The Book of Cold Cases, page 29
. . . The law of double jeopardy would apply to the murders of Armstrong and Veerhoever, though it would not apply to any other crimes Miss Greer might be accused of that arise from the investigation at her home.
Miss Greer issued a statement through the office of her attorney, Ransom Wells: “The search of my home was legal persecution, pure and simple.” The statement was not given personally by Wells, who his staff say is in declining health, but sent by email to local media outlets. “I have lived a quiet life for forty years, ever since my acquittal at trial. I have harmed no one. This has been brought on by a blogger named Shea Collins, who is seeking fame based on lies about crimes she claims I’ve committed. All of it is categorically false, and I’m considering legal action to protect myself.”
Collins apparently runs a website called the Book of Cold Cases, which contains several articles about the Lady Killer murders along with articles about other famous unsolved crimes. Collins appears to be a Claire Lake resident, though attempts to reach her for comment were met with silence . . .
* * *
—
“She’s messing with me,” I said.
I was fully dressed in my hospital room, sitting in a wheelchair, talking on the phone as the nurse put my bag in my lap. I was being discharged after a monthlong stay that included surgeries on both my elbow and my knee. My arm was in a sling and I’d be on crutches for a few months at least, but I was finally going home. It should have been an exciting moment, but I was too busy talking to Joshua Black to notice.
“Messing with you?” he said. “She just seems angry to me.”
Of course Beth was angry. The full force of the Claire Lake PD had come down on her. What Joshua Black had to do with any of it, I could only guess; for a man who had been retired for a decade, he seemed to be central. No one in the department held more respect or more sway.
“She’s screwing with my head,” I said as the nurse started pushing my chair down the hallway. “She’s gone to the media to tell everyone who I am, and that she’s planning to sue me. She’s sent so much traffic to my website that the server crashed. I have over two hundred emails in my inbox, and my phone won’t stop ringing with requests for interviews. She’s just made me famous.”
“Sounds terrible to me,” Black said.
“It is terrible. I haven’t talked to my bosses yet, but I could easily get fired over the publicity. And I’ve never wanted to be in the public eye.” Even now, all I wanted was to go home to my condo and get Winston Purrchill back from Esther, who had taken him in while I’d been in the hospital. I wanted one of my quiet nights with my laptop, my cat, and my familiar anxieties, and I had the feeling I was never going to have one of those nights again. “And at the same time,” I said to Joshua, “I called my health insurance company this morning. I assumed I was going to be in debt for the rest of my life, but guess what? I’m not. Everything is paid for.”
“Wow,” Joshua said. “And you think that was Beth?”
“She’s the only rich person I know.” I’d had two surgeries, including titanium pieces inserted into my crushed left elbow. I’d had drugs and antibiotics and physical therapy, which I was going to continue for months as an outpatient. Even with the insurance from my job, I’d thought I’d be underwater forever. The bill for the deductibles alone was probably more than my annual salary. And yet I didn’t owe a penny.
I could practically hear Beth’s voice, dry and a little impatient: Well, my dead sister did try to kill you. I suppose I’m somewhat responsible.
She’d paid my hospital bill, and then she’d made a statement that threatened to sue me, and threw me to the publicity wolves. Game on, Beth.
“God only knows what she’s thinking,” Joshua said. “I’ve never known.”
He was angry, too. Since my accident, he’d visited me in the hospital a few times and we’d talked on the phone. I liked him so much it was a little scary, and I felt for him. He’d spent forty years believing that Beth wasn’t a murderer, and now he wasn’t so sure. I knew that his original intuition was right—Beth wasn’t a murderer, at least while she was accused and on trial. The murder had come after. But I couldn’t explain to him how I knew that, because Joshua Black didn’t seem like the type to believe in ghosts.
What I had given him was everything I knew about the existence of Lily Knowles, starting with her birth certificate. Lily Knowles, who had left no legal trace behind since aging out of the foster system at eighteen. It had taken Black maybe half a minute to ask himself if Beth’s missing half sister was connected to the remains found by the lake. Now he and the Claire Lake PD had taken over.
“I don’t know what she’s thinking, either,” I said, though that was a lie. I knew exactly what Beth was thinking. She wanted me off-balance, wondering what she was going to do next. She wanted me to understand how much power she had. And she wanted a fight. “Are you going to tell me what they found in the master bedroom?” I asked him. “The police will only say that any evidence they find will be sent for testing. It’s frustratingly vague.”
“You know I can’t tell you that,” he said, though I had no doubt that Joshua knew every detail of the investigation. “I will ask you again, though, how you knew exactly where to look and what we might find. You seem to know a lot about something that happened before you were born.”
“Beth told me,” I said. The nurse had pushed me into the elevator, and we were descending. “She told me about Lily Knowles in our interviews, and Ransom Wells gave me the documentation, including the birth certificate. According to Beth, Lily is responsible for the murders of Julian Greer, Thomas Armstrong, Paul Veerhoever, and Lawrence Gage. And there are likely others, too, including a groundskeeper. We just have to find the others.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. Joshua was playing it close to the vest, which he was so good at. How he’d felt when he’d learned, after forty years, that Beth had a half sister, he hadn’t told me. He was all business when he talked to me about the case. I suspected that maybe, for the first time in a long time, the legendary Detective Black was mad. Really mad.
