FIVE

Eldon

Although Jill may have slipped relatively quietly into North Manchester when she was a teenager, she played out a complete reversal when she returned to the bucolic farm community ten years later. She blew back into town with all the subtlety of a hand grenade with the pin pulled out. And she didn’t try to get her old job back at the book bindery.

By most local standards the former North Manchester High School dropout had metamorphosed into an accomplished woman of the world; an exotic and sexually-magnetic siren who had crisscrossed half the country and carried a passport stamped with the names of glamorous foreign locales (in those days) like Port-au-Prince in Haiti and Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

But she was a single mother with three sons, and she behaved like she was serious about putting down some strong new roots in the close-knit little community. She told friends she wanted to raise her boys in a safer, more wholesome environment than New Orleans.

Jill backed up her words by buying a farm a few miles northwest of town and began putting together a menagerie of animals there for the boys. She planted a garden, harvested the crops, and canned and froze the fresh produce. She also proved that she could put together an impressive meal. She was a fantastic cook, according to her friend Nancy.

Once she was back home, Jill renewed and cemented old friendships and made new ones. She was generous, and frequently surprised people she liked or wished to impress with fine gifts. She was charming, a great storyteller who had wonderful tales to spin about her travels, experiences, and husbands. An exciting air of mystery seemed somehow to always cling to her.

At the time, she was between husbands—sort of. During the winter of 1977 to 1978, when she swept back into North Manchester, she was still legally married to DiRosa, although divorce proceedings were already filed.

But she wasn’t a woman willing to settle for being without a special man in her life for very long. As old-timers in Indiana say, the flamboyant, effervescent beauty with the exquisite café-au-lait complexion was the kind of woman whose smoldering gaze could make a man’s eyeballs sizzle.

She had barely swept back onto the scene in North Manchester with her boys, her flashy, expensive jewelry, and her snazzy red classic T-Bird before she attracted the eye and earnest attention of one of the community’s most eligible bachelors.

Eldon Duane Metzger was a highly respected local farmer and businessman who had managed to hold onto his bachelorhood for thirty-seven years before his path crossed with Jill’s. Various branches of the extensive Metzger family in Wabash County and other nearby northern Indiana communities had produced lawyers, teachers, doctors, nurses, secretaries, truck drivers, and practitioners of a host of other professions. The Metzgers sprung from solid, taciturn German Baptist stock, and when Eldon brought Jill along to family get-togethers, she livened up the normally-subdued, proper affairs.

Metzger was best known in North Manchester for his dual professions as an auctioneer and realtor. The Metzger Auction & Realty Company was a fixture in North Manchester. And just about every weekend when the weather was good, and often when it wasn’t so good, Metzger could be tracked down in front of a local home in town or a Wabash County barnyard auctioneering household goods, farm equipment, real estate, and animals.

Metzger Realty helped her purchase a store building in Laketon, another little settlement of about 500 people a few miles southwest of North Manchester. It was known locally as Mary’s Sundries and was a popular local hangout. Jill turned it into a luncheonette. Years later she dropped the luncheonette idea, and opened a noodle factory in the building. The boys helped their mother with the noodle-making, she said. Local residents remembered the noodle venture differently, however, and claim that except for being involved in a real estate transaction for the building, she had almost nothing to do with the business.

She was working hard to build up new businesses, however, and she was also occupied with more personal matters—building a relationship with the new man in her life.

Jill had the rare ability to spot vulnerabilities in a man, and she focused in on their weaknesses like a hungry cheetah surveying a herd of wildebeest. Men were her prey, and when she was on a blood-scent she didn’t deviate from her target. She was a sultry temptress who could addle male minds with her sexual charisma, serve as a charming dinner companion, or chat knowledgeably about sports cars, guns, or business.

On March 14, 1978, Jill and the auctioneer drove across the Ohio line to the Allen County seat of Lima and filed an application in the probate division of the common pleas court for a marriage license. The bride identified herself to the license clerk as Jill Coit-Johansen, and stated that her union with Metzger would be her first marriage. Spaces on the form for listing of prior marriages and minor children were left blank. Her birth date was listed as June 11, 1943, her birthplace as Iberia, Louisiana, and her profession as secretary. In the blanks on the form for the name of her father and the maiden name of her mother, she stated they were Edwin Johansen and Mary Taney.

