04.Die.My.Love.2007 (20 page)

Could one of them have been angry enough to want their professor dead?

Stem knew that the first forty-eight hours in a murder investigation were the most crucial. The Henrico P.D. had a policy they’d initiated in 1997, one that served them so well they’d cleared all but eight of the seventy-three homicides in the county since 2001. For the first two days, they fl ooded a murder case with staff and resources, everything available, to make sure no leads were left unexplored. “You’ve got to hit a homicide case hard, with everything you’ve got,” says Stem. “It’s the only way, hard and fast, because we want to lock up the bad guys.”

Before he proceeded any further on this particular case, however, he had a problem: what to do with the Jablin children, who remained in the rescue unit, parked on the street?

Family would be contacted, but that would take time. When the subject came up, Officer Harry Boyd cut in, explaining 150 / Kathryn Casey

that he and his wife, Barbara, lived two blocks away from the Jablins, and that they knew the Jablin children. Callie and his son were on the same soccer team and went to school together.

“I’d be happy to bring the kids to our house, to stay with my family, while we sort this out,” he said.

Stem thought for only a moment before agreeing. The children were going through enough, he figured. Why not at least let them stay with someone they knew? But Boyd wouldn’t be the only officer there to talk to them. Stem picked up the radio and called into headquarters. “Send the special victims unit out here to talk to the Jablin kids,” he ordered. “We need to know what they can tell us.”

That settled, Stem felt certain of two more priorities: He needed access to the inside of Fred Jablin’s house, pronto, and he wanted to make sure it was done properly, so that whatever he found inside would one day be admissible in a court of law.

“Hanna, get us a search warrant for the house,” Stem ordered Investigator Chuck Hanna, an African-American offi cer with a broad smile and an athletic build. As soon as Stem barked the order, Hanna took off, understanding the urgency and eager to comply.

The morning was moving quickly; by eight-thirty the Jablin children were at the Boyd house, and Stem had Hearthglow Lane crawling with uniformed and plainclothes offi cers.

Some searched sewers, looking for the murder weapon. In the driveway, crime scene specialist Danny Jamison began collecting samples from around the body. Jamison, a gray-haired officer with arched, dark eyebrows, had been on his way to help build a Habitat for Humanity home with his wife and daughter when the call came in that he had a murder scene to process. He’d arrived quickly and gotten right to work, swab-bing blood on the driveway, hoping it might have the DNA of the killer. In plastic bags, he placed Fred’s eyeglasses and a “to do” list another officer discovered on the driveway DIE, MY LOVE / 151

near the Explorer. It had a list of handwritten instructions, including taking the car to the shop and picking up the laundry.

Throughout the morning, Captain Stem and Sergeant Russell acted as coordinators, deploying the manpower on the scene. On their orders, officers fanned out to canvass Hearthglow, talking to neighbors. Stem had already contacted Wade Kizer, the commonwealth’s attorney in charge of the county’s staff of criminal prosecutors. Stem reached Kizer while he was out to breakfast with friends. “We’ve got a man shot dead in his driveway on the West End,” Stem told him.

“I’ll be right there,” Kizer said.

While the others worked Hearthglow and Hanna hurried back to headquarters to type up the request for the search warrant, Kelley decided to talk to the people who’d found the body. The McArdles stood nearby, still stunned by their early morning discovery, not wanting to be there but unable to tear themselves away from the horror unfolding around them. Quickly, they explained to Kelley what had happened that morning, then turned the conversation to Fred’s divorce.

“You need to talk to Melody Foster. She lives directly behind Fred,” Doreen suggested. “She was close to Fred, and she can tell you a lot more about Piper than we can.”

“It was a horrible divorce,” Mel told Kelley, after he’d rung her doorbell and introduced himself. Just a short time earlier, Pete had come into the bedroom to tell her what had happened. Mel and Pete had both slept through the shooting, and he’d learned of it from a neighbor, who’d seen the children being shepherded by SWAT officers out the back door. What would happen to Jocelyn, Paxton, and Callie now? Mel wondered, shivering from the news. Wanting to help, she gave Kelley everything he asked for, including the name of the woman Fred was dating, Charlene; Piper’s ex-paramour, Dr. Gable; the Jablin children’s nannies; and the 152 / Kathryn Casey

information on how to find Piper’s best friend in Richmond, Loni. Throughout the conversation, Mel explained to Kelley the turbulence of the Rountree-Jablin divorce, including telling him of Piper’s false domestic violence charges against Fred. Piper, as Kelley was learning, was capable of nearly anything to get what she wanted.

