by Colin McEvoy
They exited the side door to the parking lot expecting Mary Jane to follow, but instead she simply nodded and stayed behind, as if she were hesitant to leave the building. The three women didn’t understand, but stepped outside and waited, expecting Mary Jane to eventually follow. Several long minutes passed as Judy, Sue and Carol pretended to tend to the flowers, but Mary Jane still hadn’t come out. Finally, Sue walked back inside and called, “Mary Jane, we’re all leaving.”
Finally, with what appeared to be a great effort, Mary Jane sighed and followed Sue outside to the parking lot. As Carol and Sue dispersed to their cars, Judy stayed behind to lock the door behind her. As Judy turned toward the parking lot, Mary Jane suddenly wrapped her arms around Judy in an unexpected, awkward hug. Internally, Judy cringed, but she voiced no objection as Mary Jane embraced her.
Less than a half mile away, Stumpo’s radio squeaked to life as Langston called to report that Mary Jane was coming out to the car, and her brother was nowhere to be seen. Finally, Stumpo thought as he radioed Turnbow to make the arrest.
Unfortunately, it was reported back to him, another trooper car had just been arriving to relieve Turnbow, so Stumpo’s hope for having just one marked police car waiting for Mary Jane was already shot.
Oh well, too late to worry about that now, he thought as he pulled out and headed toward Township Road.
As Stumpo and Egan approached, they could see their attempt at discretion had failed more miserably than they expected. All the police vehicles in the municipal lot made it look like some sort of massive police sting, Stumpo thought. Fortunately, it appeared Turnbow had pulled over Mary Jane without incident just a few hundred yards away.
Stumpo brought his car to a halt just behind Turnbow’s vehicle, then he and Egan stepped outside and slowly walked toward Mary Jane’s front window. They found her sitting there silently with both hands in the purse on her lap, although it became immediately clear that she was not reaching for any kind of weapon.
“Oh, hi,” Mary Jane said, as if she had simply run into Stumpo and Egan at the supermarket.
“Hi, Mary Jane, how are you?” Stumpo asked.
“Oh, I’m okay,” she casually responded.
Stumpo politely asked if Mary Jane would come down to the station with them to discuss the investigation, but she replied that she would rather just go home and speak to her brother and an attorney. Stumpo, more sternly this time, told her they could not let her leave, and a look of understanding crept across Mary Jane’s face. Stumpo asked her to step out of the car.
“I had a feeling you guys would be coming today,” Mary Jane said. Motioning toward her purse, she added, “I was going to go home and put some underwear in a bag. I thought you would have come over to the house.”
When Stumpo asked why Mary Jane thought that, she shrugged and replied, “You took my car. You could take my house.”
Stumpo informed Mary Jane that she was under arrest for the murder of Rhonda Smith, and read her the Miranda rights as he clamped his handcuffs onto her wrists. As he led her toward their unmarked police car, Stumpo felt a sense of relief, but only the slightest bit. There was still so much preparation, so much work to do, and he knew he would not feel at ease until a favorable result was rendered at her trial.
As Stumpo guided Mary Jane into the backseat of their unmarked car, she mumbled something that the trooper couldn’t make out. He and Egan took their seats in the front and, after they had started the car, Mary Jane said, “I didn’t do nothing to that sweet girl. I didn’t hurt that girl.” It was the only sound she made for the rest of the trip back to the Dublin barracks. For the first time since they had first spoken to her before her choir practice about two months earlier, there was an uncharacteristic silence among the three.
CHAPTER 29
It was around quarter after three when Stumpo and Egan led Mary Jane through the Dublin station into the holding room. For liability reasons, there was no cell at the barracks, so they asked her to sit on a metal bench against one side of the stark room. After taking off her handcuffs, Stumpo asked her to remove her shoes, jacket, and jewelry. Mary Jane did so with a polite smile, showing no outward signs of fear or hostility. It seemed to Egan that she was still putting on an act that, despite where she was and what she was accused of, she was still a kind, normal lady.