Metzger entered his birth date as July 14, 1940, his birthplace as Wabash County, Indiana, and his occupation as “farming.” He identified his parents as Orville E. Metzger and the former Ellen Niccum. Curiously, both the prospective bride and groom gave their residence as Route 4, Manchester, in Jacob County, Kentucky. The tiny Cumberland mountain settlement of 1,800 people in the Bluegrass State is more than three hundred miles from North Manchester, in the Daniel Boone National Forest near the tri-state border with Tennessee and Virginia. And it is in Clay County. Manchester is adjacent to Jackson County, but there is no Jacob County in Kentucky.

Such minor inconsistencies in the filling out of personal details on legal documents weren’t anything new when Jill was involved. The couple drove back to North Manchester to wait out the next few days until they could be married. A week later they returned to the old courthouse in Lima for the ceremony. Each of them signed their names—his as “Eldon D. Metzger” and hers as “Jill C. Johansen”—under a statement certifying that they were legally free to marry, according to Ohio laws. The statement read: “That neither of the said parties is an habitual drunkard, imbecile, or insane, and is not under the influence of any intoxicating liquor or narcotic drug, that neither has syphilis which is communicable or likely to become so and they have complied with the Ohio serological test. Said parties are not nearer of kin than second cousins, and there is no legal impediment to their marriage.”

In the state of Ohio, as in other states, a former marriage that has not yet been legally dissolved constitutes a legal impediment to a new marriage.

But Common Pleas Court Judge Richard D. Heeter was obviously unaware that the bride was still married to a husband in New Orleans, and he performed the civil ceremony. This time when the couple drove back to Indiana, they returned as bride and groom. Jill’s marriage to Metzger marked the second time she had committed bigamy.

She didn’t get around to making an effort to officially cut her conjugal ties to DiRosa until she had already been married to Metzger for nearly eight months. In November she and DiRosa boarded flights to Port-au-Prince to obtain a Haitian divorce. The process required little more than Jill appearing before a civil court official on November 4 with a French and English translator and signing a one-page statement signifying she and her husband were incompatible and wished to be divorced.

The statement dissolving the fourteen-month union two days later specifically referred to the marriage on September 19, 1977 in St. Bernard Parish. The wife’s name on the document was entered as Mrs. Jill J. Coit-DiRosa, and her domicile was entered as 864 Roosevelt Place, Apartment B, New Orleans. Her husband’s domicile was listed as 812 Pere Marquette Building, New Orleans. It was the address of his law office.

The civil court functionary also ruled, “that the lady has the right to use again her former married name: COIT.”

When the divorced couple left Haiti and flew back to the United States, nothing had been entered on record in Port-au-Prince about Jill’s marriage to DiRosa in Mississippi or about her latest marriage to Metzger.

The auctioneer got along well enough with Jill’s boys, but she had other priorities that sometimes conflicted with her role as a mother. In her wanderings around the country while she flitted from husband to husband, the boys were a necessary burden. If she didn’t exactly operate according to the old saying, “out of sight, out of mind,” she sometimes came close. At least once she fixed up the basement of her home, so her sons could live downstairs most of the time, out of the way and out of sight of adults.

“It was always a different person, a different man,” her youngest son, William III recalled years later. “She just … kept us in a little closet.”

Jill was a busy woman, and she had to have help raising the boys and with her housekeeping. She liked the Old Order Amish and hired some of the plain, unassuming young women to help out with the homemaking. At one time she also arranged for a woman who was a Central American refugee to live with her and take care of the house. When the housekeeper worried about a child she left behind, Jill brought the youngster to live with them in Indiana.

It was that kind of generous behavior that endeared Jill to her friends in Indiana. Jill was a woman who seemed never to forget a card or a present for the anniversary or birthday of a friend. She worked hard at being a friend. Even then, though, some of her friends had second thoughts about her motivations for some of the things she did.

Nancy Reed later recalled in an interview with the hometown newspaper that Jill was the sharpest businesswoman she ever met. She was constantly “wheeling and dealing” and striving to get ahead. Reed said there was always a sense, however, that Jill wasn’t being completely upfront. “She had so many stories, she had been so many places, done so many things, that after awhile you couldn’t keep up and didn’t ask all the questions that came to mind, because you knew you wouldn’t get answers.”

When the younger boys became old enough, she arranged for their education away from home in boarding schools or military academies. She squeezed every dime she could get out of the trust estates left by her former in-laws, the Coits, with pleas for money she said was needed to pay for the boys’ educations.

