SO WHAT DID I go on the air with now?
I still needed to come up with something different about The Wanderer in the wake of the shocking news that I’d been chasing the wrong man in Russell Danziger. I needed something else that would set apart our coverage at Channel 10 from the NBC exclusive and all the other media playing catch-up right now.
Oh, I could play up the fact that I was inside the investigation. That I had the story first, that I was working with the FBI right from the beginning. But that then brought up the question: Why didn’t I break the story myself, instead of waiting for NBC News to do it? It was a reasonable question. One that I had no good answer for.
I finally decided that the best exclusive angle I had—the only one—was the Becky Bluso murder. I’d gone to Eckersville. I’d talked to the police chief there about the murder investigation. I’d toured the house where the murder took place. And I’d gone to Maine to interview Betty Bluso, the only surviving member of the Bluso family, about her sister’s long-ago murder.
Sure, the Bluso murder was the only one where no definitive DNA or any other kind of evidence existed to it being connected with the other murders. But Marty had obviously believed it was. In all likelihood, it was his investigation of the Becky Bluso case that led him to all the other murders on his list. He’d put her picture at the top of all the victims of the murders. And he’d made her picture bigger than any of the others. I was pretty sure I could pull off the idea that Becky Bluso was possibly—even likely to have been—The Wanderer’s first murder. Which I continued to believe, too, despite the lack of hard evidence.
The one thing I couldn’t use on the air was the revelation that Russell Danziger had donated big money to the Eckersville library. No way I could link Danziger to the story now. I still didn’t understand what Danziger was doing in Eckersville or why he cared so much about the damn library or the Bluso murder case. But since he wasn’t the killer—and the DNA results confirmed this—it didn’t matter much anymore.
I spent the hours before the 6 p.m. broadcast going over all the stuff I’d found out in Eckersville about Becky Bluso’s murder. I reached out to the police chief, Jeff Parkman, and got him to agree to do video footage in front of the old Bluso house—and also give sound bites to a local crew I sent there to shoot for us. I did the same thing with Becky’s sister, Betty, who agreed to a video interview with us from her office at the college in Maine about Becky’s long-ago murder.
I also pored over my notes from the time I was in Eckersville, looking for someone else—anyone else—I could interview. But I realized that most everyone else was dead. Everyone in Becky’s family except for the older sister. So was the neighbor who had been at the barbecue with the Blusos the night before the murder. And his troubled son who police thought might be a suspect—but never could get enough evidence to arrest—had died in a car crash years ago.
Going over it all again, I was struck by the story of Teresa Lofton, the neighborhood friend who had discovered Becky’s body. Parkman said she’d been so traumatized that she and her family moved away from the area soon afterward. I could only imagine how that could affect a teenager.
I’d never tried to track down Teresa Lofton. Everybody said she’d just disappeared after stumbling onto the horrific murder scene of her friend Becky, and no ever knew what happened to her. “Teresa Lofton?” Betty Bluso said when I asked her about it on the phone before we did our interview for the show. “No, I have no idea about Teresa. I tried to reach out to her after Becky’s murder. But she never returned my phone calls or showed up at Becky’s funeral. Everyone says she was so devastated by what she saw that she had some kind of an emotional breakdown. Her parents took her away from Eckersville right afterward, and that was the last I ever heard of her.”
I decided to use that as an angle, too. I’d talk about how this young girl’s life had changed irrevocably on that terrible day she discovered her friend Becky Bluso brutally murdered. How she and her family left town immediately afterward. How no one ever knew what happened to Teresa Lofton after that. It certainly added a bit more drama and emotion to my story.
While I was working on all this, Gary Weddle came into my office. He said all the right things about the story screwup not being my fault to try to make me feel better. I told him about what I was planning to do on the air tonight, and he seemed to like it. But things had been a bit awkward between us since the night I left him so abruptly—interrupting our plans for sex. I wondered again if he had found out about the background between me and Manning, the FBI agent I said I had to rush off to meet. Or if Weddle was just disappointed that our plan for a night of romance hadn’t worked out. But, for whatever reason, he’d kept his distance from me since then, and I’d done the same with him. I suppose we were both trying to figure out where this relationship was going.
