04.Die.My.Love.2007 (24 page)

182 / Kathryn Casey

Disappointed, Kelley hung up. They had to wait, he explained to Piper, until the children called back.

“While we’re waiting, do you have any questions about what happened to your ex-husband?” Kelley asked.

Piper replied, “No, Loni explained everything to me.”

“Where were you this weekend?” Kelley asked, getting right to the point.

Piper turned her eyes from him and looked visibly uncomfortable. He’d later describe it as “squirming.”

“Well, ummm . . .” she said.

As Kelley started to press her, the phone rang. It was Harry Boyd with the Jablin children, who’d been retrieved from the Halloween party, ready to talk to their mother.

Kelley handed Piper the telephone.

For the next thirty minutes Piper talked to her children.

While she talked, McVey introduced himself, telling the four officers that he was a former Harris County prosecutor and a criminal and civil lawyer. Kelley listened, but kept one ear on Piper’s conversation, hearing her counsel the children, as if they were her clients: “You don’t have to talk to them. You have the right to have a lawyer.”

At one point Piper was heard telling the children to “hang tight until you see a signed custody order,” then, “Paxton, your dad is dead. I don’t want you to be next . . . Paxton, I’m afraid for you guys . . . Your uncle Mike will inherit everything when you die. Paxton, there’s probably millions.

If I were you, I’d ask for police protection . . . I’d prefer you guys be with Loni.”

To Callie, Piper said, “I’m trying to figure out why you can’t come down here.”

A little while later Kelley heard her advising one of the children to be suspicious of Michael Jablin. “Your uncle is the only one who would profit from this,” she said.

Kelley listened, making a mental note of what was being DIE, MY LOVE / 183

said, the entire time carrying on a friendly conversation with McVey and the other officers. After she fi nished, Piper handed Coby his cell phone, and the officers guided her over to the reception area. Coby sat on the couch, next to Piper, who looked small and uncomfortable in the high- backed, tufted leather chair. McVey went back to his desk in the next room, sitting a dozen steps away, listening. He’d say later that he felt as if he were being drawn into a cyclone.

“Listen, I overheard your conversation. You seem to be indicating that Michael Jablin or the University of Richmond may have a motive,” Kelley said to Piper.

“Yes,” she answered, wringing her hands and twisting a white tissue until it resembled a thin white cord.

Just then Breck McDaniel surreptitiously turned on the small digital recorder he’d hidden in his shirt pocket.

“Are you saying that you think Michael or the university is involved?” Kelley asked.

“I don’t know,” Piper said, her voice breaking into violent sobs. “First of all, please don’t let them go with . . .”

“Mike?”

“Yes,” she said, crying even harder.

From his office, McVey interjected. “She’s going to tell you some things that were going on with her ex-husband’s life and stuff like that. She’s afraid that you folks are going to turn around and tell the kids.”

“Okay,” Kelley replied, calmly. “. . . We are not about trying to taint anyone’s view of their father . . . my interest is in pursuing this criminal case . . . in making sure the kids are safe and in a good environment. I don’t know her, and I certainly didn’t know her ex-husband. If we’re about to place [the children] in harm’s way, we certainly need to know that.”

“The only people who have anything to gain monetarily by Fred’s death, as far as I know, is Fred’s brother and his 184 / Kathryn Casey

wife,” Piper said. The brothers, she claimed, were far from close, rarely seeing each other or talking. “Michael has access. He’s the beneficiary, I’m sure, on Fred’s estate.”

As they talked, Piper threw out accusations, for which she offered no evidence. Perhaps, she suggested, her former brother-in-law had murdered Fred to get control of the estate and Fred’s life insurance money. While under Fred’s will the funds were to be kept in trust for the children, she claimed,

“Michael would have control of their monies.”

Piper drifted off, her mind carrying her into tangents, complaining about Michael as if he were Fred, charging that he’d kept the children from her, that he’d been the one who refused to give the children money to visit her in Houston.

“He kept us apart,” she sobbed.

