The Cold Case of Pastor Elkhorn

I then typed all the names into NCIC and found nothing, not even a file generated when a person was charged with a crime and later released.

Rochelle had done a little better. She'd looked through the newspaper archives and found birth announcements for all but six couples. She'd written down the names of the children and their birth dates for each set of parents. Out of the fifty-three names she'd found, twenty-eight were girls and twenty-five were boys. She couldn't go any further than that, but I could.

After lunch, I started typing the children's names into the Tennessee DMV records. Most were still living in Tennessee and around Knoxville. I wrote the addresses down for Rochelle. The rest had evidently moved out of state or had died before they got a driver's license.

As I was writing down those addresses, I wondered if any of the kids were old enough to have killed Reverend Elkhorn. It wasn't difficult to theorize that he'd promised to cure somebody's mother and when that didn't happen, had made one of her kids mad enough to do something about it.

That was probably a long shot because according to the birth dates on their licenses, the oldest would have been seventeen when Reverend Elkhorn was murdered. I couldn't see a seventeen year old boy knowing how to kill with a knife that way, much less pushing a cross up the Reverand's ass and cutting of his cock and pushing it in his mouth. I couldn't imagine any girls doing it either.

I didn't find that any of the kids had been charged with anything, or at least there was no file in NCIC for them except for prints from some who had been in the military, IAFIS had nothing, but it was still a possibility. Data entry is a human endeavor and is subject to human errors. The case could have just not been reported to NCIC. It was also possible that killing Reverend Elkhorn was the first and only crime the killer had committed.

I then searched the DMV in the states adjoining Tennessee and found all but one of the rest of the kids. I wrote down those addresses for Rochelle too.

While I'd been searching NCIC and IAFIS for the kids, Rochelle had been looking for obituaries and she found several. All of the men and women on Harry's original list were already dead. When we put our lists together, we had thirty-seven out of the fifty-three kids who were apparently still alive and still lived in the Knoxville area. None had never been charged with a crime other than a few who had minor traffic violations. All but one of the eighteen men had served in the US Army. None of the women had any military service.

After Rochelle finished crossing names off our list, she frowned.

"Well, that was an afternoon wasted. It doesn't look like any of the parents had criminal records and none of their kids did either."

I patted her on the shoulder.

"It wasn't wasted. We just eliminated all the kids from our suspect list. They still might know something though, something they didn't tell Harry because he didn't interview any of them."

"Well, on Monday I'll start talking to them and see. I'm going to tell them I read about Reverend Elkhorn and what he was able to do for people, and that I want to write a book so people will understand that doctors didn't have a cure for those people, but Reverend Elkhorn was still able to cure them."

I had to laugh.

"You're gonna have to do an acting job and a half to convince them you're serious."

Rochelle just smiled.

"We women have our ways of convincing men to do what we want them to do...or have you forgotten?"

Rochelle reminded me of her ways after dinner that night. It was only once and I really hadn't forgotten, but I played along with her.

}{

The next day, Sunday, was the one day a week when Rochelle and I don't work on a case. That's not for any religious reason. It's just that when you start working on any case, it's easy to burn yourself out to the point you stop thinking logically. You need some time to forget about all the little details running around in your head.

We don't work on a case on Sunday, but getting those details to go away is usually impossible. Sex helps, but only while you're doing it. After that, one of those details will pop into your head and you start trying to fit that piece of the puzzle into what you think happened.

That piece usually doesn't fit so you find another piece to work with. Sometimes that second piece doesn't fit what you know either, but it does fit the first piece. Then you start looking for a third piece that fits either the puzzle theory or the two pieces that do fit together.

That Sunday morning, I was doing my best to stop thinking about the people Reverend Elkhorn had defrauded and their kids, because it didn't look to me like there was anything there. Instead, I washed both cars, but I didn't stop thinking about the case.

