“I don’t like the way you’re handling this case,” he said. “You don’t know nothing.”
“It was evident that there were some individuals involved in this case who thought I didn’t care,” Slezak said in a June 1995 interview, while declining to name names. “It was said that I looked at it as just another case, and so be it. I’m not able to change what someone thinks. I’m sorry people think that way. And I’m sorry this whole situation took place.
“But the truth is that throughout this case, I had mixed ideas about what took place. With almost any case, there are a number of possibilities. What we were sure of was that she was missing. But there were other reports that she had been seen with him.”
Among the reported sightings was one from a police informant in Pernell’s hometown of Benson, who identified Jeannie from a picture Slezak took when he went there in June. The informant said that she had been seen in a drug house in Benson, and that she was with Pernell in Benson late in May.
Slezak thought that unlikely, since nobody had reported seeing Jeannie with Pernell in Richmond in the week after her disappearance, and Pernell had continued to work at the Remco store throughout that week.
One person in Benson offered Slezak no help at all: Pernell’s brother, Willie. Slezak called him “uncooperative.”
What Ben and Carrie couldn’t understand was why Slezak had not gone to talk with Pernell while he was still at work at the Remco store.
“When I go in to talk with someone like that,” Slezak explained in 1995, “I have had great success getting confessions because I don’t go until I have something to pin on a suspect. If somebody came to me and told me you had just killed somebody, I wouldn’t go rushing to talk to you. I’d want to talk to a lot of other people who might have seen what happened first. Then when I came to talk to you, I would be in a position to let you know that this isn’t just a visit.”
In the absence of witnesses other than St. Augustine, Slezak had concentrated on finding Jeannie’s car, theorizing that it would lead him to her. He got plenty of reported sightings of the car.
“They came from all over,” he recalled. From North Carolina, Florida, various points in Virginia, even one from Kansas City. “We didn’t investigate the one from Kansas City,” he said. “In a case like this, you have to use some common sense and not go chasing off after some lead that has very little promise.
“Obviously, locating the car became a problem. If you had to find a car in a situation like that, where would you go to look for it? There was a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking going on.”
All the while, Slezak said, he was working informants as they became available.
“I have to admit that as time passed, there were days when I did nothing on this case. I had other cases to work and there were no new leads on this case. Information wasn’t coming in every day any more after a while. But we were doing a lot that the family didn’t know anything about, especially early on.
“In my business, you have to be careful when you talk to family members. You don’t just give them all the information you have because at that time you simply don’t know if some family member is involved or not. The bottom line is that I did everything I knew to do on that case, aside from a street-to-street search for the woman. It’s hard to do that because the world’s a big place.”
In August, Jeannie’s sister Carrie placed an emotional call to her mother.
“She had had a dream,” Carrie said. “In the dream she saw Jeannie covered with dirt and calling out to be found. She said that everything seemed so real.” So real, in fact, that her sister said she would know the location where the family could find Jeannie buried if she ever saw it.
Now Jeannie’s sister became a part of the weekend searches. From Ray Williams, the Pricketts obtained directions to the church grounds southeast of Richmond where St. Augustine said Pernell had buried Jeannie. Again and again they drove along Belmont Road, out along Fairpines Street to Jessup Street and back again. But none of the terrain matched the dream.
The search was taking Jeannie’s mother away from her work, and she finally took a leave of absence to devote all of her time to it. She and Ben blanketed southeastern states with flyers seeking information. A man Jeannie had once dated in high school discovered that she was missing when he saw one of the flyers posted at a convenience store in northern Florida. All reports were passed on to the Chesapeake police including one from a husband-and-wife long-haul truck-driving team who called to say they had seen a 1985 Nissan 300 ZX with the license plate, TIGRE Z, racing north on a Florida interstate at high speed.
“My insides were like the San Francisco earthquake,” Carrie said, remembering this period years later. “I couldn’t put the pieces back together again. I made everybody’s life miserable. It was taking all my energy twenty-four hours a day.”
