by Colin McEvoy
“My mother and I used to go to the restaurant and eat a lot, and we traveled around at Roy Rogers and Burger King, and that’s what I’m telling you she loved the best,” Mary Jane said. “She said to me several times, ‘Why don’t you try a job as a waitress. You know, do what the Romans do, go along with the flow, anything that’s practical.’”
Stumpo felt like he had to interrupt. “Ms. Fonder, let’s take a break here. We just want to let you know you’re not under arrest. If you want to leave, you can go any time you want to. You can stop any time you want to. You understand that, right?”
“Yes,” Mary Jane said. “So, this matter of this, uh…”
“This gun,” Egan said, the first time he spoke during the interview.
“This gun,” she said, appearing suddenly nervous. “Right. That’s basically what we’re trying to get around to getting. But the … uh … I’m sorry, guys, um, oh, let me get my bearings.…”
Egan asked, “You carried this gun when you worked at Denny’s, for self-defense?”
“I carried it in my car, under the seat,” Mary Jane said. “I know I did it during that period of time when I left Denny’s. Then I was working at Burger King for quite some time, until July, when I needed out-patient surgery.”
Mary Jane proceeded to explain some of the abdominal pains she was experiencing at the time, as well as her knee replacement surgery and pains she was experiencing in her left hand. Egan officially abandoned hope of getting a clear answer about the gun anytime soon.
“Let’s talk about the hearings,” Egan said, hoping to steer her back on track. “You had this unemployment hearing?”
Mary Jane frowned as she recalled her visit to the Bethlehem unemployment board office. “They didn’t let me say anything,” she said. “That’s their prerogative. They said that I had threatened her with a handgun. That’s the reason for not wanting to give me unemployment.”
Mary Jane leaned forward, looked at Egan and smiled. “I said, ‘My dear, you’re not worth killing.’ Can you imagine thinking you’re that important?”
Stumpo steered back to the topic of the gun. “When we spoke the previous Wednesday, you had made reference that something caused you to get rid of the gun.”
“Yeah, well, what happened was, I was absolutely petrified when I realized that’s what she was accusing me of,” Mary Jane said. “I just thought, ‘Dear God, my car, it’s in the car outside, under the seat right now.’”
Mary Jane closed her eyes and shook her head. “Oh God, I never bought the gun for that reason,” she said. “You know, I was too chicken to use it. I shot the gun once, outside the house, in 1994, and it was terrifying. It was so loud, I was afraid of it.”
Mary Jane kept looking down at the table as she spoke, and Stumpo realized she was constantly glancing at the tape recorder on the table, almost speaking into it rather than to the troopers. Obviously unnerved by the presence of the device, she picked up a pencil from the table and started tapping it next to the recorder. Fearful that the constant tapping would drown out the recording of their interview, Stumpo picked up the recorder and slid it further away from Mary Jane, hoping to take her focus off of it.
“I was suffering from a lot of embarrassment then,” she continued on. “A lot of bad press from the articles that were written in The Inquirer about my father. He was going through all kinds of aging processes, developing Alzheimer’s. Dad was upset over my mother passing away, he couldn’t cope with it. It seemed that my father and I, it just seemed we had one problem after another.”
Determined to return to the subject of the gun, Stumpo decided to feign ignorance. “So, when you left the hearing, honestly I can’t remember what you told us, about when you got rid of the…”
“Oh, yes, well,” she said. “I just didn’t want anything to do with the thing. I put it away at the house, I did it at the house, and thought, ‘You know, thank God it’s not in the car.’ You know, it was a very rare, rare situation happening at the house, with my father’s living system. I was his main caretaker.”
Soon, Mary Jane was on another tangent, talking about the stress from dealing with her father and the various surgeries she thought she needed.
“I somehow developed a terrible strep throat,” she said. “My neighbors suggested I get Benadryl, and it helped with the cough. My face felt hot, my head got red, quite red. I felt pain at the top of my head—”
“Mary Jane,” Stumpo interrupted, slightly more forcefully now. “What did you do with the gun? When did you get rid of this gun?”
