“Did you have sex that night?”
“Yes.”
PERHAPS ELIZABETH’S GREATEST TALENT WAS SOUNDING credible. She could make the most outrageous statements and still come across as thoroughly believable. By now, Gardner was well aware of her abilities, but he seemed mesmerized by her string of surprises. Having a conversation with her was like opening one unmarked, sealed box after another: There was no telling what was going to be inside. In each interview she would add some new tidbit, throwing it out casually as though she were reporting the time of day. Then she would expand upon it, little by little, until it mushroomed with a life of its own. Gardner had the feeling that he could question her every day for the rest of his life and he would never hear the end of her tales. He was more on target than he knew.
IN HER STATEMENT TO BEEVER AND WRIGHT IN RICHMOND, Elizabeth had whined about her father, but she had hardly mentioned Nancy. This time Gardner wanted to steer the conversation in that direction. Gradually he got her talking about her mother.
Over the years, Elizabeth said, she had grown very resentful of her parents. There were times when she couldn’t stand them, especially when they had been drinking. “My father would become very, very cold. He would just blank everything around him. He would just be rude.” But her mother was different. There were times, she said, when she deeply loved her, but now, when she remembered her, she thought only about the torment that her mother had put her through. She was often hysterical, Elizabeth said, shaking her head, and she taunted her frequently, especially when she had been drinking. At times like that Nancy would deride her because she had run off to Europe with Melinda or because of her perceived character faults.
Remembering the pictures of a nude woman that had been found in Nancy’s bureau, pictures he now knew to be of Elizabeth, Gardner asked if there were some significance to them. “Did your mother ever have any lesbian affairs?” he asked as gently as he could.
She didn’t know, Elizabeth said, but she frequently commented on how much she hated men. And Elizabeth remembered how, when she was a young girl, her mother often told her about a school she had gone to where she and classmates used to listen to the head mistress and another woman making love.
Gardner caught the words “hated men.” She couldn’t have meant all men, he thought. “She loved your father,
didn’t she?” he asked Elizabeth. He was surprised when Elizabeth shot back, “No.”
“Did she ever tell you that?” Gardner asked
“Yes,” she said. “My mother and father both told me separately many times that the only reason they stayed together was because of me.”
“Elizabeth,” Gardner said, looking uncomfortable, “we found some photographs of you in the house after the murders. You were nude. Do you know which photographs I’m referring to?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me how they came to be? Did your mother take them?”
“Yes.” She said it was in the summer of 1984. Her father had gone back to Nova Scotia on business, and she and her mother had spent a lot of time together. Toward the end of the summer they had gone to Rochester, New York, so Elizabeth could attend a writer’s seminar. When they got back, her mother was upset because it was time for Elizabeth to leave for UVA and she was searching for a way to keep her daughter from breaking loose again. “What she said,” Elizabeth recollected unhappily, “was that she wanted to impress upon me how absolutely filthy and disgusting I was.”
There was a long silence. Gardner twirled his cigarette lighter, and Elizabeth stared at the wall. Finally, she spoke again. “What she said was that I could prove how filthy and disgusting I was by allowing her to take the photos.” She paused. “We were having a very vicious argument,” Elizabeth said, then, struck by the incongruity of the statement, she began laughing nervously. “That was strange because I never argued with my mother.”
“Do you remember the poses?” Gardner interjected, trying to break the mood.
“I remember her making me kneel.”
“That’s right,” Gardner agreed. “But why was she making you do that? Was she trying to destroy your sexual esteem or what? Did she sexually—”
Elizabeth interrupted. “She slept with me,” she said, looking Gardner in the eye. “Ever since I was a little girl.”
Gardner looked uncomfortable. “When was the last time that happened?” he asked.
Elizabeth said it was the Saturday before her parents were murdered, March 23, 1985. She remembered it vividly because it was her father’s seventy-second birthday. Her parents had gone out. They had both been drinking. When they got home, Nancy came up to her room, as she always did. Then Nancy got undressed and got in bed with her.
“Was there some sexual activity?” Gardner asked.
“No,” Elizabeth said slowly. It wasn’t what most people would call sexual activity, she explained. But her mother liked to kiss. She liked to hug. And she liked to touch.
“Was that activity conducted in a mother-daughter way?” Gardner asked.
Elizabeth thought about the question, then gave a typical Elizabeth answer, an answer that wasn’t one. “It was just very affectionate,” she said. “My mother craved affection. She was aggressively affectionate.”