The truth is, I didn’t know. I didn’t know where the relationship with Weddle was going. I didn’t know where my relationship with my daughter in Winchester, Virginia, was going, either. And I didn’t know where this damn story I was working on was going.
I didn’t know a lot of things right now.
At 6 p.m., I was on the air telling it all to the Channel 10 audience.
ME: Now that the news of The Wanderer murders has become public, Channel 10 News can reveal that we have exclusively been a part of the FBI investigation into the killings. We first alerted the FBI to the potential links between the murders—as many as twenty over a thirty-year period, occurring in every part of the country. And we have been with the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit team every step of the way as they try to apprehend this fiend.
I went through the details of the murders and the links that had been discovered between them, then focused on the one I wanted to play up the most for our broadcast: the Becky Bluso murder.
ME: Seventeen-year-old Becky Bluso was stabbed to death in broad daylight inside her house on this bucolic street in the Midwestern town of Eckersville, Indiana, on August 23, 1990. It is believed—even though there is no direct evidence yet to confirm this—that Becky Bluso may have been the first victim of The Wanderer. The first woman out of at least 20 to die at the hands of this monster.
A picture of the old Bluso house—and the rest of the street—went up on the screen.
ME: Becky Bluso was one of the most popular girls at Eckersville High School. She was an honor student. She was a cheerleader. She was on the Student Council. But, on this afternoon, someone came into her home and brutally butchered her to death.
Parkman came on the screen then to talk about the investigation into the case, all the leads the police had chased over the years without success. “We will never give up,” Parkman said, as he’d told me when I was in his office. “No matter how long it takes, we are determined to bring the person who committed this unspeakable crime to justice.”
This was followed by the interview with Becky’s sister. Betty Bluso talked about the things she remembered about her younger sister. About the shock of learning what had happened to her. And about the destruction of the Bluso family in the wake of that tragedy.
ME: Robert and Elizabeth Bluso died of natural causes after their daughter’s murder. But there are many in Eckersville who believe they died of broken hearts. This is a tragedy that touched—and forever changed the lives—of many people in this peaceful Indiana community.
I then segued into the story of Teresa Lofton, the teenaged neighborhood girl who found Becky’s body. I went through the account of how she showed up at the house to meet Becky, went inside when she saw the door was open, and then discovered the bloody scene upstairs.
ME: Teresa Lofton was so traumatized by what she saw that day that she and her family left town soon afterward. She never returned to Eckersville. One can only imagine the horror of what this young girl had to live through, and remember, from that horrendous scene. That was 30 years ago, but the nightmare continues. And it won’t end until the murderer of Becky Bluso, who is now believed to be the murderer of all these other women, too, is finally caught. Channel 10 will continue to keep you up to date on this breaking story both in our newscasts and in our “The News Never Stops” website coverage.
My phone was ringing when I got back to my office after the broadcast.
I thought it might be Manning. Or someone else from the FBI task force like Wharton who wanted to talk about what I’d just reported on air. But it wasn’t. It was Terri Hartwell.
“What the hell is going on?” Hartwell asked.
She sounded upset.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said.
“That Becky Bluso story you did on the air. This whole Wanderer thing you were talking about. Where did that all come from? Why didn’t you ever tell me anything about all this?”
I still didn’t get it. None of the murders had taken place in New York City. They wouldn’t have anything to do with Hartwell or her office. I pointed that out to her. I asked her exactly what it was she was asking about.
“Teresa Lofton,” she said.
“Right. The girl from next door who found Becky Bluso’s body after the murder, then moved away from Eckersville right after that. So what?”
“That’s me,” Hartwell said.
“What are you talking about?”
And then, even before she said anything else, it all came together for me.
Teresa Lofton.
Terri was a shortened name for Teresa.
And Hartwell was her married name.