A Good and Kind Person

Here was a dream customer.

It was only three days to Christmas, which meant that most people were running around trying to get their shopping done. For Tony Kafoury, a salesman at Weber Chevrolet, this could be a slow time, indeed. The showroom was quiet as he stood around, eyeballing the traffic outside, when a short, heavyset woman walked through the front door.

To Tony, she was a “real nice lady.” A veteran at his line of work, Tony was good at sizing up customers, but he wasn’t prepared for this one.

After exchanging the briefest of niceties, Tony began to ask Ellen what kind of car she had in mind. Before she even answered, Ellen was heading across the showroom to a metallic-blue, four-door Chevrolet Lumina.

“I really wanted a red one,” she said, and before he was obliged to say another word, Ellen was drooling over the showroom model.

“I’ll buy it,” she said.

“Do you want to take a drive?”

“No, I’ll take it.”

Tony had made a sale without even trying. The price tag was $15,050, and Ellen was eligible for a $1,050 rebate. On the spot, she made out a check for $200 as a down payment and told Tony she would return in a couple of days with the remaining $13,800. It would be a cashier’s check.

“Okay, fine,” Tony said, just going along with her. He knew when a customer had fallen in love with a car.

Ellen then proceeded to tell him where she was getting the money. Her child had recently died, and she was getting a large insurance check.

Not expecting this, Tony expressed his sympathy. For him, it was a strange footnote to an otherwise perfect sale. This wasn’t the first time he had turned over a showroom demo without even so much as a sales pitch, but because the money to pay for the car came from an insurance policy on a child, he would never forget this customer.

Now Ellen could tool around in a new Lumina. The purchase, however, was compulsive rather than well-advised. Only two weeks before, a homicide detective had been in touch with her.

By December 6th, Dr. Graham had finally received the results of all the laboratory tests he had ordered for Steven’s autopsy. Dr. Graham suggested that the mother be interviewed in an attempt to learn any additional information. He still didn’t know the cause of death, and it would remain an open case until he could find one.

“Anything, Joe,” Dr. Graham said, “I just don’t have a thing. I’m arriving at this diagnosis based on what’s not there. See what you can find out.”

Two days later, on the evening of December 8th, Sergeant Burgoon had the chance to meet Ellen for the first time. He had asked her to meet with him because there were questions about the cause of Steven’s death that the medical examiner couldn’t resolve. Could he come to her apartment to ask her a few questions? Burgoon was cunningly blank about it all, and Ellen was very cooperative.

Burgoon was personable, as usual. He employed a diffident style as he talked to Ellen, hoping to get her to talk freely about the events of the night of September 25, 1989. Joe also wanted to know more about Ellen’s life, and once they got past the introductions, and then the personal data, such as name, date of birth, and employment, he proceeded to bore in, eliciting a portrait of the woman as she talked.

“Ellen,” Burgoon started, “may I call you Ellen?”

“Yeah.”

“Ellen, okay, I’m here because we have some questions, and we’d like to hear from you about the death of your son, Steven.”

Burgoon paused, sensing that she was comfortable enough about the subject to talk. When it was time for her to tell her version of events, Burgoon got an earful.

“Well, on Saturday, on the weekend before …”

“That would be the twenty-third?”

“Yeah. I took Steven and Stacy to the doctor’s for shots. Steven got three shots, for measles, DPT (diphtheria) and polio, and after that we went to Casa Gallardo in South County. Steven ate a taco, and after that we went home. About four o’clock, he started throwing up, and he threw up all through the night.”

Burgoon stopped Ellen during her spiel. He needed names of doctors. He would ask what else Steven had eaten, and what he had to drink.

“On Sunday, he was feeling a little better, but he slept quite a lot all day. He was still taking a lot of liquids. Then on Monday he still didn’t look good, so I decided to keep him home from school, and I stayed with him.”

