Another Cold Case and Hot Nights

He was at least sixty, so I showed him the picture. He looked at it for a second and then frowned.

"Thought I recognized her. I seen her one day when I was filling these same tanks. It was back, let's see, it was after I asked Judy to marry me so it would have been sometime in September back in 1989. I remember her because she was blonde and she was good looking and she had the biggest...well, let's just say she filled out her halter top real good.

"This looks like the pictures of dead people they show on the crime shows on TV. She's dead, ain't she? Why you looking for her if she's dead?"

"I said I was writing a novel and I wanted to talk to somebody who knew her in 1990. He just frowned and said he hadn't seen her before or since, so it was going to be hard for me to find someone who knew her."

"Then I asked him if he remembered what kind of car she was driving and he said he did."

"It was one of them little Chevy cars, Chevette I think they called it. I remember all them little cars back then 'cause I was just starting out and they was taking a chunk out of my gas business with their little engines and good gas mileage. Hated them little cars. Course, all cars are little anymore, but them little 'uns started it all.

I think it was red and white...no, that was the license plate. I remember 'cause I was tryin' to read what state she was from, but all I could see when she drove off was that license plate was white with red numbers on it. I think the car was blue, but like I said, I was lookin' at the girl more than the car."

Rochelle opened her laptop then.

"I did some research and I think the car was from Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, or Ohio. Those states are the states closest to Knoxville with license plates that were white with red numbers and letters in 1990. There are some other states that used the same colors, but it would take more than a day to make it to Knoxville from there and back.

"What I suspect was happening is the Blairs and our blonde were having sex together and Mister Blair started paying more attention to the blonde than he did to Missus Blair. She killed them both and then took off to parts unknown. No, wait. That doesn't work because as far as we know the last time she was seen in public she had her husband with her. Maybe they were both swinging with the Blairs."

That was a good theory that I'd seen before to be true. A couple starts out sleeping with another man, woman, or couple to, as the websites claim, "spice up their marriage". The problem starts because all of us are human and we all have our failings. At some point, one of the partners thinks his or her alternate partner in sex is better in bed or at least doesn't scratch his balls in public or has a lot more interest in sex than his current wife. Usually it's the latter because women tend to ignore the bad habits of their husbands unless it becomes abusive.

Sometimes that ends in a simple divorce. Other times, well, divorces can get expensive and if there are children involved, pretty complicated and time consuming. Sometimes, the alternate partners just leave for parts unknown and start a new life together, but in too many cases, it's easier, cheaper, and quicker to make the less-liked spouse just disappear. In this case, it was possible both alternate partners decided to permanently end their current marriages by killing their spouses.

If Rochelle's theory was what actually happened, that circumstance maybe pointed to both the blonde's husband and Mrs. Blair being involved in the murders. I still had my doubts about that. Matt's crime techs had checked the house from top to bottom and other than on the bed where the blonde had been killed, had only found DNA and fingerprints from Mr. Blair and what they assumed to belong to Mrs. Blair. I couldn't believe the husband could have been inside the house without leaving something behind even if it was just one fingerprint.

Still, Rochelle had given us something of value though it was pretty sketchy. If I combined my list with Rochelle's list of states, that eliminated about half. Each state's DMV would have records of vehicle ownership in 1990 by both license number and VIN number. All I had to do was ask for the information and since I was a police officer, I could do that from my laptop.

The next morning, that's what I did. I queried the DMV in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee for records on all vehicles currently registered in 1990. I didn't specify the make and model because I didn't have much faith that the woman the gas tanker guy had seen was my unknown blonde, much less that he remembered the make and model of her vehicle.

It took all day to get the records downloaded and printed, but when I went home that night, I had something Rochelle and I could work on over the weekend.

We spent that Saturday matching up missing women with vehicle registrations that were the same or similar looking cars registered in the same county of the state. When we finished, we had two possibles, one in Anderson, South Carolina and one in Clyde, North Carolina, a tiny little town just outside Asheville.

