SINCE REID AND GARDNER DID NOT AS YET UNDERSTAND the dynamics of the relationship that existed between Jens and Elizabeth before the murders, there was no way they could gauge the changes that were taking place in the romance. Before the murders Elizabeth was the dominant figure, manipulating Jens through judicious deployment of sex and the promise of money. After the murders, however, Jens began taking an increasingly commanding position.
Once his sexual capabilities were awakened, Jens began making new demands on his lover. Previously content mainly to talk about his sexual fantasies, he now began putting them into play. He became a porn freak, toting home stacks of magazines with wild sexual themes, many of which included some sort of violence.
The relationship was changing in other ways, too. For all practical purposes Jens had moved out of his room in Watson Hall and into a house Elizabeth had rented with her dormitory roommate, Charlene Song. This put Elizabeth effectively under his thumb, and she didn’t like it. They argued frequently, struggling mightily for control of the relationship. Threats were hurled; demands were levelled; promises were made and broken. Eventually, an uneasy truce was reached. They would not discuss the murders except in a very elliptical fashion. In the future, they agreed, they would refer to the killings euphemistically as their “little nasty.”
NOT MANY WEEKS AFTER THEY REACHED THIS AGREEMENT, the two of them, at Jens’s insistence, took off for Europe for a holiday. Klaus had been after him for a year to do this, telling Jens that he wanted him to spend some time in
Germany that summer. Jens had been reluctant because he thought Elizabeth would be unable to go because of her parents. Now that they were dead, however, there was no one to put up a fuss.
One of the first cities they visited was Berlin. While there, Elizabeth telephoned Colonel Herrington, saying that she and a friend were in town and they would like to say hello. Herrington invited them to dinner.
“I had a call from Elizabeth,” Herrington told his wife. “She and a ‘friend’ are in town and I’ve invited them to dinner tomorrow.”
“Is the ‘friend’ a boy or a girl?”
“I don’t know,” Herrington replied. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Later, Herrington’s wife asked him how he was going to bring up the issue of Derek’s and Nancy’s murders.
“I’m not,” he replied. “I’m going to play it by ear and see what happens.”
The next night, when Elizabeth showed up with Jens, Herrington caught his wife’s eye and winked. It’s a boy, the look said. That’s good news. The last time Elizabeth had visited their home she had been in love with Melinda Duncan.
Neither Jens nor Elizabeth mentioned the murders, so neither did the Herringtons. It was, in all, Herrington recalled later, a pleasant, relaxed evening. However, he was somewhat taken aback by Elizabeth’s and Jens’s carefree attitude, considering her parents had been killed less than three months previously. The only word he had had from Elizabeth since the murders had been a brief, bitter note she had written after her interview with Gardner and Debbie Kirkland. He also was mildly shocked by the apparent depth of Elizabeth’s and Jens’s relationship.
“It was good to see Elizabeth so happy,” he told his wife after they had gone. “They’re just like a couple of newlyweds.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that they never mentioned her parents?” his wife asked.
“Yeah, I do. But I guess that’s the way she has found to cope with the tragedy. It sure seemed strange, though, for them to be so nonchalant.”
He was sufficiently disturbed by their behavior that he wrote Nancy’s old friend, Annie Massie, telling her about Elizabeth’s and Jens’s visit, commenting that they seemed “indecently happy.”
ANNIE WAS WORRIED ABOUT ELIZABETH’S ATTITUDE AS well. She had, in fact, been troubled for a long time, ever since Elizabeth had run off to Europe with Melinda. She could see firsthand what that had done to Nancy, and she couldn’t help resenting Elizabeth for treating her mother so cruelly. Then, she had been puzzled by Elizabeth’s persistence in going to Yugoslavia the previous Christmas when Nancy clearly wanted her to stay home and spend the holidays with her and Derek.
The strangest thing of all, though, had been Elizabeth’s reaction in April, when she learned of her parents’ murders. As soon as Annie had explained to police how she had come to discover the bodies, she drove to Charlottesville and went straight to Elizabeth’s room to tell her face to face about the tragedy.
Annie was amazed, first of all, by Elizabeth’s response when she heard the news. Far from being grief-stricken, she took it all matter-of-factly. Then Annie was shocked again when Elizabeth insisted on bringing two people along on the trip back to Boonsboro—Jens Soering and her roommate, Charlene Song. Annie felt that Jens and Charlene were relative strangers and that at a time like that Elizabeth would be anxious to spend as much time as possible with her family members who had gathered for the funeral.
Annie, who thought she knew Elizabeth pretty well, could find no explanation for what she considered Elizabeth’s peculiar behavior. Unfortunately, she did not share her concerns with Gardner and Reid.
IN BOONSBORO THAT SUMMER OF 1985, WHILE ELIZABETH and Jens were touring Germany, the two investigators were staggering under the pressure of the unsolved murders. For a while, they continued to be haunted by the notion that somehow the killings were cult-related. They made one more visit to the psychic, but when it turned out to be as unproductive as the first, they abandoned that avenue altogether. But the more they looked at the situation, the less they were convinced that satanism or any other form of cult activity had played any role in the deaths. Of course, if they had known about Elizabeth’s letters mentioning voodoo and Jens’s enigmatic response, they may have focused more clearly on the two of them rather than chasing a lot of useless leads. As it was, they were primarily following their instincts.
