“I can’t say that.”
“But you’re thinking it. The police are thinking it. If it hadn’t been on everybody’s mind from the start, you never would have been called yesterday. I want to know what happened to them. To those other couples.”
I said nothing.
“According to what I’ve read,” she pushed, “you were present at every scene, called there by the police.”
“I was.”
Reaching into a pocket of her blazer, she withdrew a sheet of legal paper and smoothed it open.
“Bruce Phillips and Judy Roberts,” she began to brief me, as if I needed it. “High school sweethearts who disappeared two and a half years ago on June first when they drove away from a friend’s house in Gloucester and never arrived at their respective homes. The next morning Bruce’s Camaro was found abandoned off U.S. Seventeen, keys in the ignition, doors unlocked, and windows rolled down. Ten weeks later, you were called to a wooded area one mile east of the York River State Park, where hunters had discovered two partially skeletonized bodies facedown in the leaves, approximately four miles from where Bruce’s car had been found ten weeks earlier.”
I recalled that it was at this time VICAP was asked by the local police to assist. What Marino, Wesley, and the detective from Gloucester did not know was that a second couple had been reported missing in July, a month after Bruce and Judy had vanished.
“Next we have Jim Freeman and Bonnie Smyth,” Mrs. Harvey glanced up at me. “They disappeared the last Saturday, in July after a pool party at the Freemans’ Providence Forge home. Late that evening Jim gave Bonnie a ride home, and the following day a Charles City police officer found Jim’s Blazer abandoned some ten miles from the Freeman home. Four months after that, on November twelfth, hunters in West Point found then bodies….”
What I suspected she did not know, I thought, unpleasantly, was that despite my repeated requests, I was not given copies of the confidential sections of the police reports, scene photographs, or inventories of evidence. I attributed the apparent lack of co-operation to what had become a multi-jurisdictional investigation.
Mrs. Harvey continued relentlessly. In March of the following year, it happened again. Ben Anderson had driven from Arlington to meet his girlfriend, Carolyn Bennett, at her family’s home in Stingray Point on the Chesapeake Bay. They pulled away from the Andersons’ house shortly before seven o’clock to begin the drive back to Old Dominion University in Norfolk, where they were juniors. The next night a state trooper contacted Ben’s parents and reported that their son’s Dodge pickup truck had been found abandoned on the shoulder of 1-64, approximately five miles east of Buckroe Beach. Keys were in the ignition, the doors unlocked, and Carolyn’s pocketbook was beneath the passenger’s seat. Their partially skeletonized bodies were discovered six months later, during deer season in a wooded area three miles of Route I99 in York County. This time, I did not even get a copy of the police report.
Susan Wilcox and Mike Martin disappeared this last February, I found out about it from the morning newspaper. They were heading to Mike’s house in Beach to spend spring break together when, like the couples before them, they vanished. Mike’s blue van was found abandoned along the Colonial Parkway near Williamsburg, a white handkerchief tied to the antenna signaling engine trouble that did not exist when the police went over the van later. On May fifteenth a father and son out turkey hunting discovered the couples’ bodies in a wooded area between Route 60 in James City County.
I remembered, once again, packing up bones to send to the Smithsonian’s forensic anthropologist for one final look. Eight young people, and despite the countless hours I had spent on each one of them, I could not determine how or why they had died.
“If, God forbid, there is a next time, don’t wait until the bodies turn up,” I finally had instructed Marino. “Let me know the minute the car is found.”
“Yo. May as well staff autopsying the cars since the bodies ain’t telling us nothing,” he had said, trying unsuccessfully to be funny.