My first thought was about the knife found beside Reverend Elkhorn's body. Why was it there since there were no fingerprints on it and the DNA testing Harry had gotten as soon as the technology was available showed only animal blood? It didn't seem logical that Reverend Elkhorn kept a butcher knife in his bedroom so somebody had to leave it there. Who would have had access to his bedroom? Assuming it was the same person who murdered him, why would they leave the knife there?

The lack of fingerprints on the knife told me whoever put the knife there had wiped it down to remove them. The logical reason would be that the killer used that knife to kill Reverend Elkhorn and then wiped down the knife to remove their prints. That was logical until Harry found there was no human DNA on the knife handle or blade. The knife was obviously a decoy clue, but wouldn't have delayed the investigation for very long. As soon as Harry discovered the knife had no fingerprints or human DNA, it just became an unexplained detail of the case.

As for who had access to that bedroom, I doubted it was someone Reverend Elkhorn didn't trust a lot, like probably his wife. He wouldn't have thought anything if she'd walked into their bedroom so she'd have been able to get close enough to him to stab him under the collar bone. Harry had checked her out and she had an alibi for the day Reverend Elkhorn was killed, but after Harry said that the church members were more cult than congregation, it was entirely possible that someone was lying about where she was that day. That theory fell apart on me because of three reasons.

One - I doubted Mrs. Elkhorn would have known how to kill him in that manner. As far as Harry or I had been able to determine, she'd never had any training that would teach her how to do that. Even if she'd taken a self-defense course, that training would probably be the same I'd learned in the Army. I decided I'd have to talk to the instructors of some of those schools if they were still alive to find out what they taught and then show them Mrs. Elkhorn's picture and ask if she'd taken any classes.

Two -- If Mrs. Elkhorn had killed her husband, why had she rammed the cross up his ass and cut off his cock and stuck it in his mouth? Those were the acts of someone who had a really serious beef with the reverend and I doubted it was her. All Harry had been able to determine about her was that she was a nearly perfect wife who supported her husband in everything he did. It was possible she could hide her feelings during his TV shows and in church, but someone -- a close friend or a housekeeper -- would have known if they were having problems.

Three -- If whoever killed him didn't use the butcher knife, there was another knife out there that they did use. Where was the knife? Harry's techs had searched the entire house, garage, and yard and hadn't found it. They had found a set of knives in the kitchen but none of them were missing except for the butcher knife in the bedroom. They did take what prints they could find and they all belonged to the Mr. Elkhorn, Mrs. Elkhorn, or the housekeeper. Whoever killed Reverend Elkhorn must have taken the knife with them.

That line of thought didn't lead me anywhere except to more questions, so I started thinking about another person who had access to Reverend Elkhorn's bedroom.

The housekeeper was an obvious choice, but Harry had interviewed her and she said she only cleaned on Friday afternoon. She did fix meals for Reverend and Mrs. Elkhorn, but never left the kitchen. Harry thought she seemed upset when she said she'd never go into Reverend Elkhorn's bedroom if he was there. She also said she wasn't sick, so why would she ever want to be alone with Reverend Elkhorn.

Harry had a second theory and the thought like I was thinking right then. If Reverend Elkhorn had a lover, she might have been in his bedroom. That wasn't out of the range of possibilities. There had been other preachers caught stepping out on their wives.

That left the possibility of a different woman as his lover. I figured she would have to be a member of his congregation. Affairs are hard to keep secret for very long especially if the person engaging in the affair is as well-known as Reverend Elkhorn was. Any strange woman coming to the church or to the house would have been seen unless it was very late at night and then only if Mrs. Elkhorn hadn't been there.

If she was a member of the congregation, it might not have seemed strange for her to be there. I'd known people who decided they had a problem they needed to talk out late at night because a couple had called me at midnight to tell me something they remembered about the case I was working. A preacher would be available to his flock at any hour of the day or night and he'd have wanted to "counsel" the woman in private. If she was really the person the members of the congregation had described, Mrs. Elkhorn would probably have gone to the living room and waited until they finished.