The Anderson vehicle was a bit of a stretch because it was a 1985 Toyota Corolla rather than a Chevette, but both were blue and looked enough alike one could be mistaken for the other. The missing woman from Anderson was about as good a match to my unknown blonde as one could get. The registered owner at the time was a Mrs. Bernice Long.

We decided to check out the Anderson vehicle first because of the description of the woman who'd been reported missing. That Monday, Rochelle and I made the drive to the address on the registration.

The woman who opened the door was about sixty and looked to me like she was Hispanic. I showed her my badge and then asked if she had owned a blue Toyota Corolla in 1989. She said, yes, she had, but she'd wrecked it on New Year's day in 1990 and her insurance company had totaled it.

Rochelle then asked the woman if she'd ever lent the car to someone and the woman shook her head.

"No. Back then, I needed that car every day. I worked six days a week and went to church on Sunday, so I wouldn't have let anybody else use it.

There wasn't much use in showing the women the picture of my blonde, but I did anyway. The woman looked at it for a few seconds and then shook her head again.

"No, can't say as I have."

We talked about it as we drove back to Knoxville. Neither of us thought the woman was lying. We hoped the Clyde vehicle would pan out. The next day we drove to the address in Clyde, North Carolina.

The Clyde vehicle was a 1986 Chevy Chevette, light blue, and the registered owner in 1990 was a Mr. Charles Upton of 150 Elm Street. When we drove up to that address, there was no house there. That address was just a vacant lot. That immediately set the alarm bells going off in my head. If the owner of the car had given a vacant lot as his address, he had something to hide. I wanted to know what that something was.

There were houses on each side of that lot, so I talked to both neighbors. The neighbor to the West said when he'd bought his house in 1995 there was no house there.

The neighbor to the East, a Mr. Harold Rockly, had a lot better information. His mother and father had bought their house in 1975 when his father retired and he'd inherited it when they passed away in 1991 and 1992.

"Yeah, I remember the asshole. Mom and Dad were the sweetest people you'd ever want to meet, but the jerk kept accusing them of spying on them. They weren't doing anything of the kind. Dad just liked watching birds so he spent a lot of time on the porch looking in the trees with his binoculars.

"The asshole didn't have anything to spy on anyway, well, except for his wife. I remember once seeing her laying out in the back yard in a bikini. That was before the guy came home from work. As soon as he did, he yelled at her to get her ass back inside and then I heard them arguing. Well, I heard him because he was yelling at the top of his voice. I didn't hear her say anything, but he'd yell and then there'd be a pause, and then he'd yell again."

I showed Mr. Rockly the autopsy picture of my unknown blonde then.

"Have you ever seen this woman?"

The guy nodded.

"Sure. She's the wife of that son of a bitch. Never could figure out why she stayed with him. She was a pretty woman, a little thick in the waist, but still pretty enough she could have had any man she wanted. I always hoped she'd kick him out and stay living there. I think she did leave him, because I came back home from Asheville on Christmas day in 1989. Mom and Dad were failing by then, so I took two weeks off work to stay with them. I figured it would be the last Christmas we'd be together. Dad said he hadn't seen her since before Christmas. The guy was still there, but not his wife. Looks like she's dead in this picture. What happened to her?"

I said it was part of an ongoing investigation so I couldn't tell him any more and then asked if he knew the name of the man and his wife. He nodded.

"The woman told Mom her name was Beth Upton. I won't ever forget that asshole's name, not after he called the cops on Mom and Dad. I still got the police report. Give me a second and I'll go get it."

The man was Charles Upton. The town cop had talked to him after he filed the complaint, but hadn't pursued any action. That was because as he wrote in his report, "Mr. Upton seemed to be really upset about anyone watching his wife to the point of threatening to take care of the matter himself if I didn't. I reminded Mr. Upton that if he did anything to Mr. or Mrs. Hudson, I'd have to arrest him. Mr. Hudson hadn't broken any laws so I couldn't do anything, but I did go tell Mr. Hudson that he should probably not watch birds when Mr. Upton was home."

I needed another piece of information to make up my mind. I asked Mr. Rockly if he remembered what kind of car the Jameson's drove. He nodded again.