She then turned her attention to the University of Richmond. Inflating UR’s more than $1 billion endowment to $3 billion, she claimed that Fred “had control of it all.” Not only did he have control of all the university’s funds, but, according to Piper, Fred Jablin, a professor who didn’t even sit on the school’s board, also controlled all the people who worked at UR. As Piper described him, Fred was a powerful and secretive man, one who had a private room in the garage, which he kept locked behind a steel door.

“I didn’t understand what was going on in the marriage,”

she said methodically, ripping the white cord she’d formed into small shards of tissue. “And, my sister deals with women’s issues . . .”

“Your sister, Tina?”

“I know, she’s a flake,” Piper said, her voice suddenly controlled and devoid of sadness, instead ironic with a slight laugh. “But . . . Fred for years grew marijuana and sold it.

Used it all the time . . . He took trips. Delivered things.”

For twenty minutes Piper threw out accusations, implying Fred wasn’t just a professor but a big-time drug dealer, and that any one of the people in his life but she could be respon-DIE, MY LOVE / 185

sible for his murder. Fred, against her wishes, she said, had kept a gun in the house, on a shelf. Perhaps, she insinuated, that could have been the murder weapon.

Attentive, Kelley was supportive, pushing gently, trying to build a rapport with Piper, and hoping she’d open up. He listened and took notes. What he needed from her, she wasn’t offering, the answer to a simple question: Where had she been the previous morning, at the moment Fred Jablin was murdered?

That afternoon with Kelley and the other offi cers, Piper again claimed Fred had abused her. When Kelley described the divorce as acrimonious, Piper blamed it on the courts, saying Fred had parlayed his influence and claiming that he and his attorney had held meetings with the judge when she and her attorney weren’t present, never explaining that she’d been notified of the hearings and simply hadn’t shown up.

Although just weeks earlier Fred had let the children go camping with her, Piper then said, “The kids were afraid they’d never see me again, and I was afraid they’d never see me again.”

Kelley listened, nodded, sympathized, but eventually he worked the conversation around to the question at hand:

“Did you go to Virginia at all this weekend?”

“No,” Piper answered.

The entire time she talked, Breck McDaniel watched Piper Rountree. After years of interviewing suspects, he considered himself something of a human lie detector, and he had no doubt that this woman was lying. She was evasive, slow to answer, and didn’t appear at all as concerned with her children as she claimed to be.

“Can you just let us know where you were and where somebody might have seen you, so we can knock that out and kind of eliminate you as a suspect,” Kelley asked.

“Uhhh . . . right here,” she answered.

“In this room, in this house?”

186 / Kathryn Casey

“No . . . in Houston and Galveston.”

“Were you working?”

“I work all over.”

As Kelley pressed, Piper hemmed and hawed, not giving any clear answers. She thought she’d been with Mac, training him. “Yeah, that was it,” she said.

“Where were you when you talked to Paxton?” Kelley asked.

“I was in the car driving back from Galveston,” she said, calmer.

That was an important admission, since that call had already been traced to a Richmond cell phone tower. When Kelley asked about her cell phone, trying to get her to recite the number the call had been made on to confi rm she’d been the one on the 7878 number the day before the murder, however, Piper said she couldn’t remember her cell phone number.

“I’m trying to help you reflect back,” Kelley said calmly, but with determination. In order to eliminate her as a suspect, he had to be able to verify where she was at the time of the murder, he explained again. “We just want to establish where you were Friday through Saturday, because this happened early Saturday morning.” Kelley asked again where she was on those two very important days. Again Piper didn’t answer. He persisted.

Finally, she implied she’d been with a married man: “Let me tell you this: I don’t want to tell you about the person because it involved somebody else. I mean, as far as relationships, it’s nothing to do with this.”

“You understand this is a homicide investigation?” Kelley said, his voice becoming louder and firmer. “If ever there was a time to come to Jesus—”

“I’m at peace with Jesus, okay?” Piper bristled, her voice strained and high-pitched.

“I don’t care if you

were buying cocaine from a

DIE, MY LOVE / 187

minister . . . you know what I’m saying,” Kelley said, even more insistent.

Moments passed.

“I was at Tina’s, but she wasn’t there,” Piper offered, suddenly calmer. She continued, claiming she’d seen Tina sometime that Friday afternoon, as her sister went back and forth between the house and her offi ce.

