04.Die.My.Love.2007 (28 page)

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If she couldn’t prove where she was, Charles advised, perhaps the forensics on the scene could clear her. “Maybe the ballistics on the gun will match it to a burglary in New Jersey or something,” he said.

“How do you match a bullet to a gun?” Piper asked.

She’d told Charles about her time as a prosecutor, and he was surprised at the question, but wrote it off as her being upset at the murder. “Well, you dig the bullet out of the body,” he said, but then he had second thoughts, considering that it sounded too cold. “Oh, I’m sorry. He’s your former husband.”

“No, it’s okay,” she said, not looking the least bit offended.

Always, Charles turned the conversation back to how Piper could prove to police where she’d been that weekend, and that she wasn’t in Virginia murdering her ex-husband.

Charles asked if she had any receipts, if she’d bought anything.

“No,” she said. “Nothing.”

“Did you charge anything on your credit card?” he asked.

“No, my credit card was stolen and my debit card was declined when I tried to use it,” she said, adding that she’d gone to the bank to withdraw money to pay cash that weekend.

And then Charles asked Piper if she’d made any cell phone calls over those two days.

“If you used your cell phone, they can trace where you were at the time, based on what tower the signal bounced off of,” he said. “As you talk, they can actually follow the cell phone, as it bounces from tower to tower.”

Looking back, he’d recall that Piper didn’t look particularly worried at that bit of information, but she did say,

“Oh.”

Moments later she said, “My cell phone was lost. I don’t have it.”

198 / Kathryn Casey

Charles thought for a minute and then said, “You better hope that your phone and credit card weren’t used in Virginia.”

“Yeah,” Piper answered, laughing slightly.

At nine-thirty that night Charles hugged Piper goodbye.

Then he took off the St. Christopher medal he wore on a chain and hung it around her neck.

“You’re going to need this,” he said.

12

In Richmond, the Jablin murder investigation took on a set structure. Twice a day, the police offi cers involved—

Hanna, Captain Stem, and Sergeant Russell—and the two prosecutors, Wade Kizer and the assistant he’d brought in on the case, Owen Ashman, met in the chief ’s conference room in Henrico P.D. headquarters. On the telephone, they patched in Coby Kelley in Houston, to discuss that day’s objectives.

They’d all worked together for many years, on cases that covered everything from robbery to fraud to murder. Yet that didn’t mean the meetings were without tension.

At eight-thirty that Monday morning, Stem and the other police officers gathered wanted to arrest Piper Rountree.

Her phone was used in Virginia to call her son, Paxton, who said that it was his mother’s voice on the telephone. Ergo: Piper was in Henrico at the time of the murder, and she’d lied about it when asked point-blank by Kelley. Add to that the contentious divorce, especially the fight over child custody, and they had a motive for murder.

While all that was true, Kizer and Ashman didn’t agree that the evidence was sufficient to hang a murder case on.

“Having enough to make an arrest and enough to try a case are two different standards,” Kizer told them. Before he’d consider pressing charges, the commonwealth’s attorney still had the same demand: “We need to place not only Ms.

Rountree’s cell phone in Richmond but the woman herself; 200 / Kathryn Casey

otherwise a defense attorney will argue that Tina Rountree or someone else made that call.”

Toward that end, on that Monday morning, November 1, Cindy Williamson turned over to investigators records she’d obtained under court order from Southwest Airlines and the Wells Fargo Bank. The debit card used to pay for the airline ticket was drawn off an account at Wells Fargo, an account taken out in the name of Jerry Walters. At that point no one involved in the investigation knew who Walters was or how he might be involved. That would be up to the Houston branch of the task force—Kelley and Dorton—to determine.

Meanwhile, in Henrico County, Stem told Hanna that he still wanted to know where the woman who’d flown as Tina Rountree stayed in Richmond. “She had to sleep somewhere,” he stressed. “We need to know where. Wherever it was, someone there might be able to identify her.” Despite not finding either Rountree sister on the hotel’s registry, Hanna’s gut was still acting up whenever he thought of the Tina Rountree registration at the Homestead Suites.

