Deadly Vows

by Leif M. Wright

  “Okay,” Tefft said. “You came here first, then went to the Sheriff’s Department. You had some conversations with them there and then San Diego Police came and brought you over here.”

  It seemed Tefft knew this wouldn’t be an ordinary interview, and he should be sure to get everything by the book.

  “We would like to talk to you, and it’s our understanding that you’d like to talk to us,” he continued. “There’s some things you want to explain to us, and some things you’d like us to do, and we’re good with all that. But we have certain rules we have to follow, and you understand all that; you’ve seen it on TV.”

  Sean nodded. He had, indeed, seen it on TV—along with a great many other things.

  “Before the police can speak with you in any formalized setting, we have to read you your Miranda rights, so I’m just gonna read them to you and we can move on and talk about what you need to talk about,” Tefft continued. “You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand?”

  Sean didn’t reply, but he did shake his head from side-to-side, indicating that the man with the genius-level IQ did not understand that he had the right to remain silent.

  “I’m not sure,” Sean said. “Just going back to the TV programs, you’re going to ask me if I give up that right. Does that mean I have to answer any question at that time, or can I...”

  “You can pick and choose,” Tefft interrupted.

  “Okay.”

  Already, Sean was setting boundaries, finding the limits of what the police could force him to say. Already, he was planning to say only what he had intended to say, and if the police wanted him to say anything beyond that, he wasn’t going to play ball.

  He may have looked contrite, remorseful—even repentant. But it was an act, they’d soon find out. This man had no remorse and no contrition had driven him here. Sean Goff had no intention of letting the interview with San Diego detectives slip out of his control for even one second.

  Tefft read Sean the rest of his Miranda rights and then the interview began.

  “Okay. Now, you can pick and choose, you can stop this interview at any time,” Tefft said. “You can do whatever you want to do here. Would you like to talk to us? We’re very interested in what you have to say.”

  “There’s a few things I’d like to say,” Sean began, his long experience preaching in front of expectant crowds coming into play as he made his rehearsed speech sound extemporaneous. “I came down here to turn myself in because I killed Joy Risker. And...she was a missing person, and I was being very misleading to the investigator and everyone else who was concerned about her, and I wanted to confess that.”

  Police had no way of knowing it at the time, but that’s all Sean wanted to confess and ultimately, that’s all he would confess. The very next question, in fact, slammed the brakes on the seeming cooperation with which the interview had begun:

  “All right,” Tefft said, writing notes. “Okay. All right. And there’s a location, evidently, where her body is?”

  The wheels had clearly turned in Sean’s head long before he stepped inside police headquarters.

  “I’m not sure I want to answer that at this time,” he said, even though a “yes” would have been enough to answer the question without giving Joy’s body away. But Sean didn’t even want to go that far. No explanation. He didn’t mind admitting he had killed Joy, but already, Sean was forming the basis of his criminal defense in his mind, knowing that once he told investigators where Joy’s body was, he could never take that information back. He couldn’t yield control to the police as a truly contrite man would have. He had to, as he had during her life, remain in control of Joy, even after her tragic death.

  Tefft, not wanting to end the interview so quickly, rapidly acquiesced.

  “Okay,” he said, not missing a beat. “We’ll go back to that. We’ll get it all squared away.”

  In Sean’s mind, however, it was already “squared away.” And “squared away” meant he wasn’t about to relinquish control of his most prized piece of information.

  “That may be something I want an attorney to discuss it with.”

  Tefft, realizing he was on the brink of clamming Sean up, changed the subject.

  “What is your relationship with Joy?” he asked. “I don’t know who she is to you and what’s going on with that.”

  Sean’s expression changed to a combination of smile and grimace, the same expression his face would assume when he was about to simplify a difficult point of theology as he was preaching.

  “This will get very complicated,” he replied. “I am married to a woman who I have a son with, um, but Joy was also...it wasn’t like she was my wife legally, but she also lived with us, basically as my wife. Like, you know, like a girlfriend type thing.”

  Tefft, either dumbstruck or relying on his training to keep his mouth shut when a suspect said something outrageous, kept his silence, so Sean continued.

  “My wife obviously didn’t like that,” he said. “But she was willing to put up with that for me.”

  It was the first time Sean had ever admitted to anyone that his first wife had been less than ecstatic with his polygamy. In his usual way of portraying things, she had not only been hunky dory with the arrangement, but had actually been actively involved in selecting Sean’s second spouse. But as he confessed Joy’s death to police, Sean saw no harm in letting the cat out of the bag: his first wife wasn’t a willing participant; she had merely tolerated the polygamy because it was what he wanted.

  She would later testify to the same fact. Sean had conveniently left out one piece of information: she had let him take another wife because he had threatened to take her son away from her otherwise.

  Tefft, a seasoned veteran of the police force, had heard a few strange stories in his day. If he was shocked at Sean’s arrangement, he wasn’t letting it show. Again, Tefft changed the subject.

  “What do you do for work?”

