by Colin McEvoy
If Rhonda was shot just after 10:54 a.m.—as police suspected because that’s when her Internet activity abruptly stopped—Mary Jane would indeed have had enough time to get from the church to the salon by 11:22 a.m.
Stumpo and Egan followed up a few days later with Mary Jane’s hair stylist at her home. Cindy Moser knew Mary Jane as a regular customer, though she had not come by for an appointment for a long time prior to her January 23 visit.
On that day, Cindy saw Mary Jane pull into the shopping center parking lot and park her car in the handicapped parking spot in front of the salon. Mary Jane had not made an appointment that day, which was usual for her, and she signed in on the walk-in sheet, Cindy said.
Cindy told the officers that when she took Mary Jane for her hair styling, Mary Jane followed her normal routine by taking off the wig she was wearing to have her own hair washed and styled. Mary Jane didn’t appear to be acting particularly strange that day. She did mutter to herself a bit while her hair was drying, but that was normal for Mary Jane. She was talking a little louder than usual, Cindy said, but she didn’t catch what Mary Jane was saying.
After Mary Jane left, Cindy realized she had left her wig behind. Cindy put the wig in a plastic bag and put it aside for Mary Jane to retrieve at a later date. But since Mary Jane had not returned, and hadn’t called inquiring about the wig, Cindy told the troopers she believed it was still back at the salon.
The troopers thanked Cindy for her time, and immediately drove back to the salon. That wig, Egan thought, could be the break they needed to solve this case. It could have retained gunpowder residue from the shooting, and both Stumpo and Egan wanted to quickly get their hands on what could be a major piece of evidence.
The wig was easily found under the front counter when the troopers arrived, but they could not take it with them without a search warrant. They reached out to Bucks County First Assistant District Attorney David Zellis, who filed for one as quickly as possible. Zellis, who had been made the district attorney’s point man on the investigation into Rhonda’s death, was just as excited about the wig’s potential evidentiary value as Egan and Stumpo. Zellis thought the wig would give them enough cause to search Mary Jane’s house for her gun. Then, if they could find that, the case would be closed.
The wig was picked up and entered into evidence the next day. Stumpo also returned to the salon to interview another stylist, Bridget Wolters, who had done Mary Jane’s hair on February 13. While she was there that day, Mary Jane had asked Bridget if the salon keeps records of “who got a wash and set.” Bridget told her no.
Well, did the salon destroy the records? Mary Jane asked. Bridget didn’t answer her.
The state police didn’t want to wait long to get the gunpowder residue test results back on Mary Jane’s wig, so Corporal Paul Romanic personally took the five-hour drive on February 15 to bring the wig to RJ Lee Group, a private laboratory outside of Pittsburgh.
Five days later, Stumpo received a call from the lab. Two elements found in gunpowder residue were found on the wig, but not a third element required for it to be a sure match. The study would have to be marked inconclusive.
Egan, working on his seventy-sixth homicide case, knew this was one of the many ups and downs that came with investigations, so he took the news in stride. But Stumpo, working on his first homicide case, was much more disheartened by the lab results. His office had stacks and stacks of cold cases, some going back fifty years, and he did not want the murder of Rhonda Smith to become one of them. He felt if he couldn’t solve it now, how could another officer solve it years down the road?
* * *
In addition to checking out the Holiday Hair salon, Stumpo and Egan had a lot to follow up on from their interview with Mary Jane Fonder.
They also took a trip up to Hellertown, where Mary Jane said she had been the day before Rhonda’s death looking at an apartment next to Rhonda’s. The officers met with Rhonda’s landlord, who did not remember meeting Mary Jane, even when shown a picture of her.
That struck Stumpo as a red flag. After all, Mary Jane was such a strange character, how could anybody not remember her if they had indeed met her?
As the officers stood outside Rhonda’s apartment, they noticed how busy the road out front was. Not only was Route 412 the borough’s Main Street, but it was also a well-traveled state highway.
This, along with the landlord’s unfamiliarity with Mary Jane, led the troopers to form a theory: Mary Jane didn’t go to Hellertown to look at the apartment, she went to scope out whether it would be a good place to kill Rhonda Smith. And, upon discovering the lack of privacy and abundance of cars driving by, she must have realized this wasn’t the right place to do it.
Perhaps that was the moment, the troopers thought, when she decided to kill Rhonda inside their church.
Egan and Stumpo also paid a visit to Nockamixon Sports Shop, the Quakertown-area store where Mary Jane had bought her gun fourteen years earlier. Mary Jane had not been back any time recently to buy ammunition or anything like that, they were told, but the officers were able to pick up the receipt from when Mary Jane first purchased the gun.
The officers also organized a large search of Lake Nockamixon, where Mary Jane said she had thrown her gun many years back. The officers didn’t believe that story, but they thought it was possible she might have discarded the gun while returning home from the hair salon.
Going past the lake from Quakertown, Mary Jane would have first passed the bridge on Route 563 closest to Route 313, so officers looked there first. In early February, there was still a lot of snow on the ground, so the officers used a metal detector to help in the search. It proved fruitless.
