Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (26 page)

Good bye
D. Mike Daniels
for Page Jennings Daniels

I’m going to start the fire with 21 $100.00 bills for she is just 21+16 days
.

This extraordinary note, with its proxy signature of Page Jennings Daniels and its dark references to other murders in New Hampshire
(“she made me promise to burn the home in N.H….” “We would go together and make them pay … ” “if we ever would have called it quits permanently I would have taken all their lives anyway
… ”), instantly focused police scrutiny on a ghastly double murder that had occurred twelve days earlier in Pinkham Notch, New Hampshire. Here, summoned to a fire at an old ski lodge called the Dana Inn in the early morning hours of January 16, authorities had found the bodies of Page Jennings’s parents, Malcolm Jennings, fifty-four, and his wife, Elizabeth B. Jennings, forty-nine. The couple were discovered dead of multiple stab wounds, tied up with nylon cord in separate bedrooms, gagged before they died. Whoever murdered them had set fire to the inn afterward, hoping to destroy the bodies. As things turned out, however, the corpses suffered only minor smoke damage and were easily identifiable.

As a forensic anthropologist, my work is necessarily focused on the dead more than on the living. I seldom occupy myself professionally with the quirks and foibles of human beings as long as they are alive. When life is extinguished, and the flesh falls away, and the hard frame of the skeleton lies exposed on the laboratory table—that is my hour. But in this case, more than in most others, I was forced to take account of the personalities of the deceased to a far greater degree than is usual for me. Because of the glare of publicity that accompanied this case, the individuals involved stood forth in stark relief, in scores of newspaper articles and television news reports. One man in particular haunted the case. Almost against my will I became acquainted with the life and times of Glyde Earl Meek.

Police had little trouble establishing the true identity of “D. Mike Daniels,” the man who signed the suicide note found in the Fiat near the burned cabin. His real name was Glyde Earl Meek, a powerfully built, red-haired Washington State man with, with a string of arrests for burglary and a prison record. He was an exceptionally athletic specimen, who had captained his college wrestling team at Washington State University. He weighed only 185 pounds in later life, just five pounds more than he had weighed in high school. He was known as a “second-story man” for his burgling feats: he would climb walls and slip into a building through the roof or an upper-story window. His upper arms were exceptionally powerful and his agility was remarkable. Meek “had a crazy body, like a gorilla,” a classmate would later recall.

Meek was born in Pasco, Washington, on July 22, 1935, the second of three boys, to Pearl and Joe Meek. Joe Meek, a lineman who worked for several power companies near Seattle, was an abusive husband and beat his wife frequently, according to relatives interviewed by the
Boston Herald
after the murders. “He was a good-for-nothing brute,” said Thelma Cole, then seventy-two, Pearl’s sister-in-law.

Meek’s parents finally divorced. While their mother worked, Glyde Earl and his older brother Alfred and his younger brother Michael were raised by their aunt, Thelma Cole. Cousin Roger Cole said Meek was a scoundrel even as a child. “He was a thief from four, five, six,” Cole told reporters from Boston after the murders in New Hampshire. “He had a million-dollar personality and a real gift with folks. It’s just that there was a missing link somewhere.” Another high school classmate, Ron Jackson, told the
New Hampshire Sunday News
that Meek was “a guy that couldn’t live by society’s rules. He had a lot of talent but he just couldn’t keep it within the system.”

Meek entered Pasco High School in the early 1950s, studied there two years and then transferred to Walla Walla High. He was described as “an honor student without effort,” who excelled in sports, especially football and wrestling. Once, while skylarking in front of his classmates, he climbed to the top of the Bonneville Power Administration transmission tower in Sacajawea Park, jumped off, grabbed the insulators and swung on them “like a monkey,” as one astonished eyewitness put it. Then he swung back to safety as easily as he had swung out. “I thought sure he was grabbing hot wires,” said a classmate, Scotty Getchell. “But he did things like that. He was always out for thrills.”

Another classmate, Tony Hapler, said Meek “could scale the side of a building, and I saw him do it.” It was Hapler who likened Meek to a gorilla. Hapler told the
Manchester Union Leader
that Meek never graduated from college because he was caught stealing a car.

