Difficult Run (14 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

T
HE NEXT MORNING, M.J. went to the park early and took a long run.
 
She showered and changed into her regular clothes, then stopped by Dodd’s office.

“Good morning, M.J.,” he said.
 
“Mrs. Coppin lives at 700 Ellsworth Avenue.
 
It’s in the old part of Great Falls.
 
Second street on the right after you pass through the stoplight in the village.”

On the corner of Dodd’s desk was a pile of clothes, a pair of hiking shoes and the case containing the Navy Cross medal.
 
He pointed to them and said, “I got those out of Doc’s things to take to the mortuary.
 
Do you think they’re OK?” he asked.

“They’re just fine.
 
That’s the way he dressed every day,” M.J. replied.
 
“Just a minute, I need to get something.”

She went to her car, reached into the back seat and took out Lola’s blue scarf, which she had left there two days before.
 
She went back into Dodd’s office and placed the scarf on top of the pile of Doc’s clothing.

“Would you ask them to put this around Lola’s neck and just knot it loosely,” she said.

“I sure will, M.J.
 
I’m probably going to take the stuff over there later this morning when I take them the paperwork for the casket and burial,” Dodd said.

“I’ll let you know how things go with Mrs. Coppin,” M.J. said.

When M.J. arrived at the house, a 1950s-style brick ranch, Olive Coppin was plucking weeds from the front garden.
 
She was wearing a cotton sun dress and sturdy sandals.

She took off her work gloves, walked over to M.J.’s car and shook her hand. “Hi, I’m Ollie,” she said. “Dodd said you’d be coming by.
 
My, you’re a pretty young thing.”

“Well, thank you Mrs. Coppin,” M.J. replied.

“Oh, please call me Ollie,” she said.
 
“Let’s go out on the back porch and talk there.
 
I made some coffee if you’d like some, or I can make tea if you’d like.”

“Coffee’s fine, Ollie,” M.J. said.

Ollie Coppin didn’t look her age.
 
Maybe mid-seventies, but certainly not late eighties.
 
She was around five feet six inches tall and very trim.
 
Her hair was silver and M.J. suspected from the cut that she took some pride in her appearance.
 
Her voice was pleasantly high-pitched, almost lilting, and she smiled when she spoke.
 
She reminded M.J. of her grandmother.

They walked through the living room to the kitchen, where Ollie poured a cup of coffee for each of them.
 
The screened-in porch ran the full width of the back of the house and was shaded by two large oak trees. It was furnished with wicker furniture and there were planters containing ferns in each corner.

“So, how can I be of help?” Ollie asked.

“Well, I’m investigating some murders that occurred last year and just recently on Difficult Run.
 
We believe they may be the work of the same person and Dodd has been helping me look for any suspicious accidents or disappearances that may have occurred in the past.
 
We think it’s possible this person may have committed other murders that went undetected.
 
We thought you might know about some incidents that we may have missed,” M.J. said.

“Well, I read about those boys that were found last year and someone said that a homeless man had been found on Monday. Are those the ones you’re investigating?” Ollie asked.

“Yes, they are,” M.J. replied.
 
“One of the suspicious incidents we’ve found so far involved a man from here in Great Falls named Dewey McGarrity.
 
Did you know him?” she asked.

“Sure.
 
All of us old-timers knew Dewey.
 
He was our resident naturalist,” Ollie replied.
 
“For what it’s worth, by the way, I never did buy that business about him falling and breaking his neck.
 
Dewey was about as sure-footed a person as I ever met and he was down in Great Falls Park almost every day, a lot of times on Difficult Run.
 
He probably knew that trail as well as the walk up to his house.”

“Is he buried here in Great Falls?” M.J. asked.

“Oh, Heavens no!” Ollie replied.
 
“Dewey would never want to pollute the earth with his embalmed remains.
 
As he requested in his will, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered just below the falls.”

So much for exhuming that body
, M.J. thought. “Can you think of any other suspicious incidents on Difficult Run?” she asked.

“Well, for whatever reason, there have always been strange happenings down there.
 
How far back do you want to go?” Ollie asked.

“We looked at records going back to 2000, but we’d be interested in anything before that too,” M.J. said.

“Let me see,” Ollie said, “there was one in 1996, as I recall.
 
A local handyman named Curt Wiley.
 
He spent most of his evenings drinking with his buddies at the bar in the Old Brogue—that’s our local pub.
 
Well, when it came time to pay the bill he reached for his wallet and it was missing. He’d been hiking that afternoon on Difficult Run and figured it must have dropped out of his pocket.
 
He told his friends to cover his tab, that he was going to go look for it and he’d pay them back.
 
So he left—it was probably around nine or ten o’clock—and headed for Difficult Run.
 
He didn’t come back that night and the next morning they found his car in the Difficult Run parking lot.
 
When his friends went looking for him, they found his wallet and a flashlight beside it on the trail, but no sign of him.
 
They notified the police, but they figured he must have fallen in the stream and been swept away into the Potomac. I suppose the fact that he’d been drinking probably influenced their thinking on that score.”

