04.Die.My.Love.2007 (30 page)

Jamison packed up all the tapes and sent them to the state crime lab for enhancement.

In Houston, Coby Kelley walked into Tina’s Village Women’s Clinic hoping for a talk. Instead she was out, but he talked with Melissa Hunt, a medical assistant who’d worked for Tina for years. “Did you see Tina last Saturday?” Kelley asked.

Hunt didn’t hesitate. “Sure, she was here until about

twelve-thirty, seeing patients. Then she got a phone call, and she left, in kind of a hurry.”

“Is there any question in your mind that she was here working in the clinic last Saturday?”

“No,” Hunt said. “No question at all.”

Another piece of evidence had clicked into place: Tina Rountree was in Houston on Saturday, and Hunt would be able to testify to that, if need be. Tina, it was obvious, wasn’t the woman in Richmond. Despite Homeland Security, it appeared someone else had flown to Virginia under her name.

That fact determined, Kelley concentrated on the next issue at hand: Jerry Walters.

With the bank rec ords and those from the Mail & More, 214 / Kathryn Casey

Kelley easily tracked down Walters, who was working south of Houston in Victoria, Texas, on his cell phone. “I thought you were the vet,” Walters growled when Kelley called. “My bloodhound, Bertha, is in the hospital. My relationship with that dog is the longest I’ve ever had with a female, except my mother. What’s this about?”

Kelley was careful. He didn’t know if Walters was involved with the murder, and he didn’t want to reveal too much of his hand.

“I’d just like to talk with you,” Kelley said. “I’m investigating the murder of Fred Jablin.”

Reluctantly, Walters agreed to meet Kelley later that afternoon, but then he called hours before the meeting to say he was headed back home to Baton Rouge. “My dog’s taken a turn for the worse,” he said. “The vet’s got her on oxygen.

I have to go.”

At first Walters balked when Kelley said he’d drive there to meet with him, but he fi nally agreed.

As soon as Kelley hung up the telephone with Walters, he called the Baton Rouge P.D. and made arrangements for an officer from that agency to accompany him to the meeting.

Kelley didn’t know Walters, didn’t know if he was dangerous, and he wasn’t taking any chances.

That afternoon, Kelley drove the four hours to Baton Rouge, hooked up with the officer assigned to accompany him, then met Walters at a Starbucks not far from his home.

It was obvious from Walters’s demeanor that the muscular man dressed like a cowboy wasn’t happy to be involved.

When Kelley asked when he last saw Piper, Walters recounted the previous week, when he’d driven into Houston and stayed at her home in Kingwood on Monday night.

“How did she seem?” he asked.

“She was fine, great, looked happy,” he said. What he didn’t say was that she certainly hadn’t looked like a woman contemplating murder.

DIE, MY LOVE / 215

When asked, Walters detailed their relationship, saying they’d dated about a year after Piper arrived in Houston, then remained friends and just started going out again that fall.

“Where were you Friday and Saturday?” Kelley asked.

“Saturday I was at a football game in Baton Rouge,” Walters said. “And there are lots of people there who saw me.”

Kelley took down the information on Walters’s alibi, and then turned his attention to the bank account. Did Walters know that his account had been used the previous week to purchase wigs, a ticket to Virginia, and at stores throughout Richmond during the days preceding and the day of the murder?

“Yes,” Walters said. “I know.”

With that, Walters explained that he’d opened the account in August 2004 at a Wells Fargo Bank inside a Randall’s grocery store in Kingwood, not far from Piper’s house, for her to use during the time she was declaring bankruptcy. It was a savings account with a debit card, one that allowed her to make deposits and withdraw money to pay for purchases. Later, he’d discovered, she’d also had checks issued on the account.

He’d first heard about Fred’s murder the night after the killing, when Piper called him and said simply, “Fred is dead.”

She’d asked Walters to come to Houston, to stay at her house. Feeling uncertain about all that was happening, he didn’t go. As they’d talked, something she said caught Walters’s attention: that she’d lost the debit card to the Wells Fargo Bank account.

