The Cold Case of Bridget Mayes

I've seen several bodies just tossed into the median of an interstate. I suppose the killer thinks that's safe because nobody except the guys who mow those medians ever walks through them. That happens to be true. By the time the body is found, it's either decomposed beyond identification or in some cases, has been chopped to pieces by one of those big mowers.

I've seen bodies buried in the woods. Usually those graves aren't very deep. I don't think most people know how hard it is to dig a body-size hole very deep. They get started and an hour later are tired and figure they've dug deep enough. A lot of the time, erosion or scavenging animals will partially uncover the body and some farmer or hunter finds it.

I've seen bodies in freezers. That's usually turned out to be because the killer hadn't thought about disposing of the body and needs time to think. It's like after the killer has killed the victim, he or she then sits back and says, "Oh shit, now what do I do? If I don't' do something fast things are gonna get really smelly. I'll put the body in my deep freeze to keep that from happening until I think of something."

The problem I was having with this case was that the body wasn't hidden much at all, so it looked like the killer wanted the victim to be found. The problem with that logic was where the body had been found.

If I wanted a body to be found, I'd do what the mob does with their hits. They'll kill the guy in a restaurant and then leave him there, or they'd kill him someplace and then take the body to a park, leave it sitting in a car, or someplace where people commonly walk. Sometimes it was in the trunk of a car parked in a city parking space. After a day or two in a hot trunk, it was obvious what was there and somebody would report it. In any of the ways, the murder would hit the news media and the message would be delivered to the intended recipients.

A farm pond didn't seem like a place anybody would go very often unless it was in the summer to fish. Farmers who have a pond to water their livestock usually put in a few minnows and fish to keep down the mosquitoes and give them a little relaxation. Most state fish hatcheries sell small minnows and game fish for that purpose.

In December, nobody would be fishing that pond. It was also on private property, so anybody wanting to hunt the property would have had to have permission. That's how the guy who found the body happened to be there. His brother owned the property.

Harry had talked to both the guy who found the body and his brother, and both had alibis for the day and night before the body was found and neither recognized the woman in the picture Harry showed them. The guy who found the body worked second shift in a factory and the factory confirmed he was there. The brother had sold his soybeans and had made several trips to a grain elevator all through the day. Both their wives said their husbands had been home all night.

Harry had tried to establish a connection between Miss Mayes and either brother or their wives or family, but couldn't find anything. There was no Bridget Mayes working in the factory or working in any of the places either brother typically went. Bridget Mayes didn't work in any store in town either.

While it was possible both brothers and their wives had lied about everything, Harry was a pretty good judge of when someone was lying to him. At least for the moment, I crossed the brothers and their families off the list of possible suspects I'd started.

I was wondering about three things then.

One - how would the killer know about the farm pond? It was half a mile from both the farmer's house and the fence along the county road. It wasn't really visible from the road because it was down over a low hill.

Two - how the hell had the killer managed to get a hundred and ten pound body over the fence and then to the pond without leaving any trace they'd been there? If the victim had been shot or stabbed, my guess would have been that the killer and the victim walked or rode to the pond together. Once they were there, the killer shot or stabbed the victim and then left. Miss Mayes wasn't stabbed or shot. She was already dead when she was dropped beside the pond, and a hundred and ten pounds of dead weight would be hard for most people to carry for more than a few feet.

Three - Miss Mayes was naked except for the shoe on her left foot. Since it didn't look like she was killed at the pond and there wasn't any indication that she was undressed there, she must have been naked when she was dumped. Why did she still have on her left shoe and where was the other one? Harry's Crime Scene techs hadn't found the other shoe.

I didn't have any answers to any of those questions, so I thought maybe if I drove to the farm, I'd see something Harry didn't about the first two.

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Like many older farms, the house was gone from the place but the barn and the machine shed were still there. Across the road and about a quarter of a mile away was another farm, this one with a house and a car parked in the lane from the county road. I drove to that house and knocked on the door.