Meek’s days at Walla Walla High School were the high-water mark of his success. He rose to become vice-president of the student body. Upon graduation he entered Washington State University on an athletic scholarship but never finished college. He married in 1959, divorced in 1964, leaving his wife with two sons. Meek made no attempt to contact his sons and to this day they do not know they are descended from him.

Meek turned to burglary in the early 1960s, using his strength and agility to break into buildings through the roof. He was caught in 1962 by Art Eggers, Walla Walla’s newly appointed chief prosecutor. “Five or six establishments had been burglarized in Walla Walla and also a J. C. Penney Store in Seattle. He used to go in through the tops of stores. He was a hell of a roof burglar,” Eggers told reporters.

“When we caught him he had a U-Haul full of about $10,000 in stolen goods—clothing, liquor—from Salt Lake City stores. If you met him in a pub instead of on the battlefield, you’d say he’s one of the nicest guys around. I’ve been at this job a long time and he’s about my favorite crook.”

Convicted, Meek was sent to Walla Walla State Penitentiary, where he became inmate No. 212104. At first he seemed a model prisoner, starring on the prison football team, but after an unsuccessful escape attempt his prison term was lengthened; he was finally paroled in 1970. The golden middle of his life was nearly over and he had spent eight of his best years in jail. He was now thirty-five.

Meek remarried and started a successful sign business, the Alpine Sign Co. In 1972 Meek’s mother, Pearl, committed suicide. She had become an alcoholic and was depressed, relatives said. She drove her Mustang to a ballpark, parked, and left the engine running. Carbon monoxide fumes killed her. At her funeral Meek “wept and wept,” friends remembered.

Fred Mielke met Meek, nicknamed “Shorty,” as part of a prison volunteer group that helped parolees adjust to life outside. “Shorty was a likable, hard-working guy. If your car had trouble and was on the side of the road, he would be the first person to pull over to help,” Mielke said.

When Meek’s second marriage fell apart “everything went to hell,” Mielke said. A second arrest for burglary followed and Meek was given a one-year sentence. He was paroled in the late 1970s. He then met a woman named Debby Alderfer, from Pennsylvania. Shortly afterward he was arrested while attempting to shoplift a seven-dollar pair of pants. Fearful of being sent back to jail, he fled Spokane, taking Alderfer with him, and went to Tucson, Arizona, where he founded another sign business.

At about this time Meek began using the alias that would appear on the High Springs suicide note: Daniel Mikel Daniels. It was one of about ten false names he used at various times. Meek was a possessive husband who forbade Alderfer to call her parents, ever. For eight years she obeyed him. “I loved him,” Alderfer told the
Boston Herald
later. “I felt my life with him was worth it. He had me convinced that if I called [my parents] the line would be traced and he would be sent back to jail.”

Many doctors and pathologists tend to look askance at chiropractors, as practicing a profession on the fringes of serious medicine. My own opinion—has no place in this narrative. But I have oftentimes blessed the impulse that drove Glyde Earl Meek to visit a chiropractor in Arizona in the early 1980s.

This small, chance event would have a crucial bearing on the case, for the chiropractor who treated Meek at the Waldschmitt Clinic in Tucson took six x-rays of Meek’s back. These x-rays became the only antemortem pictures of Glyde Earl Meek’s living skeleton in existence. As such they were of inestimable value to me. One of the x-ray films showed Meek’s upper rib cage. Another, shot rather high, revealed a gold tooth filling. This filling also showed up on dental x-rays of Meek. This small nugget of gold would later prove a crucial piece of evidence.

In 1983 the couple moved to Alaska with the vain hope of panning for gold there. Meek became the caretaker of a vacation lodge at Seal Bay. It was here he met young Page Jennings. It was an encounter that would have the most dreadful consequences for the entire Jennings family.

Page Jennings was a beautiful girl with pale skin and elfin features. She had a quick mind, liked reading and was an expressive writer with a keen sense of humor. Her parents were wealthy and she enjoyed all the advantages of an excellent education and a comfortable upbringing. She seemed destined for a life of happiness and ease.

