The Cold Case of Pastor Elkhorn

"Almost all mothers work their way out of that, but there are a few who don't. I think Reverend Elkhorn told her that God was watching her and wanted him to take away her depression. All she really needed was someone to pay some attention to her. The daughter said her father wasn't very good at anything like that.

"So, basically, what I found out is with those nine kids anyway, either their parents accepted a failure as God's plan or thought Reverend Elkhorn had worked a miracle.

"I'm going to keep talking with them until I get to the last one. There has to be at least one family whose mother or father he treated who figured out he was a fake."

I said I figured that's about what the parents told Harry too, but he thought there had to be some dissatisfied people out there who just weren't talking. Then I filled her in on my day.

"I got my warrant for the church bank account and served it, but it doesn't exist anymore. At some point it was closed but I can't tell who closed it or when because the bank only keeps checking account records for five years.

"What I did find out is that most church accounts are set up the same way. The church elects or appoints a board and writes a set of bylaws that describe how the church is run and who does what. Almost all are set up so the pastor or preacher has the only authority to write checks. That's so there's only one person to hold accountable if money ends up missing. In theory, the preacher goes to the board and asks permission to spend money, but there's no real way to prove he did or didn't after so long.

"On the chance that the church is still there and just changed banks, I drove to the church. It's still there, though now it has a different name. Instead of being called "Church of Modern Charismatics" it's called "Trinity Christian Center". I spoke to their pastor, explained why I was there, and he told me what happened after Reverend Elkhorn was killed.

"The original church did try to find another preacher, but the board couldn't agree on any of the candidates. After a year without a preacher, the congregation dwindled to only a hundred or so. The men on the board preached a sermon every Sunday, but people kept drifting away.

"One Sunday, the church board told the remaining congregation the contributions weren't enough to keep the church going so they'd decided to discontinue services. According to their bylaws, that meant they'd sell the buildings and donate that money as well as what remained of the church treasury to the other charismatic churches in the area.

"The new pastor said his congregation had been meeting in a vacant car dealership showroom on the outskirts of town, and when he heard the church and parsonage was for sale, he talked to his own church board about buying it. When they agreed, he contacted the original church board and negotiated the price. Because his church would get some of the original church treasury as well as the proceeds of the sale of the buildings, it basically cost his church two thousand dollars.

"He told me everything was in really good shape except for the parsonage. The wife of the former preacher had lived there until she died and not much had been done as far as cleaning or maintenance. It had cost his church another five thousand for cleaning and repairs. Apparently the woman had told the housekeeper she didn't need her anymore, and when something broke, she just stopped using it or tried to fix it herself.

"He said there were windows that wouldn't open anymore, half a dozen windows that had been broken and had clear plastic taped over them, and several doors that wouldn't open or close all the way. He said it was also odd that the master bedroom had a door that opened into another bedroom that also had a door into a hallway to the rear of the building. He didn't know why that door was there because there was nothing in it except a bed, so he had the door taken out and the hole filled in. They were using the other bedroom as storage for the food bank they run.

"So, my theory that another preacher took over the church to get the money is wrong. I did check with the churches he said got some of the money and they said they did and told me how much. When I added it all up, it looked about right. Maybe tomorrow, you'll find the key to the whole thing."

Like I said before, we were both really tired, so we went straight to bed after that. Rochelle without any clothes on was tempting, but I figured we'd get to the fifty-yard line and then fall asleep.

}{

The next day, while Rochelle was out talking with the people on her list, I re-read and then re-read Harry's entire file hoping to find something we'd missed. By the end of the day, all I'd come up with were seven women Reverend Elkhorn had treated for something who had refused to talk to Harry. If I could have talked to them, I might have gotten something because of all the years that had passed, but I couldn't. According to Rochelle's work with the obituary columns of the two Knoxville newspapers, all seven women were dead as were their husbands. They did have kids though, so when we got home I asked Rochelle if she'd been able to talk with them.

