Another Cold Case and Hot Nights

If you read my earlier story, you know how I met Rochelle and how she helped me solve one of my cold cases. You also know that after that case, I moved from Nashville, Tennessee to Knoxville to live with her. I won't repeat all that here, but Rochelle writes murder mysteries based on actual cases and she sees cases with a different eye than a detective does. Sometimes all it takes is a different way of viewing evidence to solve a case, so her input is something I value a lot.

I'm still working on cold cases because that's the first thing Harry, the Chief of the Knoxville PD gave me to work on. Rochelle is helping on my current cold case.

On January 5,1990, a uniform was making a wellness check on a young couple in their early twenties. They'd missed going to church the Sunday before and the pastor had tried calling them three nights in a row with no answer. He asked the police to check on them and make sure everybody was all right.

When the uniform got there, the door was locked so he walked around the house and looked in the windows. In the ground floor bedroom, he saw a woman lying on a bed and though he pounded on the window frame several times, she didn't move. The officer immediately radioed for backup and the EMT's.

After the officer's backup got there, they broke in the door and searched the house. When they got to that ground floor bedroom, there was a nude woman on the bed and a man wearing all his clothes lying on the floor. Both had been shot and according to the coroner, they'd been dead about two days, but he couldn't be sure. That was because the house furnace was off and the temperature inside had dropped to about thirty-five degrees. He said it could have been up to ten days earlier.

The coroner took the bodies for autopsy and the detective in charge, Matt Wilson, started working the case. It looked to him like a robbery gone bad until he tried to identify the victims. They should have been Mr. Thomas Blair and his wife Emma. The man was indeed Mr. Blair. His face matched the driver's license in his wallet.

The woman was a different situation. Mrs. Blair's purse was on the kitchen table, but the driver's license picture wasn't the picture of the dead woman. The face was pretty close, but the dead woman had blonde hair instead of dark brown like the license photo and her face didn't match. The weight didn't match up either. The driver's license said Mrs. Blair weighed one-ten. The coroner weighed the dead woman at one forty.

Another thing the coroner found was that while the unknown blonde wasn't wearing a wedding ring, there was the telltale indentation of a wedding ring on her left ring finger. According to his report, based on the amount of skin change, he estimated the woman had probably been married at least two years and had taken the ring off within a couple weeks before her death. She could have been married longer if she took the ring off every night, but there was a slight callous where the ring rubbed her palm that indicated she didn't.

That left Matt with four questions. Who was the dead woman, where was Mrs. Blair, why did Mrs. Blair leave her purse on the kitchen table, and why did the unknown blonde not have her purse with her? His assumption was the killer had taken the unknown blonde's purse, but he couldn't figure out a motive for doing so without knowing the unknown blonde's identity.

He'd tried sending DNA samples from the unidentified woman to CODIS and hadn't gotten a match. The FBI wasn't able to match the unidentified woman's fingerprints the coroner had lifted to any they had on file.

Matt wasn't surprised that he couldn't get a match for the DNA or the fingerprints of the unidentified woman. Most crimes are committed by men, so there aren't that many samples of female DNA and fingerprints on file. What did surprise Matt was that after he interviewed most of the people who lived near the house, they were able to identify Mr. Blair, but they'd never seen the unidentified woman before.

Matt's research into the Blairs didn't reveal much in the way of any possible motives. Mr. Blair was a line foreman at a local factory and seemed to get along well with his employees. Mrs. Blair had a small at-home business selling cosmetics door to door, though the customers he found on a list in their desk indicated she hadn't taken any orders in a couple of months. The cosmetic company hadn't heard from her for about the same time, but said that wasn't unusual. Apparently a lot of women start into that business but get quickly discouraged and just stop.

Neither had any living relatives that Matt could find. Mr. Blair was abandoned as a baby and had been raised by three different sets of foster parents. Mrs. Blair's parents had been killed in a car accident when she was eighteen. She was the only child of an older couple and the rest of her family had also passed away.