“Oh,” she said. “Uh, ’94. In the wintertime of ’94.”
But Mary Jane immediately changed topics again, this time talking about the day her father disappeared.
“I woke up on the 26th, I guess it was late morning, oh 10, 10:30, 11 o’clock in the morning. I heard my father come down the hall, and I thought, ‘OK, good, dad’s okay.’ And then I heard the front door close and I said, ‘Good, Pop went down to get the paper.’ This is nothing new from my father, so I dozed off again.”
She continued, “I woke up, I went down and looked. There’s the dining room lights on over the table and all this filthy shaving stuff’s on the table. And there’s his cereal bowl and all his stuff, and I thought, ‘What the heck’s wrong here?’ I mean, he’s usually sitting there reading the paper at the table. There’s no paper, and no Pop. I thought, ‘God, what the hell’s happened?’”
Mary Jane paused and looked at Egan, “Excuse me,” referring to her use of the word “hell.”
She continued, “I looked all over. I looked in his room, he wasn’t there. I started calling and calling for him, ‘Dad, where are ya?’ And I thought, ‘Geez.’ I looked outside, and I was terrified. I ran down the driveway, but I wasn’t finding him. The paper was there.”
She added, “So I thought, ‘My God, I lost my father.’ You know, how do you lose your dad?”
Mary Jane continued to describe the days after her father’s disappearance. She talked about her neighbors and cousins who came by to help search the area for her dad. She described the police, the dogs, the news coverage, and the four extremely thorough searches around the property, all of which yielded no results.
“Is it about this time you said you got rid of the gun?” Stumpo asked. “Or did you have the gun then? I would imagine you’d keep it now, because you were scared.”
“And then what happened,” Mary Jane continued, as if she hadn’t heard the question, “they got a court order and all, because of course, I’m the chief suspect. He was with me. They were looking for wet cement in the cellar, thinking maybe I, ah…”
When Mary Jane failed to complete the thought, Stumpo added, “There’s wet cement in the cellar?”
“They were looking for patches of wet cement, you know?” Mary Jane said, looking down at the table.
“Oh, they were looking for patches,” Stumpo said.
After a long pause, Mary Jane suddenly looked up, “The helicopters, they chased me all over the property there.”
“Chased you?” Egan asked.
Mary Jane started to describe an incident in May 1994 when, while walking along her property lines in the woods, she started to hear what sounded like propellers.
“I look over and, before I know it, my God, there’s a helicopter!” she said. “I’m not bothering anybody! Not the trees! But it’s zeroing in on me, so I started running. I was terrified they were going to pick me off from the air!”
“I said, ‘What’s going on here? I just had someone in a helicopter chase me from one end of my property to the next!’” she said. “They claimed he was doing an aerial search on the property. Aerial search? What the hell? Buzzing around me! What are they chasing me for? Can’t they waste the taxpayer dollars with something else?”
At a loss for how to delicately transition back on track, Egan said, “But let’s get back to … tell us why you got rid of the gun.”
She laughed, “Yeah, yeah, we’re off track. Th
e reason I got rid of it was because I was so despairing over the major newspaper articles of my father and myself.”
Mary Jane described someone whom she called a “very lovely lady” from The Philadelphia Inquirer, who interviewed her for a newspaper story while her father’s disappearance was still an open investigation. The woman was very nice, Mary Jane said, and spoke to a lot of her neighbors and friends. When they parted, the reporter promised to portray her in the best light possible, Mary Jane said.
“She did a wonderful, big fancy interview with me,” she said. “But when the article came out, she very neatly eliminated things I said. She took certain things out of context, rearranged what I said. ”
Mary Jane grew angrier and angrier as she talked about the story. She was particularly upset that the article claimed she only came up to visit her parents a few days before her mother died, rather than the six years she spent with her before her death.
