THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN MEMBERS OF THE HOMICIDE squad got together to compare notes, Debbie Kirkland wanted to say what she thought about Elizabeth Haysom.
“I didn’t like her,” she began.
“Why not?” one of the officers asked.
“Maybe I’m prejudiced. I just didn’t like the way she came off. She was too stuck up for me.”
“Being stuck up isn’t a crime,” the investigator said.
“I know. I guess I just got bad feelings about her. I really got suspicious when she started that walking around bit.”
“What do you mean?”
“When the questions got tough, she couldn’t sit still. She had to get up and move around. I’ve been in this job for twelve years, and that’s long enough to know that means she’s hiding something. I know she was lying, I’m just not sure what about.”
“Is this just personal?”
“No, it’s more than that. My instincts tell me she knows a lot more than she’s saying. For one thing, I guess I just didn’t feel she was showing enough emotion. I mean, her parents were just killed, but you’d never know it by talking to her. There wasn’t any sorrow in her eyes. There wasn’t a thing there to show she felt bad about it.”
“Well, you can’t arrest her for that,” Gardner said.
“No, I guess you can’t,” Kirkland agreed.
THE FEELING MUST HAVE BEEN MUTUAL. As SOON AS Elizabeth had left the interview with Gardner and Kirkland, she went to her brothers and reported that the police were giving her a bad time. Howard, the surgeon from Houston, called a well-known defense lawyer in Charlottesville, John
Lowe. He, in turn, called Sheriff Wells and told him his investigators were not to question any members of the Haysom family without him being there.
“Come on, John,” Wells told him. “You know better than that. If your clients don’t want to talk to our people
, they
have to tell us that, not you.”
Wells heard no more from the lawyer. Or from the Haysoms.
ON APRIL 12, FOUR DAYS AFTER THE INTERVIEW, ELIZABETH wrote a brief note to Colonel Herrington notifying him of the murders. She was writing, she said, with considerable “hostility” and a lot of “anger” about both the killings and the fact that she had been questioned. Her mother and father had been “butchered,” she wrote, because of America’s “savagery” and “brutality.” She added that the United States is the only place where law enforcement officials would “harass” the daughter of murdered parents by treating her as a principal suspect because the victims “did not give her a car.”
THE DAYS SLIPPED BY, BUT ANSWERS CONTINUED TO elude the detectives. When a week had passed and there had been no arrests, residents were starting to get antsy. Smalltown gossip mills being what they are, many were already convinced that Margaret Louise was the murderer, even though officers had tried to keep secret the names of the people they were talking to. Every direction officers turned, it seemed, Margaret Louise’s name came up, sometimes from the most unexpected sources.
Bedford County prosecutor Jim Updike was walking to court one day a week or so after the bodies were discovered when a lawyer from Lynchburg challenged him in the hallway.
“Why haven’t you made an arrest yet?” the man demanded.
Updike stared at him in surprise.
“Everybody knows Margaret Louise did it,” the lawyer continued.
Updike bit his tongue.
“You’d better arrest her and throw her in jail,” the lawyer added belligerently, “before she kills someone else.”
THE NEWSPAPERS WERE GETTING RESTLESS, TOO. THREE days after the memorial service for the Haysoms, a week after the bodies were found, the Lynchburg
News & Daily
Advance
waded into the discussion with an editorial that unintentionally reflected the same frustrations investigators were facing in trying to solve the crimes. Under the headline, “What Possible Motive for Such Brutal Slayings?” the editorial said:
The grotesqueness of the killings is troubling, to say the least. Brutal stabbing deaths by unknown assailants of a peaceful couple is something one reads about in larger metropolitan areas—far removed from Lynchburg. This community has been spared such violence.
Who would so brutally snuff out the lives of this articulate couple whose worldwide experiences had exposed them to far more dangerous settings than anything they could have anticipated in their quiet neighborhood? What beast of a human is capable of such a senseless slaughter? Why? What could possibly provoke another human or humans to inflict such punishment on fellow travelers? Revenge? Satisfying some sick desire to kill?
The police are just as desperate for answers to those questions as we are. If for nothing else than peace of mind for the family and friends of the Haysoms, we hope the answers will come quickly.