Their joint checking account had about two thousand dollars in it. They had about another thousand in savings and two credit cards with small balances. Matt had watched the bank account and credit cards until Tennessee took control of the estate, but there was no activity on either the bank accounts or credit cards.

It was Matt's gut feeling that Emma Blair was at least partly responsible for both murders, but he had no hard evidence that pointed to that. Matt based that on the fact that the only DNA and fingerprints the techs were able to find other than Mr. Blair's and the female victim were probably Mrs. Blairs because the DNA matched what the techs got from hairs on a hairbrush in the bathroom. That pointed to Mrs. Blair committing both murders by herself.

That's where the case was when I picked it up in June of 2019, and it looked pretty hopeless to me. The case was almost thirty years old by then, so most of the people who were around at the time of the murders were either dead or had moved away. The house itself had been torn down and replaced with a newly built house so any evidence that might have been there was gone forever.

There were a few troubling things about Matt's investigation and his conclusion. The first problem was that according to the coroner's report, both Mr. Blair and the unknown blonde woman had been shot in the chest. Women almost never kill another person by shooting them, and fewer still kill by shooting the victim from the front. It happens in only about ten percent of murders committed by women and there's a reason for that.

Shooting someone in the chest means the shooter has to stand eyeball to eyeball with the victim and watch what happens. Most women won't do that because most women who kill know their victims on a more or less intimate basis and they don't like watching someone they know die. That's why female murderers frequently use poison or a drug overdose. They put the poison in food or in a drink or inject a lethal amount of a drug, legal or otherwise, into the victim. The victim dies sometime later when the woman doesn't have to be there to watch.

The third thing that was bothering me was that the unknown blonde was apparently lying on the bed on her back and totally nude when she was shot while Mr. Blair was standing beside the bed and fully clothed. The bullet that killed the unknown blonde was recovered from the mattress under her, and the bullet that killed Mr. Blair was found stuck in the wall of the bedroom at about chest height.

I could put together several scenarios where both had been clothed or both had been naked, but not what the evidence indicated. If both had been nude, it would could have been a situation where the killer surprised them in the act of having sex. That was what Matt figured had happened. His theory was that Mrs. Blair found her husband in bed with the unknown blonde, snapped, and killed them both. That would have made sense if they'd both been naked.

If both had been clothed, it could mean that Mrs. Blair knew what they were up to and surprised them before they could start. That would have made sense too.

For Mr. Blair to be dressed and the unknown blonde to be completely naked was something I couldn't figure out. I'd never come across a murder case with that crime scene scenario.

The recovered bullets were also a conundrum. The bullets recovered were of the spitzer type, meaning they were long and pointed instead of short and blunt. That type of bullet is usually found in rifle cartridges designed to yield high velocity and therefore a flat trajectory, but rifles are almost never used in a homicide that occurs indoors. I couldn't rule out a rifle, but I didn't know of any handgun that used spitzer bullets. A rifle didn't make sense either since handguns are much easier to manipulate in the closed space of a room.

The department firearms expert who examined the bullets measured them at 0.222 inches in diameter, and said the bullet weight was about right for a.218 Bee or one of its variants. The.218 Bee is a pretty specialized cartridge and not common because it was designed for long range target shooting. It was impossible to tell for sure because although Matt searched, he didn't find any empty cartridge cases. He also hadn't been able to find any type of firearm in the Blair's house.

There was no record of either Mr. or Mrs. Blair ever buying a gun and none of the people Matt interviewed said anything about either of them doing any shooting. If that was the case, the rifle had to come from somewhere else and the shooter was smart enough to pick up all the spent brass.

One of the possible explanations for both the use of a rifle and the lack of any brass was that the shooter had been outside the house and some distance away - in other words, a sniper. Matt had thought of that possibility, but discounted it after figuring out which direction the shots had to have come from. They would have had to come through a bedroom wall and the killer wouldn't have been able to see the victims. There were also no bullet holes in the bedroom wall other than from the bullet that had killed Mr. Blair.

Rochelle and I were a week into the case when she told me about her theory.