"The asshole drove a brand new pickup truck, Ford I think, four wheel drive and the whole nine yards. His wife had to settle for a little blue Chevy Chevette. She told Mom the car wasn't much but at least she had a way to get around on her own. She said her husband wouldn't buy her anything bigger because a woman didn't need anything bigger. She called the car her midget car. That's why I remember the name, you know, midget and Chevette sound kind of the same."

My last question to Mr. Rockly was if he knew why the house was torn down and if he knew where Mr. Upton was living now. He shook his head.

"No, I don't know either. All I know is the Thursday after New Year's, I was sitting at Mom's kitchen table drinking my morning coffee when I heard that ding-ding sound when a truck backs up. I looked out the window and saw Upton unloading a bulldozer from the trailer behind his truck. An hour later, the house and foundation were pushed up in a pile back by the alley and the lot was leveled. The next day, he came back with a tractor with a scoop and put all the lumber and stuff in a dumpster.

"I only saw the jerk once after that. He drove up to the curb in his truck the next day and looked for a while and then drove off."

Before I drove back home, we stopped by the court house and asked for the property records for 150 Elm Street.

The house had been built right after World War II by a Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Upton. The deed had been transferred to Mrs. Upton when her husband passed away in 1975 and then to Charles Upton when she passed away in 1977. There were no liens on the property and apparently Charles Upton was still the owner and he'd kept up with the taxes on the property.

Things were starting to look more promising now. I had two names I could run through the system. I still wasn't sure who'd done the shooting or how, but any lead was better than what I had before.

Rochelle hadn't said a word the entire time, but I could see that she was thinking. Once we were back on the road to Knoxville, I asked her what she'd been thinking about. She frowned at me.

"Something isn't right about this case. After what you heard about this Upton guy, do you think he'd let his wife have sex with another man? He sounds like a control freak to me. He might have been having sex with Missus Blair, but I don't think he'd ever let his wife do that. It that's the case, why would she have ended up dead in the Blair's bedroom? Did Mister Upton suddenly have a change of heart and offer his wife to Mister Blair? I can't see that happening, not if he called the police just because he thought the neighbor was watching his wife.

"I'd never write something like that because nobody would believe it could happen. Something else was going on between the couples. Now that we have a name for the woman, we need to find somebody else who knew her and see what they have to say. We need to do the same for Mister Upton too."

Even after all these years, I'm amazed at how much information about a person a detective can get once he has a name. I spent that Wednesday running both Charles and Beth Upton through NCIC.

When I ran Charles Upton through NCIC, he came back with an interesting history. Charles was born in 1958 and grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1988, he'd been a cop in Charlotte. In June of that year, he'd been relieved of duty and then discharged from the force because he'd been convicted of felonious assault. Apparently he'd treated a woman he'd stopped for speeding in a pretty rough manner. In July, he was given a two year sentence. He served a year of that sentence and was released with a year of parole. His last known address was the same as on the vehicle registration and his last known occupation was construction worker.

I knew that most police departments tend to give police officers the benefit of the doubt in their dealings with criminals. Getting rough with a speeder who resists could be called assault, but normally it's only grounds for a verbal reprimand. I thought there might be something else that contributed to his arrest and termination. I called the Chief of Police in Charlotte, told him I was working on a cold case that might involve Charles Upton, and asked him about Charles' history with the Charlotte PD.

Chief Reynolds did me one better, and that made me suspicious that Charles was in deeper trouble than the assault charge. Normally, a personnel file about any officer is considered confidential, but he said he'd send me a copy of Charles' personnel file so I could see for myself.

Next, I keyed Beth Upton's name into the NCIC search window. What came back was even more interesting.

Beth Upton was born Beth Hayes in June of 1967 and she'd been arrested by an officer working a sting operation in Charlotte for prostitution when she was nineteen. What caught my eye was two things. The arresting officer was none other than Charles Upton, and the charges against her were dropped after he said he might have interpreted what she said incorrectly. He claimed she'd asked him if he'd give her a ride and because of the way she was dressed, he'd assumed she was a prostitute. While he was writing his report, he realized she hadn't actually said she'd do anything or named a price. He'd gone to his shift supervisor and told him he thought he'd made a mistake.

