In Search of a Man

Robert Jordan was sipping a cup of coffee in the Gateway Cafeteria, a good-enough place for a break from his hours behind the wheel of a bus. Back then, in the early 1980s, he was a driver for Bi-State. The Gateway was right across the street from the South Broadway garage.

As he sat there on his break, someone caught his attention to tell him that there was a phone call for him. Bob, as he is known by his friends, was a big man in his early thirties. He got up, walked to the phone, and said hello.

It was a woman on the line. She said her name was Jeannette Pepper, and she said that she wanted to meet him at the Velvet Freeze on Gravois after he got off work. That was it. The line went dead.

Curiosity more than anything else led him to stop by the place after work. Sure, he would go in for a soda and see what this was all about. In no time, he found out. It was Ellen, who came in with her daughter. It was a setup. But it wouldn’t end without acrimony, because very soon after Ellen and Stacy arrived, Paul Boehm showed, too.

Ellen’s husband launched into a tirade, accusing Bob of going out with his wife. The two men weren’t strangers. Bob and Paul had worked together when Paul drove the Cherokee route for Bi-State. They both drove out of the South Broadway garage and shared another interest. The two of them were budding, amateur photographers.

There was nothing to this rendezvous at the Velvet Freeze, but Paul continued his attack, to the point of inviting Bob outside to fight. They never did, and they all went their separate ways that night, but it wasn’t over yet.

About a week later, Bob received a letter from a woman who said that she had met him on the bus and had talked about wrestling matches. Bob figured this was Ellen’s doing, and he decided to show the letter to Paul. Bob wouldn’t have been able to recognize Ellen’s handwriting, but he was sure her husband would. When Paul saw the handwriting, he didn’t recognize it as Ellen’s, and the two of them were left in the dark about this open-ended letter.

On January 9th, Sgt. Burgoon called Bob Jordan on the phone. It was close to 1 P.M. After Joe had extracted a brief identity and work history from Bob, he wanted to know if he had ever been to Ellen’s apartment. By now the sergeant had certainly begun to get the idea that whatever Ellen had said about men could well be suspect. He was about to collect one more example.

Mr. Jordan said he had visited Ellen’s apartment on two occasions. Once he had gone over because Ellen had called and asked him to take some photographs of her children. He said that after he arrived, Ellen hemmed and hawed about the pictures, and in the end, none were ever taken. The second time, he said, was sometime after Thanksgiving of 1988. At the time he was driving the Alton to St. Louis route for Bi-State, and Ellen met him at the Greyhound Bus Station, which was the turnaround point for his route.

Ellen, he said, invited him to her apartment. Later, when he stopped by, Ellen told him about David’s death, explaining how it had happened without warning. She told him the entire story, from beginning to end, and that version tracked with all of her previous retellings with one exception. This time, Ellen said that she had a girlfriend call the ambulance. Ellen had told everyone else that she had called 911 herself.

Bob Jordan was spellbound, and saddened. He had known Paul and Ellen over the years. This was clearly a tragic blow that had been dealt to Ellen.

Ellen also told Bob that she was planning to transfer her job to Florida, and the two of them sat and talked a few more minutes about the Sunshine State’s balmy climate, and how great it would be to live there, before Bob said his good-bye. That was the last time he either saw Ellen or spoke to her.

Joe Burgoon had initially felt some sympathy for Ellen, especially after he first sat down and talked to her in her living room. To him, it was a sorrowful scene. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away. Ellen had put up a tree, and her daughter, the only remaining child, was obviously excited about all the presents that Santa might bring. His empathy with Ellen derived from his own experience. When his wife had died, she was pregnant, and the newborn had lived only a day, and after Joe had finished talking with Ellen that first time, he felt a heartfelt pity for her as he said good-bye. Anybody who lost a child knew what it was like.

As he started to call around about the insurance policies, his sympathetic view rapidly changed. The interviews that had been conducted so far were supporting his newfound observation that this was a very complicated woman, and that this was turning into a complex case. There was still the one big hole: no evidence. Dr. Graham still didn’t have any, and neither did he.

On January 10th, in an attempt to view some semblance of evidentiary matter, Detectives Jones and Cordia drove down to Ellen’s apartment. It was shortly after 2 o’clock in the afternoon when they knocked on the door of Apartment 501, which was then opened by Ellen’s mother.

The detectives requested her permission to come in and view the bathroom, as well as the hair dryer that had been dropped in the bathtub. Catherine showed them inside. In the cramped bathroom, Detective Cordia made some mental measurements of the distance from the nearest electrical outlet in the hallway outside. She noted that the tub was about three feet from the doorway, and that the outlet on the south wall of the hallway was another foot from the bathroom door.

The two detectives then asked Mrs. Booker to show them her daughter’s hair dryer, and they were directed to Ellen’s bedroom. There, resting on the floor in the northeast corner of the room, was a white Conair Pro Style 1200 hair dryer. The cord, they noted, was approximately six feet in length, easily sufficient to reach around the doorway from the hallway outlet and into the tub.

