Keeping Up Appearances

Through the month of January, Deanne Bond just wanted the growing nightmare to go away. Sergeant Burgoon was beginning to tell her things about her friend Ellen that Deanne found disturbing. He was also telling Deanne to be careful, and that worried her. She wasn’t supposed to do anything or say anything that would raise Ellen’s suspicions. But he also wanted Deanne to warm up to Ellen more than she had in the past few months.

Since Steven had died, Deanne hadn’t even met with Ellen. She didn’t want to have anything to do with Ellen.

“You have to do this,” he would say.

“Oh, Joe, I don’t want to get near her.”

“You have to. Otherwise she’ll think something’s up. So you’re better off just going ahead and being yourself and keep talking to her.”

Besides keeping Deanne abreast of the investigation—though he was very careful about what he divulged, and there was a lot she would not learn until much later—he also had some questions for her.

“Did Ellen ever discuss the Paula Sims case?”

When she heard this, Deanne’s heart sank a little lower. The Sims case? The mother who was now on trial for killing her two baby daughters? Deanne thought. Where was this all going to lead?

“No,” the answer came back. “No.” Deanne couldn’t remember Ellen ever mentioning it.

“Okay.”

“Well, that’s an awful thought, Joe. What does this have to do with anything?”

He told her that he couldn’t discuss it, and he changed the subject back to a discussion about the fact that Ellen was calling Deanne, asking her to go out to dinner with her, but Deanne was putting it off.

“I don’t want to,” Deanne kept saying. “I haven’t seen her and I don’t want to.

“After I got over being mad that she never called about Steven’s funeral, it was okay to talk to her on the phone, but I don’t want to go out to dinner. Jeez, Joe.”

He could see how flustered Deanne was becoming as he pressed the issue, but he kept it up, even after Deanne described the time that she had actually seen Ellen in the flesh, but had avoided a meeting.

It was a chance sighting, downtown at Walgreens. Deanne saw Ellen in one of the aisles, and ducked out of sight, heading straight for the checkout.

“I got in line and got out of there,” she told Joe.

“Did Ellen see you?”

“No, I don’t think so. No, because she would have called me on it.”

“You can’t stop doing the things you were doing. Otherwise, you’re gonna make her suspicious, and she’s suspicious of everybody now,” he told Deanne. “Try to go out to dinner with her.”

Certainly Ellen had started to talk about the police investigation. She told Deanne that she had begun to take different routes home after work because she suspected that the police were following her. Deanne also learned that since the investigation had started, Ellen was tidying up certain details, like paying for David’s funeral. Ellen also paid for proper headstones for David and Steven. Now she was even having balloons delivered to decorate her boys’ graves.

Deanne suspected that Ellen was trying to make things look good now that the investigation was getting serious. Then Ellen, during one of their longer phone conversations, showed a whole new side. Ellen was opening up in a way she never had before.

“You may not even want to talk to me when I get through telling you this, but I lied to you.”

Deanne didn’t say anything.

“I lied about Jeff.”

“I know,” Deanne said.

There was a pause. Then Ellen, sounding more at ease, asked, “Well, how did you know about Cleveland?”

“I called the hotel. You weren’t registered.”

Ellen was silent.

“So when you came back and told me that was definitely where you stayed, I knew it wasn’t true.”

“And I’ve lied about other things.”

“Whatever you want to tell me is okay. But you don’t have to.”

Ellen, though, was not about to be a born-again saint, Deanne would discover in the next conversation, when she learned that Ellen had hired an attorney.

Deanne immediately thought Ellen was being smart, hiring someone to represent her now that it was obvious that there was a real investigation. Deanne remembered that the two of them had once had a long discussion about this kind of predicament. Back then it had been a purely hypothetical conversation. How to act. What to say. They were in complete agreement about the first thing you do.

“You get an attorney, right?” Ellen said. “Isn’t that the first thing you do?”

“Ellen, if there’s anything to these movies, that’s the first thing you do is ask for your attorney.”

So now when Ellen told her that she had hired one, Deanne naturally assumed Ellen was preparing for the eventuality of an arrest. Instead, Ellen explained, she had hired someone to help her get the rest of the insurance money, the $44,000 she claimed was owed to her by United of Mutual and Shelter Insurance.

Deanne was speechless.

The attorney’s name was Mike Frank. In early January, Mr. Frank called Sergeant Burgoon to inform him that he had been retained by Ellen Boehm. When Mr. Frank asked for information about the death of Steven Boehm, Sergeant Burgoon didn’t mince words. He told the attorney that the death looked suspicious.

One of Ellen’s problems from the day Dr. Graham had performed the autopsy was that he had yet to rule on a cause of death. All during the fall and through the winter months, Ellen pestered him with calls, wanting to know when he would issue a finding.

By the end of January, Ellen had managed a crowning move that stumped everyone and Joe couldn’t believe the bravado of the woman. On January 30th, he received a call from Carl Carver at Shelter Insurance. Ellen had applied for reinstatement of Stacy’s life insurance policy in the amount of $30,000. He already knew that on January 6th Ellen had applied for a policy on herself for the same amount, listing her mother and daughter as beneficiaries.

Joe got right on the phone to State Farm. Yes, he was told, Ellen had also applied to that company for reinstatement of Stacy’s policy in the amount of $50,000.

Shelter’s Mr. Carver said the new application for Stacy was being held in abeyance. State Farm, however, had denied Ellen’s application.

Then, Ellen told her friend Deanne about what she had done. In the annals of their friendship, this was the topper. Deanne just couldn’t fathom it.

“Why in God’s name would you do something like that? With the police investigation going on?”

“Well, they’re trial policies,” was Ellen’s pat answer.

“Don’t start with trial policies.”

Deanne had heard this crap before. When she had confronted Ellen about all the insurance that was carried on Steven and Stacy, Ellen’s explanation was incredible.

“Why did you have four separate policies on Steven? You couldn’t afford a pound of hamburger. Where did you come up with the money to take out four separate policies on this child? And why so much? I don’t think my father has that much insurance on himself. And on a four-year-old child? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, one of them is a trial policy.”

“What do you mean trial policy?”

“It was only good for thirty days, and I was going to mail it back to them and tell them I wasn’t interested.”

“Ellen, wait a minute, you mean in other words, if he died within the thirty days you’d collect and say it was a good policy, and if he didn’t die within the thirty days you’d say, ‘Well, I didn’t want it, it wasn’t a good policy.’ I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

The words just popped out of her mouth. Deanne just wouldn’t take this from Ellen.

“Ellen, most insurance … you just let it lapse.”

“I had the policy in my purse and was going to mail it back to the insurance company.”

“Trust me. They don’t give a damn whether you mail that policy back to them or not. You just don’t pay the next premium.”