Love Me or Else

by Colin McEvoy

  It’s amazing, he thought, shaking his head. The biggest denial I’ve ever seen.

  CHAPTER 41

  On March 6, 2009, almost three months after Mary Jane’s sentencing, the lawsuit over Mary Jane’s alleged theft of her father’s pension payments was resolved. Under a settlement agreed upon by both Mary Jane and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.—and signed by Ed Fonder in his sister’s place—the pension payments were discontinued and the Fonders agreed to repay all benefits paid after August 25, 2000, the seven-year anniversary of their father’s disappearance, when he could be legally presumed dead.

  As for Mary Jane Fonder herself, David Zellis later learned that life at the Bucks County Correctional Facility wasn’t quite as difficult for her as one would expect. She had always been a woman who loved to talk and now she had a captive audience, one that couldn’t easily slip away from her. Since the jail didn’t have many elderly tenants, Mary Jane took on a kind of grandmotherly role to the other inmates. They liked having her around and listening to her, and Mary Jane reveled in the attention.

  Once she moved to the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, however, it appeared that was all about to change. The maximum-security facility was much more restrictive than county jail. She said inmates were kept in their cells all but one hour a day and given limited time outside or opportunities for social interaction with the other prisoners. Mary Jane found the atmosphere distressing, and complained about it during a hearing in late February 2009 to determine whether she was eligible for a public defender.

  “It’s terrible, just terrible. I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s not like the Bucks County prison at all. Just a lot of restrictions.”

  The complaint was comical to some, and infuriating to others. As one reader wrote in a letter published in The Express-Times, “Since when is prison supposed to be fun? The last time I checked, you went to prison to be punished, not party.”

  But soon, Mary Jane appeared to adapt to life in Muncy as well. Just as in Bucks County, she developed a small network of friends among the inmates who listened to her stories, helped do her hair and treated her like their own grandmother. The strict routine of prison life, in a way, was healthy for Mary Jane. She lost more than fifty pounds over the next year, eliminating the need to take diabetes medicine and making her look like a different woman than from the television and newspaper images during the trial. Soon she was painting again, mostly birds and other images from nature.

  This newly discovered sense of community was upsetting to some, including members of Rhonda Smith’s family. Jim Smith, in particular, said on one occasion, “There she is, happy in prison, and here we are without our daughter.”

  Many members of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church felt the same way, but Pastor Shreaves looked at it a bit differently. He still harbored anger, of course, and meant in no way to belittle the loss that the Smiths had suffered. But he had long suspected, even hoped, that Mary Jane might find a niche for herself in prison the likes of which she never found in her own life. Now, it appeared she had indeed found a community that welcomed and embraced her, and Shreaves felt it was God’s grace that allowed it to happen. Everybody deserved that feeling of comfort and belonging, he felt. Even Mary Jane Fonder.

  But despite all of this, Mary Jane continued for months to adamantly insist she did not kill Rhonda Smith. At every court hearing, every reporter’s inquiry, every given opportunity, she would lift her chin and assert her innocence, just as she had throughout her arrest, trial, and sentencing. Stumpo, Egan, Zellis, and practically everyone involved in the investigation believed Mary Jane would never take responsibility for the crime, in part because it would mean admitting to the church congregation—a congregation she still felt herself to be a part of, even now—that she had lied to them.

  “I’m convinced she convinced herself that she had nothing to do with this, and a lot of it is because of her relationship with the other church members,” Zellis later said. “The church was her only life. She doesn’t want any of those people to think badly of her. She wants them to remember her in a good light and correspond with her, to pray for her. That church is her lifeline, and if she admitted to doing this, that lifeline would be cut off.”

  But before the first year of her prison sentence was complete, Mary Jane Fonder would come to a revelation that, once again, would shock everyone.