Gardner was eager to drop the subject. But he had one more question. When she and Nancy slept together, he wanted to know, were they clothed or unclothed?
Either way, Elizabeth said. “Sometimes I’d be clothed. Sometimes I’d be wearing nothing. My mother usually was wearing nothing.”
GARDNER LOOKED AT HIS WATCH TO COVER HIS EMBARrassmet What Elizabeth had said had shocked him, but the impact was eased because he wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. By then, he was getting to know her. He realized how easily she navigated between truth and untruth, and he had no way of determining when she was speaking one or the other. Only two people knew for sure what occurred on those nights Nancy and Elizabeth slept together, and one of them was dead. But there was one thing he did know: It was getting late, and he was tired. His shoulders ached, and his eyes felt as if he had taken a long swim
in a highly chlorinated pool. It was after 2 A.M. Elizabeth had to be tired, too; she had been up for more than twenty-four hours. We’ve covered a lot of ground, he told himself, and perhaps we ought to call it a night. But there was one other area Gardner wanted to explore. Remembering how investigators had been sidetracked so devastatingly by the possibility that satanism had played a role in the murders, he brought up her Christmas letters, specifically the one in which she wrote Jens saying she was considering invoking voodoo against her parents. “What did you mean by that?” he asked.
Elizabeth laughed. “It was supposed to be a joke, okay? Jens was really into psychology. He was studying psychology at UVA and he had read all these ridiculous things. I used to ridicule him about some of the things that he thought possible.” What she had done, she explained, was to tease him by mentioning events that had occurred at widely separated times, except in the telling she condensed them into a much shorter time-frame to make it appear as if they had occurred in rapid succession.
Was that true for other events she mentioned in the letter as well? Gardner asked.
She confessed it was. “I go on to describe more of the things that supposedly happened, but they didn’t happen then. I was just projecting some things that weren’t there.”
How about the part where she referred to black magic? Gardner pressed.
“I don’t know anything about black magic,” Elizabeth said wearily.
Gardner, Reid and the rest of the investigators had spent too many hours running down deadend streets looking for ties to satanism for him to drop it without exploring the possibilities as far as he could. There were, in fact, some who still believed that it had played a role in the killings, or at the very least, that an attempt had been made to make it look that way. Gardner wanted to know if they had all been wasting their time. “Have you or Jens either one ever been involved in the occult?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Never.” She didn’t even know anything about the occult, she added. The closest she had come to it, she swore, was when some of her fellow prisoners at Holloway used a ouija board and that had made her very uncomfortable. “It totally freaked me out,” she said. “It scared the shit out of me.”
Satisfied, Gardner changed the subject. “Do you realize how many times your father was stabbed?” he asked, anxious to gauge her reaction.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said sadly. She had, in fact, seen the pictures of her parents’ bodies. They were part of the legal records turned over to her to help her formulate a defense.
“You think Jens was in this by himself?” he asked.
“No,” Elizabeth said.
Gardner’s head shot ,up. His fatigue was forgotten. He opened his mouth to speak, but Elizabeth spoke first. “Jens was in it with me,” she said.
Gardner relaxed. Did she think, he asked, that anyone else had been in the house when her parents were murdered?
Elizabeth gave him a look that said, what a preposterous question. “No,” she said emphatically. She had no reason at all to think anyone else was in the house at the time.
“So to sum it up,” Gardner began, “you and Jens Soering talked of killing your parents for several weeks—”
“It was premeditated.”
“—prior to March 29, and he went to the house and murdered your parents, and you assisted him in establishing an alibi both before and after the two murders.”
“Yes.” Elizabeth said.
But she didn’t mean it.
WHEN GARDNER LEFT ELIZABETH AT 2:30 A.M. ON MAY 9, he thought he had participated in his last interview with her. He was wrong. Three days later she asked to see him again. When he met with her, she showed him a stack of letters from Jens that she said she was willing to share with him as long as the session was not recorded. After she had gone over the letters with the investigator and was leaving the room she stopped at the door. “There’s something else I want to tell you.”
Gardner looked at her quizzically.
“I’m not saying this to lessen my guilt or anything.”
“What’s that?” he inquired.
“I told you that I was with Jens when he bought the butterfly knife. That isn’t true. Afterwards we decided I would say that. Jens wanted me to say that because it would make me more of a participant than I actually was.”