Those instincts kept leading them back to Elizabeth.
“Look,” Gardner said to Reid one hot afternoon in late June, “we know Elizabeth’s lying about the rental car thing. There’s no way she simply ‘got lost’ and drove around for more than 400 miles.”
“Especially when that mileage equals almost exactly what it would be if they had driven to Boonsboro,” Reid added.
“But how are we going to prove she’s lying?”
“I don’t know,” Reid answered thoughtfully. “I don’t know about you, but this case is running my whole life. My wife’s patience is running out. These murders are all I can think about. I can’t even sleep. Every time I lie down, I start dreaming about the way those people were butchered, and then I start blaming myself for not being smart enough to find whoever did it.”
“You can’t start feeling like that,” Gardner said.
“Don’t you? Isn’t it affecting you the same way?”
“Yeah,” Gardner admitted grudgingly. “I’m waking up in the middle of the night, too. It’s driving me crazy. Sometimes I just lie there and keep running over the facts again and again. What I keep coming back to is that without Elizabeth it just doesn’t make any sense. I know down here,” he
said, hitting himself in the stomach, “that she had something to do with it.”
“Have you heard from her lately?”
“No, she’s off in Europe somewhere. She and that creepy boyfriend of hers.”
“When are they coming back?”
“I don’t know, but I think we’d better find out.”
ON JULY 2 REID AND GARDNER WERE HANDED A REPORT from the state crime lab saying two fingerprints found on a vodka bottle at Loose Chippings had been identified as those of Elizabeth Haysom.
“So what?” Gardner grumbled. “It would be strange if her prints were
not
there.”
On August 29 there was a report on the technician’s examination of Julian Haysom’s footprints. “Based on some similar physical characteristics noted between the known and questioned foot impression specimens, Julian Haysom cannot be eliminated as a suspect in this matter,” it said.
“But we know Julian was in Canada,” Reid said when he read the report.
“Yeah,” agreed Gardner. “That’s one of the problems with lab reports. The guy studying the footprints doesn’t know what we know.”
On September 12 two reports came in. One said some of the previously unidentified fingerprints found in the Haysom house had been identified as belonging to one of the first officers on the scene. The other confirmed that the attempt to use a laser to pick up prints from an envelope believed related to the case was unsuccessful.
It would not be until November 8 that a report came in saying that Elizabeth’s footprints did not match any of those found at the scene.
As far as Reid and Gardner were concerned, that report was irrelevant. Elizabeth and Jens were long gone.
WHEN JENS AND ELIZABETH GOT BACK FROM GERMANY, they moved into a house near the Grounds and enrolled in summer school. They shared the house with two other students, but they kept to themselves. Except for an occasional disturbance resulting from one of Jens’s rather frequent temper tantrums, the others hardly knew they were there. At the beginning of the fall semester, Jens and Elizabeth moved again and became even more reclusive.
A couple of weeks after classes started, Gardner and Reid decided to renew their efforts to question Jens. They hadn’t noticed it before, but he was proving extremely elusive. Whenever they wanted to talk to him, he always seemed to have to be somewhere else. The investigators had not attached much significance to this until they realized that he was the only major player left who had not submitted his fingerprints, footprints, or blood samples. At first, he seemed to be too far on the periphery to have been directly involved, but as physical tests eliminated one potential suspect after another, the circle grew wider.
When Margaret Louise’s test results ruled her out, Reid was smug. “Like I told you,” he told Gardner with a grin, “I didn’t figure she did it. She’s out of it now.”
“So is Julian, for all practical purposes,” added Gardner. “And I think we can forget about satanism for a while.”
“That leaves us with two other possibilities,” Reid said.
“Yeah. I guess its time to go find Elizabeth and Jens. Especially Jens. Let’s put some pressure on them and see what happens.”
Late in September they tracked Jens down and made arrangements to interview him the first week of October. When he arrived in Bedford, Reid and Gardner fell into
their good cop–bad cop routine almost as if it were second nature. Reid was very solicitous and served Jens coffee like a waiter at a private club. Gardner, by nature a garrulous person, played the abrupt, probing inquisitor. Before Jens left, Gardner pressed him for a date so they could take his fingerprints and footprints and draw some blood to compare with the “alien” blood found at Loose Chippings.
Jens stalled, claiming he had exams coming up, and he was going to be too busy.
“We can make it after exams,” Reid offered graciously. “Whatever’s convenient for you.”
Jens suggested the middle of the month.
“The middle of the month is fine,” Reid agreed amicably. “We’ll see you here on the 15th or the 16th. We’ll give you a call first to set a firm time.”
By the time he got back to Charlottesville, Jens was in a foul temper. They tricked him, he said, by offering him a cup of coffee. Now he was worried they could get his fingerprints off the coffee cup. He jumped up and stomped around the room. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Well, it’s too late now. There isn’t much you can do about it,” Elizabeth said.