“For a long time, Fred was afraid of Piper,” Melody said.

“But lately, things seemed better. He was hoping maybe the worst was over.”

By the time Wade Kizer—who’d worked at the commonwealth attorney’s office for twenty-five years and had led it for four—arrived on the scene, the coroner’s office was getting ready to remove Fred Jablin’s body. Pictures had been taken, and Jamison, the lead crime scene investigator on the case, had inspected and documented the area. He’d found one copper-jacketed bullet on the right side of the body, in the grass, but no shell casings. After checking in with Stem, Kizer—a balding man with a monk’s fringe of brown hair, glasses, and a halting manner of speech—talked to Sergeant Russell. “We need to send someone to the university to secure the victim’s office,” said Kizer. “We don’t want anyone going in and out, nothing disturbed, until we’ve had a thor-ough look.” Russell nodded, and dispatched two offi cers to the University of Richmond.

Word had already reached the campus that morning that someone had been killed on the West End, and that the victim could be Fred Jablin. A UR employee who lived near Kingsley had even driven by and seen what appeared to be Fred’s body in the driveway. Calls went out to faculty, and a group gathered to contact Fred Jablin’s students. Dean Ruscio didn’t want students hearing on the radio or television that their professor was dead. When Ruscio called Joanne Ciulla to tell her Fred had been murdered, she blurted out,

“Oh my God. Piper killed Fred.”

DIE, MY LOVE / 153

Two years earlier, a group of officers had come to the Jepson School to arrest Fred Jablin. Now, late on the morning after his death, a second group arrived, asking to be directed to his office. Once there, they installed their own lock and strung yellow crime scene tape across the door.

At 10:00 a.m., Captain Stem’s phone rang. Hanna was on his way back to the crime scene with the signed search warrant in hand.

“We’re in,” Stem told Russell. “Let’s get going.”

With that, Kelley, Jamison, and a few select offi cers moved into the two-story house in which just four hours earlier Fred was brewing his morning coffee and getting ready to take the children to the neighborhood pumpkin festival. Later, neighbors would remember how the year before Fred had asked them to take pictures of him with the children. “In the past, I always took the pictures of Piper with the kids,” he’d said, handing them his camera. “We don’t have many of me with them.” Now, those few photos would become precious, holding dear, never-repeated memories.

In the driveway, the coroner’s technician was inserting Fred Jablin’s lifeless body into a black vinyl bag. Moments later the corpse was loaded into the back of the M.E.’s hearse, to be transported to the morgue for autopsy. Jewish custom disdains disturbing remains, but even if someone in Fred’s family had complained, the result would have been the same. His body was a prime piece of evidence, and until they were finished with it, within the jurisdiction of the Henrico County Police Department.

At the Boyds’ house, the Jablin children were being gently questioned by Investigator Judy Berger, of the Henrico P.D.

Special Victims Unit. It had taken time. Before offi cers could begin, their rabbi, Martin Beifield, had been called to come 154 / Kathryn Casey

to the house from Congregation Beth Ahabah. It was a sad duty. Just the night before, Fred had been at the synagogue with the children for Friday night services. When he told them of their father’s death, the three children sobbed, at fi rst uncontrollably. Finally, after much coaxing, they settled down, and Investigator Berger was able to talk to them. Afraid to again upset them, she proceeded slowly.

Of the three children, Jocelyn was the only one who’d heard the shots. Not knowing what they were, she’d rolled back over and gone back to sleep, never dreaming that her father could be dying just steps from their own back door.

When Berger asked if she and Fred had fought, or if she had a boyfriend he didn’t care for, someone he was trying to push out of her life, the fifteen- year- old answered unequiv-ocally.

“No,” Jocelyn said. “My dad wasn’t mad at me, and I don’t have any boyfriends.”

All the children insisted their relationships with their father were great. There were no problems.

