04.Die.My.Love.2007 (29 page)

The rec ords were continuing to trickle in slowly under the court orders Ashman was writing with Hanna and Williamson. Finally, at about 1:10 p.m., something substantive arrived from the Wells Fargo Bank via the offi ce fax machine: the purchases made on the Jerry Walters debit card during the days preceding and the murder.

On the

bank-card rec

ords, Ashman and Williamson

quickly zeroed in on one entry, a purchase from the Paris Boutique Wigs that sold on the Internet site wigsalon.com.

206 / Kathryn Casey

The entry that caught Williamson’s attention was invoice 430211, for the amount of $261.73, including tax and delivery charges. When Williamson called the company’s main office, in Miami Beach, Florida, she was told that the bill was for the purchase of two “Stevie” wigs, long and fl owing past the shoulders in layers that the website touted as promoting a “sensuous essence.” One was a brash red called Paprika Root, the other Frosti Blond, long layers of blond highlights. Both the wigs, as per the instructions that came with the order, were shipped to a Jerry Walters at an address on Kingwood Drive in Kingwood, Texas. When Owen Ashman looked at a map on the Internet, she discovered the address wasn’t far from Piper Rountree’s rented house.

When Ashman called the wig company and talked with Eleonor Ceballos, the clerk who’d taken the order, Ashman learned something else interesting. When the original order came in on the Internet, both wigs were on sale at a reduced price. By the time the wigs were to be shipped, the blond wigs that they had earmarked for the sale were sold out. The red wig was shipped without the blond one, accompanied by a note that said the blond wig would be shipped when it again became available at the sale price. The day the Paprika Root wig arrived, October 25, five days before the murder, a woman had called and talked with Ceballos, upset that she hadn’t received the Frosti Blond wig.

“The customer told me to ship the blond Stevie wig at full price on a rush, overnighting it to the same address,” Ceballos explained. The woman wanted the wig enough not only to pay full price, an additional $44, but Federal Express charges of $34.95 to have the wig by October 27, the day before someone traveling as Tina Rountree boarded the Southwest Airlines flight to Baltimore that connected to Norfolk, Virginia.

“She said that it was urgent she get the wig,” said Ceballos. “She absolutely had to have it.”

DIE, MY LOVE / 207

If Piper Rountree had committed the murder and used the wig as a disguise, then, Owen judged, the initial purchase a full nine days before the killing showed how long the murder had been planned. Another entry on the Jerry Walters debit card records backed up that logic. Also on the twenty-fifth, at 4:30 p.m., the same day the woman was putting a rush on a blond wig, someone had tried to use the debit card to purchase a ticket to Norfolk on the Southwest Airlines website. The purchase was declined for lack of funds. That situation changed days later when a thousand-dollar deposit went into the account. Then, on October 28, this time at the Southwest ticket counter at Houston’s Hobby Airport, the card was used again, to purchase the round-trip tickets from Houston to Baltimore to Norfolk and back in the name of Tina Rountree.

What the rec ords showed about the card from that date forward was just as interesting. Throughout the rest of the week, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the debit card was used in the Richmond area. The first time was on Thursday, October 28, shortly after the flight arrived, at a Shell gas station in the Norfolk area, near the airport.

Then, the bank rec ords brought the card into the West End, within a small cohesive area, near the intersection of Cox and Broad Streets, in the same area as the Sprint records indicated Piper Rountree’s cell phone was used at 4:36

on the morning of the murder.

First, it was used at 10:57 on October 29, the day before the murder, to withdraw $200 from an ATM at an East Coast gas station on Broad Street. Later that day the card was used at a 7-Eleven convenience store just down the street. Still later that same day, a purchase was made on the card at a nearby CVS pharmacy: $46.95 in merchandise.

Hanna and others fanned out across Richmond to follow the new leads, while Ashman added another assignment to Coby Kelley’s growing Houston list: to go to the Kingwood 208 / Kathryn Casey

address listed for Jerry Walters, the place where the wigs were shipped, and try to talk to Walters, to determine who he was and how he was connected to Piper Rountree.

In Richmond that afternoon another piece of evidence made its way to Wade Kizer’s desk, the autopsy performed by Dr.

Deborah Kay, a Henrico County medical examiner, on the body of Fredric M. Jablin. Kay described Jablin as a “well-developed, thin, white male, with his hands in paper bags.”

