Buried Memories (14 page)

After Chaplain Burris collected his thoughts, he said to Betty, “You would get life insurance and the pension.”

“How much insurance?”

“I’d have to check into that. But I’m sure there’d be some.”

“What about the pension? How much would that be?”

“I’ll check into that too.”

Betty smiled warmly at him.

When Deputy Fire Chief Jim Blackburn pulled his car up to Betty’s property that Sunday, he found her in her front yard, watering flowers. He stepped out, his posture straight with confidence.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” he said, with a touch of sympathy in his voice. He introduced himself. “They’ve got me in charge of this search for your husband. I sure am sorry, ma’am. I thought a lot of Jimmy Don. We were good, long-time friends.”

Betty nodded, but showed no emotion. Instead, she continued dragging the hose around, watering the hanging pots above her front porch.

“I hate to bother you,” he said, “but I came to get a little information. We need to know what Jimmy Don was wearing that night he went out fishing. It would help us since we’re dragging the lake. We might find some of the clothing.”

Blackburn found himself staring at her face. Her eyes lacked the redness from shedding tears and she seemed too calm under the circumstances. He saw no evidence of grieving.

“He’d have on shorts,” Betty said. “That night probably didn’t get much under eighty. He might have had on his blue-plaid shirt. It’s hard to remember. When he went out the door that night I didn’t think to pay attention to his clothes. Had no idea I wouldn’t see him again.”

“Yes, ma’am. I know this is hard. Would he have worn a hat?”

She thought for a moment. “He might have out of habit. On the other hand, maybe not since it was night.” Betty moved to the wishing well and began watering the flowers there.

Chaplain Burris returned for his third visit with Betty. He had still not seen her cry over the loss of her husband and that puzzled him.

Betty eagerly greeted him at her door that morning, and asked what he had found out.

“Jimmy Don had a fair amount of insurance,” Burris told her. Over $110,000. There’s also a double-indemnity clause in some. His insurance is doubled because his death was accidental. And, of course, Mr. Beets’s pension plan pays survivor benefits, so you’d receive those too. They’d probably be in the neighborhood of roughly $900 a month for the rest of your life.”

Betty’s smile lit up the room. “When would I get the insurance and the pension?”

Burris cleared his throat. “The pension is governed by the Dallas Fire and Police Pension Board, and they’ll have to meet to decide about paying that.”

A frown quickly replaced Betty’s smile. “And the insurance?” she asked.

“Texas law is pretty strict about paying death benefits when there’s no body. If a body isn’t found, no payment is made for seven years.”

Betty unconsciously stepped backward and her hand flew to her opened mouth.
“Seven years?
What do they expect me to do in the meantime?”

Churches announced the discovery of Jimmy Don’s empty boat. Local television and radio stations also aired the information. His neighbors in Glen Oaks were in shock, for they’d just seen Jimmy Don the day before when he came by to help his ex-wife and her husband with their boat.

That Sunday, Betty visited the Glen Oaks house and Russ Leonard spotted her. He rushed to offer his condolences.

She looked at him with clear blue eyes and pleaded, “Russ, I know something really bad’s happened to Jimmy Don. I know it has and you’ve got to help us find him. Please, Russ.”

Her emotional pleadings touched Leonard, and he agreed to look for him. He went to the dock behind his house to untie his boat, all the time musing that up until today he had only had a few scattered conversations with Betty. Now she treated him as her long-lost friend.

Her words continued to ring in his ears.
You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to help me.

He felt sorry for her and worried that Jimmy Don could be out there somewhere still alive. He spent the rest of the day cruising the lake and found himself only one of an army of searchers. Later that night, he secured his boat and stepped with heavy feet onto his dock, all the while pondering his earlier conversation with Betty and the information he had gleaned about Jimmy Don’s boat. He heard about the glasses and heart pills, but he’d never seen Jimmy Don with those.

