The Cold Case of Bridget Mayes

When I walked in the door, Rochelle was sitting at the dining room table staring at her laptop. She didn't look up until I shut the door, and when she did, she was frowning.

"I hope you found out something, because I sure didn't."

I frowned too.

"Nothing""

"Well, nothing we didn't know already. All I've found so far is a birth announcement for Sherry Miller. Her parents were Sam and Rachael Miller. I found birth announcements for both the Jeffersons, but that's it. I haven't found a birth announcement for Bridget Mayes so maybe she wasn't born in Knoxville.

"Oh, I guess I did find a wedding announcement for the Jeffersons, but they were still babies when Bridget was killed."

"You didn't find a birth announcement for Lisa Miller? I thought she and Sherry were sisters. How about kids for the Tollidays?"

Rochelle shook her head.

"It's like most of these people never existed, or at least they did a very good job of keeping their names out of the newspaper. I mean, you'd think there'd be something, a birth announcement or a wedding announcement or something that happened to them at one point or another, but there doesn't seem to be. Gerald Tolliday was the right age to be drafted for Vietnam, but if he was, it didn't make the papers. I couldn't find a wedding announcement for the Tollidays either, and seeing her name and picture in a wedding announcement in the paper is every bride's dream. I guess it wasn't hers."

"Well, maybe they just didn't go in for that sort of thing. There are people who would rather nobody knows about their private life. As I remember, you're one of those people."

"Yes, I guess I am, but I have a reason. The less my readers know about me the less the risk of one of them deciding they need to get up close and personal with me. Didn't you ever see the movie, "Play Misty For Me?

"The only reason I can think of for someone not wanting their name in the paper is if they'd done something they either weren't very proud of, or if they committed or witnessed a crime. That doesn't work for our murder because the Tollidays were in their forties when Bridget was killed..."

Rochelle got that look on her face that told me she was hatching up another theory.

"...unless Mrs. Tolliday was bi and was seeing Bridget back then. Maybe Mr. Tolliday didn't like that and killed Bridget and then carried her out to that pond."

I chuckled.

"You think if one of them killed her they'd be dumb enough to just leave her out in the open for the brother to find?"

"Well, there's no law that says you have to be smart to kill someone."

I shook my head.

"Harry talked to both of them and wasn't convinced they had anything to do with it. Besides, we still don't know what somebody would have done to her to cause her to have a brain hemorrhage."

Rochelle frowned.

"Yeah, you're right. Did you find out anything?"

"Just that the Jeffersons bought the farm where they live from Sherry and Lisa Miller. That's why I thought they were probably sisters. The Jeffersons bought the farm with the pond from Mrs. Tolliday after her husband died. Nothing sticks out at me from either except it's odd that you didn't find a birth announcement for Lisa Miller. Maybe she wasn't born in Tennessee. She does have a Tennessee driver's license though so I know she's real."

Rochelle closed up her laptop then.

"I'll do some more looking tomorrow. Right now, I'm starving and I'm too tired to cook. How about that little Italian place on Elm? You seemed to like that waitress with the big boobs."

I grinned.

"Well, the looking was OK, but she's no match for you. The veal was great though."

The veal was great that night too. Bedtime was pretty nice too, though we didn't do anything. We were both too mentally tired. We just kissed good night and then went to sleep.

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The next morning, I decided since neither Rochelle nor I could find out much about any of the people who might have been involved, I'd see if either Sherry or Lisa Miller could tell me anything. Harry evidently hadn't talked to either of them, I assumed because their house was far enough from the pond they probably wouldn't have seen or heard anything.

They lived in a subdivision just inside the city limits and when I drove there, I was surprised at how small the house was. It was a ranch just like contractors built hundreds of in and around Knoxville. They were relatively cheap to buy, and most were sold to first-time home owners.

The woman who answered my knock looked every year of the sixty her driver's license photo showed. She wasn't ugly by any measure, but the years hadn't been kind to her face and she was a little heavy in some places. I asked to speak to Sherry or Lisa Miller and she replied, "I'm Sherry. How can I help you?"

