Love Me or Else

by Colin McEvoy

“My opinion was the weapon was submerged from between zero and two months,” said David Rusak, a University of Scranton chemistry professor.

  Applebaum asked whether it was possible the gun had been thrown in the lake, taken out and then thrown back again. Rusak said any scenario where the gun was underwater for less than two years was possible.

  While Ed Fonder was unemotional on the stand, Rhonda’s father, Jim, brought tears to the eyes of just about everyone in the courtroom with his testimony.

  Jim had pneumonia that day and had to be brought into the courthouse in a wheelchair. But despite being physically weak, Jim was emotionally strong. He proudly told the jury how much he loved his daughter and how proud he and his wife were of everything she had overcome.

  “We were very close,” he said. “Her nickname for me was Dad-e-o.”

  Jim spoke about how her bipolar disorder negatively affected her life and kept her from her dream profession as a teacher, but that despite it all she kept persevering.

  “She never gave up because of her bipolar and we are so proud of her,” he said.

  While Rhonda had her ups and downs, she was in a good mood when she called her father the morning she was killed.

  “She said, ‘Okay, Dad-e-o, I’m up and at ’em,’” Smith said. “And then we both started to laugh because she was in good spirits.”

  Applebaum pressed Smith on the theory that Rhonda could have committed suicide. But Smith, who remained collected throughout his testimony, strongly dismissed the suggestion.

  “Never, never,” he said. “She had every opportunity to commit suicide without anyone around. She had a vast amount of pills. Any night she could have taken too many.”

  * * *

  Following the public disclosure that Mary Jane’s motive for killing Rhonda was a perceived love triangle between him and the two women, Pastor Gregory Shreaves had repeatedly declined media interviews. But when he took the stand on the seventh day of the trial on October 28, he sought to clear up any and all the unanswered questions.

  Mary Jane’s infatuation with him was completely one-sided, he testified. He retold the story of the day Mary Jane confessed her feelings for him in his office and how he routinely ignored her frequent calls and rejected her presents to him for two years.

  He firmly denied having a romantic relationship with either Mary Jane or Rhonda, though Applebaum pressed him on his feelings for Rhonda. At one point, Applebaum picked up a photo of Rhonda and held it in front of Shreaves.

  “What do you see here?” Applebaum asked.

  What’s he getting at? Shreaves wondered. Does he expect me to break down weeping and say, ‘Oh, I miss my love Rhonda?’ Or say something like, ‘Boy, she’s a hot chick?’

  “I see Rhonda,” Shreaves said.

  “You didn’t notice she was a particularly attractive woman?” Applebaum asked.

  “I didn’t look at her in that way, no,” Shreaves replied.

  Applebaum believed he had made his point. In his opinion, Rhonda Smith was a very attractive woman. He felt Shreaves’s claims that he did not notice were phony, and he hoped the jury would agree.

  Applebaum had developed a genuine distrust of Shreaves. Part of it was the way the pastor had refused to allow him to visit the church and seek character witnesses for Mary Jane, which did not strike the defense attorney as very Christian behavior. It also had to do with Shreaves’s background as a golf pro. Why, he wondered, would a man like that end up a minister in a little church in Bucks County, as if he was hiding from his past.

  Although he never told the jury, Applebaum had even checked out Shreaves’s alibi to make sure he was indeed at a convention when Rhonda Smith was shot. He thought it was perfectly possible that Shreaves had gotten mixed up in an illicit relationship with Rhonda, and then tried to silence her. But, of course, Shreaves’s story had checked out, and there was no evidence the pastor had shown Rhonda any undue or extra attention.

  The attorney pointed to previous testimony that Rhonda hadn’t been talking to Shreaves as much as she usually did during the weeks before her death. Applebaum asked why that was, and why Rhonda wrote the words “pastor lied to me” in an entry in her diary?

  “I can’t think of any reason,” he said.

  Three other members of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church took the stand that day: Steve Wysocki, Sue Brunner, and Mary Brunner.

  Steve Wysocki, the church choir director, testified about how Mary Jane didn’t react when he called January 23 to tell her Rhonda had been found shot in the church.