The more he thought about the search, the more confused he became. Jimmy Don would never go out on the lake alone—he always had someone around. Something was wrong. The facts weren’t adding up.

Jamie Beets’s aunt woke him on the morning after authorities found his father’s empty boat. Jamie immediately rushed to Cedar Creek to search. But first the Coast Guard took him to see his father’s boat. The sight of his father’s pride and joy shocked Jamie.

“My dad wasn’t on this boat,” Jamie insisted to the Coast Guard. “None of my dad’s habits had been followed. See that Plexiglas shelf?” he said, pointing. “That’s where he always put his CB for safety’s sake. Said he wouldn’t leave a dock without it.”

He glanced at the nitroglycerin tablets. “Dad had a heart attack five years ago, but he hadn’t used those in two years.

“He’s somewhere else and I bet Betty knows where he is. You just go round up Betty and make her tell you what happened to Dad.”

“Now calm down,” one of the searchers said. “You’re covered up with grief and getting carried away with your imagination.”

That only made Jamie angrier.

Then a couple of days later, he heard Betty had gone to the fire department to collect Jimmy Don’s final paycheck. Jamie felt he needed to do something about her, so he made an appointment with Reed Canton, a lawyer in Gun Barrel City, who coincidentally had used his own airplane to search for Jimmy Don. He wanted the lawyer to tie up his father’s assets to keep them out of Betty’s hands until they found out what had actually happened.

“Take a deep breath, Jamie, and try to relax,” Canton said. “I think a lot of your fears are springing from emotion and grief.”

Jamie realized Canton knew of his previous drug use and his dislike of Betty, and wondered if the lawyer thought he had hallucinated the story.

Later, Jamie discussed his concerns with law enforcement, his wife, and other members of his family. Not one person took him seriously.

Devastated by the news that seven years would elapse before she could gain anything from murdering Jimmy Don, Betty started laying claim to his property and prepared for an all-out war with his son. Within a week of Jimmy Don’s disappearance, Betty bought two Doberman pinschers and tied them up in the backyard of the pretty blue house on Oak Street. They would act as sentries, her first line of defense in her war with Jamie.

Then Jimmy Don’s father began driving by his son’s Glen Oaks neighborhood. The old red Ford pickup drove slowly down Oak Street, never over twenty-five miles an hour. Jimmy Don’s father was a familiar sight in Glen Oaks and he had many friends there. Friends he’d met through his son. He stopped if he saw any of them in their yards.

J. R. Burton busily sawed branches from a limb that the wind had blown off one of his oak trees when “Beets” came by, the name everyone called the old man.

Burton immediately went to Beets’s open window. The old man had lived by the lake for four decades and never understood why people needed air conditioning.

“I haven’t cried in years,” Burton told him, “but I cried when I heard about Jimmy Don. This has gotta be the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. Just against nature to lose a son. Marion and I sure want you to know how sorry we are.”

“Hurump!” the man said in disgust. “It’s the way I lost him that bothers me most. That no-good woman of his had something to do with this. Betty always tried to keep my son away from me, and she sure as hell wouldn’t come over to see me and the missus. You just mark my words,” he said, pointing a weathered, crooked finger at Burton. “My boy ain’t in that lake. She’s killed him and put him somewhere.”

Because of all the questionable circumstances of Jimmy Don’s disappearance, Burton wanted to say that he held that same thought, but Beets didn’t look like he needed encouragement.

“He was the best son a man could ever ask for,” Beets continued. “Yes, sir. Even with Betty trying to keep him to herself, he called every day to check up on us, and like clockwork he’d be there each week to cut our grass. And that’s not ’cause he didn’t have other things to do. No way. That boy had a million friends. Could have been out with his buds every minute, but he always looked after his old parents.” Beets turned in the direction of his son’s house.

“What’s with those dogs at Jimmy Don’s?”

