The Cold Case of Bridget Mayes

"I talked to Jack and he agreed that hanging upside down would increase the blood pressure in the brain and if the woman was aroused, that might be enough to cause a fatal brain hemorrhage. He told me that since the other coroner hadn't found anything on the body except some marks on the woman's ankles and the brain hemorrhage, it was a pretty good explanation for why the woman died.

"The DA had a hard time believing me, but he finally agreed that no jury would believe it was murder so he wasn't going to try them both for that. We ended up charging them both with abuse of a corpse and failure to report a death. Sherry is old enough that he's just going to ask for probation for her. He's going to ask the same for Bridget since they both had the same involvement in the crime.

"Bridget will lose the ability to get a real estate license in Tennessee again, but she's young enough she'll make out OK. She's been paying for everything anyway, and according to her bank account, they won't have to worry about money. She's been saving most of what she earned over the last thirty years in case she had to leave the state over Mandy's death.

"I looked up Mandy and found out she was last seen visiting her mother and father on Christmas Day in 1992. They're both dead now, had no siblings and Mandy was their only child so there's nobody to notify.

"I'll close the case as soon as Sherry and Bridget go before a judge and he renders sentence. That should be in a couple of days."

Well, Rochelle and I didn't do much celebrating that night. I was really tired and one glass of wine made me so sleepy Rochelle said either I had to go to bed or sleep on the couch. We did celebrate that weekend though. We drove to a little cabin up in the mountains and...well, let's just say that there was nobody else within five miles of our cabin so Rochelle didn't dress up much. When we got there, she said she had an idea for a murder that happens in a nudist colony, but wasn't sure if she knew how to write about that since she'd never been to one.

We spent one day trying out being nudists...well, Rochelle did but she already has a suntan almost everywhere. I don't so I kept my boxer shorts on. I can't imagine any worse torture than watching Rochelle parade around naked while my cock is sunburned. I know, you're thinking about that old joke about "soaking it in cider", but I think it'd still be painful.

There's a lot to be said about making love to Rochelle while she's naked and leaning against a big tree. I'd never seen her big breasts wobble like that. It was fun the one time we did it that way, but it was also a little risky. When Rochelle has an orgasm, she's anything but still, and I had to hold onto her to keep us from both falling down.

Anyway, Rochelle hasn't finished her last book yet, but she's making notes about this case. She won't tell me how she's going to end it except that it'll turn out happy for the people involved.

Our next case is a real puzzle, mostly because both Harry and the DA were convinced a murder had taken place, but there was no body ever found. Murder is difficult to prove unless you have a body, but the physical evidence at the scene indicated that's exactly what had happened.

One day in July of 1978, Mr. John Davis of Knoxville didn't show up for work at his job as an EMT for the Knoxville Fire Department. He'd not missed a day of work in over three years of his employment with the force, so that was unusual. Still, it happens, and the Fire Chief chalked it up to a normal absence.

When he hadn't shown up for the entire week, the Fire Chief called the Knoxville PD and asked them to do a wellness check since Mr. Davis was single and lived by himself.

The police officer who made the wellness check found the front door standing open, so he announced himself, waited a few minutes, and then went inside. He got as far as the living room before backing out and calling for the Crime Scene techs and a detective. That detective was Harry.

When the Crime Scene techs got there, they saw what the officer had seen. In the middle of the living room floor was a huge bloodstain and in one spot of that bloodstain was a hole in the carpet. After cutting out that section of the carpet and placing it in an evidence bag, one of the techs probed the hole in the floor under the carpet and found something filling the hole. After digging it out, he realized it was a full-metal jacketed bullet from what looked to him like a.380 or a 9mm pistol. He bagged the bullet and then measured the extents of the bloodstain.

By using some factors relative to how much blood a carpet can absorb and how quickly the stain will spread before the blood coagulates, the coroner estimated the blood stain consisted of at least 2 liters of blood and maybe three depending upon if either a major artery or the heart was struck by the bullet. His further estimate, based upon the fact that the blood was either coagulated or dried, was that the murder had happened from four to six days prior. He couldn't be more certain than that because the air conditioner in the house was running and the relative humidity inside the house was low which would have dried the blood faster.

Harry had seen enough crime scenes were the victim was shot in the chest that he agreed with the Crime Scene tech. It was pretty obvious to Harry that somebody had shot somebody else in the house and that somebody had bled out on the carpet. Then, somebody took the body somewhere else and disposed of it. His only two questions were who was that victim and where was his or her body. Without the answer to the first question, it was going to be difficult to start any investigation. Harry needed the answer to the second in order to prove the person had been murdered.

The answer for who the victim was, wasn't difficult to figure out. The house was rented to John Davis and the pickup truck in the drive was registered to John Davis. Since John Davis hadn't been seen in at least seven days, the victim had to be him. While DNA testing was still in the future, the lab techs did get a blood type from the blood stain. That blood type, B negative, wasn't absolute proof the victim was Mr. Davis, but since that blood type matched his Army records and only about one and a half percent of the US population have that blood type, it was pretty conclusive.

When DNA testing became common, Harry had the TBI run a DNA analysis of samples from the piece of carpet and from hairs the Crime Scene techs had collected from a comb in Mr. Davis' bathroom. DNA from both was identical. That pretty much proved the victim was the resident of the house, one John Davis. The fingerprints the techs lifted from various areas of the house all matched, and were identified by AFIS as the prints of Mr. Davis when he was drafted into the US Army in 1970. He would have been thirty and that also jived with his personnel record at the Knoxville Fire Department.

Harry kept hoping Mr. Davis' body would turn up, but over the years since the supposed murder and Harry's retirement, no body was ever found. That wasn't unusual since the area around Knoxville has some pretty wild country where nobody lives except animals and some of those animals are the clean-up crew for Mother Nature. If the body hadn't been in the open for very long, a hunter might have stumbled on a corpse, but if more than a year had passed, there might not have been much left to find. If the body had been buried, it would be harder to find.

When Harry turned the case file over to me, he said he was certain Mr. Davis was dead, but he couldn't prove it.

"Dick, I did the best I could, but there wasn't much to investigate. The only thing I'm sure of is that a man who lost that much of his blood would have died. I talked to the people he worked with all said he was a hard worker who never caused any problems about anything. I couldn't find any criminal record on him anywhere, so he'd probably not been involved with anybody trying to settle a score for some reason.

"I went through the house myself, and nothing looked disturbed, like somebody was looking for something or that it was a robbery gone bad. He had a couple hundred in his desk drawer, but it didn't look like that desk drawer had been opened.

"I kept hoping his body would turn up, but after forty years, I doubt there's much left. I stopped working on the case about ten years ago because there wasn't a case to work. Maybe you'll do better."

I didn't think Rochelle and I would be able to solve the case, but I did think it would give her an idea for her next novel. The circumstances were ambiguous enough she could tailor her plot to match what appeared to have happened, and then bring the story to her usual end -- a happy ending for all the people concerned. I guess we'll see.