deal with. In 2001, the same with me. We were on suffering street big time. High doses of medications … to balance our chemistry. Minds + bodies. I can appreciate Rhonda’s problems.…
“Last fall I had another health & chemistry problem. Which needed attention I had no choice but to get rest & deal with it. Everybody loves Pastor Greg … He has helped plenty of us & has made many friends. These other ladies & (Rhonda) were lucky to have had you directing their lives. I worked with doctors & treatments outside the church—But always managed to get fixed up…”
The card ended with, “This freak & horrendous act on Rhonda, no Christian could have done such a thing. I regret that it happened in our church or to her, or anyone else that might have been in the office, that day. God help us all, Mary Jane Fonder.”
The troopers’ readings were interrupted when the door suddenly opened and Mary Jane Fonder entered the room. Much to the troopers’ delight, she was the first choir member to arrive for practice, and thus their first interview. They recognized the short, heavyset woman from her driver’s license photo. She wore a big, almost goofy grin on her chubby round face, and her skin was pale and wrinkled. A large pair of wide-rimmed glasses was perched on her nose, and what was obviously a large brown wig sat atop her head.
“You know, I’ve been meaning to call you guys, I’ve been meaning to,” she said as she walked toward the table. “I knew you were at the house, I’ve been meaning to call. I was hoping I’d run into you at the church.”
Stumpo and Egan were taken aback. Before even introducing herself, she was already talking a mile a minute.
“There’s something I have to tell you, I haven’t told anyone else this,” she continued. “I just have to tell you, I spoke to Rhonda the Monday before she was murdered.”
That certainly got the troopers’ attention. They were anxious to hear more, but first had to interrupt Mary Jane so they could actually identify themselves. Once they got her settled at the table, however, they didn’t have to wait long until she was talking again.
Mary Jane proceeded to explain she had called the church Monday looking for the new church directory and was surprised when Rhonda answered the phone. Rhonda informed her, Mary Jane said, that she was filling in as secretary at the church office while Pastor Shreaves was away at a conference. They talked for about ten minutes, and Rhonda volunteered to look around the office for the new directory but was unable to find one. Mary Jane said she told her not to worry and that Rhonda took down a message for Pastor Shreaves that she had called.
They also talked about how Mary Jane was not getting along with her brother and was tired of living with him. Mary Jane claimed Rhonda told her about an apartment next to hers that was vacant. The next day, Mary Jane went to go check out the apartment. While on her way to Hellertown, she drove past the church in the morning and saw Rhonda’s car in the parking lot. There weren’t any other cars in the parking lot and nothing else seemed odd. After checking out the apartment, Mary Jane said she had lunch at the local McDonald’s.
Mary Jane suddenly stopped talking and turned to look Stumpo directly in the eye.
“It’s a wig,” she blurted out.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“You’re looking at my hair,” she said. “It’s a wig,”
“I wasn’t looking at your hair,” Stumpo said. “I was just looking at you.”
After a brief pause, the troopers moved on from the bizarre little exchange as if it never took place.
“So,” Stumpo started, “Did you tell Rhonda about checking out the apartment?”
“Oh, I figured I’d see her at choir and tell her there,” she said.
“So, you talked about Monday and Tuesday,” Stumpo said. “We were curious, what were you doing on Wednesday?”
Mary Jane explained that on that day—the day Rhonda was shot—she had left her house at five minutes to 11 for an 11:30 appointment at Holiday Hair in Quakertown. Her brother was home and saw her leave, she said. After her hair appointment, she went shopping at Jo-Ann Fabrics in the same plaza and was home around three.
Stumpo and Egan looked at each other and, although they were careful not to visibly react, they both knew they were thinking the same thing. Five minutes to 11—that was the exact time the computer forensic expert had estimated Rhonda was shot, based on when the Internet activity abruptly stopped in the church office.
That time of death had not been publicized. It struck both men as quite suspicious that Mary Jane would mention it precisely.
The troopers had something here, and they both knew it. But they continued asking their questions, determined not to let Mary Jane know their suspicions.
“We’ve been checking, and according to state records, you own a gun,” Egan said. “Where’s your gun?”
“Oh, I threw that away a long time ago,” she answered quickly. “I got rid of it.”
“What do you mean got rid of it?” Stumpo asked.
“I just threw it out somewhere,” she said. “I threw it out of the car along the road or in the woods.”
The troopers were dumbstruck. They had never heard of anyone just throwing away a gun. They didn’t believe her.
“Well, Mary Jane, aren’t you concerned that someone could find that gun?” Stumpo asked. “Like a child could find the gun on the side of the road?”
“Well I threw it in a lake, some lake somewhere,” she said. “I threw it in Lake Nockamixon, somewhere in the deep end down by the boat docks.”
