Body Hunter (5 page)

Chapter Six

Janie Ball was frightened. Ellen Blau had failed to come home overnight. Ellen had begun living with the Balls when she had finally given in to Janie's insistence and left her Polk Street apartment where the roof leaked and she kept getting bit by spiders. During this time, when Ellen was “in between” apartments, she shared space in the Balls' infant son's room while she saved money to move into her own place.

Just that morning, Blau had put down a deposit on an apartment. She was scheduled to move the next weekend. Ball remembered Ellen thinking out loud, figuring out how much of her paycheck would be going for rent.

It wasn't like Ellen not to come home, and certainly not like her not to call if she was going to be late.

Janie Ball ran her fingers through her light brown hair as her mind turned to the headlines in recent months.
WOMEN MISSING. WOMEN KILLED
. Janie began frantically making calls, trying to find Ellen.

Janie's distress heightened when a call came in from the bread delivery man who serviced the Subs 'N Suds.

“Is Ellen there?” the delivery man asked. “I saw her car down the street, parked in the side parking lot of The Country Store at Burkburnett and Puckett, near Sheppard Air Force Base.”

Janie Ball knew exactly where the store was located. Sheppard was on the outskirts of Wichita Falls. A technical training center, Sheppard hosted the only NATO pilot-training program in the world. The Country Store was close by.

“I'll be right there,” Ball replied. She hurriedly drove to The Country Store and immediately located Blau's car.

Janie opened the driver-side door and looked inside for any clue as to where Ellen might be. Seeing what looked like blood on the front seat of the unlocked, green VW Rabbit, Janie came close to hysteria. She immediately called her husband.

“The car is parked on the side of the store. The keys are in it. Her purse is in it. The shirt she was wearing last night is in it, along with a broken beer bottle. And something that looks like a trace of blood on the front seat,” Janie Ball frantically told her husband. “She was very responsible. I can't figure it out. It's a mystery.”

Although police cautioned them not to jump to conclusions, friends began to gather together to form a search party. Ellen Blau had to be found.

As police began to investigate Blau's disappearance as they would any other missing person's report, Janie Ball had one thousand posters printed and asked citizens of Wichita Falls to join the search.

“We just want to find her,” Janie told reporters tearfully. Her best friend was gone without a trace. She intended to do everything she could to find her.

The Wichita Falls police weren't prepared to rule Ellen Blau's disappearance a homicide. There were no signs of a struggle. No clues leading to a theory of abduction. No body.

Six SWAT team members searched the area where the abandoned car was found, but there was nothing that suggested Ellen hadn't left the car voluntarily. The car was impounded and processed for clues but, again, leads were elusive. And even though the case had many similarities to the murder of Toni Gibbs, an abandoned car found with her purse, keys, and blood on the interior, authorities still believed they were dealing with separate killers.

Rima Blau, Ellen's mother, had arrived in Wichita Falls from Shelton, Connecticut, soon after she had received news of Ellen's disappearance. She was tired. Her eyes were drawn, the lines in her face deepened by concern. Ellen's father had been forced to remain in Connecticut to operate his business. Ellen's brother had stayed behind with their father, leaving Rima Blau alone in an unfamiliar city. She welcomed the generosity of Janie and Danny Ball, staying at their apartment while she waited for word about her daughter. There wasn't much she could do, but waiting in Texas was better than being in a vacuum of silence in Connecticut. At least in Texas she could talk to Ellen's friends and to the police. She would know what was being done to find her daughter.

“I'm just trying to understand everything,” she told Janie, her New England accent laced with confusion.

Janie Ball put her arms around the attractive, dark-haired woman. She loved Ellen like a sister, but she couldn't imagine what Mrs. Blau must be going through. She was facing a mother's worst fears. Although Mrs. Blau was greatly distraught, she refused to believe anything bad had happened to her daughter.