Gardner was puzzled. She had already admitted she was up to her eyebrows in the murders. “Why are you telling me that?”
“I just thought you might want to know.”
He didn’t believe her. She had told Beever and Wright she had bought the knife. She had told him that as well. Jens had verified it. He didn’t know why she was changing her story now, but he had a good idea. He thought she was searching desperately for a way to reduce her responsibility, perhaps to get a lighter sentence. He was certain that her first stories about the knife had been true and that she was blowing smoke at him now.
THREE MORE DAYS WENT BY, AND ELIZABETH ASKED FOR another “official” session with the investigator. That morning,
Thursday, May 14, Elizabeth had appeared before Judge William W. Sweeney to ask for court-appointed counsel. Following the brief session, she sent word to Gardner that she wanted to see him. So, shortly after noon Gardner met with her again. This time, he had his tape recorder. She had changed her mind and was willing to talk about the letters on the record. But Elizabeth was incapable of operating within a restricted format. As usual, her comments covered a broad range of issues pertaining to the case. Practically all of them were designed to strengthen the case against Jens.
Apparently reading over the letters and then thinking about them for the last few days had made Elizabeth angry all over again. “He was manipulating me,” she complained to Gardner. “He knew that I loved him very much and I did a lot for him. I mean I really
had.
I aided and abetted him. I covered up. I lied. I betrayed my family and friends. I left Virginia with him against what I wanted to do. I agreed to go into fraud with him because he thought it was exciting. I allowed him to get hold of my brother’s credit card number and he bought stun guns or something—”
Gardner broke in. “Let’s get back to the letters,” he said. The noose was already around Elizabeth’s neck, he figured, but he wanted to nail down the case against Jens. The German was proving exceptionally slippery, and Gardner was sure Jim Updike could use all the evidence he could get.
Elizabeth dug into the pile of correspondence, but a few minutes later she was off again, attacking Jens for his coldbloodedness. It had been during the previous spring that she had really begun seeing through him, she claimed. That is when she learned that he was lying to just about everybody, not only about things she had said—which she was willing to write off as third-party meddling—but about other things as well. “His whole attitude towards the situation is totally foreign to mine,” she grumbled. While he had tried to make her believe that his reasons were altruistic and stemmed from his love for her, she no longer believed that.
Gardner wanted to make sure he was reading her correctly.
“You mean you think he’s going to do everything humanly possible to get out of it?”
She nodded vigorously. That was correct, she said. Jens was searching for a way to justify the murders. She had felt that way at first, too, she confessed, but she had realized she was wrong. Jens, however, had not changed his attitude. She was remorseful about the murders, but Jens was not. “He
justifies
them,” she repeated angrily.
Then she retreated a bit. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know how he feels, all right?” But she thought she had a pretty good idea. “All I know is if the door opens for him and the door opens for me, I’m staying where I’m seated, but he would run. He will try everything within his means to get out of what he has done.” Scornfully, she criticized him for referring to the murders as an “honest mistake.” Her eyes grew cold. “I just don’t think that premeditated murder is an honest mistake. Somewhere else in here,” she said, waving the stack of letters, “he mentions that it was a silly mishap or something. I don’t consider it a silly mishap either. It was horrible.”
Gardner was intrigued by the insight she was giving him into Jens. He was curious to know just how far she thought Jens would go to escape his responsibility. “You said if the door opened, you would stay and he would run. Do you feel he would still commit murder if that’s what it would take to get him out of this?”
This gave Elizabeth the chance to expound again on how Jens was not the innocent youth that many thought, that deep within his superior intellect brewed very disturbing thoughts. “That I do not know,” she admitted. “But I do know that after he murdered my parents, he considered murder a trivial thing.”
“Like solving a problem?” Gardner suggested.
“Exactly!” Elizabeth said. “He liked violence. He thought it was an okay means of obtaining money or solving any sort of problem that came up.”
It was a perfect opportunity for Gardner to get back to what Elizabeth had said the previous Friday about the people
Jens allegedly had contemplated killing because they were obstacles in his path. He invited her to tell him in more detail about Jens’s murder plans.
She collected her thoughts. “Take his grandmother,” Elizabeth said. “He wanted her money.” He had a plan, she said, whereby she and Jens would go to his grandmother’s house in Germany and lock themselves inside. “Then he wanted to hook her up to some kind of electric gizmo and torture her until she gave us money. Then afterwards we obviously would kill her.”