While at first Sheriff Wells had assigned every man he could find in the department to the case, he soon realized it was going to be a drawn-out investigation. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was going to have to cut back on the
Haysom staff enough to free some officers to take care of the routine. It was time, Wells figured, to assign the case to a specific investigative team. He and his top aide, Captain Laughlin, met late one afternoon to decide who it was going to be. They chose Gardner and Reid.
Late that night, when Gardner dragged in from a long day of chasing down dead-end leads, he found a note to call Laughlin.
“Be sure you go by headquarters first thing in the morning,” the captain told him. “There’s something on your desk you need to see.”
Early the next day, Gardner detoured through Bedford and went straight to his desk. Smack in the center, where he couldn’t miss it, was a two-foot-tall stack of papers. He went charging into Laughlin’s office. “What’s all that stuff?” he asked.
“That’s the material to date on the Haysom case.”
“What’s it doing on my desk?”
“It’s your case now.”
“Come again?” said a surprised Gardner, the newest investigator in the department.
“You heard me,” Laughlin said. “It’s your case. Yours and Reid’s.”
“Oh God,” Gardner moaned. “What a way to start the day.”
Laughlin grinned. “Good luck and get cracking.”
RICKY GARDNER WAS SHUFFLING THROUGH HIS NOTES for the umpteenth time when something he had scribbled jumped out at him. At one point in the April 8 interview Elizabeth had mentioned that she and her boyfriend had spent the weekend of the murders in Washington, D.C. It was a slow period at school, she said, and they wanted to get away for a couple of days. Knowing neither of them had a car, Gardner had asked how they got there. He had written down Elizabeth’s reply. She said that they had rented a car in Charlottesville and driven up. Damn! he berated himself. Why didn’t I think of that before?
The next day he drove to Charlottesville and went straight to Pantops Texaco, the local agent for National Car Rental, and asked to see the receipt for a rental to Elizabeth Haysom. When the clerk handed it over, Gardner really cursed himself.
It showed that the 1985 Chevette rented to E. R. Haysom on March 29 had 20,073 miles on the odometer when it was returned on March 31. That was 669 miles more than it had when it was checked out.
That can’t be, Gardner thought at first, 669 miles? How could they rack up that much mileage on a weekend trip to Washington when it’s less than 230 miles there and back?
The more he thought about it, the more likely it became that there was only one explanation. What if they didn’t go just to Washington, but instead went to Washington, then came back to Lynchburg, then went back to Washington?
He grabbed a pencil and paper. Say 120 miles from Charlottesville to Washington, more or less. He wrote down “120.” Then if they went to Lynchburg, they’d have to come back to Charlottesville, so that would be another 120.
He wrote another “120.” Then 80, say, being generous, from Charlottesville to Lynchburg. He put down “80.” Coming back, that would be 80, plus 120. Then they still had to get back to Charlottesville, so that would be another 120. He added his column of figures. Hot damn! That was 640 miles. Figure a little for driving around in Washington, and there’s the 669. He put down his pencil. I think it’s time to talk to Elizabeth Haysom again, he told himself.
GARDNER CALLED THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA POLICE and asked them to contact Elizabeth and set up an interview as soon as possible.
On Tuesday, April 16, at 10:40 P.M., Gardner met Elizabeth in the UVA Police Department building on the edge of the campus. While Elizabeth still professed to want to help, the interview this time was considerably more strained. Elizabeth had carped to her brother about alleged harassment from Gardner, and Gardner knew it. It didn’t make for good feelings on either side. Also, Elizabeth had sensed Debbie Kirkland’s antagonism and toward the end of the last interview had become hostile. This time Gardner had another officer along, Sergeant Carroll Baker of the Lynchburg Police Department. Still, Elizabeth was not happy to see the detectives.
When they met in the tiny office at the rear of the building, Gardner abandoned much of the friendliness he displayed at the first interview; his questions became sharper, his mood less affable.
To open the interview, Gardner asked Elizabeth about her boyfriend and the period
before
the murders, intending to work up through their weekend in Washington and the issue of the excessive mileage on the rental car.
“Has your boyfriend stayed at your parents’ house, too?”
“Yeah,” Elizabeth replied snappishly. “A lot of people have visited from school.”
“Who is ‘a lot of people’?”