Also following the interview with Mary Jane, Egan called his colleagues at the Criminal Investigation Assessment Unit to ask them for their take on the case. They, like Stumpo and Egan, were convinced Mary Jane still had her gun.
For an outsider, the idea of a sixty-five-year-old churchgoer like Mary Jane Fonder killing somebody might seem impossible. But Egan, who had seen a lot in his twenty-five years on the job, knew that it was perfectly likely. In fact, he had worked on a case in 2005 where a seventy-three-year-old woman viciously beat another woman to death with a hammer in Northampton County. The murderer, Kathy MacClellan, beat the eighty-four-year-old Marguerite Eyer to death after Marguerite confronted Kathy about stealing her belongings. Marguerite activated her medical alert device before she died and, when paramedics arrived to help, Kathy was sitting on Marguerite’s porch and said to them, “It’s too late. She’s dead already.”
The sad truth, Egan knew, was that anybody was capable of murder.
CHAPTER 20
Following church services on Sunday, February 17, several church members took part in a discussion about loss. Although the discussion was not specifically about the loss of Rhonda, she was nevertheless on many of their minds as the conversation went on.
Judy spoke about how her twenty-year-old son, Ricky, had died in the house fire back in 2001. She described how much she missed him, and how the passing of time had done little to blunt her grief. Then she turned to Mary Jane.
“And there’s Mary Jane,” she said to the group, “Her dad has never been found.”
Judy had meant the statement as a way to include Mary Jane in the conversation and make her feel welcome. But Mary Jane was uncharacteristically silent for the rest of the conversation, and Judy feared she might have offended her.
Two days later it was Judy’s birthday. That evening, she checked her answering machine to find she had a very long, rather disjointed message from Mary Jane.
“People are evil,” Mary Jane said in the recording. “We should get a staff and wave it over everybody and ward off all the evil.” The bizarre, cryptic message went on like that for about five minutes. Mary Jane kept constantly talking about evil and darkness, to the point that Judy didn’t know whether to be confused or disturbed.
Then, abruptly, Mary Jane said with a perky voic
e, “Happy birthday Judy!” before ending the message.
Judy believed the church discussion about loss must have sparked something in Mary Jane. A few days later, Judy heard from her again. She opened up to Judy about her life, about how she hadn’t had a good upbringing and that her father was mean to her and mean to her mother when she was sick.
“I’ll never forgive him for that,” Mary Jane told Judy. “Never.”
* * *
Even after all this time had passed, Pastor Greg Shreaves was still having trouble feeling comfortable around Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church. Aside from her parents and family members, Rhonda’s death probably affected him more than anybody. Every day he had to work in the building where she had died, and every night he had to return home to a house only a few short steps away from where somebody shot her to death.
He didn’t feel safe at either place. And as more time passed, his fears seemed to grow more and more irrational and intense. He feared that a crazy person was out to destroy the church, and that they would burn down his house or kill him, too. He was starting to think he couldn’t stay on as pastor there.
For respite, the church council insisted Shreaves start taking a week off each month from his duties. He would visit his parents in Virginia and, on one occasion, he went to Ocean City, Maryland, for a short stay.
But it provided little relief. Whenever he was at the church, he would do his job but tried to avoid anything beyond that. Personal conversations were just too much for him. Whenever somebody tried to strike up a chat, he would push them away, claiming that he was still in mourning.
Pastor Shreaves did try to tackle his grief, as well as the grief his entire congregation felt, through his sermons. For several weeks after Rhonda’s death, Shreaves centered his sermons on the issues of death and tragedy, anger and forgiveness. But after about a month, Shreaves could tell his congregation was growing uneasy with the topic. No one said anything to him about it, but as he stood in front of them, he could see all their eyes and body language. The whole topic made them feel uncomfortable, and rather than address the issue that loomed over everybody, they preferred to sweep it under the rug, stop talking about it, and pretend it never happened.
Shreaves felt he had to respect these wishes, and soon he stopped preaching about the subject. But their reaction troubled him. Shreaves felt like they had an opportunity to learn from this experience and pull at least one small positive thing from this tragedy, and he hated to let that opportunity slip away.
Isn’t it tragic, he thought to himself. We talk about sin and grace and evil and here it is right in our midst and we don’t want to talk about it when it happens right here on our doorstep.
Shreaves began to regret distributing copies of Amish Grace, the book about the Amish schoolhouse shooting, to members of the congregation right after Rhonda was killed. At the time, it seemed like there were a lot of parallels between the two crimes and the church leadership felt it could help the congregation learn how to cope with tragedy. But when those five children were killed at that schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, they demolished the school building altogether and erased all traces that it was ever there. That wasn’t how Shreaves wanted to handle things at Trinity Evangelical. This was still their church.
The congregation’s resistance to addressing the situation added weight to his struggle over whether to stay at the church. He was still carrying around all these feelings, but his parishioners didn’t want to deal with them. How do I deal with that as a pastor? he wondered to himself.
Finding a therapist with whom he could discuss these issues and feelings helped him greatly.