After that morning’s meeting, for the third time since the murder, Hanna drove to the Homestead Suites. Again he talked to the desk clerk and the cleaning crew on duty, showing them photos of Rountree. Again no one could place the woman in the red dress in the hotel.

Disappointed, Hanna returned to the office and dug into the paperwork, helping Williamson draw up subpoenas for even more phone and bank rec ords, asking for rec ords from the days before and after the murder. As he went through the phone bills they’d already received from Sprint—Piper’s cell phone company—Hanna noted that Piper Rountree appeared addicted to her cell phone, making dozens of calls every day. Combing through them all would be a formidable task, since the bills bore only unidentified phone numbers with no indication of the name of the person called.

DIE, MY LOVE / 201

While he worked on the cell phone bills, Williamson called Coby Kelley in Houston, giving him what information she could find on the Jerry Walters who’d opened the Wells Fargo Bank account. “I’ll check into it,” he assured her. But, first, he had something else to attend to.

That morning, Kelley, along with McDaniel, went to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in the criminal courthouse, a skyscraper on the rim of downtown Houston, to talk to one of the office’s top prosecutors, Kelly Siegler, and ask for a search warrant for Piper Rountree’s Kingwood house. They went over the evidence, showing Siegler what they had that tied Piper to the murder, principally the cell phone that revealed she’d lied about being in Richmond that weekend. Siegler frowned at the officers. Like the Virginia prosecutors, she wasn’t sold.

“You need more evidence,” she told them. “I can’t take a request for a search warrant to a judge until you give me more to work with.”

Violent thunderstorms hit Houston that Monday morning.

Just after six, Charles Tooke called Piper at the house in Kingwood to make sure she was awake to meet with the investigators at Marty McVey’s office at nine that morning.

When she answered the telephone, Piper sounded upbeat, cheerful. “Everything’s great,” she said. Yet before Coby was ready to head to McVey’s office, he heard from his office in Henrico. Piper had called, saying she wouldn’t be meeting with him due to the bad weather.

Later that morning, after the rain stopped, McDaniel called McVey. “Is she coming?” he asked. “Is she going to talk to us today?”

“Piper talked to a civil attorney in Virginia about custody, and what she has to say could hurt her when she tries to get the kids. She’s not going to talk to you,” McVey said.

202 / Kathryn Casey

With that, Kelley took the telephone. “What’s the deal? Are you representing her?” he asked the white-haired lawyer.

“No, I’m just a friend relaying information,” McVey said.

With that, the investigators’ day started on a disappointing note.

Although the Jablin case had been in the forefront all weekend, Breck McDaniel had other matters to attend to, including three murder trials to testify at that week. So he offered to stay in touch, to do what he could to help Kelley and Dorton, but he had other commitments.

The school bus stop where Fred Jablin had taken Callie each morning was quieter than usual that Monday morning.

“There was a really eerie feeling about things. It seemed odd without Fred there. He was missed,” says one of the neighbors who’d often talked with him. “We were all wondering who’d killed him. Was it Piper? If it wasn’t, were the rest of us in danger?”

At the same time at the University of Richmond, Dean Ruscio and his staff were looking for a way to continue Fred Jablin’s classes. They called in a part-time professor who’d filled in when professors had been out in the past, and he agreed to take over, but the materials he needed were in Fred’s office, secured behind police locks and crime scene tape. To give him something to work with, the students were contacted and asked to bring in their work and the class syl-labus, and the fi rst session was held back in their old classroom. Many felt uneasy being in the room where they’d last seen their murdered professor. Some cried and one ran out of the room in tears, unable to continue. Soon afterward, Fred Jablin’s classes were moved to a different classroom, one without so many painful memories.

Dean Lowry called Piper that Monday. Charles had alerted Dean, calling him to tell him of Fred’s death and that Piper DIE, MY LOVE / 203

was worried she was a suspect. “She’s trying to prove she was in Houston,” Charles told him. “I tried to explain cell phone rec ords to her, but I’m not sure she understood.”