"I wrote a book about a similar case a while back. The wife found her husband and another woman in bed together. Needless to say, she was really mad that her husband had done that to her and she knew the husband kept a gun in the dresser drawer. Before he could stop her, the wife got the gun and killed them both. I think that's what probably happened here, though I haven't figured out why Mister Blair would have been dressed at the time.

"I also haven't come up with a reason the blonde woman didn't have her purse. No woman ever goes anywhere without her purse. I'm assuming the same thing as Matt, that Missus Blair took it. Maybe she took it and assumed the blonde woman's identity. They were about the same age and hair color isn't hard to change. They were about the same height, and if Missus Blair wasn't as heavy, she could always say she'd just lost weight. A woman could probably still pick out the differences in facial features, but for most men, weight loss might account for the facial difference too.

"What would help is if we knew who the blonde woman was. One way to do that would be to see if any blonde woman who fits her description was reported missing at about that time. The coroner's report said the woman was probably married or had been. Surely her husband or a friend would have reported her missing."

I hadn't thought about that, but it was a stretch. If the unknown blonde was married, it was a possible way to find out her identity. If she took off her ring because she was divorced, maybe not. I had no idea where my ex was or what she was doing because I didn't really care.

"That's a possibility, but you've been married. Do you know how your ex is doing?"

Rochelle grinned.

"Sure I do. He has a page on Facebook and I know his email address. He blocked me on Facebook, but I guess he was too lazy to change his email address.

He's been teaching high school English in Chattanooga since we divorced. He said I'd never do as well as he would, but I'm a published author and I make more money than he does. Every time I publish a new book, I send him an email reminding him of what he said. He always replies that he's obviously happier than I am because he doesn't feel the need to remind me that I left a perfectly good man when I divorced him."

"But if he didn't send you a reply would you report it to the police?"

"Sure. I don't hate the man. I just couldn't live with him."

"OK. I'll check tomorrow on all the missing person's cases around that time. I doubt she was from Knoxville though. Matt would have probably checked that, so if she was having an affair with Mister Blair while she was married, she was probably from somewhere else relatively close. She couldn't hide the affair if she had to be gone from home for very long."

Rochelle grinned then.

"I've been home all day. Think you could check me out a little after dinner? I really need to be checked out."

Well, as it turned out, Rochelle wasn't kidding. As soon as we finished dinner, she started stripping right there in the kitchen. When she was down to her bra and panties, she crooked her finger at me and grinned.

"Are you gonna just watch or are you gonna do what I said I needed?"

Half an hour later, she snuggled up to my side and kissed me, then chuckled.

"It's funny how sex just takes everything out of your mind and leaves you sort of floating in the air."

I laughed.

"That sounds like something out of a romance novel."

Rochelle stroked my chest.

"Well, just because I write murder mysteries doesn't mean I can't have a romantic side too. I kinda feel like getting all romantic again if you think you can manage it."

At breakfast the next morning, Rochelle said she was going to drive to the address of the Blair's house and then walk around the neighborhood.

"Sometimes that helps me when I'm writing about a murder. I can mentally take myself back in time and walk and see what the victim and the killer saw. That lets me figure out what they might have done, and maybe why they did it."

I didn't hold out much hope. Over the last thirty years, the area had changed from a quiet suburb of Knoxville to a bustling area with businesses and a shopping mall. Still, Rochelle has a way of figuring out things in her own way and I wasn't getting anywhere.

When I got home that night, I was beat. In part, it was because I hadn't gotten a lot of sleep the night before. It was almost midnight when Rochelle decided she'd been romanced enough. Mostly though, it was because I didn't have any current cases so I'd spent the day going through the NCIC database of missing persons.

The NCIC database is a powerful tool for law enforcement, but the volume of data is pretty intimidating. The coroner had made the determination my unknown blonde was white and between twenty and twenty five years old. The NCIC database has only four age categories, and the blonde fit into the eighteen and over category. That category contained over fifty thousand entries.