Mary Jane claimed she got rid of the gun because she had been having problems with a woman at the Denny’s where she used to work. During an unemployment hearing after losing her job there, she had been accused of threatening her former manager, Diane Anderson, with a gun, Mary Jane explained. She had the gun in her car during that hearing, she said, under the driver’s seat. Mary Jane claimed she was so nervous that police would find the gun and believe she wanted to hurt Diane that she threw it away that very day.
She had fired the gun just once, she told the troopers. After her father disappeared, a newspaper article had come out in The Philadelphia Inquirer that had made her look like a suspect. The por
trayal upset her greatly, and she was so depressed that she began contemplating suicide. To test the gun, she had fired it into her yard, but its loud sound had scared her.
The troopers still didn’t believe Mary Jane’s explanation about where her gun was—they thought she still had it—but they doubted she would admit the truth now. Plus, they were in a church—not the best location for a true interrogation.
Besides, Mary Jane was already off on another topic. She started to tell the troopers about how, on the Sunday before Rhonda died, she had stood up in front of the congregation to thank the group for the financial assistance they had provided to her.
“Nobody told me this was going on,” she said, her voice somewhat strained. “No one asked me to help.”
Stumpo looked at his watch and saw it was 7 o’clock. Choir was starting downstairs and they should return Mary Jane to the group.
But Mary Jane seemed to be in no rush to end the interview. She continued talking right up to the point that Stumpo and Egan walked her to the door.
“Well, I really enjoyed talking to you guys,” she said. “I just have so much to talk about.”
“Hey, well maybe at some point we’ll call and we can get back together and talk some more,” Stumpo said, setting the groundwork for another interview in the future. “I’d love to hear everything you have to say.”
“Okay, that would be wonderful,” she said, starting down the stairs. “Great.”
Choir rehearsal was under way when the troopers got back downstairs. Mary Jane had talked for so long that it was too late to interview any of the other members. But Stumpo and Egan felt more than satisfied about what they had gotten from her.
There was the fact she had mentioned the time of five minutes to 11—the exact time they believed Rhonda was shot. And the fact Mary Jane confessed she knew Rhonda was working at the church that week. Only two other people had known that, Pastor Shreaves and Deb Keller, the church council president.
Then, there was her sudden mention of how the church assisted Rhonda. Mary Jane seemed angry, even jealous about it.
And the troopers simply could not believe Mary Jane’s story about the gun. She had thrown it into a lake fourteen years ago? They didn’t believe her for one minute.
It all added up to one thing: Mary Jane Fonder had killed Rhonda Smith. Now they just had to prove it.
* * *
While Stumpo and Egan were interviewing Mary Jane at the church, troopers Gregg Dietz and Pat McGuire went to her home to try to talk to her brother alone.
It was fortunate Dietz had been there before, because the Fonder home was hard to find. Winding Road proved to be a very fitting name for the curvy street in that especially rural part of Springfield Township. House numbers on mailboxes don’t perfectly align with addresses across from them, and the Fonder home was not visible from the road.
Dietz and McGuire drove their car up the quarter-mile driveway to the small, blue ranch home. The grass was long, as if it had not been mowed for months or longer, and weeds covered the walkway that led them to the front door.
Ed Fonder, wearing a cardigan sweater and his usual bland expression, answered the door. Dietz recalled that Ed seemed uncomfortable having outsiders at his home and did not invite him in the last time he visited, so this time Dietz asked whether he could come inside. Ed obviously did not like the idea, but he sheepishly stepped aside and motioned for them to enter.
And, although both men had seen their fair share of filthy homes during their time in law enforcement, the Fonder residence still made their skin crawl.
The place was a mess. Actually, more like a pigsty. Dietz, McGuire, and Ed stood in a small foyer with doors that led to the kitchen and living room. Piles of papers stretched from the floor almost to the ceiling. Glancing into the living room, Dietz noticed jugs half filled with water in one corner of the room that were covered with cobwebs spreading all the way up to the ceiling, the kind that must have taken years to form.
There were boxes and boxes of assorted junk covering nearly every part of the floor. Where the carpet could be seen, it was so worn that the plywood underneath was clearly visible. Other parts of the floor were marred by birdfeed and animal feces. Dietz could feel his shoes starting to stick to the floor as he stepped, as if he were walking through a college fraternity house right after a big party.
“Don’t tell anyone I invited you in here,” Ed grumbled. “We don’t like people in the house.”
Ed said he told Mary Jane that the troopers had previously stopped by and that she was planning to call them. Mary Jane was again not home, Ed explained. She was at church and would not be back until around 9 o’clock. As he previously told the police, Ed explained he attended a different church in New Jersey, where he used to live while teaching physics in New York. He only moved to Springfield Township in 2001 so he could stay with his sister after their father went missing.