“I’ve had friends down since I’ve been here so it would be a steady stream of people going down for just a meal.”
Gardner debated whether to push further on that. He decided against it.
“Okay,” he said, “now the last time you were visiting your parents, which was your father’s birthday, March 23, and you came back on the 24th, they drove you back. Was your boyfriend with you?”
“No. I was there alone.”
“Okay. When was the last time—”
“That he was there?”
“Yes.”
“Uh,” she paused, “let’s see. The week before that I went to Colorado. So it was about two or three weeks.” She looked around the office. “I wish I had a calendar.”
“I do,” Gardner said, digging into his briefcase.
“Okay, this was the birthday,” she said, pointing to the calendar. “I was in Colorado from the 9th to the 16th, the 17th, the 2nd, the 3rd.” She paused again, apparently puzzled. “It must have been in February, the 23rd or the 24th, something like that. Yeah, I think it was the 23rd and 24th”
“Of February?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you leave for Colorado?”
“On Friday the 8th.”
“Of March?”
“Yes. And I came back on the 17th. The 17th of March.”
“Okay. And on the 29th you and Jens rented a car and went to Washington?”
“Uh huh.”
“And you returned on the 31st?”
“Uh huh.”
“Okay. According to the mileage on the car, you drove 669 miles from the time you left Charlottesville until the time you got back to Charlottesville. Ya’ll must have really driven a whole lot.”
“Yeah,” Elizabeth responded, looking nervous. “We did a couple of things.”
Gardner raised an eyebrow.
“First we detoured.”
“A detour?” Gardner asked, disbelief in his voice.
“Yeah,” Elizabeth said, swinging a leg covered in dark blue Spandex tights. “We went into Warrenton. We got lost. I wasn’t paying attention. We drove around there for a while and …” She paused. “Yeah, because we left here about …” She paused again. “I think we left here about three-thirty and we didn’t get there until seven.” She laughed nervously. “Also we drove a lot around Washington. We drove around Washington several times. And we drove around the neighboring areas, too.”
Gardner said nothing.
“Where else did we go?” Elizabeth asked herself aloud. “We’ve rented a car several times.”
Looking alert: “It must have been on that trip that we first went down to Lexington.” Then she contradicted herself. “No, I don’t think it was. No. We went straight to Washington. nd we got lost on the way and drove around.”
Gardner waited a long time before asking the next question, giving her a chance to elaborate. When she didn’t, he plowed ahead. “Okay,” he said, “you told us before, but why did ya’ll go to Washington?”
“Oh, well, we went up just to spend the weekend together. Also, I had to go and look at a couple of things at one of the art galleries. And we went and looked at some memorials. We went to see some movies and that sort of stuff.”
Again Gardner paused. “I meant to ask you this the other day, and I forgot about it. Did your parents like your boyfriend, Jens?”
Elizabeth evaded the question. “They gave me the money to go to Washington. They would come down here, and we’d all have supper together.”
“But they didn’t object to ya’ll seeing each other, you and Jens?”
“No, not at all,” she lied. But Gardner didn’t know it was a lie.
Not satisfied with her answers, Gardner took her through
an explanation of the Washington trip again but her story remained essentially the same. Unable to budge her, he moved on to other subjects. Who in the family owned tennis shoes? How many pairs and what sizes were they? Did her father carry a wallet? Did her mother normally offer to fix a meal for a visitor? Without warning, he switched back to Washington.
“When you stayed at the Washington Marriott, did you register in your name?”
Elizabeth thought for a minute. “I don’t know quite how that worked because we used Jen’s Visa card. I believe the reservation was in my name, but it was his Visa card that paid for it. And then I paid him back.”
Again, Gardner switched subjects.
“Let’s talk about Margaret Louise.”
“That’s a touchy subject with me,” Elizabeth answered defensively.
“Yeah, I gathered that the other day. But Investigator Kirkland and I talked about it, and I have some more questions. Your mother really liked her, didn’t she?”
“Yes, very much. They did a lot of things together.”
“They had a very nice relationship?”