“When the article came out in the paper, I had to run over to Martha’s Store to pick up a copy of the thing,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to see the article. Then I looked it over and oh my God, it made me look so horrible. Like a mean, nasty, unpleasant girl taking advantage of her poor ailing parents. I said, ‘This is not me, that’s not what happened.’ I got very depressed.
“All I could think of was doing away with myself,” she said. “I didn’t like myself, I didn’t like myself, I just couldn’t stand myself! I was thinking of taking my life with my handgun.”
Mary Jane said she considered going out to the pier to shoot herself, but decided “that wouldn’t work.” She considered simply sitting outside in her comfortable Hawthorne chair and shooting herself in the heart, and “dying comfortable in the sun.”
But while sitting outside in her lawn chair and contemplating suicide, Mary Jane said she decided against it after a visit from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She said during her worst moment, two members of the Restorationist church movement visited her and spoke with her for hours, and she decided she wanted to live after all.
Given Mary Jane’s seemingly unlimited capacity for conversation, Stumpo couldn’t help but think, Mary Jane might be the one person who would be happy to see the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“And that’s when I got rid of the gun,” Mary Jane said. “I just didn’t want to … I really didn’t want to do that.”
“How did you get rid of the gun?” Stumpo asked.
“I don’t really recall where I threw it,” Fonder said. “I threw it into Lake Nockamixon. Over the bridge, you know where the bridge crosses over 563? I’m pretty sure I threw it out as far as I could throw into the lake.”
Three weeks had passed since Egan and Stumpo first talked to Mary Jane, and the absurdity of the claim still hadn’t worn off. In all his years in law enforcement, Egan had never heard of somebody disposing of their gun in such a fashion, unless they had something very serious to hide.
“So, you had financial problems at this time,” Egan said. “Did you think about selling the gun back? Because you could have gotten money for the gun.”
“Naw, that didn’t … that didn’t seem like a feasible idea,” Mary Jane said, quickly adding, “It’s funny, even other items, if I purchase something, that’s it. I’m just one of those people that when I buy something, I keep it. It’s mine, I’m not taking it back. I never thought of selling it back. It didn’t seem like a feasible idea.”
Stumpo resisted the urge to shake his head in amazement. It doesn’t make any sense, he thought to himself. She knew the question about the gun was coming. She had that answer ready. But she didn’t plan on this, she didn’t have all the details, and now she’s making it up as she goes along.
After a few silent moments, Mary Jane added, “However, I should have turned it in to the police.”
“You could have done that,” Egan said.
“You know, over the last few years, you develop wisdom. You think, ‘Gee, why didn’t I do this?’ Or, ‘Why didn’t I do that?’”
“Well, a concern is that someone else could get their hands on the gun,” Stumpo said.
“Sometimes, you’re involved in a controversy and you really, you’re not thinking, your mind doesn’t come up with the right answer at that time,” Mary Jane said, rambling as if she had not heard Stumpo. “Why didn’t I do this, and why didn’t I do that? That’s, ah, yeah, at this one period in time, one woman came over to the house, an officer was coming over to the house every week, checking up, Officer Triol was her name.”
“From Springfield?” Stumpo said.
“Ah, from Springfield Police, yeah,” Mary Jane said. “That was from the time Pop disappeared. They kept tabs on me, and she, all through the winter, she used to stop by, and I liked her. I developed a very comfortable relationship with her.
“But then one time she came over there,” she said. “She tried to break me, to break me down and make me confess to killing my dad.”
“Oh yeah?” Stumpo said.
“I was so heartbroken, so deceived,” Mary Jane said. “Right in my, right in my living room. She’s sitting there, having a coffee with me, and I thought, ‘What in the hell, right in my own house!’ And I said to her, why isn’t this something you would do down at the township building? Why didn’t you take me down and question me there? ‘Oh Mary Jane,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember anything? Do you remember anything at all about this and that?’ I broke down and I cried.…”
CHAPTER 22
“Let’s talk about something a little less strenuous for you,” Stumpo said, changing topics.
