“How have you been able to stand it?” Jens asked. “Your parents sound like monsters.”
“They are,” Elizabeth said solemnly. “I wish they were dead.”
THE SOUL-BARING INCREASED IN TEMPO OVER THE Christmas holidays. Only then it was by post instead of face to face.
For weeks Elizabeth had been busy building Jens’s ego. Despite his arrogance, Jens, at the core, was remarkably insecure. Elizabeth played to his weakness, telling him he was intelligent, witty, and urbane. At the same time she appealed to his German machismo, trying to convince him how much she depended on him, particularly as an escape from her parents, who were treating her more cruelly than ever.
Just as she had fed off her bitterness toward Derek and Nancy in her last year at Wycombe Abbey, she encouraged Jens to be angry toward them. Tentatively at first, she began hinting about how much better their lives would be without her parents. As long as they were alive, she said, she and Jens would never be happy. She said they felt he was not good enough for her. According to Elizabeth, they wanted her to break up with him. She said they resented her enrolling in German classes because it formed another bond between them. As a clincher, she said they were even considering sending her away again just to destroy the relationship.
More and more, the words death and murder crept into their conversations. At first, they dealt with the subject in the hypothetical sense, possibly in the same spirit in which they attacked the idea of designing a supercar. They talked about methods of killing their parents.
But gradually the discussions became more serious. What may have started as another intellectual game for them, discussing ways to kill people, became more specific. At first
Elizabeth took the initiative in these discussions, but she soon discovered what she later would describe as Jens’s exceptional affinity for violence.
In the beginning the discussions progressed on basically separate levels: One was an abstract debate on how to murder someone; the other was a bitter examination about the abuse her parents were heaping upon her and how they were trying to separate the lovers. But soon the subjects began to merge. By the time they left the Charlottesville Grounds for the Christmas holidays, Elizabeth had built a good foundation for her claims.
She made the short trip home to Boonsboro; Jens joined his family in Detroit, where his father had been reassigned. They kept in touch by telephone.
From Loose Chippings, Elizabeth began a “journal,” which she would later mail to Jens. Half diary, half letter, the document ran for nine pages and included a full-page drawing entitled “Still Life.” It depicted Elizabeth as an amorphous being, a ghost-like figure remarkable mainly for her huge eyes and squared-off nose. However, her parents were clearly defined. Derek was shown in profile wearing a British gamekeeper’s hat and a V-neck sweater. He looked over his bony right shoulder, away from both Nancy and Elizabeth, seemingly disassociating himself from the scene. He had long clawlike hands, one of which was draped over Nancy’s shoulder while the other caressed her arm. Nancy wore a dress or sweater with a plunging neckline, and her hair was arranged in a braid curled on top of her head. Her face was long and narrow with oversize eyes and brows that arched almost vertically. In the drawing her nose was broad and flat, and her ears were sharply pointed, like
Star Trek
’
s
Spock. With a cold expression on her face, Nancy gazed downward without apparent feeling at the Elizabeth-image.
The drawing was dated December 21, 1984, the day after she began the document. The final entry was dated Christmas Eve.
Rather than mailing these scribblings to Jens as she wrote them, she saved them and posted the entire document on
December 28, when she left for a ski trip to Yugoslavia. Later she would deny the document was a letter to Jens, claiming it was only a diary intended for her personal perusal.
Elizabeth’s document must have been exquisite torture for Jens. If he had received no letter, it would have broken his heart. But the one he did receive took him hours to decipher. Elizabeth’s penmanship was, to be charitable, idiosyncratic. She did a funny thing with her
s
’s, frequently forming them in a loop and continuing the line into the next letter. This made them look like
@
’s or
8
’s without a connecting bar in the middle. She also ran her
t
’s and
h
’s together when they fell in the same word with the result that the first two letters looked like a capital
“h.”
Her eccentric hand is a matter of personal pride.