“So you went to the Greer mansion alone,” he said to me on the phone now as the elevator doors opened and the nurse pushed me down the busy hallway.
“Yes,” I said.
“And you fell over the cliff.”
We’d gone over this before, more than once, but a cop is always a cop. “Yes. I fell.”
“And Beth wasn’t home at the time.”
“You know she wasn’t. She was getting a medical scan done. It’s an ironclad alibi. Beth didn’t push me, I swear.”
“It just seems odd that you would fall over a dangerous cliff on your own. You’re certain you weren’t intoxicated?”
“I’m certain. It was an accident, okay? I stood in the wrong place and leaned the wrong way, and over I went. They really should put a fence up there. It’s dangerous. Now, how about you tell me what the lab is testing and how long it will take?”
The change of subject worked. “I never said there was any lab testing.”
“It was in the statement in the news.”
“No, it said that anything that was collected would be sent for lab testing. You’re as bad as those reporters. There’s nothing to report.”
“No? Then why am I hearing that the DNA tests on the body that was found by the lake are being expedited?”
“Where are you hearing that?”
“Some of those emails in my inbox are from people who hear things. Is it true?”
“I’m hanging up now. Please be careful, Shea. That’s all I ask.”
I thanked him and hung up, thinking Of course I’ll be careful, but I’ve already survived Anton Anders and Lily Knowles, two of Claire Lake’s worst murderers. I can survive Beth Greer.
The nurse pushed me through the front doors of the hospital, and I inhaled the fresh air, taking it in deep even though it was cloudy and cold. The bite of fall felt good in my throat and my lungs. An SUV had pulled up to the curb, and a familiar figure got out.
I thanked the nurse as Michael De Vos took the crutches from her and helped me out of the wheelchair. He was bundled in a wool coat against the chill, and he’d left the stubble on his jaw at my request. He looked woodsy and masculine and all-over good. He smiled at me and kissed me sweetly as I leaned on the crutches.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He opened the passenger door of the SUV. I hesitated for a moment, my gaze on the darkness of the passenger seat.
I glanced at Michael to see him watching me. He looked like he wasn’t in a hurry, as if he could wait all day. “You can do this,” he said.
“I know,” I replied.
I limped to the passenger seat and got in. I handed Michael the crutches as I swung my bad leg into the SUV. Then I took a breath and closed the door, ready to go home.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Five Months Later
April 2018
From the popular podcast Listening to True Crime, episode 109, released April 13, 2018:
PAULA WATTS (LTC host): I’ve done a deep dive into this. The Lady Killer case has been an obsession of mine for years—I know I’m not the only one. There are a million details, a million theories. And I mean, Beth Greer! You just look at her, and it’s like, “Could she have done it? Maybe she could. Maybe she shot two random men just because she was rich and bored and crazy.” You can see it, in a way. And then you wonder, am I thinking that because that’s what society has programmed me to think? That any woman who doesn’t fit inside a neat little box, any woman who has sexuality as blatant and unapologetic as Beth Greer’s, maybe that woman is dangerous. Maybe she should be shunned and put in a jail cell. For us as women, I think, we look at that case and it brings up so many questions.
SHEA COLLINS: I know. I agree. I’ve been obsessed with the case myself for a long time, which you can see from the articles on my site.
PAULA: But this is crazy, isn’t it? This is nuts. I read that they reopened the Julian Greer case. Jesus, they reopened it! Because now we know that Beth Greer’s mother had a baby out of wedlock, and Lily Knowles existed, and she, at the very least— We don’t know much, but we know she was a foster child in the system and that as an adult she was a psychiatric patient. And I’m not saying anything about people with mental illness, because they can’t help that, but this was the seventies, and the treatment Lily probably got was to get thrown in a room somewhere with some screwed-up antipsychotic drugs, and that’s it. She was a mess.
SHEA: They’ve found some of her psychiatric records and released them, though not all of them. They’ve also reopened the Lawrence Gage case in Arizona. Did you know they lost the bullet in that case? It’s just gone. Apparently there was a fire in one of their evidence storage spaces and some evidence was lost, including that bullet. So we’ll never know if the ballistics match the other murders. But I’ve heard they’re pursuing the case with DNA.
PAULA: There was DNA left at that crime scene?
SHEA: They found a couple of hairs, I think. And if they can get the DNA from the hairs, they can match it to—
PAULA: They might match it to Beth Greer, right? Because Lily was Beth’s sister.
SHEA: Yeah, I think that could happen. Or they can match it to the DNA from the body they found, which we think is Lily’s body.
PAULA: So have they matched the DNA from that body to Beth’s?
SHEA: I don’t know. No one will tell me.
PAULA: Come on! You’re the expert on this case. You know everything!
SHEA: There are lots of things the cops won’t tell me, though believe me, I ask. I’m a big pain in their asses. They pretty much hate me, but that’s fine.