“Looks like Betty’s trying to establish her territory,” Burton offered. “Maybe if her dogs are peeing on Jimmy Don’s property it makes it hers.”

“Look at those things,” Beets said. “Digging up the yard. Trashing out all of Jimmy Don’s hard work.”

“Betty or her boys come over a few times a week to water and feed them,” Burton said.

Both men watched the dogs nose through the grass and paw at the dirt.

“Probably trying to dig up a body,” Beets said. Then without waiting for a reply, he slowly drove on to spread his message to the next neighbor, or anyone else who would listen.

TWELVE

At the time Jamie heard the news of his father’s drowning, he was living in an apartment in Dallas with his wife and two small children to be near his heating and air-conditioning repair job. While he lived there, he couldn’t help but worry that Betty would be spinning her web over everything his father owned. Since he couldn’t get law enforcement or even his own attorney to act, he decided to strike out on his own and protect what he considered rightfully his.

In order to make it appear that he lived in his father’s lake house, six weeks after his father disappeared, Jamie began spending each weekend at the Glen Oaks home. He’d leave after work on Friday and return late Sunday night. Jamie had heard about Betty’s dogs, but she had apparently tired of caring for them, for they were no longer there.

His plan worked well until late October, when his wife became annoyed with the arrangement. One Sunday night, Jamie returned to his empty apartment, save for a note on the kitchen countertop. His wife had penned a message saying she had taken his children, all the furniture, and wanted a divorce.

Four months after Jimmy Don’s disappearance, a deputy listened to an excited Betty Henderson, who had called the sheriff’s office. She identified herself as Jimmy Don’s sister from Dallas.

“My daughter, Kathy, saw Jimmy Don last night,” she told the deputy. “I couldn’t believe it was true.”

The deputy pulled out a report form. “Where did she see him?”

“In the Denny’s Restaurant in Duncanville, just south of Dallas. I think it was around one in the morning.”

“Did she talk to him?”

“She couldn’t bring herself to because she thought she was seeing a ghost. Can’t you imagine how she felt? But she saw him plain as day. That restaurant’s always so brightly lit. It really flustered her, beings we’re all looking for him and so worried about him. She ran to the phone and called me, but by the time I got over there, he had left.”

“If she didn’t talk to him, how can she be sure it was Mr. Beets?” the deputy asked, his voice embracing skepticism that had to be noticed by Mrs. Henderson.

“When I got over there, we talked to the same waitress that had waited on him. We showed her Jimmy Don’s picture and she said, ‘Yes, that’s the man who was here.’ She remembered him coming in at the same time as a couple did, and he told her to go ahead and wait on them first. To me, that sure sounded like Jimmy Don.”

Everyone held a theory of what had happened to Jimmy Don. Even months after his disappearance, his name still came up in lake area cafés and bars.

A good friend of Jimmy Don’s from the fire department, Craig Hollander, shared his theory with Sheriff Charlie Fields.

As anxious to solve the crime as anyone, the sheriff patiently listened to all ideas about the mystery. Fields had followed his father’s footsteps into law enforcement. His father’s goal was to be Henderson County’s sheriff, but as a deputy, his father had been shot and killed while serving a warrant. Inspired to fulfill his father’s ambition, Fields worked as a deputy until his election to sheriff. Under his tutelage, what little crime Henderson County had, decreased even more. And when time came for his second term, he ran unopposed.

Hollander entered the sheriff’s office, which had walls covered with sports and law enforcement awards, as well as plaques of appreciation from the Rotary to the local Girl Scout troops. He sat in front of the sheriff’s desk and began his theory.

“We all know Jimmy Don’s not in that lake.”

Fields nodded. “Yep. Covered every square inch of it.”

“And I don’t buy that heart attack angle either. Right before he disappeared, he had a physical and passed with flying colors. I also know that he needed glasses only for reading. Certainly not for fishing in the dark. Besides, if they were in his pocket, they’d gone overboard with him.”