Stumpo placed a handcuff back onto Mary Jane’s left wrist and secured the other to a post next to the bench. Egan asked Trooper Gregg Dietz to stay behind to monitor Mary Jane while they finished the necessary paperwork. Dietz had been with the state police for over fourteen years, spending most of his career in the Gettysburg area before he was moved to Dublin in October, only three months before Rhonda was shot. Slim but fit, the good-looking trooper had close-cropped brown hair and looked younger than his forty years.
Normally, the task of babysitting a suspect would fall to someone with less experience than Dietz, but the troopers wanted someone they could trust there in case Mary Jane started to talk.
They couldn’t question her without her attorney, of course, but if Mary Jane were to say anything unsolicited, the police wanted to be sure they got every word of it down on paper. Mary Jane had been advised of her rights and knew anything she said could be used against her in court. Under normal circumstances, it would be highly unlikely that a suspect in this situation would have much at all to say, but they were well aware of Mary Jane’s tendency to ramble and wanted to be prepared.
Dietz took a seat across the room from Mary Jane, holding in his lap a police report for an unrelated case. Pen in hand, Dietz started working on the report, waiting to see if Mary Jane would say anything. For the next ten minutes, however, they sat in complete silence, with Mary Jane showing no visible emotion whatsoever. At one point, Mary Jane started fiddling with the handcuff on her left wrist, and Dietz asked whether it was too tight, but she politely replied that it was fine.
After another five minutes of complete silence, Mary Jane bent down to adjust her socks, which Dietz noticed had numerous holes in them.
“These socks need mending,” Mary Jane said simply. Dietz responded with an affirmative nod of the head.
Mary Jane looked Dietz directly in his eyes and mumbled something about her brother. When the trooper apologized and said he hadn’t heard her, she said, “My brother, he is at home and he needs the car to go to Greek class at the church. You know, he goes to New Jersey an awful lot.”
Dietz nodded and said, “I know your brother goes to church in New Jersey. I’ve spoken with him before.”
For the next few, long minutes, Mary Jane was silent once again. Then, all at once, it was as if a light switch had been flipped on. She was chatting with Dietz as if she had known him for years, her words coming quickly and crammed together, as if she didn’t have nearly enough time to say everything she hoped to say.
“It is amazing what they are doing to me today,” she said. “They think I did something to this girl. I didn’t do anything to her.”
Dietz moved aside the police report he was working on and began to take notes about what Mary Jane was saying. He responded to her by nodding his head up and down, and Mary Jane continued.
“I don’t know what they found in my car,” she said. “You know, they took my car.”
It quickly became clear to Dietz that everything he had heard about Mary Jane, from her extreme chattiness to her bizarre demeanor, was absolutely true. Mary Jane changed topics no less than three times over the next sixty seconds, describing the house she shared with her brother, her love for Trinity Evangelical and the topic of the Prime Timers meeting she had just attended.
She looked down at her shabby socks and said, a bit of annoyance in her voice, “Those guys took my car and it has my laundry in it. We are Laundromat people. We go to the Laundromat with lunch. It is a fun day. I was ready for a real nice day last Wednesday.”
Dietz wrote down every word Mary Jane said. Just when he thought it couldn’t get any more unusual, she added,
“Oh well, I have enough underwear at home.…”
* * *
As Egan continued working on Mary Jane’s paperwork, Stumpo stepped away to search Mary Jane’s purse for contraband. There would clearly be no bail in this case, so her belongings would have to be secured at the prison after Mary Jane was incarcerated. He found nothing unusual or dangerous: just her wallet, a few odds and ends, and what appeared to be a small black checkbook.
Stumpo flipped the book open, and immediately, he spotted Rhonda Smith’s name.
It was not a checkbook at all, but rather an eighteen-month pocket calendar. Stumpo had coincidentally opened the page to January 2008, the very month of Rhonda’s death. At the top of the page was an innocuous photo of a Springer Spaniel, his rear facing upward as he rested his head and front legs on the ground.
