The Cold Case of Bridget Mayes

The case dated from December 28, 1992. A duck hunter had a floating duck blind on a small pond on a farm his brother owned, and got there just before daylight that morning. As soon as it was light enough to see what he was doing, he used a small-flat bottomed boat to set his decoys out and then went back to his blind to wait.

After two hours, he'd seen a few ducks fly by, but none of them were coming close enough to the pond for him to get a shot. That was unusual for that time of the year because every year before at this time, there had always been ducks that used the pond. After three hours, the duck hunter gave up and rowed out to collect his decoys.

He'd put the last two decoys next to some cattails that grew along one side of the pond, and when he got close to them, he could see what he thought was a large dead fish floating on the surface. When he got closer, he realized the dead fish was the calf of human leg floating just below the surface. He rowed a little closer and saw the rest of the body lying inside the stand of cattails. That was why no ducks had come close to the pond. From the air, the body would have been in plain sight to any duck venturing toward the pond.

When Harry and the coroner and the Crime Scene techs got there, the EMT's had already taken the body out of the cattails and had it lying on a plastic sheet. The sex of the victim was obvious because she was nude except for the one high-heeled shoe still on the left foot.

What wasn't obvious was what killed her or how she got there. The techs combed the area for vehicle tracks or footprints, but didn't find any. They also didn't find anything that might have contributed to the woman's death.

The coroner's autopsy report said the woman was between twenty-five and thirty, appeared to have been in good health, and had never had children. He didn't find any evidence of sexual assault.

The coroner wasn't certain about the time of death. He had measured her internal temperature at the pond and found it to be 58.8 F. At the outside temperature the night before of 29 F, that internal temperature would indicate she'd been dead for about six hours, but he stated that was probably incorrect because of several contributing factors. The body was partly in the water of the pond up to the thighs and the water temperature was 40F, and the rest of the body was in contact with the moist bank of the pond with no clothing to insulate the body. The temperature of the soil of the bank was about 50 F because the day before had been sunny and the soil had absorbed a lot of heat. Both would have impacted the cooling rate of the body, but the cooling rate was nearly impossible to calculate. His best guess was between ten and twelve hours based upon the state of rigor mortis of the body.

It wasn't until the coroner opened the woman's skull that he was able to determine the cause of death. That cause was a brain hemorrhage. Nothing in the body told him the cause of the brain hemorrhage, so his diagnosis was extremely high blood pressure that had caused one of the arteries in her brain to rupture. He couldn't identify any specific cause of the extremely high blood pressure. She wasn't overweight, the lab tests on her blood didn't show the presence of any alcohol or drugs, and she wasn't diabetic.

He was unsure how to classify the death since the woman appeared to have had no problems that could have caused the brain hemorrhage. Based on the fact that she was found beside a pond and naked, he classified it as potentially murder.

The only thing about the body that seemed abnormal other than the brain hemorrhage was what looked to the coroner like faint marks on her ankles, but the one high-heeled shoe had straps that wrapped up the ankle and had a buckle to fasten them there. The coroner attributed the faint marks to the straps on the shoes.

Since the woman's hands hadn't been in the water the coroner was able to get a full set of fingerprints from the body. He also took DNA samples from the woman including one sample from her vagina in case some residual DNA from a rape had remained.

There was no match to the prints in either the TBI database or in IAFIS. The DNA samples were a little more revealing, but still inconclusive. The DNA sample from the woman's vagina revealed two different sets of DNA, both female. One sample matched the DNA from the body tissue samples, but neither the TBI nor CODIS had a match to either.

It was a day after the nightly news reported the finding of an unidentified body at the pond that the desk sergeant transferred a call to Harry's phone. The caller just said the woman was Bridget Mayes and then hung up. To Harry, the caller sounded like either a man with a high voice or a woman with a low voice, but the caller hadn't said enough to tell for sure.

The desk sergeant had written down the number because it showed on his desk phone. When Harry tracked down the number it was placed from a payphone at the corner of Elm and Riley in Knoxville.