“She's very practical by nature,” Mrs. Blau told Janie. “She has a very strong sense of responsibility. She knows the meaning and purpose of doing a job well. She was an A student in high school.”

Mrs. Blau couldn't help but reflect on the future she had hoped would be her daughter's. But the headstrong young woman had left home three years earlier to pursue a relationship that had only lasted six months. By then, Ellen had made friends in Wichita Falls and decided to remain and attend school at Midwestern State. She knew the importance of education and wanted a degree.

“If I don't go back to school, my mind is going to get stagnant,” she had told her mother.

Ellen's mother recalled her daughter's stubbornness, which had started at birth. She had been weeks overdue, not coming until mid-March after Rima Blau's father died. Her mother had been told by doctors that it was nature's way of taking care of her until the loss of her father passed. She knew now it was just the beginning of her daughter's strong-willed presence.

Through the years the headstrong young woman had shown courage in pursuing whatever interested her, even if it had meant conflict with her parents. Rima Blau now wished that she could have somehow talked Ellen into staying at the Choate School. She wished her daughter had never come to Wichita Falls.

Making every effort to help find Ellen, Mrs. Blau spent hours with the police. She left disappointed when she was told, “There's nothing to go on at this time.” Though she was assured that five men had been assigned to the case, Rima Blau wondered if enough was being done to find Ellen.

The people closest to Ellen did the most for the despairing mother. Ellen's friends visited with Mrs. Blau while she stood vigil and made phone calls. Subs 'N Suds' management offered a one-thousand-dollar reward to anyone with information about Ellen, and the owner of the restaurant added an additional one thousand dollars.

“She's the best we ever had,” Curtis Cates, the manager, said of his valued worker after announcing the reward. “Everybody's been a little more careful. We walk all the girls to their cars each night. I think they follow each other home as well.”

Ellen's cousin, Kathleen Beller, a former actress on the ABC-TV show
Dynasty,
called LA police for advice; they in turn called Wichita Falls police for information. LA detectives were told there were no real leads in the puzzling disappearance of Ellen Blau. The family's frustrations mounted.

Even with all the displays of concern, police played it by the rules. Knowing that ninety percent of all crimes with victims are committed by friends or family, they questioned everyone. Everyone close to Ellen was given a lie detector test.

Fourteen police recruits and a borrowed helicopter diligently searched a field off Puckett Road, near where Ellen's car had been found. They came up empty handed. Finally, police made a desperate plea to citizens to call Crime Stoppers with any information concerning the missing woman. The two thousand dollars offered by the Subs 'N Suds was combined with four thousand dollars from the Blau family as an incentive for someone to come forward.

 

 

Tall grasses obscured the view of many of the open fields along rural Wichita County roads. The brown vegetation, dried from the scorching temperatures of the hot Texas summer, was being mowed by county road crews between the barbed-wire fence line and East Road. The driver of one of the high-seated tractors stopped and looked toward a mesquite tree not far from the fence line. His tractor motor idled roughly as he studied the indistinguishable form lying about twenty feet from the fence. The early afternoon sun shone brightly on the figure as recognition struck the driver.

It was a body. Hardly discernible as a human form, but nonetheless a body.

When Wichita County Sheriff's Deputy Tom Callahan arrived on the scene, he was led through the brush and a blanket of wild flowers to a badly decomposed body lying under the willowy branches of a mesquite tree close by the wall of a stock pond. The body was nude, except for one white sock, banded at the top with two yellow stripes. Flies swarmed around the decaying corpse that had been reduced to an almost skeletal state. Coyotes and other scavengers had added to the mutilation.

Callahan, his eyes shaded from the sun by the large brim of his Stetson hat, studied the blackish, swollen corpse. The body rested facedown on the native grass, the head turned to the left. The legs were extended and crossed at the knees. The buttocks was partially eaten away, as well as the victim's right arm that extended beyond her head. The skull was void of hair or flesh. Time, exposure to the elements, and wild animals had made it impossible to determine in the field if the person found by the county work crew was a man or a woman. It was a ghoulish sight that made even the former military policeman Callahan cringe.