The woman who answered my knock was maybe thirty, thirty-five. She asked what I wanted so I told her I was a detective on the Knoxville Police Force and I was looking into a case from December of 1992. She smiled at me.

"Detective, I wouldn't know anything about that. I was only a year old in 1992."

"Oh, well how about your husband? Is he home?"

She shook her head.

"I'm sorry, he's out baling hay, but he wouldn't either. He's just two years older than I am."

Well, this was going nowhere fast.

"Well, what I'm really interested in is the house across the road, except it's gone now. Would you happen to know anything about that, like who lived there or when it was torn down?"

She thought for a second.

"Well, we bought this place seven years ago in July of 2015, and the place across the road in September of 2020. I don't remember the name of the people who owned it, but it was an older couple. The husband died and the wife wanted to move in with her daughter so she sold the farm and the cows to us. We had the house torn down about a year later so we wouldn't have to pay property taxes on it. We didn't want to raise cows, but we needed a barn for our horses so we kept it. My husband stores some of his equipment in the machine shed."

"Did you change anything else about the property?"

"Not really. One of the reasons we bought the place is it was already fenced, well, that and that it was just across the road. I guess we did paint the barn, and of course any fence needs repairs from time to time because horses like to rub on the fence. Other than that, everything's just like it was when we bought it."

I said I thought there was a pond on the property and she nodded.

"That's another reason we wanted the farm. Here on this place, we have to pump water for our horses. With the pond, they just drink from the pond. It even has some fish in it, and my husband fishes there during the summer."

She looked up at me and frowned then.

"This is about that girl they found in the pond, isn't it?"

"You know about her?"

She shook her head.

"No, not really. When we bought the place the wife told us about it."

She chuckled then.

"She said she hoped there wasn't a ghost down by that pond. So far, we haven't seen one."

Well, she hadn't given me anything I could use, so I thanked her. I was turning to leave when a thought hit me.

"Since you own the farm now, could I maybe go over there and have a look around?"

She nodded.

"Just be sure to close the gate if you walk down to the pond. Jasper has gotten out before. He's our stallion and he thinks the grass up next to the road is better than the grass in the pasture."

I gave her my card and asked if she remembered anything else to give me a call, then drove back down to the farm across the road.

What I was looking for was a way to get to the pond without climbing the fence that ran along the county road. I figured the guy who was duck hunting that morning probably had already driven to the pond to put out his blind and his boat, then came back another day to hunt. The Crime Lab techs hadn't found any tire tracks though, so whoever dumped the body had to have walked.

I could believe that maybe one strong man could carry a dead hundred and ten pound woman for a half-mile. I'd done that in Army Basic with a guy who weighed about one fifty, not a half mile, but at least a hundred yards. That man would have to stop and rest, but if time wasn't important, he could do that.

The duck hunter had gotten to the pond a little before six and the body wasn't found until about nine. Since the coroner estimated her time of death at ten to twelve hours before she was found, she'd been murdered sometime between nine and eleven the night before. The killer would have had at least four hours to get the body to the farm and then to the pond and still be gone before the duck hunter got there.

The problem he'd have had doing that was the fence next to the highway was the typical woven-wire cattle fence four feet high with one strand of barbed wire on top. There was no way one man could have gotten over that fence while carrying Miss Mayes.

The gate the woman had cautioned me about was right at the barn and was twelve feet wide. It was chained, but not locked. I figured that gate was how the duck hunter had gotten his blind and boat down to the pond. It was also the probable way the killer got Miss Mayes to the pond without climbing the fence. He'd have had to go past the house, but if it was much after midnight, most people would already be asleep. He'd be able to know that by watching the house for lights.

I hadn't been able to see the pond from the county road, and I couldn't see it from the barn either. That meant whoever dumped Miss Mayes at the pond had already been there at least once. Google Earth didn't exist in 1992 and no road maps would have shown such a small pond on private property. It would also have been dark at that time of night. He had to know exactly where he was going.

