04.Die.My.Love.2007
Read 04.Die.My.Love.2007 Online
Authors: Kathryn Casey
A TRUE STORY OF
REVENGE, MURDER, AND
TWO TEXAS SISTERS
K A T H R Y N C A S E Y
For my parents, Nick and LaVerne,
with love and gratitude.
Well, maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.
It’s not a cry you hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
—“Hallelujah,” Leonard Cohen
Copyright 1985 Sony/ATV Songs, LLC
Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed throughout this book. They include: Dr. Jim and Elaine Gable, Carol Freed, and Linda Purcell.
Contents
1
Violence can erupt at the quietest moments, in the most…
1
2 The halls of
CMA, one of the three buildings that…
5
3 The
y were such a strange match that many would question…
15
4 Marriage doesn’
t always bring with it imagined comforts: love, companionship,…
27
5 Virginia is
a conservative state,” a refined man in a…
41
6 Im
a very complex person,” Piper told Dr.
Steven Welton, a…
56
7
Piper called me in the middle of the night,”
says Tina.
70
8
Fred wanted to go after Piper’s lover,” says Melody. “He…
86
9
Piper hated Fred for taking the children away,”
says a…
114
10 Darkness cloaked Heart
hglow Lane on the morning of Saturday, October 30, 2004.
142
11 Captain Stem
often marveled at the advances science had brought…
174
12 In Richm
ond, the Jablin murder investigation took on a set…
199
13 Wednesday m
orning, November 3, the fifth day after the murder, Investigator…
218
14 Earl
y Friday morning a call came in to Henrico P.D. headquarters,…
238
15 While pre
parations were being made for Piper’s arrest in Richmond,…
243
16 Three da
ys after Piper Rountree’s arrest, on November 11, Kizer, Ashman,…
261
17 In December, Duncan Reid filed a m
otion asking for saliva…
279
18 Of course, I wanted to be with Piper, to
support…
297
19 It was a Saturday
morning, yet Judge Harris’s courtroom buzzed…
324
20 As the sentencing hearing neared, Piper
worried. What would she…
338
Violence can erupt at the quietest moments, in the most secure places, to the unlikeliest victims. So it was early on the morning of October 30, 2004, in the tranquil Richmond, Virginia, suburb of Kingsley. From that moment forward, lives would be changed and perceptions of the world forever altered. Family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues would understand with a new certainty how selfi sh and dangerous love can be.
Throughout Kingsley, massive oaks and maples surrounded impressive brick homes set back from streets that rolled with a gentle undulation. The entrance to the subdivision was marked with a prim green and white sign, and the day before Halloween, well-tended yards were replete with leaf-bag pumpkins and scarecrows fashioned of worn jeans and faded plaid shirts stuffed with brittle straw. Bedsheet ghosts wafted gently in the breeze as they dangled from the near barren limbs of trees still clutching the last remains of fall’s red and gold. The following morning daylight savings time would begin, and the streets would be bright at just past six-thirty. But this morning Hearthglow Lane remained shrouded in night.
As the gunshots echoed through the quiet neighborhood, dogs barked in yards and frightened neighbors rousted from bed ran to windows, where they stared out into the quiet streets. Only a gray-haired salesman named Bob 2 / Kathryn Casey
McArdle caught a fleeting glimpse of a mysterious fi gure sprinting through the neighborhood, directly in front of his house. A jogger? he wondered. Perhaps. Or could this person—he couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman—be responsible for the gunfi re?
“Maybe it was only a car backfiring?” the 911 dispatcher asked, questioning him.
“No,” McArdle, a former Marine, insisted. “It was gunfi re.”
Within minutes of the 911 call a Henrico County squad car snaked slowly down Hearthglow Lane, shining high-beam flashlights that threw shimmering funnels of light across lawns, onto front doors, and into the curtained windows of homes where some families lingered in bed as others gathered for breakfast, preparing for the errands and plans that awaited them that Saturday. In the darkness, three uniformed officers searched but found nothing out of the ordinary on Hearthglow, convincing them the gunshots must have originated elsewhere. They fanned out, combing the rest of the neighborhood. It had happened before, reports of gunshots that were never explained, the source never found. They must have wondered: Was there anything to look for in the early morning darkness? It seemed unlikely. Bloodshed was an uncommon visitor to Richmond’s affluent bedroom communities called the West End.
At first glance the stately brick home at 1515 Hearthglow Lane appeared unremarkable. Inside the house, steaming coffee drained into a glass pot in the kitchen, while upstairs in their bedrooms, three children slept peacefully, unaware of the nightmare that awaited them. Once they awoke, nothing in their young lives would ever be the same. How could they ever forget the horror of this chill fall morning?