When sleep came, Carrie had a recurrent dream.
“Again and again, I’d dream that Jeannie’s in this building, and the building has room after room after room, and they’re all mostly empty. And Jeannie’s in there and I’m trying to find her. And I’m down on my hands and knees crawling around everywhere trying to find her.
“I finally find her under a desk and I reach and grab her and I pull her to me and I turn her around to look at her, and I can’t see her face. I always wake up trying to remember her face.”
Jeannie’s 30th birthday came and went in August without acknowledgement, and Thanksgiving was not observed in the Pricketts’ home. As the days grew shorter and the weather colder, no news came from the police. It was as though the only people in the world still interested in what had happened to Jeannie were Ben, Carrie, their two children, Denise, and a few other friends.
As Christmas approached, the cluster of tiny, golden bells Jeannie had taped to the top of the mirror in the foyer of the family home the year before was still there. Carrie had vowed never to remove them. But her grief prevented her from putting up other decorations. When Jeannie’s former co-workers at the office of the clerk of court called to ask if they could decorate in Jeannie’s behalf, Carrie relented.
The tree, the bright lights and ribbons did little to boost the Pricketts’ spirits. On Christmas Eve, Carrie’s thoughts were elsewhere.
“You didn’t love Jeannie as much as I did,” she blurted to her husband, bursting into tears.
“I love Jeannie, Carrie,” he replied.
“If you really loved her, Ben, you’d have gone to Florida and you would have found Pernell Jefferson and you would have killed him.”
“If I knew exactly where Pernell Jefferson was,” he said, “I’d have killed him a long time ago.”
That evening, Ben and Carrie made the two-hour trip to Richmond to spend Christmas with Sam and his wife Lynn. On Christmas morning, Carrie broke down in tears again and her son moved to console her.
“Mom, you’re going about this the wrong way,” he said. “You’re asking God to let us find her, but you’re asking Dad to go and kill him. Why don’t you say to God, ‘Thy will be done, and if we can find Jeannie, I will find a way not to hate. And I will leave it all in the hands of the justice system’?”
Carrie looked into his face, still crying, and for long moments she couldn’t speak. “I can’t pray that prayer yet,” she finally said.
“We may not find Jeannie until you can, Mama,” Sam said, taking her into his arms.
“New Year’s Day,” she said softly. “New Year’s Day. I’ll pray that prayer on New Year’s Day.”
Ben and Carrie were back home on New Year’s Day. Just before noon, Carrie went into her bedroom leaving Ben alone in the den. She made her bed. Then she lingered, thinking about what her son had told her on Christmas.
Quietly, she began to pray.
“If you let me find her, God, I won’t be bitter. I’ll let the justice system handle it. But I think it’s time we find her. Not my will, God, but Thy will be done.”
Near Amelia, about 160 miles away, hunter R
andy DuClau, working his favorite dog, followed fresh deer tracks into low undergrowth and toward the distant tree line just off State Route 681.
22.
The Telltale Charm
CENTRAL VIRGINIA WAS COLD AND WET on January 1, 1990. Heavy, dark clouds made the holiday surreal, in constant twilight.
Near Nibbs Creek in Amelia County, deer hunter Michael Spain entered a growth of hardwood trees in their winter hibernation and worked his dog along the busy stream. Spain occasionally lingered over clusters of deer tracks trying to determine how fresh they were before moving on.
His partner, Randy DuClau and his favorite hunting dog, a wire-haired terrier, had followed another deer trail into low undergrowth perhaps 100 yards away. Just beyond a clearing where a power line cut a swath across the countryside, DuClau stood for a moment near a dry creek bed and tried once again to find the trail of fresh deer tracks in the gloomy light. Perhaps 15 yards away, along the side of the creek bed, his dog had become distracted.