“But you never went there,” Gardner pointed out.
She conceded that was true. But it did not stop Jens from planning. For instance, there was his plot to murder Gardner.
“Tell me about that,” Gardner said, curious to see how far Jens had gone in allegedly mapping out his demise.
“He found out where you lived,” Elizabeth said.
That surprised the investigator. “What else?” he asked.
Elizabeth hesitated. Jens had told her, she said, that she was going to have to be his alibi again. “He felt we’d definitely need an alibi if we killed you,” she said. “I mean, if you were killed, we would be suspects.”
That made sense, Gardner agreed, feeling a chill run down his spine. “So what happened?”
Elizabeth said she was able to distract him. She told him a wild tale about being diagnosed as having a brain tumor and how her doctor wanted to try to excise it with a new laser technique rather than surgery. She got him so worried about her alleged illness that he temporarily forgot about Gardner. By that time, Gardner and Reid were putting pressure on him to submit to the blood and print tests, and he was beginning to get panicky. Then they decided to flee, and the investigator was forgotten altogether.
Gardner wondered if he should feel grateful to her for perhaps saving his life, or if she was just weaving another story to make herself look good. That was the thing about Elizabeth: No one ever knew for sure. He shook off his introspective
mood. “How do you feel about Jens now?” he asked. “Do you still love him?”
“Yes, I do,” she said quickly. “I mean, I’m very angry with him, but I don’t think I could possibly feel so awful about talking about him if I didn’t love him. I feel I have betrayed him. I don’t think I would have stayed with him all that time if I had not had this blind obsession, this love, for him. But I’m so overwhelmed by what I’ve done and the horror I’ve caused, I think that outweighs any affection I could possibly have for him.”
Gardner wanted to warn her not too get too carried away with her emotions. “Don’t forget that he went hands-up first,” he said, reminding her that Jens was confessing to investigators while Elizabeth was still holding out.
“Oh, yeah,” she said bitterly. “That was a very nice little set up, that’s a fact. I honestly feel he set me up for that. There I was, lying and making a total idiot out of myself, lying away and refusing to make any comment and being as difficult as possible while he was being the good little boy.”
There was one other thing she had better consider, too, Gardner felt. How would she feel if Jens received only a short prison sentence?
It didn’t take her long to answer that question. Or at least answer it in words she thought Gardner wanted to hear. “That’s why I want a life sentence,” she claimed. “I don’t want to walk the streets again if Jens is going to be on them. I have nightmares about that all the time. I would never feel safe.”
DURING THE LONG PERIOD THAT JENS AND ELIZABETH had been gone, Gardner had kept the faith. He was convinced that someday, somehow, they would be caught. He and Chuck Reid had been sure they had been involved in the murders, but they had not been able to prove it. Never in his most imaginative moments had he dreamed that it would happen as it did. It would have been so easy for them to have escaped, he told himself. The fact that they had not still amazed him. He might not have a chance to question
Elizabeth again, and there was one thing he was dying to find out, one question he absolutely had to know the answer to. “Tell me something,” Gardner asked. “There’s something I’ve been curious about ever since y’all were arrested.” He paused. She waited for his question. “Why did he keep those letters?”
Elizabeth smiled. Jens had promised her he had destroyed them, she said, and she didn’t doubt him because she loved him. Jens was always shuffling papers, she explained. It was almost an obsession with him. He was continually making files and gluing things and collecting documents. Periodically he would clean out the files and destroy large stacks of papers. One day he tossed out a sizable pile she thought was their letters. Why he had not destroyed them, she could not fathom. “I guess it just seemed natural to me that if you’re carrying evidence on you, you destroy it.”
Why did she think he kept them? Gardner pressed.
She gave a who-knows shrug. It may have helped his ego, she guessed. He was proud of the murders. “For a long time he said it was the most notable thing he had done. It was like winning a personal kind of freedom. It was something he did on his own.”
Gardner shook his head in incomprehension. People do strange things, he told himself.
WHEN ELIZABETH WENT BACK TO HER CELL, GARDNER thought he at last had a comprehensive picture of the events surrounding the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom. Again, he was wrong. Not for the first time—and not by himself—Ricky Gardner yet again had underestimated Elizabeth. So far she had given only three versions of the events leading up to and surrounding the murders. There was more to go.