“My father liked her, too,” Elizabeth volunteered. “But he didn’t like the way Julian was handling the situation.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“We all felt that Julian was, I guess, moving too quickly with Margaret Louise, that he was seeing her too much. What I mean is that Julian was aware of the fact that Margaret Louise had her problems, her emotional or psychological trouble, whatever. He knew that she had been in a home and that kind of thing, and both my parents felt that to be fair to her and fair to himself, he should take it gently and get to know her thoroughly before running off to Nova Scotia and getting engaged. My parents liked Margaret Louise, and they were very worried that Julian was going to hurt her badly and that she would flip again.”
Gardner picked up on the
flip again
but let it pass.
Elizabeth added, “He dropped the engagement and got
married to somebody else, and Margaret Louise was left in the lurch.”
“Do you have personal knowledge of Margaret Louise’s reaction when she found out that Julian had gotten married?”
“She didn’t know.”
“She didn’t know!”
“All she knew was that Julian was perhaps living with a woman. And when she found out, she coped pretty well.”
For more than thirty minutes, Gardner questioned Elizabeth about the relationship between Nancy Haysom and Margaret Louise. Elizabeth said it had been excellent up until the time she and Julian broke up, and then it had cooled. In the previous interview she had enthusiastically defended Margaret Louise, but under Gardner’s questioning this time she took a patronizing stance, implying that Margaret Louise was nice, but, well, maybe she just didn’t have it all together, that maybe she could be capable of a double murder.
“Had you ever known Margaret Louise to ride a bicycle to your mother’s and father’s?” Gardner asked.
“A bicycle?” Elizabeth asked, surprised. “No. I don’t think she’s coordinated enough to ride a bicycle.”
“She rides,” Gardner said matter-of-factly.
“She rides!” Elizabeth said. “Golly, that would be terrifying to meet her on the road. Her driving is terrifying.”
“I think she got one for Christmas.”
“Oh, really? I can’t imagine that at all.”
LEAFING THROUGH HIS NOTES FROM THE EARLIER INTERVIEW, Gardner stopped and looked up. “It was mentioned that your mother had some valuables in a closet behind the hot water heater. Have you thought about what that could have been?”
“Well, I know absolutely, dead positive, that she had emergency cash in there. And she kept silver and some jewelry back there. She and my father lived through enough political strife and things to know anything could happen at
any particular moment and you need to have some cash in the house.”
“Would it be a large amount?” Gardner asked, expecting her to reply that it was a couple of hundred dollars.
“I think there was probably between five and ten thousand dollars,” Elizabeth said.
Gardner was amazed. “In cash?”
Elizabeth smiled. “In cash.”
“And kept in the house?”
“Yes. They were thinking about plane tickets and that kind of stuff. I don’t know if it was American dollars or Canadian dollars or British pounds or whatever, but they kept a substantial sum of money back there.”
Gardner’s brain was whirring. despite what Elizabeth had said earlier, police had never found any sort of cache in the Haysom’s house, not behind the hot water heater or anywhere else. And they had turned the house inside out. If what Elizabeth was saying was true, robbery could have been a motive even if Nancy’s gold necklace and Derek’s watch had not been taken.
“Did your father know about the hiding spot?”
“I think he knew it was there, but I don’t think he knew
what
was there. Mummie was secretive.”
“Would Margaret Louise have known? Did your mother trust her enough to tell her that it was back there?”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth replied. “I know a couple of times my mother and father talked to her about looking after the house, but I don’t know whether she told Margaret Louise there was something back there or not.”
GARDNER WAS LEARNING ONE THING VERY QUICKLY about Elizabeth Haysom: She was full of surprises. Talking to her was like opening one of those large Russian dolls. Inside the outer doll is another doll. Then there is another doll inside that one. And another inside that, and so forth, on and on, seemingly interminably. If Gardner asked Elizabeth what he thought was a simple question, she invariably built on it, expanding upon her answer as she went, taking it
down paths that Gardner could not have suspected it could go. He thought he was looking into the murders of two members of an upper-middle-class, respectable family. Elizabeth made him shiver. If she were to be believed, her parents didn’t have a skeleton or two hidden in the closet, they had a whole cemetery, a virtual Forest Lawn. At no time up until then had this phenomenon been so clear as when he asked his next question, which he thought was a straightforward query deserving of a straightforward answer. What he got stunned him as much as if he’d stuck a wet finger into an empty light socket.