Jens slammed his fist into his palm. “I can get them. Especially Gardner. God, I’d love to do him. I could catch him at home and get rid of him.”
Before they had gone to Europe, Jens also had announced his intentions to kill Howard Haysom, but Elizabeth had talked him out of it. Now she feared she was going to have to talk him out of attacking an investigator. “You can’t just go around killing people you don’t like, Jens,” she said patiently. “Let’s see what our alternatives are.”
A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, HOWARD HAYSOM CALLED Elizabeth and told her he would be in Charlottesville the following Wednesday, October 16, and he would like to see her. He said Gardner and Reid had told him they had good news: that they might soon be able to make an arrest for her parents’ murders. When Elizabeth told Jens that, he panicked.
The next morning, he made arrangements to fly to Europe.
On Saturday, Jens methodically went through the apartment and wiped his fingerprints from every surface he could remember touching. Then he jumped into the red Scirocco his father had given him the previous summer and drove to Washington, parking the car in a back lot at National Airport. The irony of Jens driving a red car was not lost on Reid, who remembered the detective the previous spring who had been obsessed with the thought that he was being followed by a killer driving a red car. Wiping the car as methodically as he had the apartment, Jens abandoned the vehicle.
Twenty-four hours later, Elizabeth followed.
BACK IN BEDFORD ON THAT WEDNESDAY GARDNER AND Reid were considering driving to Charlottesville to see why Jens had not contacted them about their planned meeting when the telephone rang. It was Howard Haysom calling from Lynchburg. “They’ve gone,” he told Gardner.
“What do you mean, ‘They’ve gone’?” asked Gardner.
“They’ve left. I just tried to telephone Elizabeth, and her roommate said they’ve gone. They packed their bags and left. They’ve run away, probably back to Europe.”
“Stay where you are,” Gardner said. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
Howard had sounded agitated, but not altogether surprised. “He’s not dumb,” Reid told Gardner on the drive to Lynchburg. “He wasn’t fooled. I suspect he’s figured long before now that Elizabeth may have been involved, but he’s in the same boat we are: He can’t prove it.”
“This still doesn’t prove anything,” Gardner pointed out. “Even if they were here, we couldn’t arrest them. Not without some physical evidence.”
“I know,” Reid agreed glumly. “How well do I know.”
ON THE DRIVE BETWEEN LYNCHBURG AND CHARLOTTESville, Howard Haysom was calmer than the two detectives
expected him to be. It was ironic, Howard said as they raced northward on U.S. 29, shattering the speed limit, how much Derek had professed to dislike Jens, but how trusting he had felt toward Elizabeth. Not long before he was murdered, Derek had written and told Howard that if anything happened to him, Howard should be sure to take care of Elizabeth because she was a “very loving and responsive child.”
When they arrived in Charlottesville, having knocked thirty minutes off the hour and a half drive, they went straight to the house Elizabeth and Jens had shared with Charlene Song. The Korean, looking smug, was waiting for them with two envelopes in her hand. One she handed to Howard. It was from Elizabeth. The other she gave to Gardner. It was from Jens.
Howard ripped open his envelope. Inside were two sheets of plain white paper covered with Elizabeth’s distinctive uphill scrawl. It was an undated, rather unfocused letter addressed simply, “Dearest All.” In it she said she was leaving for an unspecified destination with Jens. She urged the family not to try to find her.
Howard sighed when he read the note. He gave the two detectives a resigned look and tightened his jaw.
Reid and Gardner, who had been reading over Howard’s shoulder, then opened their own envelope. It, too, contained a two-page letter and was dated “10/85.” Jens did not show the same consideration for the investigators that he had for Elizabeth; his letter to them was handwritten rather than typed. He was giving them the finger every way he could.
He suggested sarcastically that they not make too much of a mess going through his belongings because his parents might want them. Then he arrogantly advised them to “keep investigating as before.” He said he was “incapable” of committing murders like those of Derek and Nancy because of his ingrained “pacifism.” He implied he was leaving not because of the crime but rather because he was unhappy at UVA. He added he was sorry that Elizabeth had allowed them to take her prints and a blood sample.
After looking through her room, Howard told the detectives
that he thought Elizabeth had taken some of Nancy’s jewelry, which she probably planned to sell, but other than that, he didn’t see anything missing. Even though she was his sister, Howard explained, he hoped that if it could be proved they had anything to do with Derek’s and Nancy’s deaths, they would be arrested and tried. It was significant, Reid thought, that Howard was not advocating leniency for Elizabeth.
GARDNER AND REID CURSED TO THEMSELVES ALL THE way back to Bedford. Their birds had flown, and there was little they could do. They did not have enough evidence to charge them, or they would have arrested them earlier. And without any charges they couldn’t launch a spirited international search. The only thing they could do was wait and see what happened.
“You gotta have faith,” Gardner told Reid just before they got back to Bedford.
“Right,” Reid said disgustedly.
“No, I mean it,” Gardner said. “Things work out. I believe that. What goes around, comes around. I think we’re going to see them again.”
Reid grunted and slumped lower in the seat. His faith ran out some eight months later when he quit the sheriff’s office to take a higher paying job with a trucking firm. He left three weeks too soon.