Love Me or Else

by Colin McEvoy

  And then there was that moment when Mary Jane hunched over, her voice taking on a new, evil tone, she vehemently insisted, “… I … didn’t … do … it.” It was a new side of Mary Jane, one that, in the troopers’ opinions, showed she was capable of murder.

  A few days later, Stumpo and Egan made plans to meet with First Assistant District Attorney David Zellis. They thought they had obtained some valuable information, but wanted his take on it as well. As he rose in the ranks throughout his nearly twenty-five years with the Bucks County District Attorney’s office, Zellis had handled many of their most important cases. A bit shorter than average, with wide eyes and a big smile on his round face, outside of the courtroom he didn’t necessarily look like a hard-bitten trial lawyer.

  But he knew his way around a courtroom: He was always well researched, seldom caught off guard, and knew how to take the gloves off when he had to.

  While conducting the interview was not easy for Stumpo and Egan, listening back to it was downright agonizing. Zellis, who had never met Mary Jane, was floored by her complete inability to stay on one topic. She would go off on tangents to such an unbelievable degree that Zellis wondered if she had some kind of mental defect that affected her ability to keep her thoughts straight.

  However, by trudging through the tapes, the trio began to realize what valuable material they had on their hands. Throughout the course of nearly four hours of chatter, Mary Jane had inadvertently laid out her motive for killing Rhonda.

  She admitted she had romantic feelings for Pastor Shreaves, and that she suspected he might be involved with Rhonda. She also discussed how she was upset she was never invited to social outings with the other church ladies, but that Rhonda seemed to fit in well with them.

  Also, Rhonda made her “nervous,” she told the troopers. Then there was the jealousy Mary Jane had voiced over Rhonda being given financial assistance from the church and her working as the substitute secretary, two privileges never afforded to Mary Jane.

  “The whole world’s going around this lady and I don’t know it,” she had said.

  Zellis, Stumpo, and Egan also took notice of Mary Jane’s mention of a birthday party for Rhonda the week before she was killed. The notable events were starting to add up in that week: the birthday party the Wednesday prior, Rhonda thanking the congregation for their financial assistance on Sunday, Mary Jane finding out Rhonda was serving as the substitute secretary on Monday.

  The jealously must have grown in Mary Jane throughout the week, Zellis thought. Her misinterpretation about the birthday party must have lit a fuse in her, which grew stronger and stronger until it ultimately detonated in an explosion when she killed Rhonda, he thought.

  The law enforcement officials didn’t need a motive to arrest Mary Jane, but it helps in a trial. People—including jurors—are always curious why one person kills another.

  If their theory was correct, however, much of what drove Mary Jane to murder was in her head. The birthday party, Rhonda’s supposed affair with Shreaves, these were little more than figments of her imagination. On the surface, it could seem hard to believe that Mary Jane could bring herself to the point of murder based on such delusions. But to Egan, it made perfect sense. In his experience, he knew that even the tiniest disrespectful comments or smallest gestures were sometimes enough to drive people to kill.

  In fact, Egan had seen even stranger motives for murder in his day. He recalled Patricia Rorrer, a woman from a murder case he worked in 1994. Living in North Carolina, she called her ex-boyfriend of ten years one day only to have his wife, Joann Katrinak, answer the phone. Joann told her never to call again and hung up on her. The next day, the furious Rorrer drove all the way to Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, abducted Joann and her three-and-a-half-month-old son Alex, drove them into the woods and killed them.

  For Mary Jane, her resentment had been building even before Rhonda joined the church, even before Mary Jane joined the church herself. She had been left out her whole life, Egan thought, and she probably had built up a whole lifetime’s worth of resentment as a result.

  * * *

  On February 27, two days after interviewing Mary Jane Fonder, the police launched yet another search of Lake Nockamixon, this time expanding the area to another bridge near Route 412 as well as the one at Route 313. Nobody really expected it to be any more fruitful this time than the last, and sure enough, no gun was recovered, although they planned to conduct another search weeks later when some of the snow-covered areas around the lake had melted.