  * * *

  Mary Jane Fonder awoke with a gasp one night in her cramped Muncy prison cell. She had been having a nightmare, one of several she had experienced in the last few months. In it, she had been back at the Bucks County Courthouse, sitting next to Michael Applebaum behind the defense table as the judge and jury listened to David Zellis argue for her incarceration. Dreams about her trial were not uncommon for Mary Jane. In fact, she’d been experiencing them almost since the trial first began. But lately, they had grown both in frequency and intensity, and they shared a common element that her previous nightmares never had.

  Rhonda Smith was there.

  Rhonda never spoke in Mary Jane’s dreams. She simply stood there in the courtroom, unnoticed by anyone else, staring at Mary Jane Fonder. It was as if everything else around Rhonda was a blur: Zellis’s arguments, the murmuring of the audience, Applebaum shuffling his papers, Mary Jane could barely hear or register any of it. All she took notice of was Rhonda Smith staring at her with a deadpan expression, one horrifying enough to jolt Mary Jane from her slumber.

  As Mary Jane sat there on her prison bed, her mind still racing from having been jolted awake, she experienced an emotion she had never felt before. It wasn’t guilt, not exactly, it was more of a sadness that Rhonda was gone. A feeling of grief. And suddenly Mary Jane realized that in all this time—the day Rhonda was killed, the difficult months at the church that followed, the interviews with the police, the arrest, the trial, the sentencing—she had never really mourned the loss of Rhonda Smith.

  How could that be? Mary Jane asked herself. A member of her church was murdered, shot to death in cold blood right inside her own church, and she never even felt sorry for the woman? Mary Jane thought back to those horrible days in January 2008, but found her recollection a bit fuzzy. She couldn’t even remember the day of Rhonda’s death very well.

  What she remembered, instead, was a choir practice at the church one Wednesday, one week before Rhonda was killed. Practice had ended and, as Mary Jane was getting her things together, suddenly everybody was gone. The choir room, the kitchen, the church office, they were all empty. She assumed everyone had gone home, but then she found Pastor Shreaves in the social hall. Mary Jane said hello and Shreaves looked back at her, an odd frown on his face. He looked at her for a few moments, continuing to frown, then left through one of the exits.

  Mary Jane believed everybody from the choir had gone home, but when she went out to her car, she noticed a lot of cars in the parking lot. Then she remembered that it was January 16, the day before Rhonda Smith’s birthday. They must be having a birthday party for her, Mary Jane decided at the time.

  A party she wasn’t invited to.

  That must be why Shreaves was frowning at Mary Jane, she thought, although she couldn’t quite pinpoint why. Maybe he was upset with the other choir ladies for not inviting Mary Jane? Or maybe Shreaves didn’t want her at the party, and was frowning because he was worried she would find out about it?

  The memory of this choir practice wasn’t a new revelation for Mary Jane. In fact, she had even mentioned it to Stumpo and Egan during that four-hour police interview back in February, although the significance of it was lost at the time. Both Shreaves and the ladies of the choir would later tell police that there was no such birthday party, and they weren’t sure why Mary Jane came to that conclusion.

  But what shocked Mary Jane now wasn’t the memory of that choir practice, but how poor her memory was in the week that followed it. Everything felt like a blur after that, all the way up to the day Rhonda died. She only remembered feeling like she was in a v
ery frantic mood, like she could snap at any moment. A feeling like those she used to have in her past … during her breakdowns.…

  Oh my God, Mary Jane thought. I think I might have had something to do with it. With what happened to Rhonda.

  Mary Jane now believed that, at the time of Rhonda’s death, she was having one of the emotional breakdowns she had been experiencing every seven years or so since she was eight years old. Like the one that had left her suicidal and institutionalized when she was sixteen. It all seemed to make sense to Mary Jane, it just seemed to fit. The stress and despair over not being invited to Rhonda’s birthday party—a birthday party that never occurred in the first place—seemed to trigger a period of anxiety and hysterical emotions for Mary Jane.

  When she suffered her breakdowns, those periods tended to last for about a week. The exact period of time between that choir practice and the day Rhonda Smith was murdered, on January 23.