Rochelle looked at her notes and then looked up and smiled.

"I talked to Charity Mathews. She had a lot to say, but I didn't think it was very important."

"What did she tell you?"

Rochelle ran a fingertip down her notebook as she read her notes to me.

"She said her mother went to Reverend Elkhorn because she had what Charity called "female problems". When I asked her what that meant, she didn't want to tell me at first. I asked her why, and she said it was those problems that caused her father to divorce her mother.

"I asked her why her father had divorced her mother and she said her mother had never told her the reason. It wasn't until her mother died that she found out. She found the divorce papers and the reason was infidelity. Apparently her father thought her mother was having an affair. Her mother denied it, but her husband's lawyer said the proof was that she was pregnant but the doctors had said his sperm was the problem so the baby couldn't be his.

"We talked for a while about how it must have been hard for a single woman to raise a daughter and Charity agreed that it was. After a few tears, she finally told me what those female problems were. Her mother and father had been trying to have a baby for two years but hadn't been able to. The doctors weren't sure why. They weren't able to find anything wrong with either her mother or her father.

What they finally theorized was that her eggs rejected his sperm. They didn't know why, but said they'd seen that before. At the time, they couldn't do anything about that, so they told her it was doubtful she'd ever have children with her husband, but a sperm donor would probably work. She said her mother believed that children should be conceived by a husband and wife and that she wouldn't feel right having a baby fathered by another man.

"She saw Reverend Elkhorn on TV one day and went to see him. He said he couldn't do something like that on TV, but he could at his house. All she'd told Charity over the years was that she'd gone to the parsonage and that Reverend Elkhorn had cured her problem. She knew that was the case when she missed her period a month later.

"Charity said it was when her father found out her mother was pregnant with her that he divorced her mother. She didn't understand until she found the divorce papers. After she did, she figured her mother had been having an affair or had gone to a sperm bank and was too ashamed to admit it. She'd put ads on several websites that help you connect with birth parents, but so far hadn't gotten any responses."

I asked Rochelle if she'd found out anything more and she said no she hadn't because all the people basically told her the same thing as the first nine. Then she asked me about the seven women who refused to talk to Harry.

"Did he write down their names? If he did and they have kids, maybe they'll talk to me."

"He didn't in his report because there was nothing to report about them, but I think the names are in his notes. You think their kids will tell you something different?"

"Maybe. Until you said the master bedroom in the parsonage had a door into another bedroom, I was thinking what Charity told me was probably true. Now, I'm not so sure.

"What do you suppose Reverend Elkhorn would have done to cure Charity's mother? If it was just to put his hand on her head and then pray, why would he have had her come to the parsonage?"

I smiled.

"You're thinking he had a special cure for barren women, aren't you?"

"Well, think about it. The need to have children is strong in most women, and if she really wanted a baby, she'd have submitted to about anything he wanted to do to her. He could have convinced her that screwing her would somehow make things right. He sure wouldn't have done that in his church office, and he wouldn't have done it in the bed he shared with his wife. He'd have done it somewhere else, and why else would there be a door from their bedroom into another bedroom?"

"OK, but even if he did, he was sterile. He couldn't have fathered a child."

"That's what he told his wife, but have you seen her picture? I did because there was a picture of them together in his obituary. Let me find it again."

Rochelle spent about five minutes on her laptop and then motioned me to come over.

When I saw the picture, I saw what Rochelle meant. The woman was way overweight everywhere including her face, and that face wasn't pretty at all. It was easy to see why she might have married Reverend Elkhorn. He was the prince to her toad and she probably considered herself lucky.

Rochelle chuckled then.

"Would you want to screw her? I think he made up the thing about being sterile so he wouldn't have to. I also think Charity's mother wasn't the first or the last woman he screwed and got pregnant. That's probably why those seven women wouldn't talk to Harry. Not being able to have children is really devastating for a woman even if she doesn't think she wants any. Being fertile means you're a real woman. That's how I feel anyway.