Close by, a pair of blue jeans with one leg inside-out, tennis shoes, one sock, a bra, and a yellow-and-white T-shirt were found. Callahan looked closely at the blouse.

What's written on the front?
Callahan asked himself. He moved closer, his western boots squishing in the mud surrounding the pond.

“Beach party 1985,” the deputy read out loud.

Callahan ordered a guard be posted at the scene to secure the area, which was just north of Sheppard Air Force Base. The natural barriers, hills and ponds, kept sightseers and reporters from tracking through potential evidence.

Although the body was found outside the jurisdiction of the Wichita Falls police, county Sheriff Bill Burrow notified them that an unidentified body had been found. Missing Person's investigators immediately thought of Ellen Blau. The three-week time frame in which Blau had been missing matched the condition of the body Sheriff Burrow described. They telephoned Janie Ball and asked her to meet them at the police station.

“Mrs. Ball, a body has been found out in the county. We can't make a positive identification until an autopsy is completed. That will take about ten days. We want you to take a look at this and tell us if you recognize it,” investigators told Ball, handing her a shiny object.

Janie gasped as tears began to flow from her eyes. She held the fine gold chain in her hand. It was the necklace Ellen always wore. She clutched the emblem of the praying hands to her lips as she sobbed.

 

 

The decayed body was shipped to the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences (SWIF) in Dallas for an autopsy. Wichita Falls, like many of the 254 counties in Texas, did not have their own medical examiner. SWIF was faced with the responsibility of determining the cause of death for twelve to fifteen victims a day. Toxicology tests (which showed no drugs present in Ellen Blau's system), microscopic exams, and transcribing reports were all time consuming. Using SWIF resulted in time delays that not only affected law-enforcement personnel, but the families of victims as well.

Finally, the report on the Wichita Falls body was complete. Through dental records, the victim was positively identified as being Ellen Blau.

“Ellen Blau died of undetermined homicidal violence. We don't know exactly what caused her death,” Sheriff Burrow told the press. “The precise mechanism cannot be determined. Because of the condition of the body, it is speculated that she was killed the day she disappeared.”

Three factors were used by SWIF to determine a homicide had occurred. The remote location where the body was found; the fact that the woman's clothes had apparently been removed by force and strewn around the field; and evident signs of a struggle. Blau's watch had been found a long way from her body and bloodstains were also found some distance away.

Although it was feared as soon as the body was found that it was Ellen's, Janie Ball and the Blau family hopelessly had prayed that it would not be her. They'd held on to the false expectation that Ellen was okay and would be walking into the Ball apartment wearing the fun-loving grin she was best known for. Now they had to accept her death.

“We won't rest until the killer is found. We don't feel like it's the end at all,” Murray Blau told reporters by phone from his Shelton, Connecticut, home.

“It's in the hands of the police and sheriff's department now. We feel confident they're doing all the things that have to be done. We hope this will be brought to a hasty conclusion. I feel the good people of Wichita Falls are equally concerned.”

There was nothing left for the Blaus to do in Wichita Falls. Ellen's body was shipped back to Connecticut.

Investigators had hoped for a speedy resolution to the case, but they lacked a prime suspect. More than thirty people had been interviewed, most of them polygraphed, and they were no closer to solving the case.

Callahan and other investigators continued to work diligently. They followed up on every call from panicked citizens, grieving friends, and even weirdos.

One man, after being interviewed, shaved his head and sent an envelope containing his hair to Callahan. One self-proclaimed Ninja warrior called with information tying Blau's death to a Japanese warrior cult. It became a roller-coaster ride of false leads and hopeful breakthroughs.

Then there were calls from reporters who tried to find links between Blau's death and the murders of Sims and Gibbs. Investigators shunned the idea.