Probably the worst way to interrogate someone is to give them the idea you think they're guilty of something unless you have absolute proof they are, or can at least lie well enough they think you have that proof. I started out by explaining what I was looking for.

"Miss Miller...it is Miss, isn't it?"

Sherry nodded.

"I'm Richard Owens, a homicide detective for the Knoxville Police Department, and what I mostly do is work on old cases that were never solved. One of those cases is the girl who was found in the pond across the road and down a ways from where you lived in 1992. I was wondering if you saw or heard anything odd the night of December 20?"

Sherry smiled.

"I know about the girl, but we didn't hear or see anything that night. We were far enough from the house and there were enough trees we couldn't even see the lights of the house."

"You said 'we'. Was somebody else living there with you?"

Sherry smiled again.

"Sure. My sister Lisa. We still live together. She's not here now though. She does volunteer work at a church and won't be home until about four. You can come back and talk to her then if you want."

I shook my head.

"If you say you didn't hear or see anything, I believe you. The couple that lived in the house with the pond...did you know them?"

Sherry shook her head.

"No, not really. Mama and Daddy might have, but I don't know for sure. They seemed to keep to themselves most of the time. Daddy would help Mr. Tolliday bale hay sometimes, but I never met him or his wife. As far as I know, Mama never met her either. You'd think as close as our farms were, they'd have at least met a couple times, but Mama said she thought Mrs. Tolliday was a little different?""

"Oh, how so?"

"Well, she said about every two weeks or so she'd see a car drive past our house and then turn into the drive of the Tolliday farm. She could never see who was driving the car, but she knew it was always the same car. Mama never said what she thought was going on, just that it didn't seem right. Of course, Mama was pretty suspicious of anything she didn't understand. It's just how she was.

"She told us we shouldn't ever go over there. We wanted to when we were about ten because they had two horses, but Mama said she'd spank us if we did so we never did. Once we got in junior high, Daddy bought us each a horse so we didn't have to go over there."

"That car...you don't happen to remember what it looked like, do you?"

Sherry shook her head.

"No. I never saw it myself and I don't think Lisa did either. The only thing I remember is that Mama said it was blue."

I thanked Sherry and gave her my card and asked her to call me if she remembered anything else. Then, I drove back to the station.

Sherry telling me that a car drove to the Tolliday farm about every two weeks was a bit of tantalizing evidence, but the ages didn't work out right. Miss Mayes had been murdered when she was twenty, and that put her at ten years younger than Sherry and Lisa. When Sherry and Lisa were about ten, Miss Mayes would be less than a year old.

It did make me question something in Harry's report though. The apartment super had told him Miss Mayes didn't own a car because she always rode the bus if she went anywhere. That wasn't unusual because the bus lines in Knoxville were well established then and a lot of people living in apartments didn't own cars. If they needed to go somewhere the busses didn't run, they'd call a friend or rent a car.

There were about five hundred units in the apartment complex, so I wondered if she might have had a car and just didn't use it. I could understand that because from what some of the older patrol officers told me, even back then the traffic in Knoxville was pretty bad. It was probably easier to ride the bus.

What didn't make sense is how Miss Mayes was able to move out of her apartment without some type of vehicle. I didn't know how much stuff she had, but women typically have a lot of clothes and shoes. I couldn't see Miss Mayes getting on a bus with even one suitcase.

When I got back to my desk, I queried the DMV for motor vehicles registered to Bridget Mayes.

The report that came back was that Bridget Mayes had gotten a vehicle license in December of 1990 for a 1986 red Ford F150 pickup truck. That explained a couple things. The apartment super probably didn't know she had a vehicle since she moved out a month later. It also explained how she could get her stuff to wherever she went. The pickup did raise another question. Since Miss Mayes was dead, what happened to the truck? Did whoever killed her take it, was it just abandoned somewhere, or what?

