The Cold Case that Turned Hot

The public defender turned and whispered something to William and then turned back to me.

"Mr. McCabe wants to know if you'll put that in writing."

I said I would, tore a sheet from my clipboard, wrote down what I said, and then signed and dated it. When I handed it to the public defender, he turned to William and said, "OK William, tell him what you told me."

What William said all he'd done that night was drive over to a convenience store where Delrose Drive intersects with Boyd's Bridge Pike. He said Samantha had called him from the phone in the convenience store and told him she stopped off for some aspirins and when she came back out, her car wouldn't start. He drove his mother's car to the convenience store and used jumper cables to get Samantha's car started. Then, they both went home.

I asked William what time it was when he got the call from Samantha, and he said about two in the morning. I said I thought Samantha worked seven in the evening until seven in the morning, and he said she normally did, but she told him she had a headache and left work early. That's why she stopped to buy some aspirins.

I had to question that.

"Couldn't she have gotten all the aspirins she wanted at the hospital?"

William said she could have but she'd have had to pay for them and they were cheaper at the convenience store. I said I thought nurses could probably get aspirins for free, but William shook his head.

"Samantha said they count every pill every day so they'll know if somebody's stealing drugs and selling them."

That still didn't seem right to me, but I didn't know how hospitals do their drug inventories so I didn't argue any further. Instead, I tried to find out where Samantha went.

"William, you told the detective that as soon as your parents were cremated, Samantha took the ashes, told you she couldn't live in the house anymore and then left. Surely you must know where she went. I have a sister, and I'd never lose track of her."

William motioned to the public defender and whispered something to him. The public defender nodded.

William took a deep breath.

"She went to Chattanooga at first and worked in a hospital there. Then about five years ago, she moved to Ringgold, Georgia."

"Do you ever visit her?"

William nodded.

"When I'm in the area on a job, I always stop by."

"If you knew where she went, why didn't you tell the detective that?"

William shrugged.

"She said she was in trouble and had to leave. If your sister told you something like that, would you rat on her?"

"Did she say what kind of trouble?"

William shook his head.

"No, just that she had to leave for a while. When the detective talked to me, I thought he was saying he thought Samantha had something to do with the accident."

"She didn't say anything about the accident that night when you started her car, did she?"

"No, and she didn't say anything when I called her after the detective left and told her Mom and Dad were probably dead. She just asked me how I found out about that and I told her about the detective."

"Did she say anything then?"

"Just that Dad wouldn't be mean to me any more."

I finished writing down that last part and then looked up at William.

"Is that everything that happened that night?"

William said that was all he could remember.

I still had one more question. I was almost convinced that William was telling me the truth so I didn't intend to charge him then. I did want to keep him thinking though.

"Well, William, you've convinced me...for now, so I'll delay charging you unless I find out you left out something or something comes up that tells me you're lying. If that case, all deals are off. The last thing I need from you is Samantha's address, oh, and since your going to be charged with domestic assault, I need a cheek swab for your DNA. That's standard procedure for all people arrested for a felony."

After he wrote down Samantha's address and one of the night lab techs took his cheek swab, I called Holding to come and get him. When the officer got there I told her to make sure William didn't get to make a phone call until at lease nine the next morning. I figured he'd do the same thing to me as he did to Harry. He'd call Samantha and tell her what he'd told me. She'd be gone before the Ringgold police could arrest her.

It took me tracking down a judge at his home and then sitting in his living room and explaining why I needed Samantha, but he finally gave me an arrest warrant. I went back to my desk and sent the warrant to both the Ringgold and Dalton police departments. I didn't know what shift Samantha was working so I didn't know if she'd be home or at work at six when I asked both departments to pick her up so the warrant had both addresses.

After that, I went home. This time, when I drove in the drive, I called Rochelle before I walked up to the door and told her I was home.

Rochelle opened the door as soon as I stepped on the porch. All she said was had I had anything to eat yet.