There was a dry-cleaning shop on that corner, so Harry had interviewed the owner and employees. None of them had seen anyone using the payphone, but said they seldom looked out the window at it. They did have a list of people who'd dropped off or picked up clothes about the time of the call. Harry interviewed them as well, and one said she'd seen a man making a call from the payphone when she went into the shop.

Harry sent a Crime Scene tech to dust the phone for prints and the tech found many, but all were too smudged to be of use.

Harry also looked up Bridget Mayes in the TBI records, NCIC, and the Tennessee DMV database. All that yielded was the address of an apartment building on the North side of Knoxville that was on her driver's license and her birth date. She was twenty.

When Harry went to the apartment, he found a young couple living there. When the wife of the couple said they'd rented the apartment six months before, Harry talked to the apartment super.

The apartment super told Harry that Bridget Mayes had moved into the apartment in August of 1990. He remembered her because she'd just turned 18 and he'd been reluctant to rent the apartment to her. He told Harry he only did because she paid him the first and last month's rent in cash. She'd moved out of the apartment in January of 1991 and didn't tell him where she was going. He said he figured she didn't tell the Post Office either because the couple now in the apartment kept getting credit card bills for Bridget Mays. He gave Harry the bills the couple had given him.

Harry got the credit reports for each of the three credit cards and only found out that Bridget Mayes hadn't used any of the cards for the last six months. In spite of having almost a five thousand-dollar balance, she hadn't made any payments to any of the credit card companies either.

That's where Harry basically hit a brick wall. He did try to find out if Bridget Mayes had any living relatives, but couldn't find any. When he turned the case over to me, he just frowned.

"This one bothered me for a long time. I'm sure the girl was murdered somehow, but there was nothing that pointed to how or who did it. If I'd been able to find the son of a bitch who killed her, at least I'd have felt like I'd done the best I could for her. Maybe you'll have better luck."

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In case you haven't read my other stories, I'm Detective Richard Owens of the Knoxville Police Department. I work Homicide and I have somewhat of a reputation for solving cold cases. In fact, cold cases are mostly what I spend my days and often nights working on now. The other Homicide detectives handle most of the day to day cases.

Rochelle is my partner, but she's not another Homicide detective. She's a writer who asked my old Captain in the Nashville PD if she could work on a cold case with a detective. She writes crime and mystery novels based on real cases. Together we solved a cold case and also figured out that we fit together really well in other things. One of those things is temporarily curing the attacks of libido that Rochelle seems to have fairly often. I transferred to the Knoxville PD to live with her, and we've solved several cold cases together. We've also decided we might get married some day, but for now, we're content to live together.

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This case was going to be tough to solve, probably at least as hard as the other cases we'd solved together. The difference is that a lot cases go cold because the body can't be identified. Unless you know who the dead person was, you don't know where to look for a killer.

In this case, we had a body and a name, but basically no information about who she was, who she knew, or where she'd been for at least seven months before she was killed. The other thing that was odd was the phone call Harry had gotten that gave him the victim's name. Someone, somewhere, had decided it was important that Harry know the woman's name, but didn't stay on the line long enough to tell him any more than that.

To me, it sounded as if the killer wanted Miss Mayes to be found. That could be either out of remorse, or it could be because the killer wanted the world to know that Miss Mayes was dead. Either way, the news story didn't name the victim, so the killer, or at least the person who put her there at the pond, was the only person who could put the name and the location of the body together. I've never worked a case where the killer had someone else dispose of the body except for one in Nashville that ended up being a gang hit.

The guy was told if he'd get rid of the body, it would secure his position in the gang. When we caught him, he was scared to death and started to talk. He gave us the name of the killer and what went down. As it turned out, he'd been a present at the murder as well, so I charged them both with murder.

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That night, Rochelle looked through the copy I'd made of Harry's file, such as it was, and then frowned.

"You mean to tell me that with her name, Harry couldn't find out anything about her?"