The bags had been put on by police at the scene to protect them until the M.E. had time to test for gunshot residue, to determine if Fred had fired a weapon. During the autopsy, Kay had administered an atomic absorption (AA) analysis, capable of finding even trace amounts, and found no indication Fred Jablin had fi red a gun. Dr. Kay also found no defensive wounds on his hands, indicating there hadn’t been a struggle with his assailant. The lack of gun residue on his clothing indicated he hadn’t been shot at a close range.

A wound Kay labeled gunshot number two was fairly innocuous, entering the soft tissue of Fred Jablin’s right arm and exiting without hitting any vital tissue, back to front, downward, from the right to the left. That bullet was recovered on the crime scene. The more serious wound was one Dr. Kay labeled gunshot number one, a bullet that entered Fred’s body from the back, piercing his lower right side. Inside his body, the bullet did massive damage, ripping through his spleen, kidney, liver, diaphragm, and aorta. Gunshot wound number one was the fatal one.

When ballistics reports came in, the bullets were identified as .38 or .357 caliber Federal Hydrashock, nickel bullets, designed with a hollow point to infl ict signifi cant damage when entering a body. The most likely scenario, from the angle of the bullets, was that the killer stood near the garage, perhaps waiting for Fred as he came out to get his morning newspaper, then approached him and shot. That DIE, MY LOVE / 209

there

were no casings found suggested that the murder weapon was probably a revolver, a type of weapon that didn’t eject empty casings after fi ring.

“This type of bullet is designed to kill,” Kay would later say.

What the doctor couldn’t say was a subject that was being talked about all through Richmond: Would Fred Jablin have lived if he’d been found sooner? Dr. Kay wasn’t sure. In her estimation, due to the extent of the wounds, he could have died almost instantly or he could have hung on for an unde-termined period of time.

That Fred lay dead or dying in his driveway for more than an hour after the first 911 call infuriated many in Richmond, who believed the fi rst officers on the scene should have found him, perhaps in time for paramedics to have saved his life. But those on the scene, including the McArdles, who’d found the body, didn’t believe the officers had done anything wrong. Bob McArdle had watched Maggi and his partner comb the street with their flashlights, searching for the source of the shots. Even when Bob and his wife, Doreen, stood at the base of the Jablins’ driveway talking to their neighbor, they couldn’t see the body until after sunlight broke. “It was so dark out there, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says McArdle.

In his office, Kizer looked over the autopsy, while throughout Richmond the investigation went on.

That afternoon, Hanna drove to the CVS pharmacy where the Jerry Walters debit card had been used the day before the murder. When he showed the clerk who’d rung up the purchase the copy of the receipt, the man couldn’t identify the pretty woman in the red dress in Hanna’s photo as the person who’d made the purchase. But Hanna didn’t walk away empty-handed. When he tracked down what items were purchased on the receipt, another piece of evidence clicked into place. That $46.95 charge, he discovered, was 210 / Kathryn Casey

for the purchase of makeup, including mascara and lipstick, premoistened towelettes of the type used to remove makeup, and something that couldn’t help but catch his eye: a box of latex gloves, size small.

Before calling it quits for the day, a disappointing one, in Houston, Kelley and Dorton drove back out to Kingwood, to the address on Kingwood Drive where the wigs had been shipped. What they found wasn’t a house or an apartment belonging to a mystery man named Jerry Walters, but a Mail & More store, where packages were shipped and private mail boxes rented out to individuals.

By the time they held the second meeting of the day on the Rountree case, that eve ning, Kelley had one more piece of information for Kizer, Ashman, Stem, and the others in the Henrico conference room. Not only had Kelley and Dorton tracked down the address to the Mail & More store, they’d discovered that one of the postal boxes in the store was registered in two names: Jerry Walters and Piper Rountree.

“What more do you want?” Stem asked Kizer at the meeting the following morning. The two men were old friends and this was a familiar argument, the police wanting to make an arrest and the prosecutor holding them back, asking for more. Stem argued that the case had come together enough to arrest Piper Rountree. He wanted her house searched and her car impounded, before she destroyed evidence. Kizer, on the other hand, wasn’t about to risk walking into a courtroom without enough evidence to get a conviction.