Seth grew up closer to his mother than his younger brothers did, and as they gradually drew away from her, he seemed to grow closer. When he was thirteen, about the time his mother married Metzger, he began helping out at the office of a Manchester veterinarian. He held onto the job for several years, and as he grew older he also obtained experience in farming.

By the time he was twenty-one he was working in the little farming town of Nappanee at the edge of the Amish and Mennonite country in nearby Elkhart County at Holiday Rambler as an insulator and roof assembler.

Soon after their mother settled again in Wabash County, the two younger boys were enrolled at the Culver Military Academies, roughly fifty miles west of North Manchester along the north shore of Lake Maxinkuckee.

Maxinkuckee is the second largest natural lake in Indiana. The town of Culver, a popular summer resort of about 1,600 year-round residents, curls around the northwest shoreline where bathers congregate at a fine public beach during the warm summer months. But the Marshall County locale is best known nationally for CMA, the Culver Military Academies—Culver Military Academy, the Culver Girls Academy, and the Culver Summer Camps. Established in 1894 as the Culver Military Academy for boys only, the expanded program now draws both male and female students to the 1,500-acre lakeside campus from throughout the country and from foreign nations as far away as the Republic of Korea, Thailand, India, Japan, Israel, Slovenia, France, and Spain for its fine prep-school educational opportunities and summer camping activities. About twenty percent of the student body is from foreign countries.

Students at the tradition-steeped institution can train for private pilot ratings at Fleet Field, the academy’s own twin-runway airfield; learn sailing skills aboard the R. H. Ledbetter, a three-masted sailing ship or smaller watercraft; or become an accomplished equestrian and polo player, along with mastering traditional academics. Culver has the largest equestrian school in the United States, and since 1897 has been home to the Black Horse Troop that has ridden at ten presidential inaugurations beginning with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, and his vice-president, North Manchester’s famous son, Thomas Marshall. The troop led the inaugural parade for President Jimmy Carter.

Costs of obtaining an education at Culver are not cheap. By the beginning of the 1994 school year, the total for basic tuition and board at CMA and CGA was $16,950. Hefty additional charges are tacked on for special programs such as pilot instruction, the Black Horse Troop, and the sister program for girls, “equitation” (horsemanship).

But Jill’s sons were enrolled at one of the premier prep schools in the nation, with alumni who made names for themselves in everything from politics, business, and the media to the entertainment industry and the military. Michael Huffington, US Congressman then an unsuccessful US Senate candidate from California; Will Van Rogers Jr., movie actor, congressman, Battle of the Bulge tank commander, and son of famous humorist Will Rogers Sr.; actor Hal Holbrook; New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner; and Pulitzer-Prize winning producer and director Joshua Logan are a few of the better-known graduates.

While her boys were at CMA being looked after by someone else or looking after themselves, Jill kept busy pursuing her quest for wealth. She collected and hoarded expensive toys, baubles, and easily-negotiable possessions like the T-Bird and diamonds. She stashed South African gold Krugerrands into three and four-foot lengths of two-inch metal pipe then sealed them by capping the ends. The valuable coins were a perfect fit.

“She was money mad, money mad,” says McCurdy. A few years after Jill arrived back in Wabash County she had approximately $100,000 invested in certificates of deposit, and $150,000 in cash in addition to diamonds and gold and silver coins in her safety-deposit box.

She bought a used 1976 Mercedes to drive when she wasn’t tooling around in the T-Bird, and added a Lincoln, two Porsches, a U-Haul truck and an Airstream trailer to her growing fleet of vehicles.

She also scanned legal advertisements in the News-Journal, the Plain Dealer in Wabash and in other area newspapers, and checked at the courthouses for tax-sale properties she could invest in. Other people’s failures and disappointments turned into her opportunities and accomplishments. Eventually she acquired a house in North Manchester, two houses in Wabash, two farms, including one spread that was fifty acres, and approximately thirty pieces of tax-sale property in northern Indiana. She owned other pieces of real estate in Louisiana and Texas, including an $8,000 property in Austin.

Most of the properties were purchased under Tower Advertising or other corporate names. Seth moved into the North Manchester house, which was purchased under the Nei Mar Corporation A few years later she made him an equal partner in the corporation.

Jill was a natural saleswoman and entrepreneur. She had a keen eye and ear for business and the personal charisma of a successful evangelist. She was also a devoted collector of licenses, diplomas, and certificates of accomplishment. She was credential-driven, and licenses and similiar documents were essential elements of her freedom and mobility. With the right license she could go almost anywhere and do almost anything.