"Well, he did find an address, but she hadn't lived there for seven months. She always paid the rent in cash, so Harry didn't have a bank account to chase down. She'd never paid anything toward her credit card balances, so he didn't have anything to work with there either.

"With no forwarding address, Harry didn't have much of any place to look. She didn't have a phone number in the book, and at that time, not a lot of people had cell phones. The cell phones of the day were huge, you had to buy them outright and they were expensive."

"I see that Harry put her picture and name in the newspaper. Nobody responded?"

"Nope. That was pretty much his last hope, but it didn't pan out either."

Rochelle pulled the autopsy report from the file then. After reading it, she looked up at me.

"They found another woman's DNA in her vagina. That means she was most likely a lesbian. If she was, it's no wonder Harry didn't get any responses. Most states had revised their laws about homosexuality by then, but most gay men didn't advertise the fact that they were gay, and lesbians were even quieter about it. Lesbians didn't attract as much attention anyway. Nobody thought much about two women living together. It was considered pretty normal because that had been going on for decades. As long as they didn't publicly display some sort of affection, people might suspect, but that's all.

"For a woman to call Harry and say she knew Miss Mayes would be inviting a bunch of questions she wouldn't have wanted to answer, especially if she's the one who killed Miss Mayes. Harry would have quickly figured out she was his best suspect. Once he did that, he'd have investigated everything about the woman, and eventually, he'd get enough to arrest her for murder."

Rochelle was repeating what she usually did when we work on a case. It's because she's a writer. From what I've learned from Rochelle, writers usually start with an ending in mind and then figure out how to get there. That's what Rochelle was doing. We had the ending - a dead woman who could possibly have been a lesbian - and Rochelle was inventing the crime that killed her.

"You're assuming a lot based on a tiny little bit of evidence, aren't you?"

"Maybe, but I think what we have supports my theory. I think she probably left her apartment and moved in with her girlfriend. Then something happened that made the girlfriend mad and she killed her. Then she took her body out to that pond and dumped her."

"Wouldn't she have had some inkling that her girlfriend, if she really had one, was the type of person who could do something like that? I thought before women got into a relationship with someone, they had to feel safe or at least comfortable around the person. In my experience, it's usually not that hard to tell if someone's capable of murder. There have been serial killers who were very good at convincing their victims that they're just ordinary people, but they're few and far between."

Rochelle shrugged.

"I don't know. Maybe Miss Mayes thought she loved the woman. Love can make a woman do things she wouldn't ordinarily do. Men too, from what I understand. From what I've read, lesbians love their girlfriends just like straight women love their boyfriends. It's just that like when men and women think they're in love, sometimes it turns out that that's not the case. Maybe that's what happened to Miss Mayes. She thought she loved this woman and then found out she didn't. When she tried to leave, the other woman didn't want her to and that resulted in some sort of fight."

"Then how would the fight turn into something that caused Miss Mayes to have a brain hemorrhage?"

"I don't know but I'll talk to my doctor tomorrow. The coroner back then suspected the hemorrhage was caused by high blood pressure. Doctor Anderson told me my blood pressure was a little low the last time she checked it and she knew why. Maybe she'll know why a lesbian woman would have high blood pressure."

Rochelle grinned and pulled the top over her head, then slipped her bra straps off her shoulders and pulled her bra cups down. Her heavy breasts swayed as she turned the bra around to unfasten the hooks.

"I feel like my blood pressure is a little low again. Think you could figure out a way to raise it a little?"

Well, I don't know if I raised Rochelle's blood pressure or not, but I'm pretty sure she raised mine. I know her heart was pounding away like mad when she stopped jerking her body over my cock and pulled me down on top of her.

She stroked my back a little, and then whispered, "That helped a lot. Think you could manage it again?"

It's not like I need any encouragement to do that. It's always kind of like that old joke that says for a man to get a woman aroused, he needs to give her sparkly things and tell her she's beautiful, but for a woman to arouse a man, all she has to do is get naked.

Rochelle in clothes is pretty sexy and since I know what's under those clothes, she's pretty erotic as well. Naked...well, I'd challenge any man to keep his cock still once he saw her lying on the bed and stroking her breasts like she was then.

