Epilogue

“We really had some good times. I could never say to anybody that Ellen wasn’t a good friend to me. Whatever I needed, if Ellen had it, it was mine.”

—Deanne Bond

“Well, are you Mrs. Steve Williams yet?” the caller asked.

Deanne recognized the voice. “No, Ellen, not quite. I haven’t even talked to him in about a year and a half.”

“Oh, I thought maybe you guys would be together.”

“No, no. I don’t think so.” Deanne chuckled a little at having just picked up with Ellen again. “I don’t even go to wrestling anymore.”

Deanne hadn’t thought she was ever again going to hear from Ellen. The last time she had talked to her was on September 13, 1991, the day she was arrested. Today was January 2, 1994. Deanne had dropped Ellen from her life. She wondered at times exactly where Ellen was, but she didn’t care enough to make the effort to find out.

“Well, did you keep the weight off?” Ellen wanted to know.

“Uh-huh,” Deanne was proud to say.

“Remember that?”

Deanne knew what she was talking about—all the times that Deanne would weaken in front of a dessert and Ellen would admonish her to stretch it for another week.

Ellen said the reason she called was that she had been thinking about Deanne for a long time. “I just felt that I had to call you,” she said.

“Of course, that’s fine, Ellen.” Deanne tried to remain natural, but she felt trapped. Three weeks earlier, at approximately midnight on a Saturday night, she had received an operator-assisted collect call from someone named “Jackie.” The operator stated that the caller was in a Missouri Correctional facility. The only person Deanne knew who was in prison was Ellen, so she didn’t accept the call.

Then, on this Sunday evening when she arrived home from a visit with her parents, Deanne’s answering machine had a message: “If you wish to accept charges, press five.” Deanne carried through with it, and Ellen called about five o’clock. Ellen could have written a letter, but she hadn’t, and Deanne knew there had to be some other reason behind this call. Ellen wasn’t calling to inquire about her health.

“Did you ever see the police report?” Ellen asked.

“No, Ellen, I haven’t seen the police report.”

Ellen’s voice was changing now, and there was an edge that Deanne didn’t like. “Well, you know what they’ve done to you? You know what they’ve done, they made you out to be Burgoon’s stooge.”

“The only part I’ve seen is my part of it, because they were getting ready to take my deposition,” Deanne said. “Ellen, you know every time I talked to the police, because I told you.”

“I know, that’s what makes me so furious. Anytime I would talk to you there was either a call to the police or they would call you. You know, those bastards plotted for a year and a half on how to get me to confess.”

Deanne paused, thinking about what to say next. “I was relieved that there wasn’t a trial,” she said, treading as delicately as she could. “I didn’t know how I was going to feel sitting across the room, and have to look at you, knowing what you’ve been charged with. I didn’t know how I could sit there and not just grab something and brain you as you went by.”

“I had no choice,” Ellen said, referring to her confession. “At eleven o’clock I told them—to get ’em off my back. I’d tell them whatever they wanted to hear.

“And they wouldn’t let me call my attorney. And you know we had discussed it. If I’m ever arrested isn’t that the first thing I’m supposed to do?”

Deanne had been offered the opportunity to view Ellen’s taped confession, but she declined. She already had the indelible images of those little boys in her mind, and somebody putting a pillow over their faces. She suspected Ellen knew that, too, which explained why Ellen hadn’t made contact in all this time.

Then, abruptly switching gears, Ellen said she had wanted to spare her mother and Stacy the ordeal of a trial. But Deanne knew that Ellen was one of the best liars she had ever met. Deanne couldn’t imagine what new tricks Ellen was learning on the inside, but she sensed that Ellen was picking up some of the lingo. She had never been much of an emotional person, so the sidekicks she was meeting in prison would work out fine. Deanne also sensed that the reserved side of Ellen had now progressed into a stone coldness. Plus, Ellen was starting to think like someone who was on the inside, and she was a lifer.

Ellen said her roommate had been screwed over, but that she was getting out soon because they had discovered some technicality.

