Authors: Pat Brown
This wasn’t like Mary Beth, and he grew anxious, a mixture of anger and dread.
Why doesn’t she come home?
Meanwhile, he washed some clothes to pass time between 9 and 10 p.m. in the building’s downstairs laundry room and chatted with neighbors.
When Sam returned to the condo, Mary Beth still wasn’t there. He lay down in bed and dozed off. When he woke up, it was 1:30 a.m. He looked over at the bedroom closet, and for the first time since coming home from work, noticed that the door was closed. Mary Beth almost always kept it open, except when she vacuumed.
Sam got up and looked in the closet. There was Mary Beth, scrunched up in a fetal position, facedown on the floor of the closet, dead.
She was wearing a blouse and slip; her hair was combed as if she had just come out of the shower, which was consistent with her routine after a swim. There was no blood. Sam touched her once on the cheek and she was cold. He left the room and called 911. The police came out and took him in for several hours of questioning. He told them what happened, that he found her in the closet, and they said they didn’t believe him. They asked him what really happened and he told them the same story again. They told him Mary Beth had been killed in the evening, after 6 p.m., after Sam arrived home. Nothing made sense to Sam—that his fiancée was dead and the police said he killed her. He told them again he didn’t. They said he did. Then they told him to go to a hotel for the time being and they would contact him.
The police told reporters that Mary Beth Townsend’s death was suspicious, but it took six months before it would officially be ruled a homicide. According to the local paper, they “insinuated” to reporters that Mary Beth was killed by someone she knew, so the public had no reason to fear that a serial killer was on the loose. The condominium unit was sealed for the next three weeks.
Meanwhile, Sam Bilodeau waited in limbo. On that Saturday, after he had been interrogated by the police and checked into a hotel, he called Art but couldn’t get hold of him. Unable to just sit alone and do nothing, Sam decided to visit Mary Beth’s father—his almost-father-in-law. When he was driving back, he saw Mary Beth’s car, a light blue hatchback, off the side of the highway in a distressed part of Washington, D.C. The police had been looking for the car, but he was the one who found it. That made the police even more suspicious of him.
Sam called the police, who arrived on the scene with a dog that sniffed Mary Beth’s car and then pulled its handler toward the woods. The police brought Sam in for more questioning and leaned on him, hard.
“We know what happened,” the detective said. “You came home from work. You had an argument with Mary Beth, you pushed her, she hit her head, and she died. You panicked and put her in the closet, and you drove her car down to an area of town where you thought criminals came from, dumped the car there, and took the train back.”
Sam shook his head and said, “No, that’s not what happened. I didn’t do this.”
“She died after six p.m, sometime after six p.m. Weren’t you home after six at night?”
“That’s when I came home. If it happened after that, yes, I was there the whole time. There could be nobody else, because I was there.”
This went on for hours.
The police said they had a new technique to bring up prints. They told him his prints were all over Mary Beth, that she was alive at six p.m., and that there was an indentation on the back of her neck that matched an indentation of his palm. They said they believed that Sam accidentally knocked her off balance and then she hit her head as she fell. Sam said he gave Mary Beth a massage that morning and that that could account for his fingerprints. (The police lied about Sam leaving fingerprints on Mary Beth’s body; such misrepresentation is accepted as standard practice and is legal in interrogation techniques. Still, Sam’s lawyer later told me there could be no prints and that in twenty-five years as an attorney he had never heard such a ridiculous police claim. The method for pulling fingerprints from bodies does exist now, but is not often successful, especially if the body isn’t found within a couple of hours.)
The police asked Sam for a blood sample and he gave it voluntarily. They also took his shoes; he left the station in socks. (The police
still
have his shoes.) A polygraph test was administered to Sam—with his assent. From the police officers’ expressions, he assumed he passed. But they went right back to telling him that he did it.
Sam eventually confessed to doing what the police said he did.
He said he didn’t know how it could have happened and that he had no memory of killing Mary Beth, but that he must have panicked, hid Mary Beth’s body, and tried to stage the crime to look like a burglary by driving the car to the other side of town.
Everything he said was based on what the police told him, not his own memories. He was a trusting person, he was confused, he was exhausted and grieving, and he thought the police wouldn’t lie. He finally gave in. He signed a confession—and then the police let Mary Beth’s alleged killer go, in his stocking feet.
On Sunday, the police brought Sam in for a couple more hours of questioning, but nothing new was brought up. By Monday morning, the medical examiner’s report came in stating that Mary Beth had been strangled and that the police now had a confession that didn’t match the evidence. They never called Sam—or his lawyer—again.
SAM BILODEAU MIGHT
not have heard from the police again but he remained their number one suspect. In spite of the detectives’ dogged belief that Sam was guilty as hell, they had no evidence with which to charge him. Worse, the more they investigated the circumstances of the crime, the less the evidence supported their theory.
The police couldn’t charge Sam based on his “confession”—or anything else.
When Sam found himself in the interview room after Mary Beth’s murder, there was no time of death yet determined by the medical examiner. All the police knew was that when Mary Beth was found, she was cold and stiff; she had been dead for hours, but how many, they didn’t know. (They told Sam she was killed after six p.m., after he came home from work, but that was just to force him into confessing.) Sam could have killed her after he came home from work and waited a good long time to report her murder. So, Mary Beth being cold and in a good amount of rigor mortis didn’t rule Sam out. The autopsy is still sealed, so we don’t know what the medical examiner
ruled as the time of death, but sometimes circumstantial evidence packs a wallop.
IT WAS LATER
discovered that Mary Beth called a girlfriend at 9:15 a.m. on the day she died, and they planned to meet for a nice Italian lunch that day. She even sent an e-mail confirming, “See you at noon for lunch.”
The police didn’t know about this call or e-mail when they forced a confession from Sam.