  Mary Jane still didn’t remember killing Rhonda Smith—or at least that’s what she would later tell people. She remembered calling the church two days before Rhonda’s death and, upon hearing Rhonda’s voice, hanging up in surprise. She remembered growing jealous that Rhonda was asked to answer the phones instead of her, something the police had long insisted, but that Mary Jane claimed she didn’t recall before. She still didn’t remember going to the church on January 23 or speaking to Rhonda that day, but she suddenly had hazy memories of going that morning to Lake Towhee, a small lake and park in nearby Haycock Township. That was something she did not recall when the police interviewed her after the murder.

  She claimed not to remember planning to kill Rhonda. She insisted she couldn’t remember loading the gun, bringing it with her to the church, pulling the trigger. But with these nightmares, and the new memories and emotions that led them to her, coupled with all the evidence presented against her at trial, she now believed that she had killed Rhonda Smith.

  “I’m thinking, all this evidence … It sounds like it to me. I have to be realistic about it,” she would later say. “I can’t believe I let everyone down. What an end this is.”

  Mary Jane continued to insist, however, that she had nothing to do with the disappearance and presumed death of her father.

  * * *

  By this point, Mary Jane was pursuing an appeal through a court-appointed attorney, having claimed her trial counsel from Michael Applebaum was ineffective. It was a fairly common tactic following a guilty verdict, and one Zellis and the police had little concern would prove effective. Zellis truly believed Applebaum provided the best possible defense he could have, especially considering that Mary Jane appeared to have tied his hands by forbidding him from pursuing an insanity defense.

  But in February 2010, Mary Jane rendered the argument moot when she formally withdrew the ongoing appeal, something she had apparently planned to do for some time following her jailhouse revelations. Some, however, argued it was more related to money: She was eligible for a public defender, but would have had to put up for collateral the $400,000 Kintnersville home she co-owned with her brother.

  Prior to officially withdrawing the appeal, Mary Jane Fonder shared with reporters the alleged realizations she came to in prison, first published in a December 2009 article in The Express-Times, then in a January 2010 article in The Intelligencer. Despite falling short of a full-blown confession, Mary Jane’s partial admission of guilt came as a shock to practically everyone involved in the case, especially Stumpo, Egan, and Zellis.

  “I never thought I would live to see the day when Mary Jane Fonder would take any responsibility for the murder of Rhonda Smith,” Zellis told The Express-Times, adding, “Tragically, that doesn’t bring Rhonda Smith back to life.”

  But as is usually the case with Mary Jane Fonder, the announcement did not leave the matter entirely clear.

  Neither Zellis nor Stumpo and Egan believed Mary Jane’s claim that she could not remember actually shooting and killing Rhonda. They believed she was too cunning and calculating, that the murder was obviously premeditated, and that Mary Jane took too many steps to cover her tracks for that to have been the case.

  They recalled how, once suspicion fell upon her, she baked a pie to comfort the grieving Smith family, ordered a memorial statue in Rhonda’s honor for the church, and sent sympathy cards to fellow congregants. Upon realizing the police were going to learn from phone records that she had called Rhonda two days before the murder, Mary Jane not only told police that information, but went out of her way to make sure others in the church knew it, too, in case police started asking them questions.

  This was a woman who thought she could outsmart the police, the authorities believed, just like she thought she did when they were investigating the disappearance of her father. This was not the behavior of someone who could not remember what she had done.

  Likewise, suspicion remained among members of the church. Judy Zellner, for one, found little comfort in Mary Jane’s partial confession.

  “I don’t like all this, ‘I can’t remember,’ ‘The evidence is against me,’ all of this,” she later said. “I wish she would just come out and say, ‘Yes, I did it.’”

  Michael Applebaum and Thomas Joachim were very surprised to read about Mary Jane’s new admissions. She had never given them any indication she had shot Rhonda, nor did she ever tell them about these breakdowns from her past. If she had, Joachim believed they definitely would have pursued an insanity defense, or perhaps a plea bargain with the prosecution. If she had not tied their hands by insisting upon her innocence, Joachim wondered, what might the outcome of her trial had been?