That would work unless it happened a lot. At some point, Mrs. Elkhorn or the housekeeper would have become suspicious.

That train of thought just led me back to Mrs. Elkhorn. She'd found out about the affair and decided he had to die. She'd slipped up on him that night and stabbed him. Then she rammed the cross up his ass to show him what being fucked felt like and cut off his cock to punish him for doing it with another woman.

That theory was a little too convoluted for me for all the reasons I figured Mrs. Elkhorn hadn't killed her husband. That left the housekeeper, but besides being not knowing how, she probably wouldn't have done anything if she knew about the affair. She didn't have a reason to be jealous and telling anyone what she thought was going on would have probably gotten her fired.

When I went inside for lunch, I found out Rochelle had been thinking too, but she'd been thinking the opposite. When she sat the plate with my ham sandwich down in front of me, she frowned.

"I can't get this out of my head, and maybe I have a theory that makes sense with what we know.

"We know Mrs. Elkhorn wasn't in the house the day or night Reverend Elkhorn was killed. She said she was visiting her mother, but what if she was visiting someone else...what if she was seeing her lover?"

"You think Mrs. Elkhorn had a lover? Why?"

"Well, we know she wanted kids and we know Reverend Elkhorn couldn't give her any. We don't know if they were having sex or not, but if he couldn't give her kids, why would they? From what I've read about charismatic Christians, a lot of them think sex is only to produce children. If Reverend Elkhorn thought that way and Mrs. Elkhorn didn't, she might have decided to find someone who liked sex. She probably wouldn't have gone to the extreme of letting herself get pregnant because Reverend Elkhorn would have known it couldn't be his child. You know how I get when we haven't done it for a while. Why would Mrs. Elkhorn be any different? Most women I know like sex. They just like sex with a person they know and are comfortable being with.

"Because the church members were so close and so loyal to Reverend Elkhorn, she wouldn't have picked one of them. She'd have picked a man...or maybe even a woman who lived somewhere else. Going to see her mother was just what she told Reverend Elkhorn she was doing."

I nodded.

"OK, but how did her having an affair get the reverend murdered?"

"Well, what if the affair turned into more than just sex and she decided to divorce him. He couldn't let that happen because it would have ended his preaching job and all the money he was making by claiming he could cure people. He wouldn't have done anything to her for the same reason. What he probably would have tried was telling her she could do what she wanted as long as she stayed with him. He might have even paid her so she would.

"That might have worked except if her lover really wanted her all to himself. What if he decided the only way to get her away from Reverend Elkhorn was to kill him?"

Well, that made some sense except for one thing.

"If that's true, why didn't she marry or at least move in with the guy once Reverend Elkhorn was dead? Apparently she kept living in the parsonage until she died."

Rochelle finished chewing her mouthful of ham sandwich and then took a drink.

"I don't know. There could be a lot of reasons. Maybe after the lover killed Reverend Elkhorn he ran so he wouldn't get caught and left Mrs. Elkhorn behind. Maybe she had something to lose if she married again. Do we know if there was anything like that in Reverend Elkhorn's will?"

I shook my head.

"I didn't find anything in the file that told me Harry checked. It probably doesn't matter anyway. The Elkhorn's didn't actually own anything except for some clothing. Everything else was bought and paid for by the church. There wouldn't have been a need for a will because they had no kids and she would have been the de facto beneficiary of everything they owned."

"Well, if they didn't own the parsonage, how is it she kept living there until she died? Wouldn't the church have looked for a new preacher and given him the house to live in?"

"I don't know. Harry didn't do much investigation of the church. I don't know if it's even still there."

After saying that, I realized there might be another motive for Reverend Elkhorn's murder other than an affair by one of the Elkhorn's gone bad. When Harry checked on their finances, the church account had about a million dollars in it. I wondered what happened to that money.