When Deanne heard this she began to understand why Ellen was calling. Ellen was thinking the same thing: That she was going to get out, too, one way or another, on some narrow interpretation of the law. Maybe Ellen was trying to feel her out to see if she would be friendly or adverse, if Ellen should press an appeal to get out. Deanne didn’t know that Ellen actually had started an appeal.

At one point, Ellen’s voice began to crack. It was when they were discussing all the fun they used to have on the road. Deanne didn’t come right out and ask Ellen whether she had killed David and Steven, and Ellen never led the conversation in that direction. As far as Deanne was concerned, Ellen had to live with herself, and Deanne had no idea how she could. Deanne often wondered what went through her mind and why things turned out the way they did. She has never believed that people are born bad or born good. The circumstances in life do that. Deanne knew Ellen always believed that things would work out for her, and she was always looking for happiness that was just beyond her reach. Was it greed, or what, that finally pushed her to the point of doing what she did? From what Deanne had been told, they couldn’t find a psychiatrist who would say even that Ellen was temporarily insane when she committed the crimes. It was cold, premeditated murder for the money.

Even if Ellen had gotten away with it, Deanne knew that they would never have remained friends, and not just because her own life had moved on. Deanne also believed that if Ellen had been successful with the hair dryer in Stacy’s bathtub, she never would have killed Steven. He was such a sweetheart of a boy.

“Ellen, I know I’m gonna ask some stupid questions, but these are things I’d like to know.”

“You know you can ask me anything.”

“What do you do all day? I have no idea.”

“Data entry. Data processing,” Ellen said, and that made a lot of sense to Deanne, because she knew how good Ellen was with a computer.

“You’re not really in like a cell, are you?”

“No, it’s like a dorm.”

The conversation switched back to Sergeant Burgoon, and Ellen amazed Deanne.

“I know Joe’s working on the Major Case Squad.”

Deanne knew what Ellen was talking about, the city and county joint investigation of the abduction and killing of two young girls in St. Louis. Both girls, nine and ten years old, were found murdered within days of their disappearance, and it roused community fear that a serial killer was in its midst. Talk show hosts were entertaining calls about what kind of punishment would be fitting for the killer, or killers, when they were caught. Joe was recruited for the task force of about forty-five detectives from the city and the county that had been formed in early December. Deanne was floored that Ellen actually knew what Joe was doing, and where he worked, which was at the county’s police academy.

“I hope he gets this guy who killed these little girls,” Ellen said. “But he knows deep down in his heart that I didn’t kill those boys.”

Deanne paused, thinking about what to say. “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. I know nothing about that.”

“I made a mistake when I called Elaine. My mistake was saying to her what I said,” Ellen proceeded to say. “I know where I made my mistake.”

The conversation was coming to an end. Deanne had heard enough, and she wanted to get off the phone. When she said good-bye, she was pleasant about it, but she didn’t invite Ellen to call back.

In the hour and a half they were on the phone, Ellen never mentioned David’s name, but she did talk about Steven.

“When Steven passed …” was the opening of one sentence.

Deanne burned at that comment. Yeah, he “passed,” with a little help, she thought. Deanne remembered how sure Joe had been that Ellen was guilty, and his promise that he would get her. She also would never forget what she had said when Shirley Rogers told her they were going for the death penalty.

“I’m not opposed to that,” Deanne said. “But I would like for her to know what those two little boys felt. What was going through their minds right before they took their last breath. I just can’t believe somebody could do that.

“I think a better punishment would be for somebody to put a pillow over her face every morning for the rest of her life, and every morning she’d wonder if this would be the last morning.”

Aside from the comment that Ellen made about sparing them from a trial, she made no other mention of her daughter or her mother. By the springtime, at age sixty-nine, Catherine Booker would be dead. Among the handful of regular visitors in her waning days were Susan Emily and her daughter Terrie, and though Catherine was wheelchair-bound and experiencing difficulty breathing, it was clear to them that she would be going to her grave still believing in her daughter’s innocence.

By summertime, Paul Boehm would be on the move again. This time he and Teri were headed for Florida, meaning Stacy would be seeing even less of him. Still living in a foster home in St. Louis, she was the lone survivor. Sadly, she even missed her grandmother’s funeral. According to Teri, Stacy Ann, now a teenager, had been hospitalized for depression.