Burgoon listened as Ellen recited the routine of the morning in question. She had to take Steven out with her when she drove to her mother’s house, to tell her mother that she didn’t have to baby-sit that day after school. Ellen then described the stop at Kare Drugs where she bought some children’s Tylenol, and their stopover at Taco Bell at Spring and Gravois. Ellen omitted the fact that she had called her office with an alarming story about Steven being taken to the hospital, and she left out the part about visiting David’s grave at Trinity Cemetery. When she described the scene back at the house, with Steven lying on the sofa watching Sesame Street as she did dishes in the kitchen, Burgoon asked again about the time of day. Ellen said it was about noon. Burgoon made a note to himself. He would want to verify that Sesame Street was being aired at that time on KETC-Channel 9, so it would fit.

When she described her panic upon finding Steven, Joe found Ellen very convincing as she told of running from apartment to apartment, calling for help.

He asked about Steven’s medical history, and Ellen’s only response was that he had an ear infection and a cold in July. The doctor wrote her a prescription for Amoxicillin. Then, she said, he was hospitalized in April the year before with what doctors thought was low blood sugar that triggered a seizure.

None of this amounted to much for Burgoon. He didn’t probe the circumstances of the first boy’s death, and Ellen didn’t offer any information about it. He did ask general questions about Ellen’s family history and about whether she was married, divorced, or single.

The picture Ellen painted of her life was a sorry one. Her husband had abandoned her when she was pregnant with her second son, David, and had never paid any child support. Ellen made a point of telling Burgoon that the father hadn’t come to either funeral. Paul Boehm was interested only in notifying child support about David’s death so that he would be off the hook, she said.

When she told Burgoon that she had had a difficult time finding Paul to notify him about Steven’s death, claiming that she had worked through the Red Cross in Tucson, Arizona, Ellen was beginning to wind up. This was blatantly false. The last comment she had to make about her former husband served to muddy the medical waters. She explained that Paul had a lot of medical problems, and that at one time he suspected that he was suffering from past exposure to Agent Orange. While they were married, she said, Paul had had an EKG done to determine if he suffered from any heart problems.

“Did you have any life insurance?” Burgoon asked.

Ellen was quite forthright. “Yes, I have four policies. One with State Farm, Aetna from work, Shelter Insurance, and United of Omaha.”

“Have you been contacted by anyone else regarding this incident?”

“Yeah, I heard from a Ms. Turner from Family Services,” Ellen said.

Burgoon made a note of that and concluded the interview. Ellen had done much of the talking, and Burgoon did most of the thinking.

Up to now Burgoon was unaware of the hair dryer incident. In fact, the only authority who had found out about it was Ms. Turner at Family Services, and it was reported to her more or less as a rumor.

A week later, Ellen called her old friend Deanne. Despite their long-standing friendship, the two women had not talked to each other more than twice since Steven’s death. It wasn’t that Deanne had dropped her because of whatever suspicions she had. Deanne had just had enough of Ellen’s lies and of her apparent lack of grief over Steven’s death.

On the night he died, when Ellen had made the curious statement that he had died during the day, not the night before, they had closed off their conversation with Deanne asking Ellen to be sure and let her know about the funeral arrangements. Ellen said she would call her back and let her know.

It was a week later when Deanne called back, wanting to know where and when the funeral would be. Ellen told her that she had left a message about the funeral arrangements on Deanne’s answering machine at the office.

Deanne couldn’t believe what she was hearing: more of Ellen’s B.S.

Deanne hung up on her.

Later when she checked, she wasn’t at all surprised to discover that there was no message from Ellen, and from that point on she had no intention of calling Ellen again, for any reason. Then, about two weeks later, Ellen called her. She wanted help remembering the last name of a wrestling promoter in Memphis. Deanne told her his name, then hung up on her again.

Now it was mid-December, and Ellen was calling again. Deanne said hello and did her best to be polite.

“Listen, I thought you would want to know,” Ellen said, “that I just learned the boys died from electrical rhythms of the heart.”

Deanne had almost no reaction, and she waited for Ellen to continue. She couldn’t bring herself to hang up this time. Of course, Deanne didn’t know it, but no such cause of death had yet been determined.