I queried the DMV again, this time for all the records for the truck VIN number. What I got back was the name and address of the original owner, the change in title from that owner to Miss Mayes in December of 1990 and the license number she'd been assigned. The last entry was a request for a title for an abandoned vehicle from a local scrap yard in February of 1993. The request was granted and a new title issued. I assumed the pickup was scrapped then because there were no other sales or title transfers recorded.

There was another interesting thing about Miss Mayes and the pickup. She'd evidently paid the cost in full because there was no lien holder listed as part of the transaction. The lowest cost F-150 in 1986 was about nine grand, so by 1990, it would have been worth at least half of that. I didn't understand how Miss Mayes could come up with almost five grand or more in cash to buy the truck since according to what I found on the Department of Labor website, the minimum wage in 1990 was three dollars and eighty cents an hour. Even most managers and professionals were only making about twelve thousand a year. She had to have a source of money other than a job. Usually, in my experience anyway, that source is either a relative or a boyfriend. In this case, maybe it was a girlfriend.

This was getting frustrating. I kept finding a few bits of information but instead of helping me solve this case, all that information did was raise more questions.

To have something to do, I tried laying out a timeline of the crime. I knew Rochelle had already started one, but some of our best deductions have come because of a difference in our time lines.

Bridget Mayes had been born on July 6, 1972. I had zero information about her until July 10, 1990. That's the year she turned eighteen and the year she got a driver's license. In August of 1990, she'd rented the apartment and lived there until January 1991. In December of 1990, she'd bought a red Ford Pickup. On or about December 19, 1992, she was found dead beside a farm pond. The pickup was scrapped in February of 1993.

About ninety percent of my information was about the two years from when she'd gotten a driver's license and rented the apartment until her truck was scrapped. The rest was just blank time.

Sometimes, knowing what a person did in the past helps figure out what happened to them or what they might have done in the future. I hadn't searched the juvenile records because it didn't seem like Miss Mayes had had an issues with drugs.

When I queried the TBI juvenile criminal database, I found a shoplifting charge against Miss Mayes when she was fifteen. In the end, the charge was dropped because the storeowner didn't show up for the trial. It was odd to me that the person listed as legal guardian was the State of Tennessee. That meant that Miss Mayes had spent some time in the foster care system.

That information wouldn't be in the juvenile criminal database, but there should have been a court record transferring guardianship from her parents to the State of Tennessee. After another half-hour of searching, I found her.

Miss Mayes' parents had both been killed in a car accident when she was twelve. Since she had no other living relatives, she became a ward of the state and was place in a foster care home with a Mr. and Mrs. Edrington of Bristol, Tennessee. They'd apparently taken care of her until she turned sixteen. Then, she was transferred to another couple, none other than Gerald and Bertha Tolliday of Knoxville.

That might explain a few things. Miss Mayes would have had to move out of the Tolliday's home when she turned eighteen because Tennessee would have stopped paying Mr. and Mrs. Tolliday to take care of her. It might also explain where she'd gotten the money for the apartment and to buy the truck.

A lot of people think couples who foster kids do so only for the money, but that's not usually the case. The caseworkers who place kids in foster care are extremely picky about who they accept, and they conduct interviews with both the foster parents and the child at regular intervals.

That's especially true when the child is in their teens. Teenagers have a whole bunch of problems even living in a loving family. It takes some special people to help a teen through those years when they aren't parents to that teen. I've arrested more than one kid whose foster parents said they'd done everything they could but he wouldn't stop stealing. Apparently, the Tollidays had done a good job with Miss Hayes because other than that one charge of shoplifting, she hadn't had any other interaction with law enforcement until the EMT's pulled her out of that pond.

When I went home that night, I told Rochelle what I'd found out. She frowned.

"So, she lived on that farm for two years and the neighbors didn't know her? I don't think that's very possible, do you? I mean, I know there was an age difference of ten years, but you'd think they'd have seen her when they passed the farm at least once in a while. There's also the school bus. If she was in school, the school bus would have stopped at the house every school day, both coming and going. Sherry and Lisa might have been working, but their mother and father were still alive. You'd think since the Tollidays didn't have any children of their own, her mother or her father would have seen the school bus and wondered why it was stopping there. They'd have told their daughters."