That brought the discussion to a topic the troopers had hoped to cover: the disappearance of their father. It was clear to Dietz that Ed didn’t feel entirely comfortable discussing the matter, and wondered why the troopers wanted him to talk about it at all. Nevertheless, Ed started to explain some of the family dynamics: His mother had passed away in 1992, he explained, and he always felt his father could not cope with her death.
Mary Jane and their father frequently fought after that, he explained, but Ed didn’t believe Mary Jane had anything to do with his disappearance. He truly believed his father simply walked away that day. Something akin to an Eskimo going onto an iceberg at the end of his life, he said.
Mary Jane was deeply upset by the way Springfield Township police handled the investigation into their father’s disappearance, he added.
“Were you ever concerned for your safety?” Dietz asked. “I mean, did you ever buy a gun for protection or anything?”
They had a .22-caliber rifle, Ed explained, but the police had taken it and never returned it. Long ago, when their family lived in Philadelphia, he saw a handgun in the basement that his father claimed belonged to him. He did not know if his father brought the gun with him when the family moved to Springfield Township.
Ed said he also did not know whether Mary Jane owned a gun when she was living here alone, but he knew he had never seen one.
“Do you remember the day the woman was shot at Mary Jane’s church?” McGuire asked. “Do you remember what you were doing that day?”
He did not, but Ed explained that he kept a detailed ledger of his comings and goings. After leaving the officers for a few moments, Ed returned carrying a composition notebook, one of several he owned. As Ed was a physics teacher, the notebooks contained not regular lined paper, but graph paper with rows and rows of tiny squares, which Ed filled with small, almost illegible script handwriting.
Rather than a diary or journal like any normal person might keep, Ed seemed to take note of every little detail of his life, complete with specific times and places minor events in his life occurred. The notebooks struck Dietz as extremely strange.
After flipping through the pages and reading a bit, Ed said he had been at his church the night before and didn’t return home until 11 p.m. After such late nights, Ed said he usually slept late the next day. On January 23, he only had made note of a single late-afternoon phone call from a friend.
Ed said that must have meant he was home all day. He did not know his sister’s whereabouts that day. The troopers asked Ed if he knew anything else about Rhonda’s death, but he claimed he did not.
The troopers thought that was the end of the interview, but then Ed suddenly started talking again. Mary Jane had been upset lately, he explained, but they didn’t talk about it much. She had been too upset to go to Rhonda’s funeral, so Ed went in her place, he said.
At a luncheon after the funeral, Ed had picked up some pamphlets about feelings and dealing with grief, he said. Ed gave them to Mary Jane, who said the information in the pamphlets reflected exactly what she was going through. She sa
id she was feeling a little depressed and stressed out, and had recently started having nightmares. Ed claimed Mary Jane was upset over Rhonda’s death and recent developments in their father’s case, although he didn’t volunteer what those developments were.
With that, Ed ended the interview. He assured the troopers he would be willing to answer any questions they might have in the future, and also would let Mary Jane know they had stopped by.
CHAPTER 19
With only Stumpo, Dietz, and McGuire working in the criminal investigation unit of the Dublin barracks, the state police could no longer afford to dedicate all three of them to the Rhonda Smith case, let alone for the twelve- to sixteen-hour workdays they were putting in. Dietz, in particular, had a number of other cases stacking up, since he was in charge of the sexual crimes and child abuse cases in the barracks’ coverage area. Dietz and McGuire were ultimately pulled off of active participation in the case, leaving Stumpo to work more frequently with Bob Egan.
The day after speaking to Mary Jane at the church, the state police’s first stop was the Holiday Hair salon that Mary Jane said she had been to the day Rhonda died. Egan and Bucks County Detective Greg Langston drove out to the salon in Quakertown, where they were provided the customer sign-in sheet for January 23. Mary Jane Fonder’s name was on the sheet, with a sign-in time of 11:22 a.m. The officers were unable to talk to the stylist who did Mary Jane’s hair that day because she was not scheduled to work.
With Mary Jane’s arrival time now in hand, Egan and Langston drove two different routes from Mary Jane’s house to the salon. They wanted to determine whether Mary Jane would have had enough time to leave her house, stop at the church and drive to the salon within the timeframe they believe Rhonda was shot.
During their first trip, they traveled directly from her house to the salon, a 10.2-mile route that took about seventeen minutes to drive. On a second route, the officers first drove from Mary Jane’s house to the church, which was 3.2 miles and took about five minutes. Driving from the church to the salon was another eight miles and took fourteen minutes. The officers were careful to abide by all speed limits and stop at all stop signs on the way.