“The next morning, I got on the Wells Fargo website, and found out that the account was overdrawn and that it had been used in Virginia,” Walters said, frowning. “So I called her back. She said that the card had been stolen at the health club, while she was playing tennis. I asked her how somebody could use it without the access code, and she 216 / Kathryn Casey

said she’d written it on the card, backward. Then she asked me not to report the card stolen to the bank. But I did, and I closed the account.”

That was information Kelley knew he could check on after he’d looked into Walters’s alibi. What he asked about next was the P.O. box, number 162, with Walters’s name on it. “Piper had that box,” Jerry said in his thick, whiskey voice. “She asked me to pick up the mail for her there, so she added my name to it.”

That was information Kelley had already received from the manager at Mail & More. At least that part of Walters’s story he knew to be true.

Kelley’s third set of questions for Walters involved telephone calls made from Piper to his home the day of the murder. Had he talked with her?

Although one of the calls, according to the rec ords, had lasted eleven minutes, Walters said he was sure he hadn’t talked with her early that day. The tension built as Kelley asked repeatedly if Walters could be wrong, if he might have talked with Piper that day. If so, Kelley wanted to know if she’d told him where she was and even what she’d done.

“I’m telling you that I may have talked with her. I talk with her all the time. But if I did, I don’t remember it,” Walters growled angrily. Once he calmed down, however, he remembered that he did get a voice mail from her that day, during a time when Kelley knew Piper Rountree’s Sprint records showed her cell phone was bouncing off towers in Virginia.

“Are you sure she was the one on the telephone message, not someone else, like her sister, Tina?” Kelley asked. “Maybe someone who sounded like her?”

“It was Piper’s voice,” said Walters, punching another hole in Piper Rountree’s story that she hadn’t been in Virginia that weekend.

Then Walters told Kelley something else: that earlier that DIE, MY LOVE / 217

same week, the Monday or so after the murder, Piper had called him again, asking him to stay at her house, in case anyone showed up looking for her. She said she and Tina wouldn’t be there, that they’d checked into the Houstonian Hotel. As he had earlier when she’d asked him to go to Houston the night of the murder, Walters refused.

13

Wednesday morning, November 3, the fifth day after the murder, Investigator Chuck Hanna sat in the morning meeting with Stem, Russell, Kizer, and Ashman, and felt frustrated. In his opinion, the Jablin investigation had stalled. Piper Rountree, lawyer or not, had left a bunch of clues for them to follow, but none of them were leading to what Kizer said he needed—an eyewitness willing to positively testify that she was in Richmond the day preceding or the day of the murder. At the meeting, the officers and prosecutors snapped at each other, Hanna figured out of the same disappointment he felt. Afterward, Hanna got on the telephone with Kelley, filling him in on the tension in the meeting.

“Man, you owe me,” Hanna said, and both investigators laughed.

That day, at Hanna’s request, Steve Byrum called Piper Rountree on her cell phone that ended in 7878, the same one police were subpoenaing rec ords on and the same telephone that she’d told Dean Lowry she’d lost. After answering, Piper immediately gave Byrum another phone number to call and hung up. When Steve dialed the new number, it rang the Houstonian Hotel. He asked for Piper Rountree and was connected to Room 220. Without Piper knowing, Hanna recorded the conversation.

For days, Piper had left messages on Byrum’s phone: “I need to talk with you.” Now that he’d called, Piper was DIE, MY LOVE / 219

friendly, but she didn’t seem overly nervous or concerned. “I just wanted to see what was going on,” she said.

“You said you needed my help,” Byrum said to her. “What is it?”

“I need to know how my kids are and where they are,”

Piper said.

“You know they’re not here, with me,” he said. If the police had the children, Steve advised her, she needed to get a lawyer.

“I’m working on that,” she said. “Have the police been to see you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I don’t know why. I guess your children told them we had some kind of a relationship or a close friendship.”

Then she told Byrum she was staying at the Houstonian because the police kept bothering her. She gave him a new cell phone number, but said it could change again. Byrum asked if she’d been in Richmond on the day of the murder, and Piper said, “No.”

“You need to be going and taking custody of your children,” Byrum said.

In Virginia, Chuck Hanna called Southwest Airlines to track down anyone who interacted with the person who traveled as Tina out of the Norfolk airport. He grew hopeful when he discovered that the original airline ticket had a scheduled return for Sunday, not Saturday. When the woman arrived at the airport on Saturday morning at 8:29, two hours after the murder, “Tina” had the ticket changed by a clerk at the Southwest counter for the next available fl ight to Houston.