Her December 20 entry was short and cryptic, saying only that she was lonely. But the next day she covered a page and a half, excluding the drawing, complaining about her parents’ drinking, particularly her mother’s. But Derek was her special target for the day. She noted that Nancy was beginning her sixth drink and Elizabeth hoped it would give her mother courage to kill her father. Seemingly off the cuff, between statements about her parents smothering her with affection and the news that she was painting a mural, she commented that her neighborhood had been subjected to a rash of burglaries.
The December 22 entry began chattily, briefly chronicling their preparations for Christmas. Before long, though, Elizabeth began writing about how much she wished she could be rid of her parents, speculating that supernatural means might be preferable.
Before ending that day’s writing with a sonnet, she noted that her focus on bad things that could happen to them seemed to be having some results because of a series of nearcataphoric accidents, which she later claimed were largely imagined.
The December 23 message, except for noting that her mother nagged at her incessantly and refused to do anything
about cleaning the house, was devoted largely to poetry, her own and T. S. Eliot’s. On a more ominous note, she made two more references to the deaths of her parents. In one, she said she wished her parents would die. Later, she hinted that murder might be necessary.
For the most part, though, her Christmas writings were mainly nonsense with none-too-clear references to David Bowie and Jens’s psychological state. After teasing him with references to the rock idol and her possible inherent lesbianism, she swore her undying love. Investigators would also later find an undated letter, probably written during the Christmas break, in which she devoted considerable space to her previous sexual experiences with both men and women. But that was in the past, she added. Since she had met Jens, he was her only interest.
AS ELIZABETH HAD DONE, JENS COUCHED HIS RESPONSE in “journal” form. His letter was thirty-nine pages long and, unlike Elizabeth’s, it was virtually all typewritten. He didn’t want to make Elizabeth have to strain to read his scrawl. His handwriting, while better than Elizabeth’s, was not a model of readability. But even with that, he took pains to please her. Propped up in his bed at his parents’ home in suburban Detroit, Jens worked through the night drafting his thoughts in longhand before typing the finished letter.
Jens’s letters were centered much more on himself and his feelings than on those around him. At this stage the idea of actually killing Elizabeth’s parents apparently was not something he took as seriously as Elizabeth did, although he made several veiled references to the possibility. His letters, on the whole, were more general but exceedingly egocentric.
Primarily they reflected two themes: self-doubt and sexual awakening. But in contrast to Elizabeth, whose prose exhibited a certain coherence and a definite direction, Jens’s correspondence was totally undisciplined. It wandered all over the place with obtuse references to literature, self-indulgence, intellectualism, insecurity, science, and a dozen other topics.
Although it would later be argued that it was coincidental that both Elizabeth and Jens seemed to be writing more or less simultaneously about the deaths of her parents, there was an apparent pattern to Jens’s words. He seemed to be responding to what Elizabeth had written about her parents rather than advancing ideas on his own.
Elizabeth’s mention of burglaries in her Boonsboro neighborhood elicited a response from Jens that seemed to hint that something worse than theft could result from a break in. After she referred to voodoo, Jens replied that it was possible.
JENS AND ELIZABETH WERE HARDLY BACK AT SCHOOL before they were separated again. Early in March Elizabeth took a week-long break to go skiing in Colorado with her half-brother, Howard. By then the discussion of killing her parents had moved from the general to the specific: They were now talking about Derek and Nancy. Still, Elizabeth must have felt Jens needed some final nudge. Her ski trip gave her that opportunity.
In an eight-page letter dated March 8, 1985, written on stationery from the Ramada Inn at 3737 Quebec Street in Denver, Elizabeth penned an intricate but largely fictional account of her situation.
She said her cousin, Lady Astor, had given her a house in London as a christening present. (This is not impossible, but it is improbable. Lady Astor died seventeen days after Elizabeth was born.) The gift, Elizabeth said, was contingent upon her attending Cambridge or Oxford. In the story she told Jens, she had decided for herself to be an engineer (rather than Derek’s having demanded it of her as she claimed in other versions), but her math was inadequate so she had switched to history.