  By now, Stumpo and the other investigators were paying close attention to any bit of information that came along about Mary Jane Fonder. The day of the Lake Nockamixon search, Stumpo spoke with church choir director Steve Wysocki, who said he had received an unusually short message from a distressed-sounding Mary Jane, where she told him, “I won’t be at church and choir for a few weeks. I am taking a break from choir and church to get some things in my life straightened out.”

  Upon reviewing Mary Jane’s phone records, Stumpo and Egan found that she had called her neighbor, Rosalie Schnell, the day of Rhonda’s murder on January 23, at around 2:45 p.m. On March 3, Stumpo and Egan visited Rosalie, who described herself as one of Mary Jane’s longest and closest friends. Rosalie said she could not remember the phone conversation from that day, but recalled that she and Mary Jane had discussed Rhonda’s death during a day of shopping in Quakertown a few days after the murder.

  Schnell seemed to recall that Mary Jane had said she didn’t know Rhonda all that well but thought she was a nice young woman, and that there was talk it could have been a suicide, not a murder. She also thought she vaguely remembered Mary Jane saying something about buying a gun for protection—something that certainly caught the attention of Stumpo and Egan—but she did not remember ever seeing a gun or hearing Mary Jane bring it up again.

  Besides, Rosalie insisted, she couldn’t imagine Mary Jane ever even holding a gun, much less using one. Yes, she’d heard all the rumors and all the talk about Ed Fonder’s disappearance, but to this day she just didn’t believe it. Mary Jane was a sweet lady and a good friend, and Rosalie didn’t believe she could possibly be a killer.

  As they were leaving Rosalie’s home, the troopers saw that Mary Jane and Ed didn’t appear to be home, but had left their garbage cans out for pickup. They knew it was a long shot, but with nothing to lose, Stumpo and Egan pulled the trash bags out of the cans and brought them back to the station with them. But after a thorough search, nothing of value was found, and they were discarded in a Dumpster outside the station.

  The next few days were relatively uneventful in the investigation, but Stumpo and Egan continued speaking to various people from the church community. On March 11, they visited Judy Zellner’s husband, Les, in Allentown, where he worked. He had very little to share aside from the typical church rumors Stumpo and Egan had encountered numerous times before.

  But Les did offer one interesting tidbit, even if it wasn’t particularly useful. Back before Shreaves arrived at Trinity Evangelical, when Donald Hagey was still the pastor, Mary Jane had approached him at the church, wearing an overcoat. Her cat had recently died, and Mary Jane asked if the church would be willing to bless her deceased pet. Hagey smiled warmly and nodded yes, of course he would. That smile quickly melted away, however, when Mary Jane opened her coat and showed she was holding the cat’s corpse underneath it.

  Suffice it to say, Zellner explained, Hagey did not bless the cat that day.

  CHAPTER 25

  It was around noon on March 12, a Wednesday afternoon, when the phone rang at Jim and Dorothy Smith’s Lower Saucon Township house. Dorothy picked it up and Jim, seated comfortably in his favorite living room chair, could hear a woman’s voice on the other line.

  “Oh, hello Mary Jane,” Dorothy said.

  Jim grimaced. Neither he nor his wife knew Mary Jane Fonder very well. To them, she was just another member of the church, and one they had never gotten to know particularly well.
The last thing he wanted today was to hear from anybody from the church. Six weeks had passed since Rhonda was killed, but time had done nothing to blunt the heartache he felt for his lost little girl. And, likewise, time had done nothing to dampen the distrust he had developed for just about everybody at Trinity Evangelical.

  I don’t want anything to do with any of them, he thought. I don’t want anything to do with anybody.

  “I was wondering if you wanted an apple pie that I baked?” Mary Jane asked. “I made too many.”

  Dorothy put her hand over the receiver and asked her husband, who immediately and vehemently shook his head no. Dorothy felt the same way and, speaking back into the phone, she politely declined the offer. Seemingly unoffended, Mary Jane simply responded, “Okay.”

  Dorothy was relieved. She barely knew Mary Jane, and the last thing she wanted today was a visitor. Besides, Dorothy had already encountered Mary Jane earlier in the week. After a church service that past Sunday, Mary Jane had gone up to Dorothy and, out of nowhere, started talking about how much she missed Rhonda. She also mentioned that she had spoken with Rhonda the Monday before she died, something Dorothy had never heard before.