Several of the calendar’s date blocks were filled with the sloppy scribbling Stumpo recognized to be Mary Jane’s handwriting. Under January 17 were the words “Rhonda’s BDAY,” and sprawled from January 23 to the 26th were the words, “Someone called from church to tell me of incident.” Under February 25, the day of Stumpo and Egan’s four-hour interview with Mary Jane, were the words, “Dublin S.P., They Say They HV Wig, TRiED To MK ME CONFES.” The writing there appeared particularly sloppy, as if they had been written with a sense of urgency and anger, especially the item about the wig, which was circled.
But Stumpo’s eyes were immediately drawn to January 23, the day of Rhonda’s murder. In big letters, above a circled notation about Mary Jane’s hairdresser appointment, Mary Jane had written the words “Rhonda MURDered.”
The notation alone struck Stumpo as unusual. He was positive that he could go through the day planners of every other church member and not find any such note written on that date. I don’t see an innocent person taking those notes, he thought.
Stumpo immediately closed the planner, put it back in the purse and took the purse to be secured for the prison. He didn’t want to read a single word more until he had obtained a search warrant. The last thing he needed was for Mary Jane’s lawyer to have the evidence thrown out on allegations of an improper search and seizure.
* * *
Mary Jane had been silent for the last five minutes, but soon she was at it again.
“I know Rhonda’s car is here,” she said, looking up directly at Dietz. “I was looking for it when I was coming in.”
Dietz looked back at her and said nothing.
“You know, for the investigation,” she continued.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Dietz said.
Mary Jane said she expected Rhonda’s car had been impounded to the police station, which led her into a long tangent about a time in 1976 when she visited Philadelphia and her car was impounded. Dietz took it all in, writing down every jumbled, seemingly irrelevant word.
One of his fellow officers passed by in the hallway and glanced into the room. He smirked at Dietz, silently and jokingly mocking the trooper for having to sit there and babysit this seemingly crazy old woman. Although Dietz was inwardly a bit annoyed with the trooper and concerned that the interruption might silence Mary Jane, Dietz simply smiled in response as the trooper in the hall walked away.
The smile seemed to stir something in Mary Jane, who said to Dietz in a joking tone, “You are bright eyed and bushy tailed!”
Hiding his confusion, Dietz responded simply, “I will take that as a compliment.”
“Please do,” Mary Jane replied. Then, with a laugh, she added, “I guess I’m doing all right. I haven’t fallen over yet.”
Dietz had no idea what to make of the comment, but asked that if Mary Jane felt she was about to fall down, she warn him. Another few minutes of silence followed, but soon Mary Jane was talking again, indiscriminately switching from topic to topic at a jarring pace. She spoke again about her brother, how often he drove back and forth from New Jersey, how messy their house was. She described her arthritis and back pain, how much she hated to live alone, how she and her brother took care of each other.
Throughout the one-sided conversation, Mary Jane remained completely calm and unemotional, as if she were simply speaking with a friend she had known for years. Dietz had known in advance of Mary Jane’s chattiness, but still couldn’t help but be surprised by the tone.
She knows why she’s here, she knows she’s under arrest, Dietz thought. Yet she’s chatting like I’m just the guy sitting next to her on the bus.
Soon, her conversation turned to the church itself and, in particular, Pastor Shreaves.
“You know, he encouraged me to join the choir,” she said. “So sad. I regret joining the choir, with Rhonda being murdered, me in having a good time. I was so optimistic, cruising all over the place, getting a kick out of singing, looking at the clouds, talking to people. You know, Wednesday was choir rehearsal. I spent a lot of time at church over the holidays.”
Mary Jane abruptly stopped talking and just started staring at Dietz. Dietz said nothing, simply waiting for Mary Jane to act, even as an awkward ten, twenty, thirty seconds passed and she continued her staring. And then, just as suddenly, she said, “You know, I like talking to you, always smiling and laughing,” and she entered into a short, uncontrolled laughing spell.
It was unlike anything Dietz had ever seen in a suspect before. Again, he decided to say nothing and simply wait for Mary Jane to stop laughing. Eventually, she did, and continued speaking.