Rochelle had kept dinner in the oven for me, so at almost eleven, I ate the pork chop and green beans she'd fixed. While I ate, I told her what I'd found out from William.

"Since William's wife admitted he sent her to watch our house and we have him in jail pending arraignment for spousal abuse, I think you're probably safe now. He'll be there for the next two days and his wife isn't going to do anything to you.

"I think William is innocent in all this except for obstruction. He says all he did was go help Samantha start her car at two in the morning on the day of the accident. He said she'd come home from work early because she had a headache and had stopped at a convenience store to get some aspirins. He didn't seem nervous or show me any body language that told me he was lying.

"Like you said he probably would, he's been in contact with Samantha since she left. I'm almost positive he figured out where we live and told that to Samantha. She's the one who sent the threat.

"He gave me her address and it's the same one you found in Ringgold. I sent an arrest warrant for her to both Ringgold and Dalton. With any luck, they'll have her in custody by about seven tomorrow morning. That means I'll probably be late again tomorrow night because I'll have to drive down there to question her."

We went to bed then, but didn't do anything because I was pretty wiped out. It isn't the work that wears me out like that. It's the waiting for something to happen or for some suspect to finally begin talking. I'd done more than my fair share of both over the last three days.

I got to my desk the next morning at seven-thirty and about eight got a call from the police department in Ringgold. They had gone to Samantha's home address and arrested her. Two and a half hours later I was sitting in an interrogation room at the Ringgold police station across the table from Samantha.

According to the date of birth I had, she was fifty-two, so I'd expected to see a woman with some lines in her face and a woman who was probably a little overweight. Instead, the woman sitting across from me had those lines, but her body looked more like she was in her thirties. She was still going by Samantha McCabe, so she'd never married. The officers who'd arrested her said she was living alone, so if she had a boyfriend, they weren't living together.

Samantha did seem to be nervous, so I was going to tell her part of the truth and lie out my ass about the rest to see if she'd tell me what really happened. I still wasn't sure that William wasn't more involved, but the insurance gave her more motive to kill her parents than William. It was also suspicious that she'd been within a mile of the accident at about the same time it happened.

I introduced my self and then told her why she'd been arrested for suspicion of murder.

"Miss McCabe, you're here because I'm working on the case that started the night your parents were killed in that car accident, except that I don't think it was an accident. The detective who started the case thought it was a double murder or a murder/suicide, but he couldn't find any evidence that said it was. The coroner at the time couldn't either.

After reviewing all the evidence and after talking with your brother, William, I think it was a double murder and it was you who killed your parents. You were in the vicinity of the accident because William said he helped you start your car at a convenience store that's only about a mile from where the accident happened.

"What I think is that you left your car at the convenience store when you went to work and caught a ride to the hospital from somebody, then called your parents to pick you up. William told me that's where they were going when they left. They were going to pick you up and then go out to eat.

"Delrose Drive is a way to get from the hospital to your house without going through all the downtown traffic, so either that's the way your dad took or that's the way you made him take. Once you were on the curve, you made him stop, killed them both, and then walked to the convenience store and called William to come and help you.

"You thought you had it all figured out. By leaving the Suburban there it was almost sure to be hit by another car and their deaths would look like an accident. I think you put something inside the car to make it catch fire and to make sure the fire burned up any evidence you'd left. You only made one mistake and that was using a gun to kill them. The crime lab found a lot of melted metal inside the car and thought it was just the soft metal of car parts melted by the fire. When I had the crime lab look at it again, they found two lumps that weren't aluminum. They were lead, the same lead bullets are made out of."

"Now, I've told you why you're here and now I need to advise you of your rights. You can have an attorney present before you answer my questions. I'd advise you to do that because right now, all my evidence points to you as my killer and anything you say from now on will be used at your trial. Since this murder was obviously planned, the DA in Knoxville will ask for the death penalty. If you confess, he'll probably settle for life in prison with no possibility of parole. Do you want an attorney?"