I had to reduce that number down to something manageable so I sorted it by state and then looked at the states that border East Tennessee as well as Tennessee itself. My logic was that if the blonde had been having an affair with Mr. Blair, she probably lived within a few hours driving time of Knoxville. Even if she wasn't still married at the time, taking a couple days off work just to have sex wasn't something most people could do. They'd want to drive to the area, do their thing, and then drive back home the same day. That would give the blonde maybe a couple hundred miles each way.

The states within that distance were West Virginia, Virginia, both Carolinas, Kentucky, and Georgia. The total for those states was about thirteen hundred and Tennessee brought the total up to almost sixteen hundred missing white women over eighteen.

That was better but still pretty unmanageable. I printed off a map of the US and then drew a circle with a radius of two hundred miles with Knoxville as the center. I printed the list from each state and then started crossing off entries that were outside that circle or were older than twenty five. When I got done, I still had a total of a hundred and twenty six.

I looked at hair color and weight where those were given, but I didn't disregard any that didn't match the coroner's description. Like Rochelle had said, women can easily change their hair color and most do at some point in their life. Weight is also something that can fluctuate considerably even if the woman was honest about her weight. Many lie about their weight to even their spouse and closest friends.

By then, my brain was fried and it was time to go home anyway. I printed a copy of my final list and then went home.

Rochelle was bursting to tell me what she'd found out, and made me sit down so she could tell me.

"I did some checking with the Chamber of Commerce and found out that in 1990, there were only two businesses within five miles of the Blair house. One was a barbecue restaurant and the other was a gas station. I figured our unknown woman had to eat and probably get gas, so I drove to both and talked to the people there.

"At the restaurant, all the waitresses and people in the kitchen were too young to have been alive in 1990, so I asked one of the waitresses if the owner was there. She said she was in the back cooking the meat.

"The woman was about fifty or so, and when I asked her if she owned the restaurant in 1990, she said she didn't, but she'd worked there as a waitress then. She and her husband bought the place when the owner retired in 2015.

"On the off chance she might have seen our blonde, I showed her five pictures I'd taken with me. Four were from other cases I turned into novels and the fifth was the autopsy picture of the blonde.

"She looked at the pictures for a few minutes and then pointed to the picture of the blonde."

"Yeah, it's been a long, long time, but I think I've seen her before when I was waiting tables. Came in by herself a couple times. I remember her because she wanted pulled pork with the hottest sauce we have. Our Wildfire sauce is so hot I have a hard time breathing just making it. I've known men to try that sauce and then call me over and ask for something milder. That girl finished it all both times.

"The last time she came in, she had a man with her. I figured he was her husband because she was wearing a wedding ring, but for the love of God, I don't know what she saw in him. She was a pretty girl, a little heavy maybe, but a pretty girl. He was older than she was and he was a fat slob. I remember him because it was right after Christmas and he wanted to know if we were going to be open on New Year's Eve. When I said we'd be closed, he grinned and told the girl she'd have to settle for his hot sauce on New Year's Eve. I mean, she was embarrassed to death because she and I both knew what he was talking about."

Rochelle grinned.

"So if the woman saw our girl, we know she was with a man the last time she was in the restaurant and since it was almost January, that might have been when the murder occurred."

I said that was something we could look into, but it didn't prove anything. Rochelle grinned again.

"I'm not done yet. The next place I went to was the gas station. The girl behind the glass was all of sixteen, so I asked her if the owner was there or if she had a phone number so I could call him. She said he was outside with the guy filling the underground gas tanks.

"I walked out to the tanker truck and there were two men standing there. When I asked if I could speak to the owner, the younger of the two smiled.

"I'm the owner. What can I do for you?"

He didn't look old enough, but I showed him the picture of the blonde and asked he he'd ever seen her. He shook his head and said he hadn't. I thanked him and was turning to leave when the other man said, "Ma'am, can I see that picture again? I been bringing gas to this gas station since 1987. I might be old, but I ain't dead and I got a good memory where women are concerned. I think maybe I seen her before."