Ellen’s mother was becoming nervous about all of this, and started blurting out information. First, she told the detectives that she was certain that her daughter had not dated anyone.

“If she had,” Catherine said, “she would have told me.”

Then Catherine wanted to drive home more points about the hair dryer episode, and she stated that she had learned about it from Ellen, who had told her the morning after it happened.

Detectives Jones and Cordia had first interviewed Mrs. Booker at length only six days before. At that time, Mrs. Booker had said that Ellen had told her about the incident about two weeks before Steven died. Detective Cordia also had now interviewed Caroline Fenton, the custodian, who had witnessed Mrs. Booker’s surprise in learning of the event from Pauline Sumokowski.

They thanked Ellen’s mother for showing them around, and they left with what they had come for in the first place: some corroboration of Stacy’s statement that her mother’s white hair dryer had been used, and that it could have been plugged into a wall outlet outside the bathroom.

That same afternoon, Detectives Waggoner and Wiber drove to Don Brown Buick/Chevrolet on South Kingshighway to run down the lead that surfaced when Deanne Bond mentioned that Ellen had experienced problems there.

Michael Yarborough, the service manager, was not pleased when he was told that two detectives wanted to question him about Ellen Boehm. He had already had enough of this particular customer, and Waggoner and Wiber learned why.

They said they just wanted to ask him some questions, because they were conducting a background investigation of Ellen Boehm, and had been told that Ellen had dated him and another service manager, named Gregory Allen. Mr. Yarborough told them that he knew Ellen as a customer of the dealership. He said that she was always cheerful and pleasant to deal with, but she had pestered him several times to go have drinks with her. He explained that he had repeatedly refused, and that Ellen was aggressive about asking again and again, though she was always pleasant about it.

He couldn’t have been more emphatic when he said he had never seen Ellen socially. The detectives understood what he was saying. They had heard it before. When they wanted to talk to Mr. Allen, they were told that he was no longer employed at the dealership.

Mr. Yarborough said that over the time that Ellen had been a customer, he had observed some strange behavior on her part. Once, he said, Ellen had called from Florida just to make an appointment to have an oil change. At the time, he considered it amusing, and it sort of fit with Ellen’s unpredictable style. But if Ellen were somehow trying to impress him by making a long-distance call just to schedule routine maintenance on her car, it didn’t work. If she thought he would be impressed because she was calling from Disney World, she couldn’t have been more wrong.

What was more worrisome, he said, was that during the time when Ellen had been pushing to get him to go out for a drink, he and Mr. Allen received obscene phone calls from a woman. The caller identified herself only as “Fuzzy Bunny.” Everyone in the shop thought it was either Ellen or a friend of hers, because in the calls reference was made to Ellen.

It was cloddish humor, if not sick, but he remembered receiving a phone call from Ellen on one occasion when she was all business, making some appointment for car service. Then, a day or two later, she called and told him that when she had called him last, her son had died—on the very day that she was making casual conversation about her car. Ellen then proceeded to talk about the funeral arrangements.

Mr. Yarborough was nonplussed. He was a busy man, but he would not be rude to a customer, so he listened. It then became even stranger, because soon thereafter “Fuzzy Bunny” called more or less to say that she had heard that someone they knew—“they” being the Don Brown employees—had lost a child.

Before they thanked him and left, Mr. Yarborough again emphasized that he had never seen Ellen socially, or had drinks with her. The detectives understood. They were beginning to know more and more—or less and less—about Ellen.

The next day, when they talked to Gregory Allen, they met another victim of Ellen’s fabrications. Mr. Allen, too, had declined Ellen’s advances and her invitations to have a drink after work. On several occasions, she had asked him to meet her at the Tropicana Bowl, but he never went. Once, when he was eating by himself at a Shoney’s Restaurant, Ellen just walked in. At the time he considered it a coincidence, though it did cross his mind that maybe it wasn’t, considering how contrived Ellen had been with the “Fuzzy Bunny” phone calling.

He and Michael were sure it was Ellen as soon as the mention was made of the child who died, but they went so far as to prove it to themselves by catching her in the act. The next time “Fuzzy Bunny” called, Michael, who had Ellen’s number at Andersen on file, called her at the office. As soon as Ellen answered, “Fuzzy Bunny” put Gregory on hold. After Michael had discussed whatever trumped-up reason he had to call her and had hung up, “Fuzzy Bunny” immediately returned to the other line with Gregory.

The last thing Mr. Allen had to say to the detectives added to the puzzle. It was alternately bizarre and gross. Once, when he was working on Ellen’s Cavalier, he noticed something on the floor in the backseat. It was a canister of some kind, and curiosity got the better of him as he peered in to read the label. To his disgust, what Ellen had left out in plain view was a can of anal lubricant, which carried a lurid label, BUTT GREASE.

What the hell? was all he could think.