Since she’d changed a ticket and not merely checked in for the flight, Hanna figured the clerk had spent more time with the woman, improving the chance that “Tina” might be remembered by the ticket agent. When Hanna tracked the clerk down, she quickly agreed to meet with him.

220 / Kathryn Casey

Minutes later Hanna and his partner were in his car and driving to Virginia Beach, a two-hour trip, to the woman’s house, hoping for the break that could ease his frustration and result in an arrest warrant for Piper Rountree. When they arrived, they stood outside the apartment on a chilly fall morning, while the ticket agent inspected a copy of the ticket.

“Do you remember changing this ticket last Saturday morning?” Hanna asked.

“Not a thing about it,” she said with a frown. “To tell the truth, I’ve been working double shifts. That was my last day in a long string of days, and I’d changed a lot of tickets for a lot of people. But if you want to show me the photo, I’ll look at it.”

Hanna took the photo of Piper Rountree in her red dress from his file and handed it to her.

“No, I don’t,” she said after sizing it up. “Not at all.”

Later that day, Dean Lowry talked with Piper on the telephone and gave Piper similar advice to what Steve Byrum had offered earlier that morning: that it was time for her to stop acting guilty and scared and start acting like a concerned parent.

As with their previous conversation, there was hesitancy in her voice. Lowry thought, Piper did it, and she knows that I think she did it.

When Dean asked Piper if she still had her cell phone, the one she’d answered that morning when Steve called, she said, “No, I threw it out, in pieces.”

As she said those words, Dean’s mind flashed an image: Piper driving down a highway, scattering pieces of her cell phone out the window of her black Jeep. Perhaps she believed the record of the calls was on a chip inside the telephone itself, not recorded in the business office of the cell phone company? he thought. Maybe without the telephone, DIE, MY LOVE / 221

she assumed the police wouldn’t be able to trace where it was used?

In Richmond, at two that afternoon, a funeral service was held for Fred Jablin at Congregation Beth Ahabah. Despite Fred’s stature at the university and in the academic world, on the advice of police, there’d been no obituary in the Richmond newspaper. Still, two hundred people showed up to honor a man and a scholar. When Professor Ciulla pulled up and parked the car, she heard on the radio that her candidate in the presidential election, Senator John Kerry, had just conceded. It added to the gloom she felt and seemed somehow fitting. Inside the synagogue were others from the University of Richmond waiting for the funeral to begin, many of them students who’d availed themselves of a bus the school had supplied.

Many of those attending looked for Piper in the crowd, but she was noticeably absent. While most mothers would rush without hesitation to their children’s aid, a full fi ve days after her ex-husband’s murder, Piper Rountree remained in Houston. She’d cried throughout her interview with Kelley, claiming she was worried about her children’s welfare, yet she’d still made no attempt to be with them. Instead, Piper was hiding out in a hotel room, trying to avoid the police.

Michael Jablin and his wife, Elizabeth, along with their two children, brought Jocelyn, Paxton, and Callie to the service. Many cried as the Jablin children entered the synagogue. Michael had his arm around Paxton, who looked traumatized, while Callie and Jocelyn were pale and silent.

Melody Foster and others from Kingsley were there, to say goodbye to a friend and a neighbor. With them were their children, the Jablin children’s friends. The parents were having a difficult time explaining such a tragic turn of events to their children. Dads weren’t supposed to be murdered in their driveways in quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhoods.

222 / Kathryn Casey

During the service, Rabbi Beifield talked of Fred, his upbeat attitude and his devotion to his children, mentioning that Fred had wanted them to have the strength of their religion, after the divorce enrolling them in religious programs, including Jocelyn in the youth group.

In the front row of the synagogue Paxton’s friends sat wearing yarmulkas, to support him. While Elizabeth Jablin cried inconsolably, Ana, the children’s beloved nanny, gently rubbed Jocelyn’s shoulder and whispered to comfort her. At the end of the service many dried tears as Michael, Elizabeth, and their family, which now included Fred’s three children, stood to leave. There would be no burial in Richmond. Fred’s body was to be interred in New York, near his parents.