by Colin McEvoy
“I just wish she had said something to Rhonda,” Jim said that day. “Instead of doing this, if she’d just said something to her. Rhonda would have helped her. That’s how she was.”
Nevertheless, the Smiths were relieved that somebody had finally been arrested, and knew they were lucky that the gun had been stumbled upon the way it was; Jim made a mental note to give $100 to Garrett Sylsberry if he ever got to meet the boy. Gary Smith called his parents the day of the arrest and expressed shock at one particular detail he gleamed from the news reports: that the gun was found in Lake Nockamixon. The very same lake where Jim would often take his children for fishing trips.
“Can you believe it?” Gary said. “After all this time, can you believe the lake came back to reward us?”
Throngs of reporters knocked on the Smiths’ door that afternoon, and Jim and Dorothy politely took each one into their house and spoke to them, one after the other. Jim sat in his favorite living room chair, next to a table with framed photos of Rhonda, and proudly shared with each reporter the four-page letter Rhonda had written to him the Easter before she died, thanking him for helping her get through her bipolar disorder.
When asked how he felt about Mary Jane, Jim refused to discuss it, insisting he would wait for the courts to handle that matter. “We can never have Rhonda back anyway, so I don’t want to judge anybody.” When one reporter expressed that this must be a difficult day for the family, Jim shook his head no. For months, he had been enduring speculation and gossip that Rhonda had committed suicide, something he knew was impossible. After everything she had overcome in her life, he knew his daughter hadn’t killed herself, and now at last everybody else knew it as well.
“You can see how good I feel on my face,” he said to the reporter. “You know why? Because she’s free. She lost her life, but she didn’t lose her name.”
* * *
As reporters spoke to the Smiths, others were calling practically everybody involved in the Mary Jane Fonder case. Doug Sylsberry fielded several calls at his Quakertown home, but was careful to protect Garrett from the limelight and did not let anyone speak to his son. The press seemed to particularly love the detail of the eight-year-old boy finding the gun, and he had already heard his name mentioned several times on the television broadcasts.
“You’re a real celebrity now!” his mother said to him, to which Garrett simply shrugged in response.
Doug similarly downplayed their role in Mary Jane’s arrest. “We just wanted to do the right thing as any citizen should,” he said during one telephone interview. As he explained where and how the gun had been found, Doug took a few moments to point out that this crime should not be reflective of all gun owners.
“I’m proud of my Second Amendment rights,” he told The Express-Times, the Easton-based newspaper. “It’s important everyone does what they can to keep gun crime down so people who enjoy their rights can enjoy them for a long time to come.”
Meanwhile, Paul Rose served as the press spokesman for Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church with the help of Robert Fisher, an assistant to the bishop in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod. Paul and Robert stood in the church parking lot while a seemingly endless stream of reporters and news vans pulled in to speak with him, or snap photos and record video of the two men or the church itself.
It was not a pleasant experience for Paul, who quickly grew tired of answering the same questions over and over, and of the barely veiled attempts by reporters to elicit some sort of shocked quote or sound bite from him.
It’s either this, or paying my taxes back home, he thought. I think I’d rather be paying my taxes.
Paul was distrustful of how the press might spin the story. They’ll find three words to fit together to say whatever they want to say, he thought. Particularly due to Mary Jane’s feelings for Shreaves, Paul feared they would portray the murder as some sort of a love triangle, and that people might wrongly conclude that Shreaves was involved with Rhonda, or Mary Jane, or both.
Paul tried to convey to the reporters that this was not only a tragedy, but also a test for the entire church congregation, an opportunity for them to respond like Christians in the face of a terrible tragedy.
“We are going to rise above this,” Paul told several reporters. “We will gather together in Christian fellowship and remind ourselves that our faith will get us through this.”
Robert pledged to The Morning Call that the synod would do whatever it could to get the community through this period. “This is going to be a difficult time,” he said. “We are saddened and perplexed that this kind of violence occurs within the church family.”
But Paul didn’t want to portray Mary Jane as a complete monster in all of this. After all, she had been with the church for nearly fifteen years, and had always seemed like a happy and friendly person, despite her obvious peculiarities. At the very least, she was entitled to her rights of due process just like anybody else, Paul felt. She deserved to be considered innocent until proven guilty.
Paul made sure to point out some of the good things Mary Jane had done for the church over the years, like the time she made paintings of the church on old stone slates when the steeple was replaced a few years earlier. After all, he had known Mary Jane for twelve years, and barely ever got to know Rhonda, who participated in activities at the church that Paul was less involved with.
“You’d never think she’d do something like this,” Paul said of Mary Jane. “She seemed so harmless.” Stressing that he meant no disrespect toward Rhonda, he added about Mary Jane, “The woman’s been caught, but she hadn’t been convicted. So for all we know, she’s innocent.”
CHAPTER 31
For the most part, Pastor Gregory Shreaves himself avoided the many press inquiries directed at him, although he did speak briefly to The Philadelphia Inquirer, to whom he expressed his disbelief at Mary Jane’s arrest.