One thing that could have happened is a new preacher might have convinced the church he was the one and could continue Reverend Elkhorn's legacy. He probably wouldn't have been healing anybody because that would have been both too obvious as well as hard to believe for most of the congregation. It looked to me as if Reverend Elkhorn had conned his way into the minds of the congregation that he was a very special preacher. They'd find it hard to believe there were two special preachers in this world and the second one just happened to find their church.

What a new preacher might have been doing is trying to get as much money out of the church treasury as he could and then leave. He'd have had to get control of the church account somehow and I wasn't sure who got control of that account once Reverend Elkhorn was dead, but there probably was a way.

"You know what, you just gave me a different theory to check out. What if, like you say, the church hired a new preacher and he wanted the job to get access to the church treasury? Tomorrow, I'm going to request a court order for the church financials and see what happened to the money after Reverend Elkhorn's death. Somebody had to be listed as the person to take over the account if something happened to him. I need to know who that was."

}{

The next morning after breakfast, I drove to the station to get a warrant for the church account. Rochelle took our list and started talking to the kids of the people Harry had found. By the time we both got home, we were wiped so we went out for dinner.

When we got back home, Rochelle got her notes.

"I got to talk with nine of the kids on our list and I didn't find out much. They all knew about Reverend Elkhorn and what he did. I also got the feeling that their parents were pretty sold on him and on his church.

"Six had a mother or father who was suffering from cancer, and at that time the accepted cure for cancer was to cut it out. If it had spread much, the doctors basically sent the patient home to die with enough medication to manage the pain. They'd turned to Reverend Elkhorn as a last resort.

"They all told me the same story about what he did. He took them each into his office and did his healing thing, but he also told them that sometimes God just wants the person to join him in Heaven.

"They didn't really have anything bad to say about Reverend Elkhorn. All they said was their parents believed he might be able to help and when he couldn't they just said it was God's will that their mother or father died.

"There were three I talked with who were convinced Reverend Elkhorn was the real thing.

"One was the son of a men who had constant backaches that the doctors couldn't fix. He went to Reverend Elkhorn and it worked. His back didn't hurt anymore and he was able to go back to his job as a mechanic. I asked them if they thought his pain was real and they said they didn't know because they were only about six at the time. They'd just heard their father tell the story.

"Another was the daughter of a man who she said was paralyzed in one leg. He had to walk with a walker and couldn't work so her mother was their only source of income. They were also church members and one day Reverend Elkhorn told them he could heal the man so he could work again. He did that one Wednesday afternoon in the church office, and it also worked. The man had to exercise to build the strength back into that leg, but after six months, he was able to go back to work.

"The last one was a woman who said her mother had been depressed for years before she saw Reverend Elkhorn on TV. She started going to his church, and eventually asked him to take away her depression. Evidently he did, because the woman told me her mother was a completely different person after that.

"What I think was probably the case with the first four is when Reverend heard what the doctors had told the people, he knew their problem was real and incurable. He went through the motions, but gave them a reason why it might not work that would give them some peace when the person died.

"The one who had a constant backache and the one who was paralyzed probably didn't have anything wrong with them at all. The man with the backache had been in a car accident and the doctors said he was fine, but he didn't believe them. The man who was paralyzed had felt a pain in his leg after he'd been climbing a ladder for four days roofing houses.

"I think both of them just got it in their head that there was something wrong and quit trying. All Reverend Elkhorn did was tell them that God was going to heal them. It's like when you were really young and your parents told you about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. You couldn't really argue with them because you heard about them from everybody and you saw what they did - the presents at Christmas and the Easter basket of candy at Easter. It was only when you matured enough to question both that you stopped believing. I think Reverend Elkhorn was good enough to make them believe and when it worked, they never stopped believing.

"The last one, the depressed mother...well, a lot of women get depressed after they have a baby. For nine months, it all about her, but once the baby is born, it's all about the baby. Nobody asks how she's feeling or if she's getting along all right. It's always how is the baby doing, how much does he or she weigh now, things like that.