  “I didn’t find there was any reaction about it or question about it like there had been with other choir members,” he said.

  During his cross-examination, Applebaum pointed out that Mary Jane had heard about Rhonda’s shooting before the choir director called her. Steve Wysocki said she made no mention of that to him. Steve also admitted, under questioning from Applebaum, that he had never noticed any animosity between Mary Jane and Rhonda before her death, and that he never witnessed anything other than a congenial relationship between them.

  “Did you ever have Mary Jane over to your house for tea and crumpets along with the rest of the choir?” Applebaum asked at one point.

  Steve explained Mary Jane had been to his house before when he invited all the choir members over. But after further questioning from Applebaum, he admitted he had never invited Mary Jane alone over for a visit without the rest of the choir. Applebaum emphasized this point, and suggested that Steve, along with the rest of the congregation, never made Mary Jane feel welcome.

  “Well, let’s be candid,” Applebaum said. “You didn’t really want to have Mary Jane at your house, is that correct?”

  “That’s not true,” Steve insisted.

  “Well, she’s highly talkative, right?” Applebaum asked.

  “She’s highly talkative.”

  “She’s annoying?” Applebaum asked.

  “I didn’t find her to be annoying, I found her to be Mary Jane,” Steve said. “And no, as we all try to do at our church, we accept and involve and work with and love those people. I tried to find ways, as I do with a lot of folks at the church, for people to use their gifts and their talents and services to the church and into its mission.”

  Later, Sue Brunner and Mary Brunner testified about how Mary Jane seemed depressed during the days before Rhonda died. Sue Brunner said Mary Jane told her on January 21 that she wasn’t going to be going to church for a while because she was depressed. Mary Brunner said Mary Jane told her on January 22 she was upset with the church’s choir and Bible study group members.

  “She said there’s a group of people that whisper behind her back and don’t include her and that made her sad,” Mary Brunner said.

  Applebaum used the Brunners’ statements to add weight to his argument no one ever heard Mary Jane say anything bad about Rhonda.

  “You weren’t aware of any bad feelings Mary Jane Fonder had toward Rhonda?” he asked Sue Brunner.

  “No, I wasn’t,” she responded. “I never saw them argue.”

  Also that day at trial, Trooper Gregg Dietz recalled Mary Jane’s long, rambling rant after she had been arrested.

  “Oh my God, they found my gun. It … is … threw away years ago,” he read from his report. “Someone used that gun.… It doesn’t look good for me.”

  Dietz also detailed the way Mary Jane lashed out at Pastor Shreaves after reading the arrest affidavit.

  “I had no reason to attack that girl. He’s a liar,” the trooper read. “Somebody had my gun. That pastor … what a cad.”

  * * *

  The prosecution wanted the jury to hear Mary Jane’s jealousy directly from her own mouth. So, on the eighth day of the trial, almost three hours of her February 25 interview with police was broadcast throughout the courtroom.

  “Lots of people think maybe my pastor was involved with that lady,” Mary Jane said through the tape recorder. “I wonder if the poor pastor was in love with that lady.” />
  Applebaum knew the interview was going to hurt his client in the eyes of the jury. He truly believed if she had simply declined to talk to police and kept her mouth shut, this could have been an open-and-closed not guilty verdict.

  I always wonder why people who watch television don’t understand the right to remain silent means the right to remain silent, Applebaum thought. She had the right, but she just didn’t have the ability, under any circumstance, to remain silent.

  But there was a flip side to the prosecution’s strategy: The jurors also got to hear Mary Jane repeatedly deny killing Rhonda.

  “I may have been upset. I have all kind of things to be upset about. But it had nothing to do with her,” she said in the interview. “I didn’t do anything to Rhonda.”

  The recording showed that Mary Jane was largely composed and forthcoming with police throughout the interview until they mentioned her wig was being tested for gunshot residue. Then her voice broke some as she asserted her innocence.

  “I’m sure that nothing appeared in my wig because I don’t have a gun and I didn’t do anything,” she said.