It took only about half an hour of walking to reach the pond. I could probably have walked faster, but I was trying to simulate walking and carrying a body so I stopped every fifty yards or so and rested for five minutes.

When I got to the pond, I walked all the way around it looking for where Harry's sketch indicated the body was found. The pond had evidently changed some over the years, because the point on the west side was more of a gentle curve now, but it was the closest place on the pond to the house.

When I came back, I walked at my normal pace and made it back to the barn in twenty minutes. What that gave me was about an hour the killer would have taken to drop the body and then leave.

I also had one other piece of information. I had the name of the neighbor across the road. The person closest to the pond other than the brother who owned the farm would have been whoever lived in the house across the road. Harry hadn't talked to anybody in that house. I suppose that was because it was a ways down the road so the people there probably hadn't heard or seen anything.

I hadn't asked the woman who owned the house before in case the farm had been part of her or her husband's family, but that would be easy to find. All I had to do was call the County Recorder of Deeds. They'd have a record of the sale.

It was five before I got back to my desk, so I called it quits for the day and went home. I was anxious to see what Rochelle had found out. Over dinner, she told me.

"Doctor Birkley said that a lot of things can cause high blood pressure but they almost never happen to young people unless they already have some sort of problem like diabetes or their arteries or veins aren't strong enough for some reason. The other cause she says she's seen is being overweight. Sometimes pregnant women have high blood pressure, but as soon as they give birth, it goes back down.

"I told her why I was asking, and then asked if lesbians were at greater risk. She said probably not just because the woman was a lesbian. She said any type of arousal raises your blood pressure, but almost never enough be a problem. She said it's more like when your blood pressure goes up when you take a brisk walk. As soon as you have an orgasm or just stop having sex, it goes back down again.

"Then she said she did remember reading about a case in 2016 where a twenty-four year old woman had a brain hemorrhage while masturbating and died. She said if it could happen to a woman who's masturbating, it's probably possible for a woman to do the same while having sex.

"Maybe that's what happened. She was having sex with her girlfriend and her blood pressure got high enough to cause a brain hemorrhage."

I shook my head.

"Wouldn't the girlfriend have called 911?"

"Maybe she was too embarrassed. She'd have had to explain what happened, and like I said, back then lesbians were still hiding that from almost everybody. She might have just taken her to the pond so nobody would know."

I smiled.

"Remind me to never have a heart attack while we're having sex. I don't want to end up in a shallow grave beside the garage."

Rochelle grinned.

"I wouldn't bury you beside the garage. Somebody would find you. I'd freeze you so you wouldn't start to smell and then take you up into the Smokies and feed you to the bears. I wrote that into a novel once. It didn't sell, but I still thought it was a good way to dispose of a body. In my novel, the police never found enough of the victim to identify."

"Well, it wouldn't work, not with my DNA on file in CODIS. You'd get caught."

"Yeah, I know, but I wouldn't do it anyway. Too many people know we live together so I'd be the prime suspect.

"Oh, my doctor said that girl was a very rare case, so it's probably not what happened to Miss Mayes. Did you find out anything?"

I went through what I'd done at the farm.

"I found out that it would be pretty easy to get a body down to that pond in at most an hour. There's a gate into the pasture where the pond is. The killer would have had to go past the house to get to the gate, but given the time Miss Mayes was killed, the people who lived in the house were probably asleep.

"The other thing I found out is that there's a house across the road and a ways down that was sold to a younger couple seven years ago. They bought the farm with the pond a few years later. One of the things that's been a question in my mind was where the killer parked his car. I don't think he'd have driven up beside the house. He'd have parked somewhere else and then carried her to the gate and then down to the pond.