Mary Beth never showed up for lunch, and it wasn’t her style to not keep her appointments.
Why did Mary Beth stand up her friend? Why did she miss a noon appointment if nothing happened to her until six p.m.?
And that was just the beginning.
MARY BETH TOWNSEND’S
death was one of eight homicides in the county that year, according to the local paper. It remains the department’s only unsolved case of 1998.
The second problem for the police and their forced confession was that Sam had solid alibis and plenty of witnesses as to his whereabouts all day and night.
His time card authenticated that he was at the store where he worked, except from 12:45 p.m. to 1:45 p.m., when he left to buy lunch. But witnesses said he was gone for only five minutes and ate his lunch at the store, off the clock.
It was a thirty-minute round trip to the condo and back. He wasn’t gone long enough to make the drive and kill Mary Beth. Besides, if he left at 12:45 and drove home, Mary Beth would have already been off enjoying food and wine with her girlfriend at the restaurant.
Sam also produced a receipt that showed he was pumping gas at a service station at 5:12 p.m. So we know that he was at work all day, barring the few minutes to go out, grab lunch, and bring it back, that
he left work at the normal time, got some gas, and drove home. Now, it was six p.m. Once he was home, Sam was seen in the building doing his laundry and talking to neighbors at the same time that the police theorized that he was on the other side of town, disposing of Mary Beth’s car.
Again, at the time of his forced confession, the police didn’t know that neighbors had seen Sam doing laundry between nine and ten p.m.
THE THIRD PROBLEM
was that the medical examiner came back and said that Mary Beth had been strangled. That was not in the confession, essentially because the police never told Sam that he had strangled Mary Beth. They said he hit her, so that’s what he confessed to under extraordinary pressure.
The police had a false confession. People have a hard time understanding why anybody would confess falsely, but it’s more common than people realize. Art Townsend’s lawyer—he got one when the police started implicating him along with Sam—told me that the very detective who pressured Sam to confess claimed that 70 percent of the people he got to confess were innocent, something of which I wouldn’t have been so proud, but he bragged about it.
In fact, the police department was sued because the same detective also forced a false confession out of a man accused in a woman’s brutal rape and murder in 1984. He went to prison, and it wasn’t until three years later that another detective in the department began to suspect that he was innocent. He was released after another two years of investigation, DNA testing, and paperwork. The real murderer, a cat burglar, was finally convicted. DNA proved he did it; the man was also a serial killer. The falsely accused man spent five years in prison convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. He got $117,000 from the state for his pain and suffering.
When Mary Beth Townsend was murdered, that same detective finagled an equally false confession out of Sam Bilodeau.
At that point, the police told Sam, “Don’t leave town,” and he stayed. The case lay dormant for a long time. The police told the community, “There’s nothing to be worried about,” insinuating that Sam
was responsible in spite of evidence that seemed to prove that he was not.
ART TOWNSEND, MARY
Beth’s son, became frustrated because nothing was happening with the case and it was going nowhere.
In September 1999, Art contacted me.
“Can you help with this case? I don’t think Sam killed my mother, and I want somebody to find out the truth,” he said.
I was excited to get the call. I was going to talk with the case investigator and see the crime scene photos and everything else related to the case. I was going to help them out, and this was where I got my first comeuppance.
When I dealt with the Anne Kelley case, I knew that I was not considered a friend of the police department—I lived in the community, was directly impacted by Anne’s murder, and was a common housewife—but this was a totally different situation. This was not a personal case to me. This was not a case that I brought to them as a citizen. This was a case in which a family member asked me to see the police as a profiler, admittedly new in the field, so law enforcement might have an issue with that.
Now that I was working in a professional capacity, I thought that Art and I would sit down with the police detective and he would say, “We are kind of stuck. If you want to look at things, we’d like to hear your thoughts.” It didn’t go well. The detective in charge was not pleased that Art had the audacity to bring in an outsider to examine her case. The police were working the case and she didn’t appreciate any implication that they weren’t doing their job well in spite of the fact that they had made no progress on the case whatsoever. They did not want anything going public that would make the police department look bad.
She greeted me coldly and told me in no uncertain terms that I was not welcome.
“I refuse to discuss this case with you or the family,” she said. “If you go public you had better be careful with what you say because I have done a lot of work on this case.”
That caused a dilemma, because I obviously would have liked to see all the evidence in their possession. Should I profile a case if I can’t access the case information and the case photos?
Ideally, I want the police department’s cooperation and access to every shred of evidence I can possibly see, all of the reports, all of the photos. But the reality is that even a police investigator sometimes doesn’t have all of this when he works a case. There are many pieces of evidence that might be missing. Maybe the elements have destroyed it. Evidence may have also been negatively impacted by first responders at the scene, by the fire department hosing down a place that was on fire. Things may have gotten lost on the way to the lab. They may have been misplaced in an evidence locker. They may have degraded. A witness may have disappeared so we can’t get a statement. In a perfect world, I would have 100 percent of all possible information and evidence. But in the real world, I get what I get.
Does that mean if I don’t have everything, I shouldn’t try to be helpful?
The police department and the medical examiner’s office refused to officially tell the family the time of death and refused to allow the family the right to see the autopsy report, even after Mary Beth’s son, Art Townsend, went to court over the matter.
The family wanted to know: Why were no other suspects being considered? Was this really a death from a domestic dispute or was it a burglary-related homicide that was never investigated as such? If Mary Beth Townsend’s fiancé was really involved with her death, why did the department stall on an arrest? Were they struggling to make conflicting facts fit the story? Were they wasting time focusing on the fiancé rather than pursuing other leads?
The police also successfully resisted the local newspaper in its investigation. The newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that resulted in the release of some basic information but not the autopsy report its reporters (and Art) sought.