At the 1,100-student Kennett High School in Conway, New Hampshire, Page Jennings made the National Honor Society and served on the student council, was a homeroom representative, a delegate to the New Hampshire Youth and Government Council. She overcame two knee injuries to throw the javelin for the girls’ track team her senior year. These injuries were severe enough to require surgery, and this would later have a crucial bearing on the case. The precise details of the surgical procedure would send me on a wild goose chase that lasted for months and nearly brought me to my wits’ end.

Until now life had smiled on Page Jennings. But in her first year at Simmons College in Boston she became acquainted with bitter failure. She studied physical therapy there but did poorly. She failed a difficult but required course in organic chemistry and this failure seems to have shaken her resolve, Page decided to take a year off from school, strike out on her own. She landed a job as a cook at the Seal Bay resort in Alaska where, in June 1983, she met Glyde Earl Meek.

Meek, who was working as a caretaker at the lodge, was instantly smitten with Page Jennings, at least to judge from the wording of the suicide note found near the cabin: “The love we have had and always had since our eyes first met in Alaska has been so strong that in just 19 months we both have proven it more than most people show in a lifetime.”

Meek’s third wife, Debby Alderfer, took a dimmer view of the relationship. She later told the
Boston Herald
that Page “had a lot of problems,” and that Meek “seemed to want to help her out, protect her…. He became obsessed with her.”

Page seemed to enjoy the attentions of the older man. Meek took her on nature trips and, much later, she rapturously described seeing an American bald eagle for the first time in Alaska, on a trip with a friend she called “Mike,” who was obviously Meek.

“When one thinks of the American bald eagle, visions of thundering, snowcapped mountains and rushing rivers in Canada, Alaska and the northern states invade the mind,” Page wrote. “Keep your eyes skyward and your ears open. Maybe one day you’ll see the magnificent bird overhead.”

In the fall of 1983 the unlikely trio left Alaska together. Eventually an unhappy Debby Alderfer saw she was no longer wanted and bowed out. “I’m not bitter now,” she told reporters later. “I was hoping he would find some kind of happiness, but I guess he didn’t.”

In October 1983, Page took Meek to visit her parents in Jackson, New Hampshire. The visit was an unmitigated disaster. The whole family was shocked and repelled by the vagabond, middle-aged, uncouth man their daughter had fallen in love with. To the Jenningses, Meek appeared a creature from another world, a man whose past was as murky as his future was dim. Page’s older brother, Chris Jennings, was openly disgusted by Meek and did nothing to hide his contempt.

“This guy had no history, no ambition. She could have done a lot better,” Christopher Jennings later said to reporters.

Determined to stay together, the couple headed south in the last months of 1983, moving into a modern duplex in Palm Harbor, Texas, near the town of Rockport. Page landed a job as a sportswriter at a local weekly paper, the
Rockport Pilot
, where she worked from December 1983 to April 1984. A coworker, Bobbie Drennon, re-called that at least once Page Jennings came to work with bruises on her face. Page admitted she had had a fight with Meek.
“Page was the most beautiful lady in the world but at times a devil,”
Meek later wrote in the suicide note.

She stayed in touch with her parents, who made it clear they still loved her but despised Meek. In the spring of 1984 she and Meek decided to return to Alaska. Page left a good-bye note for her coworkers, using a quote from D. H. Lawrence.

  
Dear Pilot friends:

I leave you with these words of wisdom. There is no point in work unless it absorbs you like an absorbing game. If it doesn’t absorb you, it isn’t fun, don’t do it. “All that we have while we live is life. If you don’t live during your life, all you are is a piece of dung.” Fare ye well, Page
.

But the relationship was beginning to erode and crumble. Fewer than six months after returning to Alaska, Meek and Jennings headed south again. They broke up in Seattle and Page returned to Rockport, Texas, in September 1984, then went back to New England. She visited a psychiatrist, then decided to accompany her brother Christopher to Gainesville, Florida, where he had landed a job with the
Gainesville Sun
.

Page Jennings got a job as a waitress at the Stacks restaurant in the Gainesville downtown Holiday Inn. Soon afterward, around December 4, 1984, Glyde Earl Meek appeared and persuaded Page to let him move in with her, sharing her bedroom in the apartment where she was living with her brother Chris.