“Obviously, we’d rather have a priest you were with, she’s your sister, but okay,” Kelley said. “And what about Friday night?”

“Uh, hmmm,” she agreed, indicating she’d been at Tina’s that night as well. But then Piper backtracked. At fi rst she said Tina hadn’t spent the night at the house, then that perhaps her sister had been there.

“It’s a big house,” Piper said. “I don’t know when people come and go.”

Kelly reiterated what was forming as Piper’s alibi: that she’d been at Tina’s house Friday afternoon and night.

Would her sister confi rm that?

Again Piper balked.

“Can we just leave it at that? My concern,” Piper said, measured, angry, and biting off her words. “I have my children I’m concerned about. It may sound cold, but something has happened, and now you’re ready to turn the kids over to him . . .”

With that, she flipped full circle, back to Michael Jablin, who she described as “not a trustworthy person,” and certainly no one who should have custody of the children. “I had no way of knowing that Fred had signed his life over to him.”

“You say you were in Texas, you weren’t at all in Virginia,” Kelley said, bringing her back to the most important question, her alibi. “Tell me where you were, when you were with Tina, and I’ll try to put a hold on what’s going on in Virginia.”

188 / Kathryn Casey

McDaniel piped in, “Somebody can verify your whereabouts?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m looking for,” she said.

At that point, from his office, McVey rejoined the conversation, urging Piper to give the officers what they needed, to warn the man she’d been with before the police banged on his door.

“We’re not going to put his business out on the street,”

Ferguson tried to reassure her.

With that, McVey, who had to pick up his teenage son, Alex, suggested they call the meeting to an end and meet again the following morning, after she’d had time to “tell the man what was going down.”

Piper agreed.

Coby walked off to use his cell phone, but Piper kept talking, as the other three officers attempted to get her to verify key points in what she’d already told them.

“You talked to Paxton on your way back [from Galveston]?” Ferguson queried.

“I talk to Paxton all the time,” Piper answered, sounding irritated. Again, when Ferguson asked, she said she couldn’t remember her cell phone number and didn’t know where her cell phone was over the time of the murder, at Tina’s house or her house.

“These investigators need to know your whereabouts for Friday and Saturday,” Ferguson said, gruffer and more demanding than Kelley had been. “This is for your benefi t.”

“I understand that . . .”

“You’ve got to talk to this guy and that’s it,” McVey urged her, sounding as if he were talking to a little girl about the need to ingest a bitter medicine in order to improve her health. “You’re going to have to give up his name. He’s going to call them and do it the easy way, or it’s the hard way . . .”

“Somebody who lives here in Texas?” Ferguson asked.

DIE, MY LOVE / 189

“Well, there are two people,” Piper said.

By the time Kelley returned to the conversation, Piper had agreed she’d call the man who she said would be her alibi, and then meet with them that very night to give them the information that could answer all their questions—the details on where she was and who she was with at the time of the murder.

Then Kelley, still trying to pin her down, asked how to call her, repeating her cell phone number, the one used in Virginia that ended in 7878. Piper stammered, saying that was one of her phones but she had others.

Again, as they got ready to part, Kelley dangled the car-rot that he knew meant the most to Piper Rountree—her children. “I was just talking to the commonwealth attorney,”

he said. “He’s trying to work something out with CPS.”

Later, outside, as the traffic streamed by, Piper confi rmed something Kelley had wondered about: that she knew her ex- husband was dating.

“Have you talked to Fred’s girlfriend?” Piper asked. In Piper’s version, the woman Fred had just met via the Internet that spring had been dating him for nearly fi ve years, two years before the divorce. Fred, she claimed to the offi -

cers, had had many extramarital affairs. Portraying herself as a dedicated mother, she said she’d been busy caring for their children and hadn’t been aware of them at the time.

Sounding sympathetic, Kelley said many women “bury their heads in the sand.”

When they parted, Piper agreed to call Kelley at six that eve ning, to talk about what he had been able to arrange in Richmond to keep the children from being turned over to Michael Jablin. At that time, she said, she would give him the name of the unidentified married man who could confirm she was in Houston during the murder.