“Not in my wildest dreams, no one in the congregation could imagine that it could have led to this,” he told the paper. When asked how he would lead the congregation through this time, he responded, “I’m going to have to just pray that I’ll be given the right words to say.”
But, of course, Shreaves had known for weeks that the police were focusing their efforts on Mary Jane, and he had long since grown convinced she was the one who killed Rhonda. Although the despair he voiced to the Inquirer was genuine, the single strongest emotion Shreaves felt following the arrest was relief. He no longer had to live in fear that Mary Jane would lash out and hurt him or someone else, no longer had to feel that sense of dread during his church sermons or when he went to bed at night in his own house.
But the media reports following the arrest were particularly painful for Shreaves to read. Mary Jane had retained an attorney named Michael Applebaum, a defense lawyer with a strong reputation in the area. In his younger years he worked as a longshoreman on the docks of Philadelphia, and traces of that working-class background could still be detected in Applebaum’s rough voice and his slightly rugged face.
Nevertheless, Applebaum was known for his gregarious and conversational approach, which allowed him to engage his juries and make them laugh. He had worked four murder cases before taking Mary Jane as a client. One of his best-known cases involved the 1994 murder of Philadelphia teenager Eddie Polec, a sixteen-year-old who was beaten to death with bats by high school kids on the front steps of a church. Applebaum defended the eighteen-year-old Bou Khathavong. In a controversial split ruling, three of the boys were found guilty of murder, one was found guilty of manslaughter and conspiracy to murder, and two others, including Applebaum’s client, were convicted only of conspiracy to commit murder. His client served five years in prison.
Mary Jane had contacted Applebaum shortly after her lengthy February 25 interview at the Dublin state police barracks. She and her brother, Ed, met in Applebaum’s Allentown office with his associate attorney, Thomas Joachim, who would become second chair alongside Applebaum for her defense.
Joachim was a bit overwhelmed upon first meeting Mary Jane, who spoke incessantly and appeared to be in a panic. It was very difficult to keep her focused, and Joachim at first did not understand why she had even wanted to meet with them.
“I think I’m a suspect in a homicide case,” Mary Jane had conveyed at the time.
She explained how two state troopers had interviewed her on multiple occasions, and how she felt they had become accusatory toward her during the conclusion of their most recent interview, which lasted nearly four hours.
“I can’t understand why the police are focusing on me,” Mary Jane told Joachim. “I just want the interviews to stop.”
Following her arrest, Applebaum spoke to the press on behalf of his client: “From what we’ve determined, she’s a good Christian, very active in her church, and hardly knew this woman except from the church. She bore her no ill will.”
Many reporters were asking whether Mary Jane suffered from some form of mental illness and, although Applebaum said he did not have enough information to answer, he was quick to identify her many physical health problems, including diabetes, arthritis, and high blood pressure.
“It all happened very suddenly,” he said of her arrest. “She is very distraught. She’s never had any run-ins with the police or been arrested. She’s been uprooted from her home of twenty-one years.”
Applebaum began to paint a portrait of his client as a kindly old woman who loved her church and its congregants, but was not loved in return. He even went so far as to compare their treatment of Mary Jane to the Salem witch trials. Applebaum believed that Mary Jane did not match the type of member the other congregants wanted at their church, so they shunned her.
It was uncanny how fast they threw her to the wolves because she was the odd one, Applebaum thought privately about his client. They speak the words of the Christian philosophy, but they don’t act it. It’s directly contrary to what they preach.
Although his public statements about the church weren’t quite as extreme, Applebaum made clear to reporters there were cliques at the church from which Mary Jane was completely excluded, and hinted that the pastor was not there for Mary Jane when he should have been.
It was difficult for Shreaves to see his church portrayed as insensitive or uncompassionate toward Mary Jane. He felt as if a mirror was being held up to the congregation, and they were being forced to face a hard truth about themselves.
Some, like Paul Rose, believed the idea of cliques at Trinity Evangelical was nonsense, nothing more than a smokescreen presented by Mary Jane’s lawyer that the press was eating up because it made for a better story. But Shreaves had a more pragmatic view. He knew there were cliques at the church, but he felt all churches had their cliques. There are cliques everywhere. But Applebaum’s statements only added weight to a guilt Shreaves had been carrying since the murder.
What did I do wrong? he would often think. What could I have done better? There must have been something I did to cause this, or something I could have done to prevent it.
What bothered Shreaves even more than those accusations, however, were Mary Jane’s own words. He hated to read about the feelings Mary Jane apparently harbored for him, and worried about the many different ways people could misinterpret his own role in her imaginary love triangle. He couldn’t imagine anybody from the church believing that he’d had a relationship with Mary Jane, but outsiders were free to form whatever opinion they wanted. The idea that somebody could suspect him of having some romantic involvement with his congregants—whether Rhonda, Mary Jane or otherwise—left Shreaves feeling truly uncomfortable.
But nothing bothered him more than the reports of what Mary Jane told police during her various interviews about her fears that Shreaves had fallen in love with Rhonda and gotten involved in something he shouldn’t have. As if she was some sort of motherly figure trying to protect the naïve pastor who was in over his head.