  For Jim and Dorothy Smith, Mary Jane’s words brought no closure. But then again, there was no closure to be had. The arrest, the trial, the conviction, none of it was going to bring back their daughter. And, once the investigation and trial were no longer there to distract them, the pain of their loss only grew stronger as time passed.

  But Jim said he did find at least a tiny bit of comfort in the fact that Mary Jane was starting to realize the pain she had inflicted on those who knew and loved Rhonda Smith.

  “It makes us feel good, the fact that she’s coming out in the open with this,” Jim told The Express-Times. “I was asked by reporters at the court, and I said she has to think about what she did to Rhonda. That’s what she did.”

  EPILOGUE

  For his role in leading the Rhonda Smith murder investigation, Gregory Stumpo was named the 2009 Trooper of the Year for the Pennsylvania State Police’s Troop M, which included the barracks for Dublin, Bethlehem, Belfast, Fogelsville, and Trevose.

  “That case was a very, very complicated case,” said Captain D. Michelle Turk, the troop’s commanding officer, during a ceremony on May 1, 2009. “He was very tenacious.”

  Also honored at the same ceremony were Doug Sylsberry and his now-nine-year-old son Garrett, who received Meritorious Citizenship Awards for finding and turning in the murder weapon.

  “They could have easily kept the gun or thrown it back in the lake,” Turk said of the Sylsberrys at the ceremony. “They did what’s right.”

  Stumpo continues to work for the criminal investigations unit at the Dublin barracks.

  Robert Egan retired from the Pennsylvania State Police after twenty-five years of service in late 2008, almost immediately after Mary Jane was sentenced. The next May, he was selected by Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli to spearhead a new task force investigating the county’s cold cases. In October 2010, Egan and Trooper Raymond Judge, who also worked on the Mary Jane Fonder case, made their first cold case arrest with Lucinda Andrews, a fifty-five-year-old woman accused of shooting John Joseph Mayerchak to death in his Northampton County apartment in September 1985. Andrews pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in August 2011 and was sentenced to ten to twenty years in state prison.

  Egan continues pursuing other cold cases, including the unsolved murder of Charlotte Fimiano, a real estate agent found shot and strangled to death in
Lower Saucon Township on September 12, 1997. Egan had worked as an investigator on the Fimiano case and, out of more than seventy-five homicide cases over the course of his quarter-century career, it is the only one that has gone unsolved.

  David Zellis made an unsuccessful bid for Bucks County judge in 2009. Since he was not an active politician throughout his career, he was not endorsed by either of the two major political parties, and his campaign lacked funding from local attorneys. In August 2011, Zellis departed from the Bucks Country District Attorney’s office to start his own defense law practice, Zellis Law. He had been an assistant district attorney for twenty-six years, the longest tenure in the county’s history.”

  The Mary Jane Fonder case marked the first time law enforcement authorities in Bucks County ever handled gunshot residue in the course of their investigation. They learned from the questions Michael Applebaum raised during the trial about how the state police searched for gunshot residue in Mary Jane’s car. In response, Zellis set up a meeting between local law enforcement officials to develop a new search procedure that included far more precautions to limit any possible gunshot residue transfer from police uniforms and guns. In the future, Zellis believes, gunshot residue searches will be handled with a great deal more care.

  Gregory Shreaves remains pastor of the Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, where the congregation membership has struggled to heal, but has for the most part remained intact. Mary Jane Fonder continues to contribute financially to the church from prison, and, to this day, she remains on the church prayer list.

  Jim and Dorothy Smith continue to live in Lower Saucon Township and attend Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church. On occasion, Jim feels some of his fellow parishioners do not feel comfortable having them around and would rather they find a new church, but that has only strengthened his resolve to remain. The Smiths started a memorial scholarship in Rhonda’s name at her alma mater, Saucon Valley High School. The church has donated toward it.