“Find someone who saw her in Richmond that Friday or Saturday. Someone who can positively identify her,” he said again. “Then we’ll get a warrant.”

In Kizer’s mind, it wasn’t like they were dealing with a serial killer who would kill again. Piper Rountree was dangerous to one person—Fred Jablin. He was the only one she had a motive to kill, and he was already dead. “The police DIE, MY LOVE / 211

aren’t the ones in the courtroom trying the case,” says Kizer.

“They don’t understand what you need to get a conviction.”

That morning, Tuesday, November 2, Coby drove Robin Dorton to the airport to catch a flight back to Richmond. Dorton had a family emergency and was needed at home. At the same time in Richmond, Chuck Hanna was going over cell phone rec ords again with Cindy Williamson when something caught his eye, an entry for a phone number he recognized.

“That’s Papa John’s pizza,” he told Williamson. “I know, because I call it to order pizzas myself.”

“Do you keep a database with your customer’s names and rec ords of purchases?” Hanna asked the manager at the piz-zeria when he got him on the telephone.

“We do,” the man said.

“Would you check to see if you have a Rountree?” Hanna asked.

Minutes passed while Hanna held onto the telephone.

When the man got back on, he said, “Yes, we have a Rountree. She called from the Homestead Suites on Broad Street, and we delivered the pizza to Room 171, last Thursday evening.”

“This could be it,” Hanna said as he hung up the telephone. He’d had a feeling about that hotel ever since the fi rst day of the investigation. Plus, it was strategically located, near the fi rst phone call the morning of the murder and every place the debit card had been used.

That afternoon, Hanna and his partner, Bill “B.K.” Kuecker, drove to the Papa John’s with a photo of Piper Rountree, hoping to secure what Kizer said he needed, an eyewitness who could place Rountree in Virginia. Once there, they waited while the manager shuffled through a pile of receipts, finally coming up with the one for a large pizza delivered to a Rountree at the Homestead Suites. When the driver who’d made the delivery arrived, however, he couldn’t 212 / Kathryn Casey

help the officers with their problem. Before he even looked at the photo, he said, “I’ve probably delivered a hundred pizzas since this one. I couldn’t identify anybody.”

“Would you look at the photo for us,” Hanna asked. “Just to be sure?”

The driver agreed. Hanna handed him the photo and the man was quiet, staring at it, thinking. “That doesn’t remind me of anyone,” he finally said. “Sorry, but I can’t help.”

“If someone stopped you in the parking lot and took the pizza, if you hadn’t actually delivered it to the room, would you remember that?” Hanna asked.

“Yes,” he said. “That I’d remember.”

“Thanks,” Hanna told him, and moments later he and his partner were back in their car headed toward the Homestead Suites. This time he had a room number: 171. But when the clerk at the front desk looked the room registration up, the name of the occupant that night didn’t answer any questions, just brought up more possibilities. “Last Thursday night, that room was in the name of a Jerrilyn Smith,” the woman said.

“Damn,” Hanna said. “Who the heck is she?” Could she have been a friend of Piper Rountree, a hit woman, or someone totally unrelated to the case?

Back at the office, Hanna put the name Jerrilyn Smith through the computer and nothing of interest came up. Somehow, he knew this Smith woman was involved, but how?

For the rest of the day, Chuck Hanna made cold calls to the phone numbers on the cell phone rec ords supplied by Sprint, the one for Piper Rountree’s cell phone ending in 7878. One by one he wrote in who the numbers were assigned to. “Who are you?” he asked when he called.

“Who are you?” more often than not the people replied.

Meanwhile, that morning, Danny Jamison, the crime scene officer, met with Michael Jablin at the Hearthglow house.

DIE, MY LOVE / 213

Michael talked with the investigator while Mel and Barbara Boyd, the neighborhood mom who’d cared for the Jablin children after the murder, combed through the house with a list, looking for the clothing the children had asked for to wear to their father’s funeral. The meeting was a somber one, Michael Jablin still looking stunned.

Afterward, with the bank rec ords in hand, Jamison went to the places in Richmond where someone had used the Jerry Walters debit card, with subpoenas for any and all surveillance tapes from the day the card was used. Back at the office he watched them. On the tape from the 7-Eleven convenience store, he noticed a woman with long blond hair who looked enough like Piper to arouse his interest.