  Sean replied that he was a marketing director for a high-tech publishing company—the same company where he had met Victoria Mack, the book editor he had traveled cross-country with discussing many subjects, including how Joy was the kind of woman to just get up and leave, and how television crime shows were giving away all the information criminals needed to get away with murder.

  “Did Joy have an occupation?”

  Sean’s impatience with Joy, still hot even after he had killed her, snuck into his voice despite his best efforts to control it.

  “No, she kind of...um, she was actually taking college courses,” he said, trying to compose the frustration out of his voice, but it crept in anyway. “She had dropped out of school two or three times, and she was taking some courses, thinking about going to makeup school and things like that. But she wasn’t working.”

  Though his knowledge of what Joy was doing—or more specifically wasn’t doing—seemed to be comprehensive, Sean was caught flat-footed when the police asked him what his first wife did for a living.

  “Um,” he started, pausing. “She is, um...I believe a customer service representative.”

  The police weren’t really that interested in Sean’s first wife’s occupation. It was their way of redirecting the conversation to safer, ostensibly more familiar and comfortable ground, so they could later re-ask the question they really wanted to have answered. But Sean was no typical criminal. He carefully thought out his answers to each question, even the trivial ones.

  “Okay,” Tefft said. “And you have a child with your first wife.”

  “Yes.”

  “Girl or boy?”

  At that point, Sean’s subtle pride came out as he gave an answer he had clearly given proudly before.

  “Boy,” he said. “All my children are boys.”

  Boys, in Sean’s eyes, were more valuable than girls, because they could become leaders in their own right if they were raised correctly by a spiritual, godly leader who was following the Spirit and living in the “anointing” of God.


  Sensing that he had with that question pulled at least part of Sean’s guard down, Tefft shifted directly to one of the questions he really wanted answered.

  “Sean, you seem like a nice guy, pretty easygoing here,” he said. “You seem sad and remorseful, and that says a lot for you. How did this all go bad? What happened in all this?”

  It was walking pretty close to the line he didn’t want to cross, but being respected by the officer put Sean at ease, and he answered.

  “I don’t know,” he said, dipping his head. “I honestly don’t know. Joy and I were…incompatible and, you know, we had been talking about splitting up. Her mother died three years ago, and since then, she had been very unhappy, you know, being in a family, having kids, that sort of thing. So our relationship...I mean, we were friends, but our relationship wasn’t...um, you know...We were going to split up. Eventually.”

  But the detective didn’t want to know why the two were incompatible. He wanted to know why one of the two people they were talking about was dead and why the other one refused to tell him where the body was.

  So he tried the same tactic again, flattering Sean with respect:

  “You don’t seem like a bad guy; I don’t think you’re a bad guy,” he said. “How did this happen? How did you end up hurting her? How did that happen?”

  Sean, however, sensing that control was teetering toward the police, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

  “That’s also probably things I’d probably rather talk about with an attorney,” he said. Then he feigned ignorance of the legal system to explain. “I just...I...I don’t know, I mean, I don’t know. Honestly, in my situation, I came in here voluntarily to tell you what I did but I don’t know what is wise for me to say or wise for me to be silent about. I have no legal knowledge whatsoever. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be disrespectful.”

  Tefft, realizing that his opportunity was slipping away, sought to reorient the conversation to be more favorable to himself.

  “No disrespect taken,” he said. “Now when you say, I asked you that one question, you say you want to talk to an attorney about that. That’s just regarding that one question. If I ask you other questions, you can pick and choose. Is that...am I understanding you correctly?”

  Sean, however, was done.

  “I understand that to be what you are saying,” he said. Working for televangelists had given him plenty of experience sticking to the letter of the word, meaning he refused to say he agreed with what the detective said, in case it would later be used against him. Instead, he acknowledged that he understood what the detective was saying, not that he agreed with it.

  Tefft, desperate, tried again.

  “Because sometimes when people say ‘I want an attorney,’ we’re supposed to stop the interview,” he said. “But you say you want an attorney just regarding that one question, am I understanding that correctly?”

  Sean, not willing to become trapped in any statements he had made, or tricked into making any more that he didn’t want to make, dug his heels in.

  “Well, I don’t know,” he answered, still in the same soft, measured tone he had used throughout the interview. “I mean honestly? I don’t know what’s wise to do at this point. I don’t know if it’s more wise to talk to an attorney before going on at all. When you asked me the question about how did things go wrong, I thought you were talking about our relationship, I didn’t know you were talking about anything happening.”

  Sean’s mind works at blinding speed. While in the midst of a conversation with police detectives about him killing his wife, he had already analyzed the conversation that had transpired and had maintained enough composure to clarify a point that he believed could have been borderline outside his control, making sure detectives—and certainly later a jury—understood that he had not willfully made any comment about what had led to him killing Joy Risker. All of that he reserved as a key plank of his defense, which had already formed in his mind.

  “But about what happened, just like I know, I know...I know it’s going to be in the newspapers et cetera, et cetera, but there’s certain things I’d rather...certain people I’d rather...I don’t want to hurt any more people, obviously,” he said. “So I want to be respectful to them, but I also don’t want to get myself into...I don’t know.”