  Nearing the end of its case, the prosecution also addressed timeline issues from the day of the alleged murder, including how Mary Jane could have shot Rhonda at about 10:54 a.m. and arrived at a Quakertown hair salon at 11:22 a.m.

  The drive from Mary Jane’s house to the Springfield Township church was about five minutes, Egan testified. The drive from the church to the Holiday Hair salon was about fourteen minutes, he said.

  Stumpo testified how Mary Jane made a specific point to tell police she left her house for the hair salon at 11 o’clock, and arrived there at 11:30. The time of Rhonda’s death wasn’t public at the time of the interview, Stumpo said.

  “Only the person who committed a crime in a case like this would know what time it occurred,” he said.

  Applebaum pressed Stumpo on how authorities could have known when Rhonda was shot. Stumpo responded that Rhonda’s Internet activity abruptly stopped at 10:54 a.m.

  “It could have been someone stopped using the computer because they answered the telephone … or someone went to the restroom,” Applebaum said.

  Stumpo said both those cases were possible. The time of Rhonda’s shooting, then, was just a “guess,” Applebaum concluded.

  CHAPTER 38

  After eight days of prosecution testimony and jury selection, it was finally the defense’s turn to present their case. But as court resumed on the morning of October 30, it was announced the defense wouldn’t be presenting a case, including that Mary Jane wouldn’t testify.

  With the jury kept out of the courtroom, Applebaum asked Mary Jane to explain why she didn’t want to testify. He pointed to how the jury already had heard her say repeatedly in her taped interview with police that she had nothing to do with Rhonda’s death.

  “You would have repeated what you said before?” Applebaum asked.

  “That is correct,” Mary Jane answered.

  In the back of his mind, Applebaum questioned whether keeping Mary Jane off the stand was the right decision. Although he knew her tendency to chatter would lengthen the trial by at least ninety minutes, he also felt there was a chance that she would come across as a warm, friendly, Christian woman to the jury. Thomas Joachim, on the other hand, insisted that keeping her off the stand was the right move. Mary Jane simply talked too much, and there was no telling what Zellis could persuade her to say on cross-examination.

  And with that, both the defense and prosecution rested.

  It was a surprise to many people that Applebaum didn’t present more of a case, but Zellis imagined Mary Jane didn’t leave him a choice. He didn’t know for sure, because attorney-client privilege prevented Applebaum from discussing it, but Zellis imagined that if it were up to him, Applebaum probably would have pursued an insanity defense. But to seek such a defense, Mary Jane would have to admit that she killed Rhonda Smith, even if she didn’t realize what she was doing at the time.

  In Zellis’s opinion, Mary Jane would never do that. That church was her life, and she would rather go to prison for the rest of her life than admit to her fellow congregants that she did something like this. That’s why Zellis was sure that Applebaum must have at least considered an insanity defense, but that Mary Jane ultimately tied his hands.

  As was customary, Applebaum gave his closing statement first. But this time, his closing argument differed from that of his opening statement. Rather than pointing to the possibility of suicide or one of Rhonda’s boyfriends committing the murder, Applebaum turned the spotlight on Ed Fonder, claiming he was a much more believable suspect than Mary Jane.

  He pointed out how suspicious it was that Ed Fonder hired a lawyer after finding bullet fragments in his car.

  “There’s just as much evidence against Ed Fonder as there is Mary Jane,” Applebaum said. “In fact, even more.”

  Applebaum’s suspicions about his client’s brother had been growing for some time. When he first met Mary Jane and Ed together, Ed was unequivocal in stating that Mary Jane left her house for her hair salon appointment at a time that would have made killing Rhonda impossible. Later, however, Ed seemed less confident about the timing and reluctant to go on the record about it, which made Applebaum suspicious.

  The defense attorney also had his doubts about Ed’s supposed discovery of bullet fragments in his car. Applebaum had been inside Ed’s home before, and it was squalid. It was so filthy that Thomas Joachim couldn’t even step foot in the place because of his allergies. Applebaum found it hard to believe that Ed’s car would be sufficiently clean that he would notice tiny bullet fragments. And while Ed claimed he noticed it because of the sunlight reflecting off the metal, Applebaum felt their house was too deep into the woods for that to have been possible.