Also in this version she said she had been given a scholarship to Cambridge and had actually enrolled. During a school holiday, she continued, she went to the Continent with Melinda. But, she said, this decision did not sit well with the trustees of Lady Astor’s estate, who were anxious
to see that she committed no unseemly acts. The trustees’ reaction caused her to pause and reconsider her situation, she said. On the one hand were her parents, who wanted her to continue at Cambridge because they wanted the house in London that had been bequeathed to Elizabeth.
On the other hand, she wrote Jens, she wanted her freedom more than the house. So she went off to the Continent for a second time. As a result she lost everything because the trustees removed the bequest.
When she returned from that jaunt, she said, her parents agreed to forgive her if she would enroll at the University of Virginia. In return, she would remain in their wills. In the end, she said, after they died, she would be wealthy. In the meantime her fees at UVA were being paid out of her own money, a $25,000 book contract she had negotiated. But she was tired of being manipulated by her parents. Besides, she said, they could not remove her from their wills.
Then she dangled a carrot in front of Jens. Because she loved him, she said, she would pay for his brother’s college education out of what remained of her book contract money. If that was not enough, she said, she would sell her jewelry and steal her mother’s to sell as well. Also, she added, she would go to Europe with him that summer, as he had been begging her to do although she had been putting him off by saying her parents were unalterably opposed. But there was a caveat. If she did that, she said, she would forfeit her inheritance.
Then she hit him with the hard one: The decision would be up to him.
What a decision. Elizabeth was telling Jens that she wanted him, but that her parents were in the way. She said she wanted their money, not for herself but for Jens and his brother. Jens did not have to be an Echols Scholar and the holder of a Jefferson Scholarship to understand what she was saying: The only road to their happiness, she claimed, was over her parents’ dead bodies.
ELIZABETH WAS WRONG ABOUT ONE THING: DEREK AND Nancy came very close to writing her out of their wills, certainly as far as any ready cash was concerned.
The documents were promulgated in probate court in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, on May 7, 1985. Although they were drawn up at different times—Nancy’s on October 27, 1978, and Derek’s on July 4, 1984—the provisions were virtually the same. According to the wills, if they died within thirty days of each other, a previously created trust fund would be used to pay for Elizabeth’s education and to help her get started in her career. After that obligation was taken care of the money was to be divided equally among the six children.
The amount of the money in the trust fund was never disclosed, but the Haysoms had surprisingly little in the way of personal assets. According to documents filed with the Bedford County Clerk of Court on November 8, 1985, Nancy’s estate consisted of $10,000 in jewelry, $7,000 in household furniture, and $821 in the bank. Derek’s assets were even less. He had the Bronze Belle and the twelve-year-old BMW, each of which was valued at $1,000; almost $3,000 worth of unspecified personal property, and $3,000 in the bank. The house, which they had paid for in cash, was valued at $150,000. Their total assets were estimated at only $175,000, which was far from the wealth Elizabeth had hinted at so broadly.
A year after the murders the house was sold at auction to the man Derek and Nancy had bought it from originally. He got a very good deal. The Haysoms had purchased it in 1983 for $150,000. Three years later, the original owner, Ranny Ferry, bought it back, along with five acres of land, for $101,000.
IF RICKY GARDNER AND CHUCK REID HAD KNOWN about Elizabeth’s and Jens’s letters, especially their references to voodoo and black magic, they would have gone straight up the wall.
In Boonsboro Reid and Gardner were so frustrated they could cry. Gradually, sheriffs in surrounding counties had begun pulling their personnel out of the task force because there was no appreciable progress and they didn’t have enough people to spare for an extended period.
By June the investigation was down to Reid and Gardner and whatever help they could pick up from the Lynchburg PD. The regional homicide squad had set a record for longevity, but the results had been disappointing. No matter which way the investigators turned, it seemed, they ran into dead ends. They were ready to try almost anything.