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The next morning, Rochelle made an appointment to talk with her doctor. I decided to get a second opinion on the original autopsy and walked down to talk to Jack. He was working on a body at the time, and when I walked into the morgue, he looked up and smiled through his face shield.

"Hi Rich, what brings you to my dungeon today? You got another OD you want me to confirm like the last time? Honestly, your cases are getting boring. That last one still had the needle stuck in her arm so it wasn't like I had to do much in the way of scientific research.

I shook my head.

"No, I need you to look at an old autopsy and tell me what you think."

He grinned at me.

"OK, but you'll have to give me a couple minutes to get this woman closed back up."

It took half an hour before Jack pulled the sheet back over the woman, took off his gloves and face shield, and then walked over to his desk.

"OK, whatcha got that takes my expert opinion?"

I showed Jack the autopsy forms and report. He pulled up another chair, sat down, and then started reading. About fifteen minutes later he looked up and frowned.

"The woman had a cerebral hemorrhage and that's all the coroner could find but he still called it a murder?"

I nodded.

"Well, it wasn't what killed her that caused him to make the call that it was murder. It was the fact that she was found naked and part way into the water on the shore of a pond. Neither he nor the detective figured she was just out for a stroll, took off all her clothes, and then dropped dead while wading in the water.

"That's why I wanted you to look at the report. I thought maybe you'd see something the other coroner missed, or maybe you could tell me how someone could cause another person to have a brain hemorrhage."

Jack shook his head.

"Well, normally, I'd say it isn't possible to cause any young person to have a cerebral hemorrhage unless the person was extremely overweight or diabetic. A cerebral hemorrhage is when a blood vessel in the brain ruptures. That either starves the brain of oxygen, or the pressure of the blood between the brain and the skull causes damage to the brain. It's a stroke that just happens in the brain instead of somewhere else. It's a little like what happens with a stroke, only worse. We're seeing more strokes in young people because they tend to be overweight even when they're young, but they're not usually fatal. Half the time, they don't even know they've had a stroke until they can't do something they used to be able to do, like maybe they have problems controlling an arm or leg or they slur their words.

"Probably the most common cause of a cerebral hemorrhage is trauma to the skull that damages an artery in the brain. The other common causes are normal aging, hemophilia, liver or other disease or a brain tumor. She wasn't old enough for aging to be the cause, and the other corner would have found the others."

Jack thought for a second, then looked at the report again.

"Well, there is another possibility. A few people, and we really don't understand why, have some weak places in their arteries. We know that sometimes it's a congenital defect, but a lot of times it's just how the person is.

"They don't exhibit the common causes, but they still have a blood vessel that opens up and causes a bleed. It's hard to detect if that's the case because the difference between a blood vessel ruptured because of high blood pressure and one that ruptures because it's thinner than normal is hard to see if the rupture is severe enough to cause death.

"There are a couple of labs that I know of who are trying to isolate the gene or genes that control how thick blood vessels get, but so far they haven't been able to find one or more that are present in all people with weak blood vessels. The data is obscured by other factors like diet and exercise. The best they can do right now is say that if you have a particular gene or genes, you have some risk of having the condition. They can't say that if you don't have that particular gene or genes, you're not at risk."

That last statement gave me an avenue Harry wouldn't have known about and I hadn't thought of until then.

"I have a DNA sequence on the woman. Would one of those labs be able to tell me if she was at risk? If she was, that might mean the difference between murder and an accidental death. Someone tried to hide the body, so there was still a crime committed, but it might not be murder."

Jack said he wasn't sure but that he'd look up the names of the labs and give me the contact information.

When I got back to my desk, I found Jack's note and the addresses of the two labs. I copied the DNA sequence and sent it to both and asked them if this person had any indicators that might result in a brain hemorrhage. After I did that, I read through Harry's report again because I had nothing else to check out. After I finished, one thing did stand out. It wasn't evidence. It was just a gut feeling about where the body was found.