If she wasn’t out somewhere buying properties, she was attending night school or some other class in order to equip herself with new skills or hone old ones to a greater degree of proficiency. One of the schools she attended was sponsored by State Farm Insurance to train its agents.

While Jill was attending the school she shared a motel room with another woman. One evening after returning from classes Jill walked into the room and dumped the contents of her purse on her bed. Her roommate was shocked when a little pearl-handled pistol tumbled out onto the bedspread.

“What are you doing with that pistol?” the woman gasped.

Jill stared at her as if she was insane for asking such a question.

“You mean you don’t have a pistol?” she asked. “Every woman should have a gun. How are you going to defend yourself?”

Jill’s companion found herself apologizing for not carrying a gun and trying to hide her embarrassment. She had grown up in a small town where the streets were safe, and private homes were secure sanctuaries. Jill was from New Orleans, a big and violent city where people locked their doors at night and were as likely as not to barricade their windows with metal bars.

The way Jill explained it, packing a gun in her purse made a lot of sense. She had a way of turning things around, so that her eccentricities seemed suddenly not so curious anymore and anyone who didn’t share them appeared to be the one who was out of step.

One of her girlfriends from her high-school days in North Manchester was visiting at her house once when Jill opened a dresser drawer. It was crammed full of handguns.

The same year Jill was licensed as a State Farm agent, she obtained a real-estate license, an auctioneer license, a nursery-dealer’s license, and a health-food license. She began attending school to obtain a travel-agent’s license but dropped out. Her health failed her, she explained.

In 1981 she took a trip to North Carolina where she got herself a gun license. She used the name Terri Kisla, a variation of “T. Kisla,” the name used for the doctor or paramedic on the bogus birth certificate for Thadius Brodie. Jill also bought a tract of tax-sale property while she was in North Carolina.

Back home she ran ads in the News-Journal encouraging insurance shoppers to: “See me for car, home, life, health, and business insurance.” A photograph run with the advertisement showed Jill’s hair pulled away from her face and piled high in a bun. Large circular earrings dangled from her ears, and she was wearing a business-suit jacket with a tasteful high-necked blouse and a knotted scarf. Jill ran the busy agency from a yellow house on West Street, just off the main drag.

She was a hard worker, and a decade later she was receiving monthly checks from the company for more than $1,600 in residuals from policies she sold during her brief career in insurance. Jill often opened the doors at six-thirty in the morning to take care of business with factory workers before they checked in at their jobs. It wasn’t at all unusual for her to stay on the job until seven or eight o’clock at night.

Eventually, during her travels around the country she collected driver’s licenses from more than a dozen states, usually in one of her married names. She acquired a North Carolina driver’s license, however, in the name of Jill Theressa Kisla. She also obtained an Alaskan voter-registration card.

Jill lived in some of the states where she acquired driver’s licenses, such as Louisiana, Indiana, and Texas for years. In others—Arizona, California, Georgia, Kentucky, New York, New Mexico, and North Carolina—she stayed for only a few weeks or for a few months.

If Jill is to be believed, however, after she settled down in rural North Manchester tending to her duties as homemaker, mother, and businesswoman, a painful tragedy intruded on her busy life. She claimed to have given birth to another baby, and it died.

When stories first began circulating around town that Jill was pregnant and Eldon was going to become a father, it was considered good news. Jill’s boys were growing up, and townspeople who knew the couple speculated that it would be about the best thing that could happen to the marriage to have a new baby in the house. At the time she was living in a farmhouse west of town, and she fixed up one of the rooms as a nursery. She showed the nursery off to her friend Nancy, along with baby clothes for the anticipated newcomer.

Jill, it seemed, was a woman who didn’t gain much weight, even in an advanced state of pregnancy. She explained to her friend she never showed.

When the time came for the baby to arrive, however, Jill was out of town. She returned after a few weeks without the baby, and quickly resumed her normal routine looking as slim and feisty as ever. When people began asking questions, she explained the baby was afflicted with serious congenital defects and had to stay behind in a hospital incubator. One day when Worth Weller, the local newspaper publisher, ran into Metzger on the street, the newshound told the auctioneer how sorry he was to hear the tragic news about the baby.

“He just gave me a blank look,” Weller recalled later.

According to Weller, a few days later his weekly newspaper, the News-Journal ran an obituary for Tinley Metzger, who it appeared had died in a hospital halfway across the country without ever drawing a breath in Indiana.