“Today, I was at least glad to see people at the church. The last fourteen years…” she sighed, then continued. “That is my family. Fourteen years. All the problems I had with my pop. You know, he left and is missing.”
Dietz shook his head no.
“I was home to have an operation, but we were doing fine,” she said. “We got along pretty well, until a couple of cousins stopped by on a hit-and-run visit.”
Mary Jane’s tone remained neutral and unemotional just as it had been since she began talking, but Dietz could tell by the way she described the visit that the matter was a sore subject for her. He nodded in an affirmative manner, and she once again started to simply stare at Dietz. It was no less awkward than a moment ago, only this time, there was no laughing, no smile from Mary Jane.
“They just showed up from Hatboro,” she said. “They were old women, and they brought my pop a cake, and they just started getting him worked up. They came with this big surprise, it was late afternoon, and they pushed this cake at him and began lambasting me about how I don’t treat him right and I never do anything for him and we never go anywhere.”
Mary Jane was talking a bit faster now. “My father liked to stay at home, he liked to work around the house. They criticized me and stayed for about twenty minutes. I only wanted to do nice for him. They set my father off. I remember seeing his eyes, they got as big as saucers and he changed after that. They made him that way.”
Hoping to keep Mary Jane talking, Dietz said, “Is that right? I’m sorry to hear that.”
“My cousins, they are old and dead now,” Mary Jane said, matter-of-factly. “His personality changed. He was angry and Pop slammed the door and it went dead quiet like you could hear a pin drop. He went from happy to a solemn, quiet guy. This went on for about two or three weeks. I couldn’t reach that damn brother. His sleeping patterns changed. He used to stay up all night and sleep in late.”
Mary Jane touched her fingers to her throat, then said, “I am getting dry.” She took a sip from a water bottle Egan had brought her earlier, then started speaking again.
“I just accepted it. He wasn’t angry at me, just because…” she mumbled a few things, then continued. “A couple of weeks later, I heard him walking down the hallway to get the morning paper as usual. I got up and didn’t see him. Went outside, and the dog was there. Because he was a missing person, I called Chief Bell and the state police. I checked all around and I was heartbroken. Never, never found my dad. Talked to the neighbors. Where would an eighty-year-old go?”
Mary Jane’s
thought process seemed to be growing more fractured, less focused. She spoke in spurts of sentence fragments, and her voice trailed off until she stopped speaking altogether. Then, suddenly, she lifted her eyes to meet those of Dietz.
“I was a suspect,” she said. “They feel…”
Dietz stared back at Mary Jane, returning her gaze and waiting desperately to hear what she would say next. It was unbelievable to him that Mary Jane had brought up her father in the first place, without any prodding. And now, although Dietz had absolutely no expectation that Mary Jane might make a confession, it seemed she might be on the verge of one.
“Feel … feel sorry for her. She was popular, attractive, well liked.” Dietz realized that suddenly, somehow, Mary Jane had switched topics altogether. She was no longer speaking about her father at all, but rather of Rhonda Smith.
“Never got to know her,” she said. “I am older than everyone in the choir. Rhonda, the girl that was murdered, her mother is not much older than me. You know, I visited her mom and dad?”
Dietz shook his head no.
“I am depressed about this, what a terrible thing,” Mary Jane said. “At Easter breakfast, I sat down at their table at church. I was not chowing down. They had amazing food, anything you could want.”
Just like that, it was over. That growing agitation Dietz had detected since Mary Jane brought up her cousins had subsided, and she was talking about her visit to the church as if she was talking with a friend or fellow parishioner. Any hope for a confession had completely dissipated.
“I probably would have chowed down,” Dietz said, if only to keep the conversation moving.
“I don’t chow down like I used to, not much of an appetite,” she said. After a short period of silence, she added, “It was a beautiful, sunny day. I got my tray and started to eat, and got dizzy. You know, my diabetes. I went home and took some medicine and back. Struck me as funny. I…”