  Ed Fonder could have found his sister’s gun and used it to kill Rhonda, Applebaum argued. Rhonda had been helping Mary Jane find an apartment and that could have angered her brother, the defense attorney said. He might have grown upset at the prospect of losing her company or, perhaps more importantly, her Social Security income, so he murdered Rhonda for trying to take her away from him.

  “The last time she tried to move, he got angry,” Applebaum said. “Did he lose it and take the gun and shoot Rhonda? I don’t know.”

  Now, he argued, Ed Fonder was letting his sister take the fall. Not only did this protect himself from prosecution for the murder, but also he now stood to inherit the entire house if his sister were imprisoned. Even Joachim, who was less confident in Mary Jane’s innocence than Applebaum, had to admit it was strange that Ed would have so willingly come forward to police with the bullet fragments, something that could prove to be so damaging to his sister’s case.

  Zellis wasn’t particularly surprised by this new tactic from Applebaum, which he regarded as smoke and mirrors to distract the jurors. Zellis wasn’t even surprised Applebaum waited until the closing statement to spring it on the jury. He probably wanted to wait until the jurors heard testimony from Ed Fonder and got a sense for how strange he seemed, Zellis thought. The police had looked into Ed Fonder during their investigation, of course, but everything he told authorities checked out. In the end, they simply believed that he didn’t have the motive, while his sister did.

  As Zellis expected, Applebaum also pointed to the phone call to the church at 12:07 p.m. the day Rhonda was killed. The two-minute call, he argued, was evidence that Rhonda was still alive at that time.

  “Sometime between 12:07 and 12:45 is when she was shot, not 10:54,” Applebaum said. “We know where Mary Jane Fonder was. She had signed in at Holiday Hair.… It was physically impossible for her to be at the church.”

  Zellis argued against some of Applebaum’s assertions in his closing argument. He finally was able to refute Applebaum’s claims about the phone call by pointing out that the church answering machine likely picked up the 12:07 p.m. phone call. Zellis also stressed that Ed Fonder did the right thing by turning in th
e bullet fragments found in his car and then getting an attorney.

  Mary Jane Fonder had a motive to kill Rhonda and her brother did not, Zellis said. He again pointed out her jealously and how she did not feel accepted by the perceived clique at the church.

  “She’s a murderer and all the evidence points to it,” Zellis concluded.

  And with that, closing arguments concluded.

  Around noon on the ninth day of the trial, after Judge Boylan gave the jury its direction, the twelve jurors started their deliberations.

  * * *

  Judy and Sue stepped into the court hallway as Judge Boylan cleared the courtroom. They had been present for all nine days of the trial, and their emotions were running especially high now that the jury was about to deliberate. As Judy excused herself to the restroom, Sue couldn’t help but run through the defense attorney’s arguments over and over in her head. All those things the police hadn’t done, the sloppiness of the investigators, the carelessness in their search of Mary Jane’s car.

  Maybe the jury won’t feel they have enough evidence, Sue thought. Maybe she’ll be found not guilty. It was a horrifying notion. The seven months since Mary Jane was arrested had put a terrible strain on the Trinity Evangelical community, and people were terrified at the thought of Mary Jane coming back. If she were somehow acquitted, Sue knew the church couldn’t possibly survive.

  As Sue stood waiting for Judy to return, she glanced over at three men talking among themselves. She recognized them as three of the four alternate jurors, who also had just been dismissed. Two of them in particular seemed to be very animated in their hand motions, and Sue couldn’t help but eavesdrop on their conversation. The more she heard, however, the more the pit in her stomach tightened: It sounded like they believed Mary Jane was innocent!

  One of the alternates noticed Sue standing alone. Recognizing her as one of the prosecution witnesses, he approached her and started discussing the case, confirming all of Sue’s fears. The alternate indeed felt Mary Jane was innocent, and expressed confidence that she would be set free. The police didn’t do their job, he said. They should have done more careful tests during the car search, should have been more extensive in their investigation.