Well, that stunk to high heaven. Early in my career, I'd been part of a couple sting operations targeted at the prostitutes in Nashville. Not once did I have a girl walk up to my car and say she'd blow me for ten bucks or let me fuck her for twenty. They always just sort of hinted that they were available until I got them in my car because they knew the police were out to take them off the streets. I had to convince them I was just a horny guy before they'd talk services and price.

What I was thinking was that Mr. Upton had cut a deal with Beth. He would see to it the charges were dropped if she'd do something for him. It's fairly common for a police officer to offer to forget about a minor crime if the criminal agrees to become a confidential informant. I'd done that myself a few times when the crime was something like dealing a very small amount of marijuana or a minor assault between to guys in a gang. The best information an officer can get is information from people who live amongst the bad guys.

According to the NCIC file, she'd changed her name sometime before January 1988 when she'd been arrested for shoplifting at a Victoria's Secret, so what it looked like to me was she'd agreed to marry Charles in exchange for him dropping the prostitution charge.

Beth was convicted of the shoplifting charge, but only got a year of parole. I didn't understand why her prints weren't on file with the FBI or NCIC, but that isn't really all that unusual. Filing prints with the FBI NCIC is a clerical task and most police departments aren't overly blessed with clerical staff. Her prints were probably on file with the Charlotte PD and just had never been sent to the FBI or NCIC. That still happens today.

Her last known location was 150 Elm Street, Clyde, North Carolina. Her occupation was listed as waitress, and her last known place of employment was a barbecue joint in Clyde.

According to her file, she had a brother still living in Charlotte, so I drove to Charlotte the next day by myself. Rochelle had bought some flowers she wanted to plant by the front porch so she said she'd pass on the trip. I wanted to know what the brother knew about Beth. I was also going to tell him she was dead.

When I knocked on the door of the house next to a church, a woman answered. I introduced myself and asked to speak to Mr. Richard Hayes. She asked me to come inside while she got him.

A couple minutes later a man in a suit walked into the room, stuck out his hand, and said, "Hello, Sir. I'm Pastor Hayes. How can I help you?"

I said I was a detective for the Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department and asked if he had a sister named Beth. It was a few seconds before he answered.

"Yes, I used to have a sister named Beth. What did she do now?"

I said I didn't know that she'd done anything but that her name had come up during an investigation I was conducting.

I heard him sigh then.

"Yes, I have, or at least I had a sister named Beth. I haven't seen or talked to her since she was nineteen and got herself arrested for prostitution. I was in Theology School at the time, and I told Mom to tell Beth not to contact me ever again. If anyone knew I had a sister who'd been arrested for something like that, I'd have been forced to leave school and I wouldn't be where I am today."

I asked if he could tell me anything about her. He sighed again.

"Beth was a handful for Mom when she was growing up. She didn't like going to school so she didn't study. She had to repeat seventh grade and barely passed each year after that. When she was a senior, she basically quit school altogether. Mom would drop her off to make sure she got there, but as soon as Mom drove away, Beth would take off to this older woman's place and spend the day with her. She'd go back to the school a little before they let out so Mom could pick her up.

"Mom figured out what was going on when Beth forgot her lunch one day. Mom took her lunch to the school, but Beth wasn't there. Mom didn't say anything until she brought Beth home. Then they had a big fight. Mom said Beth had to tell her everywhere she'd been going, and Beth said since she was eighteen it was none of Mom's business. Mom said Beth couldn't live under her roof unless she followed the rules. Beth said that was fine with her. She went to her room, packed some stuff in a bag, and left.

"I don't know where she went after that. As far as I know, Mom didn't try to get Beth to come back home. I think Mom had just given up on Beth, and I didn't blame her. Mom was a good, God-fearing woman who was trying to raise a good, God-fearing daughter. Beth usually did the opposite of everything Mom tried to teach her.