I'd heard a lot of suspects say a lot of things in my career, but I'd never heard one say what Samantha did then.

"I don't need an attorney. I did it, just like you said. They came to pick me up at the hospital and I used my gun to make Daddy drive out to Delrose Drive and turn off the engine and the lights. Then, I shot them both and then walked to the convenience store and called William to come help me start my car."

Since most of what I'd told Samantha was a complete fabrication, there was no way I believed her. She was protecting somebody, and I had a hunch that somebody was William. That put me in the position of trying to get her to change her story to something I would believe instead of trying to trap her into incriminating herself.

"Well, we got the hard part out of the way. There are some things I'm still not clear on. Why did you kill them?"

Samantha changed position in her chair three times before she answered me.

"I didn't like Daddy because he was mean to Mom."

"OK, but why did you kill your mother?"

Samantha changed position again.

""Because she was doing something she told me I should never do."

"What was that?"

"She was having sex with a man she wasn't married to."

"How did you know she was doing that?"

"When I was eighteen, I found a page of information about IUD's when I was putting some towels in their bathroom closet. Attached to it was a paper with an appointment with her doctor for the first of March. I knew she didn't need any birth control because she and Daddy slept in different bedrooms. If she got an IUD, it had to be because she was sleeping with another man.

I didn't know for sure until I was nineteen. I heard her talking on the phone one day when I was sick and stayed home from nursing school. I didn't know who she was talking to, but I heard her say, 'Yes, I'll wear it.'

"She came into check on me and said she had to leave for a few hours to show a house. When she bent over to feel my forehead, her dress fell open and I saw her bra. Where her nipples were, there was no bra, just two circles cut out that let her nipples stick through. That's when I knew for sure. She never let Daddy see her even in just her underwear.

"I decided to kill them both then, but I had to wait until I could buy a gun. When I got one, I hid it in my closet until that night. I decided it had to be that night because Daddy called Mom a whore and she said if he hadn't gotten her pregnant with me she'd have never married him in the first place."

"So, how did you manage to get in the car with them? William told me they were going out to eat that night."

"That's what they said they were going to do, so I lied and told them my car wasn't running right and asked if they'd drop me off at the hospital before they went out."

"What kind of gun did you use?"

She shrugged.

"I don't know except it was one of those with a round thing that goes around when you shoot it. I bought it and a box of bullets at a pawn shop and the man showed me how it worked."

"After you shot them, what did you do with the gun?"

Samantha thought for a second or two and then said, "I threw it and all the bullets away when I was walking to the convenience store."

I twisted up my mouth then.

"That's funny, because...I have it here somewhere...yeah, here's the coroner's report. The coroner wrote that he'd had his techs search with metal detectors for a mile in each direction from the site of the accident. I know how those techs work, and if that gun or even a couple bullets had been there, they'd have found them.

Samantha's answer was the she'd thrown everything as far away from the road as she could. I said I'd have the techs go back and search again, then asked her another question.

"Samantha, that fire was really hot, so hot the firemen couldn't put it out. The fire captain there told the detective the only thing that could make a car burn like that was a lot of fuel, like gasoline or kerosene or diesel fuel that would fill up the car when it rolled over. Did you put something in the car like that?"

Samantha didn't think about that.

"No, I didn't have to. Daddy always carried six gas cans of gas in the back of his car to use in his lawnmowers and trimmers."

"Plastic or metal cans?"

"Both, I think, at least I know he had some of both."

"So, you're confessing to murdering your mother and father and leaving them in their car where it was likely to be hit?"

Samantha nodded.

"Do I have to sign something like they always do on the cop shows on TV?"

Samantha hadn't told me anything that changed my mind, so I said I didn't need her to sign anything right then. Actually, I didn't want her to sign anything until I was sure who was telling me the truth. What I needed was one confession that would make sense to a jury. I didn't need more than one. If I had more than one, a defense attorney could use both to create doubt in a jury's mind, especially since Samantha didn't have an attorney with her when she confessed.

