THE ACCELERATOR WAS IMPRINTED ON HER SHOE
The young lady, let’s call her Mary, was traveling east to west on Interstate 40 in Tennessee headed to the mountains of Arkansas. Records indicate she stopped at a rest area about 50 miles east of Jackson and used a payphone to call her husband in Arkansas. This was long before we had cell phones!
After placing the call, she got back on the Interstate and continued eastbound. Mary stopped in Jackson and bought gas at a convenience store on Highland Avenue. This chain of events seemed sort of strange. Why didn’t she wait until she got to Jackson to call her husband instead of making an extra stop at the rest area? Maybe she needed to use the restroom and decided to call while she was there. You can think of several plausible reasons, I guess. Still, to a skeptical, young TBI agent, it seemed a little strange. Things would get a whole lot stranger.
Mary returned to the Interstate, traveled approximately 8 miles west of Jackson, and ran directly into a bridge abutment killing herself and her unborn child. She was 8 months pregnant.
There was a perfect imprint of the car’s accelerator on the sole of her right shoe. Mary never touched the brake. Perhaps she fell asleep. But she had been awake enough to gas up her car only 10 minutes before she died. The evidence was enough for the District Attorney to ask for a TBI investigation.
It is normal in any kind of a death investigation to try and view the deceased’s body, so I went straight to the funeral home when I was assigned the case. It was not long after her death, maybe 48 hours, but I really don’t think it was quite that long. The husband, we’ll call him Karl, had already had his wife cremated. No funeral, no memorial service, nothing. Cremation was not frequently done back then.
THP Sgt. Ben Joyner and myself interviewed Karl at the Highway Patrol office in Jackson. We learned he was a retired scientist and at least 30 years older than his wife. He as a small man, dressed in black pants and a black shirt. He wore his white hair long and his similarly white beard reached the middle of his chest. He was very nice and soft-spoken but shared very little information.
Ben and I discussed it after the fellow left. Just talking to Karl and being in the same room with him gave us a funny feeling. It was weird.
About a week later I began getting mail from Mary’s mother who lived in Florida. She shared a very unusual story with me and sent me a picture of her daughter. Mary was strikingly beautiful.
It seems Karl was the leader of some type of a religious cult based somewhere in the Ozarks. Mary’s mother and father were members of the group. Mary was enrolled in medical school at a college in Hawaii. During a break in school, she came home to visit her parents. It just so happened Karl was visiting her parents at the same time. Shortly thereafter Mary dropped out of law school, married Karl, and announced she was pregnant. Attempts by her parents to intervene in this series of events were unsuccessful.
About 6 weeks after Mary’s death I was contacted by Bill. Bill was an insurance investigator and he wanted to speak with me about Karl. We met in Jackson and had coffee.
It was common to see small, $10,000 life insurance policies for sale everywhere. You could buy them at just about any grocery store. The insurance investigator told me Karl had 10-15 of these types of policies on Mary. Bill explained having that a large number of small policies could indicate the beneficiary (Karl) was trying to keep from being noticed. Instead of having one $150,000 policy, you get 15, $10,000 policies, each from a different company. You hope, since the money is broken up into smaller amounts, the company will just pay it off and go on about their business.
It seems poor old Karl really had some bad luck. Mary was the third wife who had died under mysterious circumstances. They all were insured by multiple small life insurance policies with Karl being the exclusive beneficiary on each one of the policies!
I never knew if Bill was able to put together any type of fraud case or if the insurance companies refused to pay off the policies.
If, in fact, some criminal act had taken place in Mary’s tragic death, we had no proof.
Obviously Karl was a charismatic figure. Is it possible he had such control of Mary that he could convince her taking her own life was the right thing for her to do? Maybe there was some kind of hypnotic suggestion and he triggered her subconscious when she made the call from the rest area. If that were the case, why would she drive so far, stop, get out of her car, and gas up before driving into the bridge? Perhaps that was an effort to distance the act from the phone call. If you are planning on killing yourself, why gas up the car?
And what about a mother taking part in killing her unborn child? That is not totally unheard of, but it is VERY rare. When it happens it is usually because the pregnancy is the triggering event in an already troubled life. The expectant mother has no money, two other children already, no man to help, substance abuse problems. Things of that nature. The thought of bringing another child into this world and having the responsibility of rearing the child is simply more than the mother can handle. It happens. There was no evidence Mary suffered from any of these challenges.
Was this one of those cases where forces outside of our normal understanding come into play? Perhaps.
May Mary rest in peace.
The author, Jim Leach, is a former Special Agent in Charge with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. He was the recipient of the Award for Outstanding Achievement from the University of Tennessee at Martin in 2003. Visit his Facebook page, Tennessee Underground, for more blogs and podcasts relating to law enforcement issues.