PAULA: You’re so freaking brave it blows me away. Beth Greer must hate you, too. And maybe she isn’t the Lady Killer, but she’s a pretty intimidating person, even now.
SHEA: I don’t think she hates me. She agreed to have me interview her in the first place, and she told me about Lily. No one knew about Lily until she pointed me in the right direction.
PAULA: But because of you, she could be looking at new murder charges. Aren’t you a bit scared of her?
SHEA: I’ve been researching this case. I’ve seen some things. I had an accident it took months to recover from. Honestly, not much scares me anymore. I want the truth to come out.
PAULA: Does Beth Greer ever call you? Do you guys, like, hang out? Be honest. What’s she like?
SHEA: We don’t hang out. We have talked—I’ll say that she knows my number, and I know hers. We don’t shoot the shit or anything. As for what she’s like, I don’t really know how to describe it. I think the Beth you see in the media, in the photos, a lot of that is the real Beth. It isn’t like she’s at home baking cookies or something. She’s hard to figure out, and she likes it that way.
PAULA: If you guys have wine parties or start a book club or something, call me. I’ll move to Oregon for that.
SHEA: If we do that, I’ll definitely call.
* * *
—
The doctor’s office fired me.
I couldn’t blame them. I’d left work one day a nobody, and then I’d been in the hospital for a month and I’d come back famous—or maybe I was infamous. I never really knew which it was.
It didn’t matter. I was busy. Traffic and memberships on the Book of Cold Cases skyrocketed. I got a lot of interview requests, though I didn’t accept many of them. I started work on an article about my interviews with Beth, the amazing story she’d spun. The article was long, and it was by far the best thing I’d ever written, and, to my amazement, Rolling Stone bought it. After that came more requests—for more articles about the Lady Killer case, and for articles about the other cases I’d researched. I was a guest on a few podcasts, and then, with Michael’s help, I tried the unthinkable: I started a podcast myself. The numbers started out good, and then they got better.
I’d never planned to be this person, talking all the time in the spotlight. I’d never chased fame, and I wouldn’t have chased it now except for the fact that my fame served one important purpose: It kept the spotlight on Beth.
Michael’s private detective business started to climb, too, and he took on better and better cases. Our relationship was serious, and it was the best thing in my life—I was crazy about him, and I thought he felt the same about me. We worked together on a lot of projects, both mine and his, and we spent a lot of nights at either his place or mine. But we mutually agreed that we weren’t living together yet, and we made no mention of marriage. We were both too burned. It was one of the things we understood instinctively about each other without having to talk it to death. There were a lot of things like that with me and Michael.
“I like him,” Esther said when we had lunch together one Saturday in a diner in downtown Claire Lake. “He’s ultraserious, like you are. He’s smart. He likes you. And as the girls say today, he’s a snack.”
I flinched. “Please don’t say things like that. You’re an embarrassing mom already, and the baby isn’t even here yet.”
My sister smiled and sipped her sparkling water with a twist of lime. She and Will had been scheduled for their first round of IVF when they found out she was already pregnant. Now she was quietly happy in a way I’d never seen her, though of course she was still Esther the overachiever. Everything about this baby was being organized to the smallest detail. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a 401(k) already. “You can be the cool aunt,” Esther said. “I’ll be the awkward mom. It works for me. How is the physio going?”
I shrugged and speared a piece of roasted potato—using my right hand, because my left elbow ached almost constantly. “I go as often as I can.”
“Shea. You’re working too much. You had a terrible trauma. You have to take care of yourself.”
“I am,” I argued. “I will. Just as soon as all of this is over.”
Esther frowned. “I know that Beth is over sixty, but she looks pretty healthy to me. You’re exposing her as a murderer. Maybe you should be careful in dark parking lots.”
“I never go into dark parking lots,” I said. “And Beth talks a big game about suing me, but that’s bluster. She doesn’t actually care about murder charges. If she did, she would never have agreed to talk to me at all.”
“I don’t get this,” Esther said. “There’s no such thing as someone who doesn’t care about murder charges.”
“That’s because you haven’t met Beth.”
I didn’t tell her about Beth’s aneurysm. Beth thought her time was limited, and she didn’t care about how the last part—whether weeks or months or possibly years—played out. She’d been tied to that house, to Lily and Mariana and Julian, for forty years. She was done.
At one in the morning that night, my cell phone rang. I was alone in bed—Michael had an early flight to San Francisco in the morning—and I was halfway between waking and sleeping. Winston was curled against my chest, kneading imaginary biscuits on my T-shirt, and he flattened his ears in annoyance when I reached over him and answered the phone.
“Hi, Beth,” I said. She only ever called me at one in the morning.
“ ‘An anonymous source’?” she said, not bothering with hello. “Did they actually buy that? I don’t know whether to be insulted or amused.”
“Try both,” I said, using one of Beth’s own lines. She was talking about an article that had just run on CNN’s website, in which I said that “an anonymous source” had tipped me off to the possibility of Beth murdering her half sister in 1978.
“Whatever,” Beth said, sounding more like the twenty-three-year-old she’d been in the seventies instead of a woman who was over sixty. “I also saw the 60 Minutes thing. Were you trying to pull at my heartstrings?”