  “I don’t know how this happened,” Dorothy remembered Mary Jane saying, before the woman inexplicably started to cry. The tears seemed a little forced to Dorothy, and she was a bit annoyed with the idea of having to comfort someone else about her daughter.

  Three hours later, the phone at the Smith residence rang again. This time, Jim picked it up, and he was more than a little annoyed with what he heard.

  “Hi Mr. Smith, this is Mary Jane Fonder,” she said, her voice sounding a little distant, as if she was distracted. “I’m up here on the highway. How do I get to your place?”

  Jim frowned. I thought we said we didn’t want you here, he thought, but didn’t say aloud. It didn’t matter, she was already here, driving up and down Route 412 looking for their house. Everybody had trouble finding the Smiths when they visited for the first time. Not only was their home heavily concealed by a row of thick bushes, but the driveway ran along a rear alley that started several houses away, and visitors had to loop around and take a hidden path before they could reach the Smiths’ home.

  “Now look, it’s a dangerous highway, I don’t want you to get hurt,” Jim said, nervous about her talking on her cell phone while driving on Route 412. There had been plenty of accidents on that road in his time, and the last thing his conscience needed right now was for a sixty-five-year-old woman to crash her car looking for his house.

  “I’m going to come up with an apple pie,” Mary Jane said, her enthusiasm apparently unaffected by Dorothy’s rejection a few hours earlier. “How do I get to your place?”

  Reluctantly, Jim decided to direct Mary Jane to their driveway before she hurt herself. A few minutes later, Dorothy was greeting Mary Jane at the backdoor. With a pie in her hands and a big smile on her chubby face, Mary Jane looked around at the small kitchen as she stepped inside. Dorothy politely accepted the pie and, after placing it on the kitchen table, led Mary Jane to the living room, where she sat on the couch next to framed photos of Rhonda.

  As usual, Mary Jane did most of the talking. In her typical manner, she rambled on and on, discussing one subject for a few moments before abruptly going off on another tangent altogether. Dorothy barely said a word, mostly listening and nodding every few minutes. Jim sat in his chair, watching television and doing his best to pretend he wasn’t paying attention at all. But he was listening to every word Mary Jane was saying, and growing inside him was that blistering feeling of distrust he had been harboring for everyone at the church over the last two months.

  The conversation soon turned to Mary Jane’s brother, Ed, and the deplorable conditions of the home they shared together. “He don’t clean up,” Mary Jane said. “He has everything a mess.” In fact, Mary Jane said, her brother was so hard to live with, she had visited an apartment near Rhonda’s apartment in Hellertown just the day before Rhonda was killed.

  “You know, it seems a little odd that I would be looking for an apartment when I own property, but I don’t get along with my brother sometimes,” Mary Jane said.

  The line of conversation made Jim and Dorothy uncomfortable. They didn’t even want Mary Jane here, and they certainly didn’t want to hear her talk about their daughter. But, fortunately, it wasn’t long before Mary Jane was off the topic altogether and rambling about something else.

  Dorothy was distracted by Mary Jane’s shoes, a worn, odd-looking pair of black rubber shoes that almost resembled a pair of galoshes. Jim, too, had noticed them right away when Mary Jane came in the house. Motioning toward her feet, Dorothy asked, “Can you use a pair of sneakers there?”

  Yes, Mary Jane nodded, her shoes were a bit worn out.

  “We’ve got some of Rhonda’s old shoes,” Dorothy said, standing up from the couch. “I’ll see if they fit.” She went through the kitchen and into the cluttered first floor bedroom, where they were keeping a number of Rhonda’s old things, including several pairs of her old shoes and sneakers. She grabbed one pair of each and brought them back to Mary Jane, who had already slipped off her rubber shoes and happily fitted Rhonda’s sneakers onto her feet.

  Mary Jane stood and walked back and forth between the living room and the kitchen a few times, the floor creaking a bit under the pressure of the shoes that Rhonda had worn in that house so many times in the past. Suddenly, Mary Jane stopped, and a big smile crept across her face.

  “Yes ma’am,” she said. “They sure do fit, ma’am.”

  By 5 o’clock, after two hours of politely enduring Mary Jane’s visit, Dorothy led her back out the door and wished her good-bye. As she closed the door in front of her, she looked at the pie sitting on the table. Jim came into the room and waved his hand dismissively.