By the time Ellen had realized she was becoming the target of questions about her sons’ deaths, she was turning to a more sympathetic ear than Deanne had to offer. Deanne knew Ellen too well, anyway, in ways that Elizabeth Pratt didn’t.

It started with a routine call from Elizabeth to her husband, William, at the office, and since William Pratt was the manager in Ellen’s department, there was nothing unusual about the fact that Ellen fielded the call. His wife would often get Ellen first when she called, and it wasn’t long before Ellen and Elizabeth formed a kind of friendship that moved well beyond the bounds of casual telephone chitchat.

In the same summer that Deanne had moved across the river to Illinois, the Pratts had arrived in St. Louis from Europe. Stanley was transferred from Andersen offices there, and while the contact between him and Ellen, a word processor in his department, was limited in his first six months on the job, the tragic death of Ellen’s son, David, changed their relationship. To the Pratts, the little boy’s death was one of the first major events since they had moved to town, and it galvanized a closeness between Ellen and Elizabeth.

Part of the reason for this was that Elizabeth was herself pregnant when David died, and she and William also had a four-year-old daughter. It was Elizabeth, not William, who had the greatest amount of empathy for Ellen after David’s death, and her feelings became the driving force that allowed what was merely a telephone acquaintanceship to become more social.

In May 1989, the Pratts had invited Ellen to William’s birthday party at their house in St. Charles, a city-suburb of St. Louis west of downtown and across the Missouri River. Others from the office were also invited. To William and Elizabeth, Ellen seemed to be a good and kind person, and she seemed to fit right in at the gathering. Later that summer, Ellen was invited again to the house for a dinner party that was held for a smaller group. By this time Elizabeth and Ellen had become well acquainted. In fact, because the Pratt’s daughter liked to play with Ellen’s daughter, Stacy, they often arranged for Ellen to baby-sit, or Ellen would just come over to the Pratts’. The little girl also stayed overnight with Stacy at Ellen’s apartment.

Though Ellen visited the Pratts’ home numerous times, Elizabeth thought it was a little strange that Ellen never invited them to her apartment. Maybe, she thought, it was because Ellen was ashamed of her furniture, or her housekeeping. Or, she also knew, some people, for whatever reason, were just reluctant to have people in their homes.

The budding relationship between Elizabeth and Ellen was not based on any true common intellectual ground. Elizabeth, an attorney, was filling the role of a Missouri housewife at the time, and the death of the second boy triggered even deeper sympathy in her. The tragedy of it all obscured any suspicion Elizabeth might have had, even when Ellen talked about her life insurance on the children.

In late summer of 1989, only a few weeks before Steven died, Ellen complained to the Pratts that she had never been paid the death benefit that was due upon David’s death. Ellen had mentioned, too, that she had taken the policy on David shortly before he died, freely discussing the facts as if to cast her misfortune in an ironic, rather than suspicious light. Then, after Steven’s death, Ellen told William about the hefty life insurance she carried on him, and almost bragged that she would be getting the money soon.

Perhaps playing for sympathy, Ellen later told William and Elizabeth that she had bought a new sofa for the living room, because the old one brought back too many bad memories of the boys. In truth, Ellen never bought a new sofa. Her living room setup was pretty much the same, and the rose-colored cushions she had used to smother her boys were still there, memories and all. She also told them that she bought a new car with some of the money.

To the Pratts, all that mattered was that Ellen was a hard worker who had been dealt a crummy hand. As the month of December came to a close, and everyone started to talk about their New Year’s Eve plans, the Pratts invited Ellen to go out with them to Laclede’s Landing on that night. It had been only three months since Steven had died, and the Pratts felt sorry for Ellen when they picked her up in front of her building, hoping for a night of celebration. They noticed right away that Ellen’s spirit was missing. The three revelers drove to the restaurant, but after a short while William could see that Ellen really wasn’t up for it. He offered to drive her home and she accepted. She spent the last night of the year alone.

Ellen had good reason to be glum, because the New Year was upon her, and though she would have no way of knowing what lay ahead, things weren’t going exactly the way she had planned. A certain detective from Homicide was asking a lot of questions.