Leaping to the distant bank, DuClau now had a small stream to negotiate and once past that he called to his dog to join him. Not far away, he could see the terrier playfully pushing about something that looked like an old ball. When DuClau called again and the dog still ignored his summons, he went to investigate. The terrier, its tail wagging excitedly, seemed proud of what it had discovered. DuClau quickly saw that the object wasn’t a ball. It was a human skull.
He knelt for a closer look. Clearly visible was a ragged hole in the left temple of the skull and, as he pushed it around with his foot, he saw another hole opposite it at the rear, a few inches behind the right ear. Obviously, the holes had been made by a bullet. DuClau tentatively picked up the skull and heard something rattle inside. He shook it and again it rattled. Inside, amidst leaves and dirt he spotted what seemed to be a distorted slug.
But, he reasoned, if there were two holes, the bullet must have entered at one place and exited at the other. What else then besides the fatal bullet could this chunk of metal rattling around inside have been? It was too large to be a dislodged dental filling. So, was the small chunk of gnarled metal really what was left of a bullet? And if so, how did it get back into the skull?
He called to Spain. Getting no immediate response, he called yet again, this time more loudly, and Spain answered. “Come take a look at this,” DuClau yelled.
As DuClau waited for Spain to cross Nibbs Creek and make his way along the creek bed that carried water only during torrential downpours, DuClau thought once more about the deer tracks leading off into the distance and was annoyed that his day had been interrupted.
Finally, Spain was there staring down at the skull. “Found it right here,” DuClau said.
“What are you going to do?” Spain asked.
“Take it to the sheriff’s office, I guess,” said DuClau.
They drove the three miles to the sheriff’s office at the back of the courthouse in Amelia and parked near the big oak beside the sidewalk. DuClau carried the skull into the sheriff’s office, being careful to keep the hunk of metal inside.
“Look what I found,” he told Deputy Leonard Lee Wiggins Jr., the first officer he encountered. Wiggins had been enjoying a quiet, trouble-free holiday on patrol and had just stopped by the office for a break.
“Just hold it for a minute,” Wiggins said declining the macabre offering. He disappeared into a nearby storage room and returned with a large plastic bag.
“Where’d you find this?” he asked as DuClau placed the skull in the bag.
“It was just laying there in a dry creek bed a few miles out of town, out where we were looking for some deer,” DuClau answered. “I think the bullet’s still inside.”
Wiggins gently shook the skull in the plastic bag and could hear the distinct rattle.
“I’m going to have to take a statement from you and Michael,” he said.
In ten minutes, Wiggins had DuClau’s and Spain’s brief statements, and he dialed Sheriff Jimmy Weaver’s telephone number at home. He waited while Weaver’s wife summoned him from the barn where he was attending his registered quarterhorses.
“Sheriff, there’s something here you ought to see,” he reported. “Randy DuClau just came in with a human skull. Said he found it in a field while he was out deer hunting.”
Weaver told Wiggins to follow DuClau back to the scene to make sure no other hunters stumbled upon the area and disturbed any evidence. Then he called his chief deputy, Wes Terry, at home. Though it was noon, Terry was still asleep, resting up from a New Year’s Eve party at which he had lingered long past midnight the night before.
“Wes,” Weaver said, “better meet me at the office. Looks like our New Year’s going to start out with a murder.”
Weaver arrived at his office and picked up the gruesome evidence that had been left on a desk in the squad room. He took it into Wes Terry’s tiny office and closed the door behind him.
The son of a West Virginia coal miner, Weaver stood six-feet-five-inches tall and weighed 250 pounds. An ex-Marine and a former member of John Kennedy’s Presidential Honor Guard, he had been a detective for the Fairfax County Police Department and a chief investigator for the Virginia State Police before he and his wife moved to a farm near Amelia that had been in her family for generations. Police work followed him to his pastoral life. He had been hired as a regional investigator by the state before running successfully for sheriff in 1987.
This would be his first big case since being elected, he thought, as he placed the skull on Terry’s desk so that it seemed to be looking at him. One of his favorite techniques for beginning an investigation was to close himself in a room where a crime had been committed and to sit in the middle of the floor pondering what had happened there.