  “I wouldn’t eat that,” he said.

  Dorothy agreed. She had absolutely no appetite anyway, she thought, as she picked up the pie and brought it to the downstairs freezer.

  * * *

  Later that day, Mary Jane showed up for choir rehearsal about forty minutes early. Choir director Steve Wysocki was the only one there when she arrived, getting everything ready before the practice began. Steve thought it strange that Mary Jane had shown up so early.

  In fact, he was struck by her overall pattern of attendance at church functions over the last few weeks. Before, she would miss the occasional service or two, and sometimes would go a few weeks at a time before she attended any of the church’s special events. But ever since Rhonda died, it seemed, Mary Jane hadn’t missed a single church function. In fact, she was not only attending church every Sunday, but going to both Sunday morning services every week.

  As Mary Jane entered, she extended her arms and gave Steve a big smile.

  “I feel so good tonight,” Mary Jane told him. “Tonight, everything feels peaceful.”

  Mary Jane continued on about how positive a mood she was in today, and explained that she had just visited Rhonda’s parents, Jim and Dorothy. The visit went great, Mary Jane explained. They had a lovely talk, Mary Jane brought them a pie, and they even gave her a pair of Rhonda’s old sneakers, she said.

  “Everything feels back to normal and fine,” Mary Jane said, almost like a declaration. “I think Rhonda’s spirit is finally at rest.”

  She continued on and on like that, repeating over and over especially that last phrase, about Rhonda’s spirit being at rest. Steve frowned. Personally, he was not sharing those sentiments.

  “Mary Jane, I really need to finish getting ready for rehearsal,” he said in as polite a voice as he could muster, then resumed his duties getting ready for the rehearsal.

  * * *

  Pastor Shreaves had started getting phone messages from Mary Jane again.

  They weren’t coming as often as they were before, but between the calls she made to his house and to the church, he was still getting four or five messages a week. And they certainly hadn’t gotten
any shorter, or any less unfocused or rambling.

  “Peace be with you, Pastor Greg,” one of the messages started. “Hoping sunshine will be blooming in your office! A big pot of sunshine or something, ’cause you’ll need a nice happy day!”

  If the messages were a nuisance to Shreaves before, they were nearly unbearable now. Ever since the police had hinted they were looking into Mary Jane, Shreaves had been doing his best to avoid her, which was no easy task in a small church like Trinity Evangelical. While Shreaves used to linger after services to talk to people, now he was leaving so Mary Jane wouldn’t get the chance to chat with him.

  This hadn’t gone unnoticed by Mary Jane, as she pointed out in one of her messages.

  “I wanted to stop and talk with you at choir practice, but you were in a hurry to leave and, ah, well anyway, I wasn’t able to stop you,” she said. “I think we, I could come over to sit and talk with you, but I can’t, I know … It’s up to you if you wanted to talk to me. I got so much I wanted to discuss with you, but that’s the way it goes.”

  Nowadays, it became very difficult for Shreaves to even conduct a service while Mary Jane was in the pews. If she would so much as squirm during a sermon, Shreaves would get nervous, irrationally wondering to himself if she was reaching for a gun.

  Once, when Mary Jane asked if she could help with communion, as she often did, Shreaves said yes, thinking to himself, If I say no, she’ll shoot me.

  Just like before, Mary Jane’s messages bordered on incomprehensible at times, and varied widely in tone. In some, Mary Jane was chipper and pleasant, while in others she sounded bleak and depressed, as if the weight of the world was on her shoulders.

  “Dreary, dismal, terrible day,” Mary Jane said in one.

  “Right now, it seems like everyone you bump into has some tragedy in their life or some sad problem,” she said. “Some of the terrible things that happened to our Lord are actually happening to us, and it’s just we’re in terrible times. Lord knows it’s always something. Some devil somewhere, or some terrible person or some terrible thing or maybe a friend doesn’t love you anymore or doesn’t like you and that is very hard to take, but you know, it’s like you roll with the waves of the sea. It comes in and it comes, it comes back and forth sometimes, the sad part washes away and sometimes it goes to its end and another beginning starts again.”