Nothing out of the ordinary had happened the night before, they all agreed. Fred had made them dinner and then taken them to the synagogue. They returned home about ten, and immediately got dressed for bed. When they were ready, Fred tucked each of the children in and kissed them good-night, as he did every night. Saturday was to be a busy day. Callie and Paxton each had soccer games, and then there was the neighborhood pumpkin festival at Gayton Crossing Shopping Center.

Such ordinary plans, and then something extraordinarily tragic had changed everything.

It would prove to be an emotional and diffi cult morning at the Boyd house, as Berger led the children through the questions she needed answered. The children knew of no one who was angry with their father. At first they weren’t DIE, MY LOVE / 155

sure when their mother had called them last. “She calls a lot,” they said. Then Paxton remembered Friday afternoon, after school, when he’d been in a friend’s garage with a group of his friends playing poker, like the celebrities on television. His mom had called, and he remembered talking to her, and then she talked to Russell Bootwright, one of his best friends.

“Where was she when she called?” Berger asked.

“She was in Texas, driving home from working in Galveston.”

“Did she sound mad at your father?”

“No,” Paxton said.

“What did she talk about?”

“A raccoon living under her porch,” the youngster said.

When Piper found out the boys were playing poker, she laughed and said she’d call later.

Callie, too, had talked with her mother on that Friday, at about six-thirty that eve ning, when Piper called the house.

Was she sure it was her mother? Yes, the little girl said, she was sure.

When Berger asked what their parents’ relationship was like, she was told “they get along.” The last time they’d seen their mother, they said, was a couple of weeks earlier, when they’d gone camping. They’d borrowed the camping gear from one of their mother’s friends, a man named Steve Byrum. Steve wasn’t a boyfriend, just a friend, but their father did have a woman he was dating, they said, a woman named Charlene.

Inside the Jablin house, Jamison noted that the house alarm had been turned off. He found the keys to Fred’s Explorer and two cell phones resting in cradles in the kitchen, charging. Picking through the house, Jamison looked for anything that appeared out of place, anything that could be remotely 156 / Kathryn Casey

important to the investigation. One officer found a photo in the children’s room of a woman in a red dress, a woman neighbors would identify as Piper Rountree, Fred Jablin’s ex- wife. The offi cer confiscated the photo for later use.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Chuck Hanna, who’d arrived with the warrant, flicked through the recent calls on the home phone and the two cell phones. On both phones he found a number that ended in 7878, one that displayed as “Mom’s Cell.” Inside the pantry, he found a phone number list, and there it was again: “Mom’s Cell” with the 7878 number.

At about the same time, Investigator Berger called Captain Stem from the Boyd house. “The kids are doing well,”

she told Stem. “They say they talked to their mother yesterday and that she was calling from Texas.”

“What kind of phone was she on?” Stem asked.

“I’m not sure,” Berger said.

“Find out,” he ordered.

“Look at this,” said Hanna, who’d wanted to be a police officer since childhood, when he met a friend’s detective father. Hanna showed Stem the cell phone with Piper’s phone number displayed on the screen. “Looks like the kids’ mom called yesterday on her cell phone.”

Just then, Stem’s own cell phone rang again.

“She called the kids on her cell phone,” Berger confi rmed.

“Bingo,” Stem said with a smile. “Get Cindy Williamson working on this. We need to subpoena the rec ords for the ex-wife’s cell.”

Williamson, a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length, graying brown hair and oval glasses, worked in the commonwealth attorney’s office as an expert at procuring and dissecting rec ords, including bank and phone rec ords. Already in the Henrico P.D. office organizing rec ords for another case that Saturday morning, when Stem put in the call, asking her to shift over to the Jablin investigation, she didn’t hesitate.

DIE, MY LOVE / 157

On the scene, Kizer offered to head back to headquarters.

“I’ll help Cindy write up the request for the subpoena,” he said. It wasn’t his favorite way to spend a Saturday. Henrico’s head prosecutor would have much preferred to have been with his wife and two sons, or saltwater fi shing, feeling the bite of the sharp ocean air on his face. But that wasn’t an option; a man named Fred Jablin had been murdered, and Kizer wanted as quickly as possible to find the person responsible. Perhaps Jablin’s ex-wife had nothing to do with his murder, but if she did, tracing her phone calls could turn out to be an important piece of evidence.