“They used to kid me about the walls talking to me,” Weaver later recalled. “The walls, the floors, the ceiling, the curtains. Sometimes it’s like they all have something to say.”
Now he sat staring at the skull. He had read Wiggins’ hurried report and he, too, had shaken the skull and seen the slug inside, but it was no puzzle to him. He had seen such a phenomenon in murder cases he had investigated earlier in his career. “Tenting,” he said out loud. “The bullet almost made it through, but not quite.”
He shook the slug from the skull and looked at it through the plastic, moving it with the tip of his finger. “A thirty-eight,” he said to himself. “Maybe a thirty-two.”
He replaced the slug and spoke again to himself.
“It’s not somebody from Amelia.”
On his way in, he had searched his memory and knew that there were no missing person cases in Amelia. Hadn’t been any since he’d become sheriff.
“Female,” he said, judging from the delicate cheekbones, the fine line of the jaw and the size. “Small female. Adult, but not a large person.” The structure of the bones told him it probably was a white female.
Now he looked closer, turning the skull as he did. “Redheaded female!” he said excitedly. Matted against the bone on one side was a long, solitary red hair.
“Talk to me,” he said, turning the skull so that it faced him again.
He opened the bag and sniffed inside, detecting no odor of decaying flesh, no bad smell at all, and knew that this person had been dead at least four or five months, perhaps longer, considering how cold it had been since Thanksgiving.
A suicide? Not likely, he thought. Long experience had taught him that women who kill themselves almost always do it with pills, rarely with guns, and those who do choose firearms almost never shoot themselves in the head.
“They spend so much time trying to look good they usually find another way to end their lives,” he explained years later.
This death seemed clear.
“It’s murder,” he said.
“What’d you say?” asked Wes Terry, who had just opened the door to his office.
“Murder,” Weaver repeated.
“What else?” Terry asked, realizing that his boss a
lready had begun analyzing the case.
“Probably a white female. Red-headed. Small, maybe five-feet-two, five-feet-four. Slight build most likely. Nobody around here knows her. Dead probably more than six months.”
Like Weaver, Terry had an impressive resume in law enforcement. A native of Rich Square, North Carolina, he was 45, stood six-feet-one and weighed 250 pounds. He had been an agent with North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation, the Florida Bureau of Law Enforcement and the Virginia State Police. He and Weaver had known each other since they had worked together for a chemical company in 1963. When Weaver had worked in Fairfax County, Terry had been a police officer in adjoining Arlington County. After Weaver had become an investigator for the Virginia State Police, he had recommended Terry for an opening in his department, and they had worked together on many cases before Weaver had moved to Amelia County. As soon as Weaver was elected sheriff, he called Terry and asked him to be his chief deputy.
Terry had always been impressed with Weaver’s deductive abilities, even if he sometimes kidded him about them.
“Anything else?” he asked, only partially kidding.
“That’ll get us started,” Weaver said, reaching for the phone. He called an off-duty deputy, Les Moler, and told him to join Wiggins just off State Road 681 for a field investigation. Then he quickly called the state medical examiner in Richmond and the state police.
“Let’s go,” he said, turning finally to Terry.
By the time Weaver and Terry arrived at the scene, Wiggins already had taped off the area where the skull had been found. DuClau and Spain waited just outside that large circle.
After a quick look at the site, Weaver talked briefly with DuClau and Spain and sent them on their way. When he returned, he spotted a piece of denim protruding from the soft earth.
“Men,” he said, “we’ve got some digging to do.”
The officers dug carefully, using shovels Wiggins had brought from the sheriff’s department. Turning up one small shovelful at a time, they carefully sifted each for any sign of evidence. Almost immediately, the creek bed began yielding its harvest. The piece of denim, apparently from jeans. A ring. Part of a necklace. A tampon. A cigarette butt. Bones. Lots of bones.
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