It was, therefore, an indication of their desperation when Reid and Gardner turned onto Court Street and pulled up in front of LPD’s brick building one hot afternoon early in the summer. Clambering down the stairs, they walked into into PD headquarters and buttonholed the first cop that walked by.
“Where’s Sergeant Carroll Baker?” Gardner asked.
The cop pointed down the hall.
Reid and Gardner found Baker sitting at a desk in a small office off the main corridor, up to his ears in paperwork.
“Come on,” Reid waved. “You’ve been selected to come with us.”
“The Haysom case again, huh?” Baker sighed.
“You got it,” Reid replied.
“Oh, well,” Baker said, stuffing his papers in the drawer. “Where we going?”
Gardner told him they were going to see a psychic.
“A
what?
” asked an amazed Baker.
“A
psychic
,” Garner repeated. “You know, one of those guys that sees things.”
“Have you guys gone nuts?”
“What the hell?” Reid shrugged. “We don’t have anything to lose.”
They drove for thirty minutes, finally pulling up in front of a house in a small town just outside Lynchburg. Before they got out of the car, Gardner turned to Baker.
“We asked you to come for a special reason,” he said.
“Oh?” Baker replied, raising an eyebrow.
“We know you’re on the SWAT team and you’re good with weapons and all that stuff,” Gardner explained. “So what we want you to do is cover our backs. While we’re sitting there with our eyes closed, we want you to keep yours open. We want you to be looking around to make sure there’s nothing funny going on.”
“I don’t believe this,” Baker mumbled, searching Gardner’s face for some sign that he was joking. He wasn’t. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Instead of entering the house itself, they walked around the side and knocked on the door of a small apartment in the back. A small man in his midthirties, dressed neatly in khaki work pants and an open-necked sport shirt, invited them in and told them to be seated.
All around were Native American artifacts, from handwoven rugs to hand-thrown vases. The man was only a parttime psychic; the rest of the time he operated a shop that sold Native American crafts.
Gardner had called ahead so the man knew what they wanted. He had asked them to bring along some items of the victims’ clothing and, if they had them, pictures of some potential suspects. He specified that the latter should be sealed in heavy envelopes because he didn’t want to see the faces; he would work through a more esoteric sense.
When Reid handed over the parcel, the man got up and turned on a tape of sitar music. The detectives sat stiffly in
their chairs as the music blared at them from speakers around the room.
“It helps me concentrate,” the man yelled. Reid rolled his eyes.
The three cops sat silently as the man unwrapped the package and drew out an item. It was Derek’s shirt. “Close your eyes and think about the crime,” he ordered the officers. “It will help bring the scene into my mind.”
Gardner flashed Baker an I-told-you-so look. Reid bit the inside of his jaw to keep from laughing.
Holding the blood-stained shirt, the psychic rocked back and forth. With his eyes tightly closed, he began humming, shaking, and occasionally jerking. Baker looked at Reid, who was turning red in the face as he labored to smother a guffaw. Simultaneously, they looked at Gardner, who looked as if he were asleep. As they stared at him, he opened one eye and stared back. Reid clamped his hand over his mouth and Baker looked away.
“I see a man in dark clothing,” the psychic wailed. “He’s looking in the windows!”
Three sets of eyes swung to the windows. They seemed surprised when there was no one there.
The psychic let out a sharp squeal. “I feel a knife!” he screamed. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! I’m feeling pain,” he moaned. “Oooohhhhh, I’m feeling so much pain.”
Baker, Reid, and Gardner shifted uncomfortably.
Unexpectedly, the man’s energy gave out, and he collapsed upon himself. “I’ve lost it,” he said weakly. “That’s all I can tell you.”
Actually, he had told them nothing.
But then again, neither had anyone else.
BACK IN THE CAR, THE THREE POLICEMEN LOOKED AT each other disconcertedly.
“Boy, that was something,” Baker said.
“Better than television,” added Reid.