It was true that Jill had been back in New Orleans again, but she didn’t go there to have a baby. She was still involved in legal wrangling involving DiRosa and his former wife, Marie. Jill was in New Orleans to provide a deposition, a legal term for testimony or a statement given under oath outside a courtroom.

Some of the questions asked at the December 14, 1978, confrontation were merely curious, others were exceedingly odd. “Have you used the name Jean or Gene Remington?,” she was asked. “Are you related to the Rockefeller family?,” and “Are you presently living with Elton Metsker?” The auctioneer’s first and last name were spelled phoenetically by the court reporter.

Her attorney, Harry R. Cabral, Jr., refused to permit her to answer the questions, claiming Marie was merely attempting to humiliate his client. However, according to the records, she did state that she was not married at that time and was currently living in Princeton, Indiana. Princeton is more than 200 miles cattycornered across the state from North Manchester, and the town of approximately 9,000 is in Gibson County near Evansville. Jill did not say anything about how she happened to settle so far from her more usual haunts in the northeastern area of the state. Another smaller Indiana town named Pierceton is only a few miles from North Manchester in adjoining Kosciusko County, however, leaving the question open that her statement may have been misunderstood during transcribing of the deposition tape.

Jill also didn’t say anything during the deposition hearing about being pregnant with or giving birth to the auctioneer’s child. The Metzger baby was another phantom, like Thadius, as difficult to grasp and pin down as the putative mother.

Early in 1979, Marie Buffa-DiRosa filed a lawsuit against Jill and her New Orleans lawyer, Cabral, accusing them of defamation of character. Cabral represented Jill in the divorce suit between DiRosa and Marie. Curiously, among the information filed with the suit, three separate Social Security numbers were listed for Jill.

The first Mrs. DiRosa sought a total of $300,000 from the two defendants for humiliation and mental suffering allegedly caused by a petition for injunction that Cabral filed in the Orleans Parish courts accusing her of making threats against the lives of Jill and her children. Cabral asked the court to issue an order prohibiting Marie from interfering with Jill Coit-DiRosa or her family in any matter whatsoever.

Through her attorney, Marie denied threatening or harassing Jill and contended the allegations were made in order to damage her character and reputation. She claimed the petition exposed her to “disrepute and ridicule and has lowered her in the opinion of her friends and family by picturing her as a jealous wife who would go to any extreme to cause harm to Jill Coit-DiRosa…”

In filing the petition for injunction, Cabral “acted recklessly, maliciously, and in wanton disregard of the truth,” it was claimed in the lawsuit. Breaking down the requested judgment, Marie’s lawyers asked for $100,000 for injury to her reputation in the eyes of her friends, $100,000 for injury to her reputation in the eyes of her relatives, and $100,000 for injury due to embarrassment and mental anguish caused by filing of the injunction petition.

The Jefferson Parish-based lawyer and Jill apparently avoided any serious damage from Marie DiRosa’s spirited defense of her character. At her request, the suit was dismissed in August, less than four months after it was filed.

Seth was a teenager while Jill was coping with phantom pregnancies, depositions, and a Haitian divorce, and he was experiencing some troubles of his own. He was named in a paternity suit filed in the Kosciusko County Courthouse in neighboring Warsaw.

Jill was undaunted by all the fuss about babies. She was on a roll, frenetically collecting licenses, educational credits, and properties. She was obsessed with money and all its trappings, and was constantly scheming, plotting and mapping out new ways to accumulate more wealth. In 1980 she bought a three-year-old Porsche.

She also managed an amicable breakup with her husband and took up with another local man. He was the grown son of a well-to-do Wabash County farmer, and they were involved with each other after Jill moved out of her husband’s farm home and into a historic home near North Manchester’s downtown area. But Jill didn’t invest too much of her time on the farmer’s son before that relationship, like her marriage to the auctioneer, ended.

Other business and romantic interests were already developing a few miles west of North Manchester in an area of small farming communities that were very much like those in Wabash.

Wabash County is known for its scenic namesake river that winds southwesterly to Terre Haute where it dips almost due south and defines Indiana’s western border with Illinois until it flows into the Ohio River at the tri-state juncture with Kentucky.

Jill was busily shuttling between North Manchester and Marshall County, where the best-known body of water is the 1,854-acre spring-fed Lake Maxinkuckee. The town of Culver and the Culver Military Academies are located on it’s shores.