In the past, Piper had told Dean about Fred and her marriage, claiming that her ex-husband had always treated her not as a wife but as his student. She also charged that Fred was the one who’d had the affair, and that she’d known because he’d often been out late at night. Her affair with Dr.

Gable, she said, was merely a way “to rub Fred’s nose in it, like he’d rubbed mine.”

On the telephone that morning, two days after the murder, Piper told Dean what she’d told Charles, that she wasn’t anywhere near Richmond, Virginia, the previous Saturday. She’d been in Houston at the Volcano bar, where she’d met a man who’d walked her home. But when Dean asked questions, Piper said she couldn’t recall if she’d left the bar at ten that eve ning or remained there until two the following morning, when the bar closed.

“Piper, I want you to go in your backyard and wait there for four hours and then call me back,” Dean said, wanting her to understand what a long period of time she was talking about. “And I want you to consider what the police will think if you tell them that you can’t say where you were for a full four hours.”

As he listened to her, Dean had the unmistakable impression that Piper was lying. It bothered him to think she could have become desperate enough to commit murder, but as bitter as she’d been about the divorce, he thought he almost understood her desperation.

Without Piper asking, Dean proceeded to explain the way cell phone rec ords worked, saying that they recorded what towers her phone hit off whenever it was in use, or when a call was made to the number or from the number.

After a pause, Piper said, “You know, I lost my cell phone.

I’ve been using one of Tina’s.”

204 / Kathryn Casey

While Piper never confessed, Dean interpreted her long silences on the telephone as indications that the reality of her situation might be sinking in. Yet, it seemed obvious to him that she didn’t understand what he was telling her, that with or without the telephone, the rec ords would refl ect

when and precisely where it had been used during the previous weekend. As smart as she was, Piper couldn’t seem to or appear to want to grasp why the cell phone rec ords could be important. Trying to get through to her that this was something she needed to consider, Dean told her that the cell phone could either clear her, by showing she was in Texas at the time of the murder, or cast even more suspicion on her, if the phone had been used in Virginia.

With that, Piper asked a favor. She asked Dean if she could use his credit card to get a new cell phone. He refused, and the conversation became strained, with even more silence. Finally, he began to suspect that she realized he didn’t believe she was in Texas the night Fred was murdered. Yet, he never asked if she’d killed Fred, and she didn’t offer the information.

“I’ve heard that they serve warrants on people in the middle of the night, while they’re sleeping,” Lowry advised her. “Piper, you need to find a good attorney.”

In Virginia, Wade Kizer turned over many of the day-to-day aspects of the case to the commonwealth’s assistant attorney, Owen Ashman. A single mom with a long neck, wide-set eyes, pin- straight dark blond hair, and an all-business manner, Ashman came from an old Virginia family, one that traced its roots back to the Revolutionary War. Her fi rst name, Owen, was a family name, her great-grandmother’s maiden name, and she had followed her father, a commonwealth’s attorney in another county, into law.

Although she had three other ongoing murder cases, the DIE, MY LOVE / 205

Jablin case struck a special chord for Ashman, who’d lost her own father at the age of sixteen when, at just forty-three, he died of a sudden heart attack. She identified with all the pain and confusion the three Jablin children were undoubtedly going through, understanding how devastating the loss of a father could be. Like Kizer, Ashman had gone to the University of Richmond law school. She’d passed the bar in 1991, and worked in Virginia Beach for ten years, Newport News for seven, and had been in Henrico for fi ve. Compared to Henrico, Newport News had been like the Wild West, with guns and drugs. “I’d interview a witness one week, and the next that same person would be dead, a murder victim,”

she says. “I got a lot of experience, quickly.”

The Jablin case, based on the growing importance of Piper’s cell phone and bank rec ords, reminded her of a case she’d prosecuted years earlier, involving a husband who’d claimed his wife disappeared while he’d been at work. The man’s cell phone rec ords told another story, showing he was close to home that day. And his wife’s bank rec ords revealed that before her body was found, when she was still presum-ably alive, he’d used her credit card to buy his girlfriend jewelry.

That Monday, the first after the Jablin murder, Coby Kelley used two cell phones, alternating charging them, as he relayed information back and forth to Ashman in Richmond.