  Trying to let Sean know he was on Sean’s side, the detective tried again to stand on common ground.

  “Well, let me put it to you this way, Sean,” he said. “You’ve come down and turned yourself in for murder.”

  Sean interrupted.

  “For killing someone.”

  It was a key point. Sean knew that murder was homicide with malice. He didn’t want to confess to that. He wanted to confess that he killed “someone,” even avoiding recapping that the “someone” was his beloved wife. Killing “someone” could lead to jail time, but certainly not a significant stay such as would be imposed for a murder.

  “It was my understanding when they called me from home and asked me to come down here, it was my understanding that you wanted to lead us to where we could locate Joy,” Tefft said.

  Sean shook his head immediately.

  “I never said that to anyone,” he said. “I’m sorry, I never meant to mislead anyone in any way.”

  Strangely, it seemed Sean was already adamant that Joy’s body wasn’t on the table, so to speak. Her location was not going to be divulged. Why? It was the burning question in the minds of police, so Tefft began to push a little harder, shedding a bit of the “good cop” image in order to see if Sean might be susceptible to a little psychological pressure.

  “You’ve already made the big step here,” he said. “Clearly, I mean, you have a couple of children that were with Joy, and you’ve obviously cared for her. Obviously things didn’t go all that...you’ve had some problems, but you did have a caring relationship with her, and I think it’s been my experience most of the time, I don’t know where she is at or what’s going on, but usually it’s probably best that we take care of the matter, don’t you think?”

  Sean didn’t. In fact, nothing could be farther from his perception of the way things would be best.

  “Well, like I said,” he said, “I just think I’d rather talk to an attorney about that.”

  Tefft pressed the “bad cop” image just a little farther, seeing if maybe guilt could work its way past the stolid defense Sean had so cunningly erected around his flow of information.

  “So you wanna leave her out there?” Tefft asked to absolutely no reaction from Sean. “That’s fine. Whatever you want to do. I mean, you know, you know. I don’t.”

  “I know,” Sean said.

  “It’s up to you.”

  “I know.”

  “If that’s the way you want to do it.”

  Sean put the coup de gras on the conversation by reiterating what he had said from the very beginning, back when Tefft thought that maybe some of the standard interviewing techniques might lend some results. Tefft hadn’t, however, counted on encountering someone who had so meticulously pre-planned what he would and would not answer, and who was mentally disciplined enough to make sure no one could budge him from that position.

  “I think that would be wise,” Sean said, and the interview, which had started so promisingly for the police, came to an abrupt and dissatisfying end.

  Police found that at the conclusion of the interview, they knew nothing of substance they hadn’t already known before they started when Sean had walked in and admitted he had killed Joy Risker. Not why, not how and certainly not what he had done with the body.

  Sean had pulled a fast one on them—he had used what was intended as an interrogation to form a platform for a criminal defense he had already decided on in his mind: self-defense.

  All he had done by turning himself in was end the need for him to tell more lies and possibly jeopardize his ability to later claim that he was acting out of shock and panicked self-preservation when he had lied to
police and all Joy’s friends.

  So, even in his confession, Sean was the masterful controller, using the police as pawns in a defense he had already solidified.

  Chapter 18

  “GODDAMN CSI”

  Sean Goff had certainly done his best to disguise Joy’s body, to make sure if it was ever found, no one would be able to tell who it was. But even the best plans sometimes encounter a kink. The desert can play tricks on you. The site wasn’t as remote as he might have thought. In fact, it was just a football field’s distance from the closest road.

  Four months after Sean buried the body under a pile of rocks in the Arizona desert, a man hiking around the wilderness near his campsite happened upon it.

  Ruben Conde was a former hunting guide and he was familiar with the area. There is really nothing in the vicinity except scrubby desert, but Conde loved the place and spent a lot of his time there. However, on this day he saw a very unusual rock formation underneath a palo verde tree around three hundred feet north of the nearby dirt road.

  The odor was strange and noxious. He had smelled dead animals before but this was different.

  Later, Conde would say, “You could smell...different smell from an animal.” He added that the tomb was “too big to have an animal like a dog buried there.”

  Conde’s son, also named Ruben, was a federal ranger with the Bureau of Land Management. The next day, he went out to the area his father had described to him and began gently moving the stones to see what lay underneath.

  “I found a partial portion of a head and a torso,” the ranger said. “It just became apparent it wasn’t an animal.”

  When investigators found the decayed remains, the bones told a story that was violent, graphic and desperately depraved. Almost completely decomposed except for the bones, the female body still had a bit of flesh on the legs and ten-inch dreadlocks clinging to the skull. It lay on its side in a loosely fetal position beneath the rocks that had entombed it. The body seemed to be curled up as if the woman wanted to get back into the womb which had once protected her. However, the truth was that the murderer had positioned her body that way after brutalizing her and trying to disguise who or what she had been.