It also comforted him to learn more about the investigation into the case. Stumpo and Egan had asked him several times about Mary Jane Fonder during their meetings together, but Shreaves never thought much of it. After all, they had asked him about so many different people, so many times. But then, during one meeting in early February, when the subject of Mary Jane came up yet again, Stumpo leaned in and said to Shreaves, “We know a lot about Mary Jane Fonder.”
Shreaves would never forget those words from Stumpo. In that moment, the pastor put it all together: The police believed Mary Jane had killed Rhonda! Strangely, this brought Shreaves some peace. No longer was he afraid of the unknown; he only had to be concerned about one person.
Of course, the idea of going to church every week with a possible murderer did frighten Shreaves. But at least now he had some idea what to watch out for, and was not suspicious of the whole world, as he had been before. Prior to Stumpo saying that fateful sentence, the idea of Mary Jane as the killer had never even passed through Shreaves’s mind. But all of a sudden it made sense: All the phone messages she left for him, the confession of her romantic feelings for him—they gave her a motive.
Feeling at least somewhat more comforted, Shreaves started having second thoughts about leaving Trinity Evangelical. Besides, what would it say about him if he went to a new church while his old church was in their hour of need? What if he went to a new church and there was a new tragedy there? They would probably fear he would leave at the first sign of trouble. No, Shreaves decided. He was staying here.
CHAPTER 21
After the wig testing and lake search proved fruitless, Stumpo and Egan’s next step was to set up another interview with Mary Jane. After leaving a message on her answering machine on February 21, Stumpo got a return call the next day.
When he picked up his telephone, there was a woman on the other end rambling about how her brother had been chopping wood in the parlor.
“Is this Mary Jane?” Stumpo asked.
“Oh, yes, it’s Mary Jane! My brother has been chopping wood in the parlor, and it’s just a mess!”
Confused, Stumpo replied, “Mary Jane, you can’t just chop wood in the parlor!”
“I know!” she responded enthusiastically.
Stumpo paused for a moment, still a bit stunned, then continued.
“So how are things going at church?” he asked.
“Things are the same at the church. There’s something in the atmosphere—they’re getting over it,” she said in one breath.
“The new church secretary quit,” she continued. “The girl was disturbed over it; it’s a hard act to follow.”
“Mary Jane,” Stumpo asked. “So would you be willing to meet with me and Corporal Egan again?”
“How about Monday?” she volunteered. “I could come down to the station.”
That was just what Stumpo wanted, and he did not even have to suggest it. It’s easier to control an interview at a police station than it is in somebody’s home. If someone is at home and starts to feel pressure, it’s much easier for him or her to come up with an excuse to end the interview. Not to mention the fact that a police station is a far more intimidating setting than one’s own house.
Stumpo and Egan had a very simple interview strategy: Let Mary Jane talk for as long as she wanted. Given her tendency to ramble, they weren’t sure they would be able to keep her focused on a single topic anyway. So the plan was just to let her go on, and even if it took a few hours to get any useful information, eventually she would wear herself out. Besides, Stumpo felt he wasn’t a good enough interviewer to keep her focused on one subject.
Egan, though more experienced, also favored the strategy of just letting Mary Jane go on and on. The most important thing in an interview is to let that person feel relaxed so they open up to you. The more people talk, especially when they are lying, the more authorities are ultimately going to be able to use their words against them, Egan thought. When you are telling the truth, the truth is always going to come out the same. But when you are lying, the lies change a little bit each time.
* * *
Mary Jane Fonder started talking the moment she walked through the door.
Egan and Stumpo met her in the lobby of the Dublin barracks, and she immediately started talking about her father. The two troopers were surprised. They were expecting Mary
Jane to be talkative from their last experience with her, but not before they even made it to the interview room.
“Sorry if I seem nervous,” Mary Jane said as Egan and Stumpo escorted her through the hallway. “I just couldn’t get any sleep last night. I don’t know why.”
As they walked, Mary Jane continued talking right up until they reached the interview room. She was going to be an unusual challenge, Egan thought. Usually it was hard to get someone to talk. In this case, it would be difficult just to keep her on topic.
Mary Jane sat at the 4 × 3 foot table in the middle of the otherwise barren interview room. Stumpo took a seat at the corner of the table next to Mary Jane, while Egan sat directly across from her. Stumpo rushed to turn on the tape recorder, to avoid missing anything more Mary Jane had to say.
“Okay, Mary Jane,” Stumpo said. “You were talking about your father, and…”
Mary Jane interrupted, “The only reason why I’m even mentioning it, about my dad, is these things came to my mind as a result of the incident that happened at the church. It was upsetting to me, I had so much on my mind at the time, and what bothered me so much was this terrible, heinous thing to happen to our friend.”
Before Stumpo could speak, Mary Jane continued, “You gentlemen mentioned to me during the questioning session, had I owned a .38 revolver? I do know the handgun, and you might have known the caliber, but yes, it was a .38.”
This was a good sign, Egan thought. The troopers weren’t expecting a confession, but one of the things they hoped to learn in this interview was an explanation of where her gun was. It was promising to see her bring it up so early in the interview.
Mary Jane said she bought the gun in 1993, while working as a waitress at Denny’s Restaurant in Center Valley. She said the cook there suggested she buy it for self-defense because she worked late nights and often drove alone.