"I don't think the doctors would have told Charity's father that his sperm was the problem unless they were sure it was. He knew he couldn't be Charity's father but he did know of one man who could be because she'd have told him what she did. When she found out she was pregnant she thought Reverend Elkhorn had really fixed her problem and told her husband that. It was just her husband who didn't believe so he divorced her."

"OK, but I don't know how you'd ever prove that."

Rochelle grinned.

"If Harry did his job I can. Did they keep any of the clothes he was found in after he was murdered?"

I said I remembered a paper bag with the word clothing in the box but I hadn't really looked.

Rochelle grinned again.

"Well, if he was wearing it when he died, it'll have his DNA on it. All we have to do is get a sample from Charity's daughter and compare it to the DNA on the clothing. If it shows that Charity is Reverend Elkhorn's daughter, we have a motive. The killer might not be Charity's father, but if there are more women he got pregnant, I'd bet there's at least one husband who could have killed him."

That night, I looked through Harry's notes and wrote down the names for Rochelle of the women who wouldn't tell him anything. She looked through the birth notices in the newspapers and found three of the women had had one child and two had had two. I then queried the Tennessee DMV for those names and got the addresses for the five children. It was almost two by the time we finished up, so there wasn't any playing around that night. Six was going to come too early for any playtime.

}{

The next morning, I retrieved the evidence box from the evidence locker and opened the paper sack I'd seen before. I didn't pull out what was in there, but it was made of cloth and it had a few spots of blood on it. I took it to the Crime Lab and asked if they could see if they could find any DNA on it.

There wasn't much else I could do then, so I ran the names of the seven women through NCIC. All I came up with was one of them, an Irene Blake, had been arrested for shoplifting when she was nineteen.

It was after lunch when Peggy, one of the Crime Lab Techs, called me.

"Rich, I got a good sample from the blood stains, but I also got something else. The cloth was a pair of men's briefs, and in the crotch, I found a semen stain. I've seen that before. When a man dies, it's not unusual for him to ejaculate. It's a nervous system response like the muscle twitches you've probably seen before when a person dies.

"I sampled that too, and I've sent both to the TBI for sequencing. They're not real busy now and they just got a new machine, so they said they'd have the DNA from both samples sequenced in about two days.

Rochelle had had pretty good luck. She'd managed to talk to three of the five daughters.

"They all knew their mother's had gone to see Reverend Elkhorn, but they weren't sure why. I can understand that. I doubt a woman would tell her daughter that a preacher had screwed her in order to cure her so she could have kids.

"All three husbands stayed with their wives, even the wife that had two daughters after they'd been trying for five years to have a baby. Evidently the husbands believed as much as their wives. None of the mothers or fathers seemed to be very smart though. The wives didn't work outside the home and the husbands all worked unskilled jobs in factories. I know that doesn't mean the wives and husbands were stupid, but they weren't rocket scientists either. It was probably pretty easy for Reverend Elkhorn to explain that he did the only thing he could do to cure the women. They let him do it because they trusted him."

I'd been nodding because what Rochelle was telling me made sense.

"OK, I think you're on to something, but to prove it, we'll have to get DNA from each of them, have it sequenced, and then compared to the DNA from Reverend Elkhorn's underwear. I don't know how we can do that without a court order since none of them have committed any crime. I doubt they're going to voluntarily give us a sample knowing it might end up proving their father was the killer."

Rochelle smiled.

"I think I can get at least one. When I talked to Charity, I told her I was writing a book about Reverend Elkhorn and his church. When I told her I'd already written several crime novels she said she'd have to find one and buy it.

"I told her she didn't have to buy one because I had a bunch of copies the book company gave me to give to friends. I said if she'd meet me for coffee on Saturday, I'd give her one. When we finish I'm going to wait until she leaves and then steal her coffee cup."

I chuckled.