Outside on the long, narrow asphalt driveway, their father, Fred Jablin, lay dying, his life leaking out in a steady stream of dark crimson blood.
DIE, MY LOVE / 3
On his stomach with his head turned to the side, Fred’s eyes were open and staring out toward the street. When he’d fallen, he landed on a thin bed of brown leaves, his head hitting a row of brick that lined the driveway, directly under his children’s basketball hoop. Later observers would describe him as lying in a near fetal position, knees slightly bent, as if in death he’d tried to retreat into the tightness of his very beginnings, his mother’s womb.
All around Fred the breeze whispered, a susurrus born of ruffling, withering leaves.
Of all the ways death can come, who would have predicted that Fred Jablin’s life would end this way, gunned down in his own driveway? He was the most improbable of victims.
The world knew Fred as an esteemed University of Richmond professor, a man who lectured to thousands across the world, whose ideas helped defi ne the field of or gan i za tion al communication. His work and his life were based on logic and painstaking attention to detail, and his personal habits were regimented. A meticulous man, he kept to a precise routine. It was that predictable schedule that had made him so vulnerable: Those close to him knew that each morning at approximately six, he awoke, put on coffee to brew, then walked not out the front door, but the back one, near the kitchen, to claim his newspaper off the driveway.
Perhaps this morning he had smiled as he emerged from the house, anticipating the pleasure of the Saturday that lay ahead: the neighborhood’s annual pumpkin festival, an afternoon with his children, a time to play and feel young again. Did he see the figure emerging from the shadows as he shuffled outside in slippers, navy blue sweatpants and sweatshirt? As he looked down the barrel of the gun, was he surprised? Or had he often feared this might happen?
Did he plead for his life or turn to run, desperate to escape? Did the intruder say anything as the trigger was pulled?
Did Fred Jablin cry out in horror into the pitch-dark night?
4 / Kathryn Casey
It happened so quickly, life changing on a dime, as they say. One moment Fred was planning his day, anticipating all that lay ahead—then three gunshots, and suddenly he had no future. What went through his mind in those fi nal, brief moments as he lay dying? Did postcards of his fi fty-two years fl ash before him? Did he wonder how his world had gone so terribly wrong?
Or, as his consciousness faded, did Fred Jablin pray, en-treating God to keep his children from finding his lifeless body? In his last moments of life, perhaps he simply replayed over and over again a question he’d asked so often, a question to which many doubted he’d ever found an answer: Why?
The halls of CMA, one of the three buildings that comprise the Jesse H. Jones Communication Center at the University of Texas, Austin, were deserted and silent one eve ning in 1981. Students had departed hours earlier, leaving only scattered faculty quietly poring over papers in their small cluttered offices. Just after nine the silence was broken by a gruff yapping that carried through the corridors.
“Arf arf arf arf arf,”
Fredric Mark Jablin, an assistant professor, barked as he began hurriedly stowing the day’s work in his briefcase for the night. Some said Jablin, a wiry man with a quiet manner, spare physique, glasses, and receding hairline, resembled a young Woody Allen. A serious nearly thirty-year-old who’d already made his mark in the academic world, Jablin had a playful nature, a sharp sense of humor, and a zest for living. He’d been the one to start this nightly ritual, a canine call to arms that alerted colleagues it was time for a bit of merriment.
From down the hall came an answer:
“Woof woof,”
assistant professor John Daly barked back, brusque and loud.
Tall, with a warm manner and intelligent, intense eyes, Daly looked up from his work and smiled, then glanced at his watch. Laughing softly, he closed the books he’d been combing through, stacking them in a pile for morning.
Just then Jablin peered in Daly’s office door. “Ready to go?” he asked with a wide grin.
6 / Kathryn Casey
“Let’s be off,” Daly said with a fl ourish.
Moments later the clacking of their heels filled the hallways as they hurried out of the building, then across the street, eager for a beer at the nearby Hole in the Wall bar.
As hard as Jablin and Daly worked throughout that long day and into the eve ning, teaching and compiling data for their research, they played equally hard at night. It was an exuberant time in both their lives, one filled with promise and expectation. They’d studied long and hard, and now they were at the beginning of their careers, John in interpersonal communications, while Fred was a rising star in a burgeon-ing field: organization al communication, the study of how people within corporations and organizations interact. While it may have seemed dry to many, to Jablin it held excitement and great promise, giving him the opportunity to explore what made some associations work while others failed. The implications were invaluable in business, education, even, at its very core, in life.