"The house across the road is close enough he could have just picked her up and walked across the road to the house with the pond. Tomorrow, I'm going to find out who the original owner was. With what I found out today, that original owner is someone I want to know about. They might be a really good suspect. As far as I can tell Harry never talked to them."

"You keep saying "He". What if it wasn't a man? What if it was the lesbian lover?"

"Rochelle, according to the autopsy report, the woman weight a hundred and ten pounds. I can't see how any woman could carry that much weight for that distance unless she was so strong she didn't look like a woman. It almost had to be a man unless she drove down to the pond and if she had, the techs would have found some indication that a vehicle had been down there. They didn't find any tire tracks, but there still should have been some mashed down grass.

"She'd also have had to drive past the house. A person walking past the house probably wouldn't have been seen. A car's headlights would have been seen through the windows and it would have made at least a little noise."

Rochelle frowned then.

"So, where do we go from here?"

"Well, I'm going to ask the County Recorder of Deeds who owned the house before the couple living there now. After that, well, you're really good at searching through the newspaper archives. Maybe you can find out something about the old owners while I run them through the TBI and NCIC."

Rochelle grinned then.

I could do that if I have some incentive. How are you doing on incentive? Got any left?"

I've never needed any encouragement to make love to Rochelle, but she gave me some that night. When I came out of the bathroom, she was lying on our bed with her legs spread and she was lightly stroking the bush of brown hair between her thighs.

"Since our victim had female DNA in her vagina, she must have had sex with a woman before she was killed. I wonder what they did."

I said I didn't know because I wasn't a lesbian, but I figured they did things like most men would do except they didn't have the equipment that a man had. Rochelle smiled.

"You have part of the equipment another woman would have. Let's try that and see what happens."

Well, what happened is Rochelle clamped her thighs around my head when she came the first time. She pulled me up on top of her once she stopped jerking, kissed me until I had to stop to breathe and then whispered, "About that equipment women don't have...why don't you show me what you meant."

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It took two hours to find out Jacob and Melissa Jefferson, the current owners of both farms had bought the farm where they lived from Sherry Miller and Lisa Miller. The ownership passed to Sherry Miller and Lisa Miller after their father and mother had both passed away.

The Jeffersons had bought the farm with the pond from Mrs. Bertha Tolliday. Ownership of the farm had transferred to her when her husband, Gerald, passed away.

I called Rochelle and gave her all the names, and then started looking through the DMV, TBI, and NCIC files looking for all four names. While I was looking, I also queried Jason Jefferson and Margaret Jefferson, the current owners of both farms. My reason for looking at Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson was to find out if there was any past relationship between them and the Tollidays. I'd had one case before where a seemingly simple real estate transaction had been used to cover up for a crime.

The only thing I found for Sherry Miller or Lisa Miller was a driver's license for both. Sherry was sixty and Lisa was sixty-one. Both lived at the same address. There was nothing else in the TBI records or in NCIC on either one.

I found a driver's license for both the Tollidays but both had expired ten years before. According to the birth dates on their licenses, that wasn't a big surprise. Mr. Tolliday would be seventy-eight now and his wife would be seventy-five. I also knew from Mrs. Jefferson that Mr. Tolliday had passed away before his wife sold the farm.

Checking the various databases for a name isn't like it always happens on TV. On the TV shows, the detective sits down, types in the name, and in a second or two, all the information pops up on the screen. In real life, it's a lot more complicated.

Criminal records are protected from access by anyone who hasn't been certified. That means law enforcement and it also means your department has to request that you be certified. Then, you have to go through training in how to use the database before you're actually certified.

Typing in the query is pretty simple, just the name of the person and your user ID. Getting the information back can take some time. That's because if you query somebody named Harry Lightfingers and he has a record, NCIC has to contact the person who entered that record to make sure it's current. The TBI is a little faster, but still takes time.

As a result, it was five before my last query turned out to be nothing found on Bertha Tolliday. I signed off my laptop and headed home hoping Rochelle had come up with something because I hadn't.