"You'll get your sweet little ass arrested for theft if you do that."

Rochelle grinned.

"No I won't. We're just going to a donut place that uses paper cups. I'll just tell her I'll clean up everything and when she leaves, I'll put her cup in a baggie."

I shook my head.

"Well, if you pick it up, a judge probably won't allow it as evidence since there will be no continuous chain of police custody, but it will tell us if your theory is true or not. If it is, maybe I can get a judge to compel an cheek swab from the other kids."

That Saturday, Rochelle came home with a paper cup in a baggie. I took it to the Crime lab that day and asked them to look for DNA as soon as they could.

On Tuesday of the next week, I got the results of the blood and semen samples from Reverend Elkhorn's underwear and they answered a lot of questions I hadn't even asked yet.

The TBI had been able to sequence the blood and semen stains and they were all the same so I knew they were from Reverend Elkhorn. The TBI had also run the DNA sequence through CODIS and had come up with a match. Reverend Elkhorn had a past.

His real name was Jeff Andrews, and up until a year before he took over the church had been a doctor in private practice in Lexington, Kentucky. He'd lost his medical license because three female patients thought something had happened to them when they went for a routine gynecologic examination. The reason they thought that was he'd told them his examination might cause some pain so he'd put them to sleep while he did it. He gave them an injection after they agreed.

When they woke up, nothing seemed wrong, but when they got home, they noticed some sort of discharge in their underwear. One of the women recognized the discharge as semen and called the Lexington police. A female officer talked to her and looked at her panties, and then sent her to the hospital for an examination. The discharge was indeed semen, so the female officer then arrested Jeff Andrews for rape. They also searched his records for any women who'd had him do the same type of examination and found eighteen more. All the women had the same story. He'd told them he was going to anesthetize them while he did the examination. When they got home they noticed the same discharge but thought it was just caused by the examination.

The semen tested as the same blood type as Mr. Andrews, but since there was no such thing as DNA testing back then, there was no way to prove the semen was his. He maintained his innocence and the woman's husband also had the same blood type, so the rape charge was dropped and he was convicted of sexual assault based upon the testimony of the women. The peer review wasn't as lenient. His medical license was revoked.

That knowledge explained a lot of things. Since he was a doctor, he'd probably have been able to determine which ailments were real and which were just in the person's head after talking with them for a while. Most of his actual TV show people said he'd talked to them to hear their story and to tell them what to expect if they came on stage with him. By picking those people with imagined ailments for his TV show, he'd been able to show his power even though that power came from being able to convince people they weren't really ailing rather than coming from God. The really dramatic cases were the people he paid to act the part.

It also explained why he'd asked the women to come to his house. He evidently got off by raping women, albeit that they weren't resisting. They still hadn't given their consent to the act. They'd just trusted him because he was a doctor.

The women he'd screwed in order to cure them hadn't really given him their consent either. I figured once he got them into that little bedroom off the main bedroom, they were either too scared to tell him to stop, or they believed him when he said he could cure them. That was essentially rape as well.

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Charity's DNA came back from the TBI two days later and proved what Rochelle suspected. It was definite proof that Charity's father was Jeff Andrews aka Reverend Andrew Elkhorn.

That gave us a motive for the murder. The only women who'd refused to talk with Harry had probably been raped and were too ashamed to admit it. At least one of them told her husband what had happened and he took care of the problem by killing Reverend Elkhorn. We just had to figure out which husband did it.

When I explained my theory to Rochelle she said she just had one question.

"I think your theory is valid, but the youngest of the kids was ten when the reverend was killed. Why would someone wait that long? You'd think if they were going to kill him they'd have done it as soon as they found out what he'd done. Wouldn't you?"

"Well, I'd call the police and swear out a complaint, but I see what you mean. I don't know why they'd wait that long. The other thing I haven't figured out is how a man could get close enough to him to stab him like he was stabbed. Maybe it was one of the women."