Ellen’s Turn to Wait

She was crying on the phone as talked to her mother, calling from the Homicide Section, telling her mother that she had killed the boys. Ellen kept saying that she was sorry. Sergeant Burgoon and Detective Bender heard it all, because they were standing right there.

Ellen had dialed the phone herself. She was at the phone by the desk in the conference room. The detectives stood at a little distance by the doorway to give Ellen some privacy.

It was almost two years to the day when Steven Boehm had been transported to Cardinal Glennon hospital. For Joe, it was also poetically perfect that today was exactly two years to the date when Stacy was taken to Children’s Hospital. It had taken a long time. The advice from FBI Agent Wright had paid off, as had Dr. Graham’s unwavering resolve to make an indisputable finding, but Joe also knew that the only reason the investigation was ever started in the first place was because a citizen had cared enough to call. He remembered, too, his promise to call Deanne Bond as soon as they arrested Ellen, and he picked up the phone. He always told her he didn’t want her to hear it on the news.

It was 11:57 P.M. Deanne was sound asleep when the phone rang beside her bed.

“Hello.”

“This is the S.O.B.,” Joe said into the phone.

Deanne knew who it was, but she couldn’t imagine why he was calling at this hour. The orange-lighted digital clock on the nightstand told her how late it was.

“We got her.”

“What?”

“We arrested Ellen,” he said in a hushed voice.

“What?”

Deanne sat straight up in bed.

“I can’t talk loud because she’s using the phone next to me.”

“Jeeminy, oh, my God,” Deanne said, flustered. “Don’t even use my name. Call me Deep Throat or something.”

“She has no idea.”

“Who’s she calling?”

“Her mother.”

“She confessed.”

“What, you’re kidding.”

“No.”

“With an attorney present?”

“She didn’t ask for her attorney.”

“Wait a minute. Are you sure?”

“Yeah, we videotaped it.”

This wasn’t making sense to Deanne, because she and Ellen had discussed this time and time again. The first thing to do is ask for an attorney. Deanne hadn’t even known that Joe had gone to the grand jury. Deanne also didn’t realize that there was no statute of limitations on murder. She wanted to believe that Sergeant Burgoon was going to get her, but she also thought that time was running out. She knew that Ellen didn’t have a clue that she was going to be arrested, and she knew Ellen was flat broke. If she ever figures this out. If she killed twice, she’d kill a third time, Deanne thought. Deanne was half serious about getting ready to leave town.

Because it was a Friday night, Ellen couldn’t be arraigned until Monday, which meant she would be booked and put in the lock-up all weekend. Someone was dispatched to pick up Ellen’s car, and place it in storage.

The next morning, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s front page carried the story under the headline: MOTHER ARRESTED IN DEATH OF BOYS, ATTEMPT ON GIRL; INDICTMENT FOLLOWS 3-YEAR PROBE.

The story drew attention to the fact that the police investigation of Ellen Boehm had ended more than a year before, and that the move to make an arrest awaited the certainty of a medical finding.

Captain Bauman was quoted praising the investigative team, and citing Dr. Graham for the thoroughness of his approach.

Dr. Graham was quoted in the article, stating: “Sometimes the effects of smothering will show up in an autopsy. Sometimes it won’t. There are ways that a small child can be killed and the cause not show up in scientific tests.”

Bright and early on that Saturday morning, Detective Bender visited the circuit attorney’s office with an affidavit for a search warrant to retrieve certain items from Ellen’s apartment. Assistant Circuit Attorney Dee Vossmeyer-Hayes reviewed the request and telephoned Judge Robert Dowd at home. Detective Bender was told to take the affidavit to the judge’s residence, where he would sign the search warrant. What Detective Bender wanted to confiscate were Ellen’s nineteen-inch Phillips color television, her Conair hair dryer, and rose-colored couch. Ellen had told them that all of the items were still in the apartment at 5015A South Broadway, where Ellen had recently moved, mostly because she had run out of money and couldn’t afford the Brazillia Apartments any longer.

By 11:45, Detectives Bender and Trevor, along with a small army of five other officers, drove to Ellen’s apartment and seized the evidence. Another officer first photographed the television, the hair dryer, and the couch as they were found in place.