It burns me up, he thought as he read those reports. What the hell does she know about that stuff? Let me deal with that stuff.
The day after the arrest, Mary Jane Fonder was not far from the thoughts of anybody at Trinity Evangelical. In a way, it was as if she was still at the church, her presence looming over every congregant no matter how much they might like to avoid her. Choir practice proceeded as scheduled that day, but few were able to concentrate on the music. Most of the ladies were still reeling from the shock, the idea never having crossed their mind that it was one of their own congregants, let alone the sixty-five-year-old Mary Jane.
“Do you know anything?” Many of them asked Judy Zellner. “What’s going on? What do you know?”
But although Judy had known more than most about the case, she really had nothing satisfactory to tell them, short of what was already being reported in the news. Most of the choir members said nothing, keeping their thoughts silent, but tension bubbled to the surface after Sue Brunner made a remark to Judy about her surprise over what Mary Jane did.
“Well, how do you know she did it?” snapped one of the congregants. “I don’t think they proved she did it! How do you know she did it? I don’t think she did it!”
A few others voiced support for Mary Jane, but they were few and far between. Some congregants wrote letters to Mary Jane in prison. Others supported Mary Jane in silence. One day, Judy noticed one of Mary Jane’s old paintings was hanging in the choir room. I don’t want to look at it and be reminded of her, Judy thought, and she took it down. The next day, however, Judy was surprised to see that somebody had hung it back up just where it had been. It has remained there ever since.
Reta Bieber maintained a regular correspondence with Mary Jane after her arrest. In the face of the evidence against her, Reta believed Mary Jane probably did kill Rhonda. But Mary Jane had always been sweet and kind to Reta in the past, and to her the woman who could have committed this crime was not the Mary Jane she knew.
That was just another side of her I had never seen and never expected to see, Reta thought. She was always pleasant to me. I have no reason not to write to her.
Although Paul Rose did not write to her, his own thoughts mirrored those of Reta. Despite his pleas that the media not rush to judge Mary Jane too quickly, he believed she had committed the murder, especially after David Zellis met with congregation members to explain the case they had against her. Zellis hadn’t gone into too much detail, but just enough to set the church members’ minds at ease, as neither the prosecutors nor the church council wanted them to learn all the sordid details from the press first.
“We’ve got a terrific case,” Zellis assured them. “It’s one of the most solid cases we’ve ever had.”
But even though Paul was convinced of Mary Jane’s guilt, he also felt there was still a lot of good left inside her.
There is a good Mary Jane and a bad Mary Jane, and the good Mary Jane had no idea what happened, Paul believed. In her right mind, she’s a very nice person. She just lost her way.
That, however, was not the prevailing attitude around Trinity Evangelical. Few openly discussed Mary Jane, and those that did often spoke of her with scorn or disgust. It was not uncommon for Shreaves to hear the words, “She got what she deserved,” “She’s guilty,” or “She’s where she belongs,” whispered from the corners of his church, and it disturbed him.
Although a large part of him was angry with Mary Jane, he didn’t feel it was right for the congregation to feel any sense of victory or superiority over her. Mary Jane’s arrest should be a sad thing, he thought. A tragedy, not a triumph. He did not want people to simply dismiss what Mary Jane did as the work of a two-dimensional monster, and preached about the fact that anybody was, in a way, capable of murder. Just because we don’t murder with a gun, he said, doesn’t mean we don’t murder with a pen, or with a vote, or by spending money on products from a company that uses child labor. He didn’t want people to feel they were superior to Mary Jane because she did something they would never do.
But Shreaves soon f
ound that forgiveness toward someone close to the congregation, someone known to them, was far more difficult than forgiveness toward someone anonymous to them. To forgive a nameless and faceless person was easy, but when it was someone in their midst, they couldn’t just speak it. They had to live it out. It reminded Shreaves of the ease at which his congregants discussed evil when spoken in abstract terms, but that when it was visited upon their doorstep, it became another matter entirely.
Shreaves found himself in a situation that reminded him of Dead Man Walking, the story of Sister Helen Prejean, which was adapted into a film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. Sister Prejean established a bond with Matthew Poncelot, a prisoner on death row for the murder of a teenage couple. Shreaves often thought of Sister Prejean and the difficult role she played, attempting to serve as a pastor for the convict and maintain respect for the victims and their families, all while attempting to reconcile her own conflicted feelings and deal with the criticism from those who felt the killer deserved no counsel or comfort whatsoever.
Mary Jane Fonder was still on the Trinity Evangelical prayer list, and Shreaves decided he would leave her name there despite the arrest. The decision did not come without conflict for him, but ultimately he felt it was the right thing to do. To take her off the prayer list, Shreaves thought, does that mean we’ve stopped thinking about her or praying for her?
In the end, she was still technically a member of the church, he thought. People didn’t have to pray for her if they didn’t want to.
But the decision proved to be particularly controversial among the congregation. Just the presence of the name alone was enough to discomfort some, and anger others. Tempers flared even further after one of the congregants posted Mary Jane’s prison address at the church, in case anyone wanted to send her letters of support. When Shreaves declined to take the listing down, one man even went so far as to call him at home and threaten him.