“Did they ever find his body?” M.J. asked.

“No, they didn’t.
 
But you probably know about the currents and how they sometimes pin bodies to the bottom and they never surface,” Ollie replied.

“What time of year was this?” M.J. asked.

“It seems to me it was in the spring because they said the stream was pretty high and running very fast due to the rain,” Ollie replied.

“Any others that you can recall?”
 
M.J. asked.

“Well the only ones I would know about would involve people who lived in Great Falls, unless there was something in one of the newspapers,” Ollie said.
 
“The only other one that comes to mind right now occurred a long time ago, and when I say ‘long’ I mean well before you were born and maybe even before your parents were born.”

“What year would that have been?” M.J. asked.

“1942,” she replied.

M.J. smiled and said, “That’s a little outside the time range we’re looking at, but please tell me anyway.”

“Well, that was back when the land was still privately owned and there was actually a road that ran along Difficult Run where the trail is now—big enough to drive a car on,” Ollie began.
 
“There was a little cabin down at the end—close to where the stream spills into the Potomac—that belonged to a family named Murphy that lived here in Great Falls—it was actually called Forestville in those days.
 
The cabin had been in the family for years. Well, anyway, the whole family—they had two young daughters—was down at the cabin one night, just enjoying the beginning of spring weather I guess, when Mr. Murphy thought he heard something outside and went to investigate.
 
He took a kerosene lantern and started walking down the road toward the river.
 
Mrs. Murphy and the girls just stayed inside because it was raining pretty hard.
 
Well, when Mr. Murphy had been gone for a good long while, his wife went out to look for him.
 
She saw the lantern down the road and thought it was him, but when she called out, he didn’t answer.
 
She walked down a way and saw the lantern lying in the road but didn’t see him anywhere.
 
She became frightened and ran back to the cabin, grabbed the girls and took off in the car to find help.
 

Ollie continued, “She got ahold of the Fairfax County Police, but they had only been in existence for a couple of years and didn’t have but two or three officers.
 
By the time they arrived, it was near daybreak.
 
When they went down the road they saw Mr. Murphy’s footprints going from the cabin toward the river.
 
Then they found the lantern and, because of all the mud, they were able to see some other footprints that seemed to come from the hill on the north side of the road. At that point, Mr. Murphy’s footprints turned toward the stream.
 
If I recall, they said it looked like he was running.
 
In any event, there was no sign of Mr. Murphy.”

“Did they ever find him?” M.J. asked.

“Well, they spotted his body pinned between some rocks about a quarter mile down the Potomac, but the water was so high and fast they couldn’t get to it for a couple of days,” Ollie replied.

“What did they think had happened?” M.J. asked, now thoroughly enthralled with the story.

“They thought he might have been attacked by a drifter that was living in the park,” Ollie replied.
 
“This was just a few years after the Great Depression and a lot of folks were still out of work and homeless.
 
Funny thing, though, when they finally recovered the body, his wallet and money were still in his pants pocket.
 
Didn’t seem to me, even then, like someone was trying to rob him.”

“Did they ever determine how he had died?” M.J. asked.

“I don’t know if they did an autopsy or anything, but somebody told me his body had been thrashed around in the river so much that his head was turned all funny,” Ollie replied.

This got M.J.’s attention, but she was having difficulty dealing with the possibility of a serial killer who would now be in his eighties or nineties.
 
She made a mental note to look into it further, but for now decided to turn the conversation to less morbid topics.

“Have you lived in Great Falls all your life?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” Ollie replied.
 
“Of course, like I said, it was called Forestville back then. They didn’t change the name to Great Falls until 1955.
 
We lived in a house on Georgetown Pike near what is now Old Dominion Drive.
 
When I was little, though, it’s where the trolley tracks ran for the Great Falls and Old Dominion Railroad.
 
There was a station house right there on the corner and another one down in Great Falls Park, which the railroad owned.

“My sister Sarah and I went to the old schoolhouse on down Georgetown Pike toward the village—it’s still there as a ‘historic structure.’” She laughed and said, “Guess that makes me ‘historic’ too.”

M.J. smiled and asked, “What was the park like back then?”

“Oh, it was really something,” Ollie said.
 
“People would come from Washington and points south on the trolley cars all day long and into the evening—hundreds and hundreds of them.
 
The women all wore beautiful long dresses and big hats, and the men were in suits and ties wearing bowlers and skimmer hats. The park had a big picnic ground, the Great Falls Inn, a carousel and a dance pavilion—why it even had a little zoo!”

“A zoo?
 
What kind of animals?” M.J. asked.

“Well, let’s see,” Ollie replied, “there were some native animals that kids could actually pet—rabbits, goats, that sort of thing.
 
Then there were a bunch of animals that had been brought in from Africa—a zebra, some ostriches, a wildebeest.
 
Oh, yes, and an ape of some sort that they brought in sometime in early ‘36.
 
I think they thought it would be a big attraction.”