That night, Joe and Detective Bender paid a visit to Ellen’s friend Sandy Nelson, who had known Ellen for more than half of her life. Ms. Nelson told the detectives that Ellen had never mentioned anything about insurance to her. She said on the night that David died, Ellen had called her and while they were talking, Ellen said she had to get off the phone because she said something was wrong with him.

Ms. Nelson said Ellen then showed up at her home, and Stacy and Steven stayed with her mother so that she could accompany Ellen to the hospital. To her, Ellen seemed upset on that night, but since then, except at David’s funeral, when she witnessed her crying, she had behaved as if nothing had ever happened.

A few weeks later, when the detectives had no further need for anything in Ellen’s apartment, Catherine asked Susan Emily if she would help her clean it out. Ellen’s mother actually needed Susan to do it all, because Catherine couldn’t even navigate a flight of stairs. Susan didn’t look forward to the job, knowing what a poor housekeeper Ellen was. Once when she had visited Ellen at the Brazillia apartments, she was offended by a smell of urine in the living room. When she saw a mold-covered leftover pizza, Susan said something. “Why don’t you do something about this!”

Ellen tried to shrug it off with a throwaway line: “Oh, you know. I don’t know.”

As Susan carted things out and tidied up the kitchen and the bathroom, a friend who was helping her noticed something in a small cubby space behind the toilet. He reached in to remove what appeared to be an bottle of Scope mouthwash. First he wondered why it had been stored in such an inaccessible place, then he called Susan to examine it. They were both puzzled by what was inside the bottle. It was greenish in color, but there was no clarity to it. What had happened to this bottle of Scope? When Susan’s friend uncapped it, he knew right away that it wasn’t mouthwash. It was antifreeze, he told her.

Susan felt a sudden chill. What was Ellen doing with antifreeze in a Scope bottle in the bathroom? She thought immediately of Stacy. Was she to be next?

In the same year that Steven had died, another child’s death had caught the headlines in St. Louis. Patricia Stallings, a young mother who lived south of the city in Hillsboro, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in the death of her five-month-old son, whom authorities believed had been poisoned with antifreeze. The case proved to be a sensational one when Mrs. Stallings, who was pregnant when she was imprisoned, gave birth to a second son, who suffered from a rare disease, methylmalonic acidemia, which offered an entirely new explanation for her first son’s death. She was eventually granted a new trial and was freed, but until then everybody knew about it as the “antifreeze murder case.”

Susan stared at the Scope bottle. Was Ellen considering this route? She knew that Ellen had killed the boys, because just weeks before she had talked to her on the phone. It was by chance that she had been visiting Catherine when Ellen had called from the city jail.

Susan had then confronted Ellen about it: “You done wrong, Ellen.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Weeks later, on December 18th, Joe would receive a phone call when he got into work. The caller identified himself as a resident of 4720 South Broadway, the Riverbend Apartments, and said he had been out of town for the past few months, working in Atlanta, Georgia. Upon his return, he said, he had read the newspaper articles about Ellen Boehm, and it triggered a memory about something that had happened on the night of Stacy’s electrical shock.

Joseph Rodriegquez said he was walking in the hall past Apartment 501 on the night Stacy was hurt, when he heard loud shouts and screaming coming from within the apartment. It troubled him so much that he returned to his apartment and called 911. Then, he told Sergeant Burgoon, he went to the lobby to wait for the police to arrive. While he was there, Ellen and her children came downstairs, and it was clear they were heading out somewhere.

Mr. Rodriegquez said he distinctly overheard Stacy saying: “He was not in the bathroom. There was nobody there.” The little girl kept saying it, he said.

He then saw the police car pull up, and overheard Ellen talking to the officer, who was telling her about Alexian Brothers Hospital, located a few blocks away. After Ellen left with her children, he went over to talk to the officer to inquire about what had happened.

Joe thanked Mr. Rodriegquez for calling, and told him that what he had said was important. When he hung up the phone, and as he wrote up the report, Joe felt another sense of vindication that this had been a good investigation and a good arrest. He knew that now he had at least someone else’s word to challenge Ellen’s statement that Steven had been in the bathroom, that he had gotten up from his sleep and plugged his mother’s hair dryer into the outlet in the hallway and then dropped the high-voltage appliance into his sister’s bathwater.