Mary Jane started to discuss the difficulties of living with her brother in such a filthy house, which quickly led the conversation back to Rhonda when she started talking about how Rhonda helped her look for apartments in Hellertown.
“It was a Mecca up there for apartments! I got so excited, Hallelujah!” Mary Jane said. “But it was too much. It was $850 for a small place, plus they told me they put $14,000 into fixing this apartment up. Plus you have to pay all the utilities, the phone utilities, the cable, the heat, hot whatever, everything.”
“I wonder how Rhonda was affording it,” Egan said.
The question seemed to catch Mary Jane by surprise. “Huh?”
“I wonder how Rhonda was affording that apartment,” Egan repeated.
After a pause, Mary Jane said, “With the money I guess she had from people who were helping her.…”
“Was that right?” Egan said.
“Uh-huh,” Mary Jane said. “Mrs. Bieber told me that the pastor had, um, made a request during a church service to help one of the parishioners who needed financial help and, ah, if, ah, they could possibly give him a hand in helping.”
She continued, “She didn’t tell me how much, but I thought, that’s the first time Reta had mentioned that to me, that the pastor had made a request for financial help for that lady.”
It struck Stumpo as cold the way Mary Jane referred to Rhonda as “that lady.” The woman’s dead, Stumpo thought. She was murdered in a church. And a fourteen-year member of the church is calling her “that lady.”
“It sounds like Rhonda was very well liked,” Egan said.
“Mm-hmm,” Mary Jane nodded.
“Very well liked by the congregation,” Egan said.
“Judy said she loved having Rhonda around. Rhonda loved Judy, she took to Judy like a duck in water. Which is good. They sure did become friends.”
She continued, “I’m afraid that I personally never was … I was never involved deeply with that group of ladies until I joined the choir. I didn’t join the choir right away like Rhonda did. I enjoyed being in the audience listening. You’re either a performer or appreciator, and I was the appreciator. I enjoyed that thoroughly.”
Mary Jane paused before continuing, “There’s a certain group of that five or six women that click together. Like, sit together all the time and they go places. They’re in their houses, or at each other’s homes, or on the phone, you know?
I mean, going to Tupperware parties. What’s strange about it is, I never was involved with this group, going to parties, going to places, events outside the church. But Rhonda knew these ladies outside, and there were a great number of them in the choir that knew each other, that socialized and fraternized at each other’s homes. I mean, no matter how many years I’m here, I never knew them in that capacity.”
Stumpo could see this was making Mary Jane upset. It had never even occurred to her to join the choir until Rhonda Smith came along. The thought simply never crossed her mind. But even after she joined, she just couldn’t seem to become part of the group like Rhonda had.
“Did the church ever help you out financially?” Stumpo asked.
“Ah, no, they did not,” Mary Jane said. “Never financially, no. I was encouraged by the pastor. He was very warm and a very friendly kind of guy, and he took right to me.
“He’s a real man, Pastor Shreaves. He’s a hell of a man, a real man,” she continued, smiling. “If I ever needed a man, yup yup! He put me on my feet, he gave me courage. He’s an affectionate, friendly man. If I misjudged this man before, I didn’t really get to know him but I said, oh, that was some good guy. He was attractive. He was kind to me, asked me nice, said, ‘Listen Mary Jane, I know you’re having a terrible time right now.’”
Egan had grown somewhat more accustomed to Mary Jane’s chattiness by now, but listening to her talk about Pastor Shreaves in this way made him think back to the long, rambling messages she would leave on his phone. Egan imagined there hadn’t been too many men in her life.
“I just think it’s odd that the church helped Rhonda but hasn’t helped you in the past, don’t you?” Egan asked.
“Nope,” Mary Jane said. “Doesn’t tick me off.”
“No?” Egan asked.
“No one ever helped me,” she said. “My parents raised me to take care of myself. I’m really trying to take care of myself and figuring a better way. I want to live in a nicer home, I like to have nice things around me, you know, I’m heartsick looking at the place I have.”