"No, not now. We'll take care of that once you're back in Tennessee, but it's standard procedure that all people charged with a felony have to submit to a DNA swab. I'll call a tech to take one unless you have some objection. I'll still get the swab if you do object. I just have to get a court order, but given the severity of this crime, that won't be hard to do."

Samantha said she didn't object and after the tech took the swab, put it in an evidence bag and signed it over it to me, I asked that Samantha be transferred to holding pending extradition to Tennessee.

When I walked in the front door at a little after midnight, Rochelle was sitting on the couch. She saw my face and asked me what was wrong.

I went through my conversation with Samantha and when I finished, Rochelle said, "She didn't do it, did she?"

"No, at least I don't think she did. I told her a bunch of lies that would prove she was the killer, and she confirmed every one of them. She's protecting someone else, and the only person I can think of she would be protecting is William. Him being the killer fits two of my "must" criteria. He had the motive that he hated his dad and his alibi back then was pretty shaky because he just said he was home alone and asleep. His statement about helping Samantha start her car is also pretty shaky. The place is gone now so I can't talk to anybody to confirm his story. He probably had the means though we still don't know what those means were."

Rochelle smiled then.

"Yes we do, well...maybe. When they went through the Suburban they found a lot of other lawn care and gardening tools besides those two claw things Morgan thought made the holes in the skulls. One of the things they found was a World War Two Army pick mattock. I found some for sale on eBay. They're kind of like a hatchet except they have a blade like a hoe on one side of the head, and a spike thing on the other. It was laying under the passenger seat when they found it.

"I looked at the pictures of the holes in the skulls and they weren't round like the claw things. They were kind of square but also rounded. At first I thought that was just because the claw things had square points, but then I looked at the pointed end of the pick mattock. It was square and really sharp looking and when I measured the pictures of it and then measured the holes, it's almost a perfect fit. I think that's what killed both of them. I think the killer made the holes a little bit rounded by twisting the pick mattock when he or she pulled the pick mattock out."

I shook my head.

"I don't know. I could see how either Samantha or William could have killed one of them with a tool like that, but it would have taken some time to pull it out and then hit the other one. Would you just sit there and let somebody kill the person in the other seat and not try to get away?"

Rochelle grinned.

"I think he killed his father first since his father was big enough to fight back. His mother would have been so shocked she probably couldn't do anything except sit there. He killed her second so she couldn't identify him as the killer, dropped the pick mattock on the floor and then walked back home. It isn't very far from that curve to the house on Blakemore."

"OK, that's at least plausible, but how did he get in the car in the first place?"

"Well, what he told Harry was that he was home with they left. I think he must have left with them and made them drive out on that curve."

"Why would they do that? He was just an eighteen year old kid?"

"I thought about that and I think he must have had a gun. He didn't use the gun to kill them but he used it to make his dad do what he wanted him to do."

"So what did he do with the gun?"

"I didn't know that until you told me what Samantha said. I think he tossed it somewhere on his way home. Harry only searched the areas along Delrose Drive, but that's not how William would have gotten home. He'd have wanted to stay off Delrose in case somebody saw him so he cut through the trees over to Hoston Hills Road. It's only about a quarter of a mile from one road to another, and from there it's only about four miles to the house on Blakemore."

I still couldn't believe it.

"That might work in one of your novels, but it's too far a stretch for me. I'm still thinking he killed them, but I think Samantha had to have helped him. Maybe he did have a gun and forced his dad to drive to that curve, and he might have killed them with the pick mattock like you said, but I'm having trouble with that part too. He was only eighteen. I don't think any eighteen-year-old kid could muster up the courage to kill one person that way, let alone two. It would have been pretty messy because head wounds bleed a lot. They also probably didn't die right away and if they didn't, they'd have been jerking around a lot. People even do that if they've been shot in the head."