“Well, what did we learn?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“We learned that the killer, as he sees him, is a man who wore dark clothing and that he looked in the windows of the house before he went in.”
“What a surprise.”
“As I said, not a damn thing.”
“Damn,” said Reid dejectedly, “we just wasted most of an afternoon.”
“I need to get back to my work,” Baker said, still not sure he had not dreamed the whole sequence.
“Yeah,” agreed Gardner, turning the ignition key. “We do, too.”
SOME INVESTIGATORS WHO WORKED ON THE CASE would have been willing to offer sworn statements saying that in their considered opinions even a totally befuddled psychic would give better evidence than Margaret Louise Simmons. Chuck Reid was not one of them. While she drove most of the detectives to distraction, Reid maintained a quiet confidence in her capabilities.
“If you just take the time and listen to her real carefully,” a patient Reid explained to Gardner, “she makes good sense.”
Gardner shot him a look that said, “Right, and I’m the king of Bavaria.”
“No kidding,” Reid persisted, “the trick to understanding Margaret Louise is just not to rush her. Let her work things through for herself.”
By now, the two investigators had developed their good cop—bad cop routine. Reid was the good cop, the quiet helpful one who said soothing things and always offered to fetch the coffee. Gardner was the bad cop, the one who asked all the pointed questions and kept poking his nose where a lot of people felt it should not be.
Whenever the two talked to Margaret Louise, Gardner’s patience ran out quickly. Before very long he would go find something else to do while Reid sat down to chat with her.
One morning Reid and Margaret Louise were having a cup of coffee and shooting the breeze.
“Do you think I did it?” Margaret Louise asked.
The question caught Reid by surprise. He thought about it for a minute, then answered very slowly, “No, Margaret Louise, I don’t. But somebody had to do it.”
“Yeah, that’s for sure.”
Reid sensed that she had something she wanted to tell him but wasn’t sure how to begin. Feigning casualness, he stretched and looked into his coffee cup. It was empty.
“Would you like some more coffee?” he asked her.
“I don’t think so,” she said, looking preoccupied.
“You know,” Reid said carefully, “”we hear one thing about how so-and-so must have done it, and then we hear another thing about how somebody else must have done it. It’s downright confusing. But you’re pretty sharp about these things, Margaret Louise. Who do
you
think did it?”
At first he thought she hadn’t heard him. She started talking softly about her and Elizabeth and how they used to just sit down and talk but these days they hardly ever did that any more.
Ho-hum, Reid thought, here we go again. Am I ever going to learn?
Margaret Louise was saying how just the other day it was almost like old times because she and Elizabeth were able to have a few quiet minutes with each other. They were drinking orange juice and Elizabeth was playing the hostess.
Reid twirled his empty cup and was debating about a refill.
“I think Elizabeth did it,” Margaret Louise said suddenly.
Reid dropped his styrofoam cup. “What was that?” he said, leaning closer.
“I said,” she repeated, talking to him as if he were a five-year-old, “that I think Elizabeth did it.”
“Is that right?” Reid said, trying to act nonchalant. “Why do you think that?”
“I was just telling you,” Margaret Louise explained patiently. “Elizabeth was pouring a glass of juice for me, and she stopped right in the middle and she said, ‘You know,
Margaret Louise, I’m the devil, and you’re the sacrificial lamb.’”
Later, when he and Gardner had a chance to talk about what Margaret Louise had said, they agreed that Elizabeth’s remark was a very interesting bit of information, but they had to put it into context. That is, they had to consider the source. Finally, they decided that it was something they should keep in mind, but it was hardly strong enough to allow them to charge Elizabeth Haysom with murdering her parents.
“I mean,” Reid told Gardner, “who’s going to believe that Margaret Louise has enough wits about her to make that kind of connection?”
A few weeks later some of the lab reports came back. One of them formally eliminated Margaret Louise as a suspect on grounds that her foot impressions did not match any of those taken at the scene. A second report said the same about Elizabeth.