I hadn't thought about that, but I decided I needed to go back and talk with Sherry and Lisa again. Sherry told me neither she nor Lisa knew anything about the Tollidays. Now, it sounded like she might have been lying to me.

The next morning over breakfast, Rochelle said she'd been thinking more about Miss Mayes and the Tollidays.

"If she was in foster care, her caseworker would have records of that. Do you suppose you could get the file on her from the Department of Children's Services?"

I said I probably could, but didn't see how that would help anything. Rochelle shrugged.

"I don't know if it will, but it's more information that we don't have right now."

I said I'd see if I could, but it would probably take a while unless the DCS had digitized files that old.

When I got to my desk, I called DCS and asked them for the file. I heard the click of a keyboard for a few seconds, and then the woman told me she'd have to go to the records storage area and search through all the records from the 1990's. She said if I filed a formal request, she'd be happy to do that. I thanked her, hung up, and then went to the DCS website and filled out the request form. Half an hour later, I got an email saying my request had been approved and I'd have a response in five working days.

After that, I tried to track down Miss Mayes' pickup truck.

My call to the salvage yard wasn't very productive. The guy said they got in about five cars every day and while they kept records of each, they didn't have time to go searching through the files. He said if I wanted to do it, they'd show me where the files were. I drove to the salvage yard.

At least they'd filed the information by month and year, so I only had to search through two boxes. Each contained the wrecker report of what the vehicle was and where it was when it was towed. It also contained a copy of the mandatory notice sent to the owner of the vehicle that stated the storage charges accumulated to date and the statement that if the owner didn't pay the storage charges, the vehicle would become the property of the salvage yard.

I found the pickup midway through the second box. It had been reported as abandoned on January 25, 1993, was towed on January 27 from a grocery store parking lot in Knoxville. The notification to the owner, listed as Bridget Mayes was sent out on February 1.

Of course the salvage yard hadn't received a reply because Bridget was no longer living at the address of the apartment they had. On February 8, a second notice was sent to the same address, also with no response. On February 15, the scrap yard requested a salvage title for the pickup, and on February 22, it was scrapped.

By the time I got back to my desk, it was three. I spent half an hour writing my notes about the pickup and then drove out to talk with Sherry and hopefully, Lisa. I didn't think Sherry had been truthful with me about knowing the Tollidays or Miss Mayes. If she had any information about them, I needed to know that information. Knowing that Miss Hayes had been placed with the Tollidays as a foster care child made them possible suspects.

There could be several motives, but money was probably the biggest. Maybe they'd paid for her apartment and paid for the truck but she wanted more. The argument evolved into a fight and Miss Mayes ended up dead. Putting her body by the pond might have seemed the safe bet because no killer with any brains would hide a body on property he or she owned.

She'd been moved from one foster care home and the only reason that usually happens is the foster parents say they can't manage the child. That made some sense because Miss Hayes had been arrested for shoplifting while at the former foster home. Maybe she didn't get caught again, but the foster parents knew she was still doing it and asked DCS to take her back. As cold as that seems, sometimes it does happen. It isn't worth the money if the child doesn't at least make an attempt at cooperating. Maybe the Tollidays were happy when she aged out of the foster care system but Miss Mayes wasn't. She tried to push the issue and the argument ended up like my first theory.

I got to the house where Sherry and Lisa lived and as I pulled into the drive, I saw the curtain on one window move slightly. I didn't think much about that because Rochelle and I have curtains on several windows that move a little when air comes out of the floor vents. When I knocked on the door and Sherry answered it, I thought again.

I asked Sherry if she remembered me and she smiled and said she did. When I asked her if Lisa was home, I saw a little wrinkle on her forehead move.

"Officer Owens, you've missed her again. She's usually home by now, but they have some sort carnival or something at the church on Saturday and she had to stay late to put that in the church newsletter. She said what she was doing had to be done by tomorrow morning, so she didn't know what time she'd be home."