Trouble finally came to Annelise when she was nineteen. She’d had a boyfriend, Owen Greene, for three years, and they were getting serious-the relationship had survived his decision to go to school in California. Greene was prelaw at UC San Diego, with a 3.9 average, well liked by professors and peers. Then Marnie Hahn, a pretty local girl in her senior year of high school, accused him of raping her after a party in the moneyed La Jolla area.
Hahn, an indifferent student and the employee of a pizza parlor near campus, had gone to the party of her own will. She had been underage and drinking. She was an unlikely girl to bring a rape case against a rich college boy; nevertheless, she stuck to her story.
Whatever Greene told Annelise over the long-distance wires shortly thereafter is unknown, but Annelise flew out to California in a public show of support. During her visit, Hahn turned up dead, bludgeoned with a heavy object never recovered or even quite identified.
Greene was firmly alibied. Annelise, on the other hand, was not. Evidence, circumstantial but inevitable as a snowdrift, began to amass. Witnesses had seen Annelise’s rented car parked outside Marnie’s house. A little of Marnie’s blood, just a trace, was recovered from the driver’s-side floor mat of that same car.
The police moved fast, but the Eliots moved faster. By the time there was enough evidence for an arrest, Annelise was gone.
The parents denied any knowledge of her disappearance. They lawyered up and made public appearances, calling on the police to investigate their daughter’s disappearance as a kidnapping. However they were funneling money to Annelise-and the authorities all believed that they were-it wasn’t traceable.
That was how the matter stood for years, despite the best efforts of the FBI and police in two states. Thousands of leads fizzled. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the case was that no set of fingerprints existed for Annelise. She’d never been arrested, and she was the kind of girl who always had a troupe of friends around her, using her things. There was no way any latent print lifted from any possession of hers could be proven to have been made by Annelise.
Her case had been news across the U.S., but it was particularly big in Montana, where an 18-year-old Shiloh followed it in the newspapers. He’d been employed by one of old man Eliot’s logging crews-the magazine writers who’d done stories on the case had loved that particular detail.
But at first, when Shiloh believed he’d found Annelise Eliot in the Twin Cities, twelve years after her crime, his theory impressed no one. At first, it didn’t even worry Annelise herself.
Like most investigators, he’d made narrowing circles around his target, pulling at the edges of her Aileen Lennox identity, discovering how thin and immaterial it was. As his courteous, relentless probing continued, her nerves began to fray. She tried a high-handed approach first, writing him a letter requesting him to cease his activities. Then she complained of harassment to Shiloh’s superiors, as did some of her parishioners. And Shiloh’s superiors had listened.
This is a law-abiding woman, they pointed out. More than law-abiding: a philanthropist, a clergywoman. This couldn’t be Annelise Eliot, they said. Everyone knew where Annelise was. She was living with other American expatriates in Switzerland. Or maybe in Cozumel, where her parents’ U.S. dollars went a long way. She certainly wasn’t in Minnesota, a cold midwestern state where she knew no one, a minister at a nondenominational New Age church, feeding the homeless and tending the dying.
And they pointed out that the Eliot case might be a cold case, but it wasn’t a Minnesota cold case. Annelise had lived in Montana and killed in California. Back off, they said. Work your own caseload.
Shiloh had backed down, but only to retrench, looking into the life of Annelise, not Aileen. Shiloh talked to detectives in Montana. He’d begun talking to the FBI agent who’d headed up the Eliot investigation, who was polite but not very interested. And finally, he’d started talking to people who’d known Annelise. Not her close friends, but old acquaintances on the edges of her life.
It took a long time, an investigation crowded into the beginnings and ends of his workdays. But the day came when he had a long, friendly phone conversation with a high-school classmate of Annelise’s. During the course of the woman’s recollections, she suddenly remembered that during freshman-year biology, she and Annelise had been lab partners. They had typed each other’s blood. And oh yeah, they’d fingerprinted each other. She’d never really thought about that before.
His voice calm, his heart slamming, Shiloh asked if she’d kept her old school stuff.
Maybe, she said. My parents are real pack rats.
That spring evening he came home from work a little late. When I met him on the back step, he slid his hands up my rib cage and lifted me up off my feet as an exuberant young father might do with a small child.
Several days later, nearly a year after he’d met Aileen Lennox, Shiloh opened a Federal Express package containing patent fingerprints from Annelise Eliot. They drew a nineteen-point match with ones he’d had a fingerprint technician take months ago from the polite, annoyed letter Lennox had written to him.
Now Special Agent Jay Thompson of the FBI was interested. He flew to Minnesota. I’ll never forget seeing him on our doorstep, a lean, leathery man in his late forties. He looked tired, sly, and happy, all things I’d never seen before on a federal agent’s mien.
“Let’s get her, Mike,” he said.
It wasn’t easy, even then. Thompson flew to Montana, where Annelise’s mother, now a widow, still lived in a graceful old house on forty acres. Thompson and the detective who’d originally headed up the Montana investigation got a warrant to search the Eliot house; several officers went out to help them.
The widow Eliot was as tall as her daughter, and her blond hair was just beginning to be streaked with white. She’d had time to get used to follow-up visits from detectives, particularly the Montana man, Oldham. If she was alarmed that this time they had come with a search warrant-the first search in twelve years-it didn’t show, Thompson later said. She offered the men homemade ginger cookies.
It was a good performance, but she must have known how futile it was. Although there was little in the house to betray her ongoing contact with her daughter-the paperwork on the phone bill, for example, showed no calls to Minnesota-there was a sealed and stamped letter with no return address on the old roll-top desk in the study. It was segregated from the other outgoing mail, as if Mrs. Eliot meant to drop it separately into a public mailbox in town. There was no receiver’s name above the address, but it was going to Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
It was Thompson who’d found the letter, and he knew from that moment he had to move carefully. The letter hadn’t been hidden; he doubted Mrs. Eliot would believe they hadn’t seen it, even should he leave it behind unopened and in the same position on the desk. No matter what, the moment the police left her home, the widow Eliot was going to be on the phone to Minnesota.
No turning back. Thompson opened the letter. The salutation read, Dear Anni.
Thompson slipped the letter into his jacket, found Oldham, and told him to sit down with Annelise’s mother for a reinterview. “Keep her occupied,” he said.
While Oldham accepted ginger cookies and a cup of tea in a first-floor parlor, Thompson returned to the second-floor study and made two quick, quiet, and urgent calls to Minneapolis. The first was to a federal judge; the second was to Shiloh’s cell phone.
“Today’s the day,” he said. “We’re at the house. We got her, and the mother knows. I’m getting you a warrant. It’ll be ready in twenty minutes.” He looked out a wide window to where the Eliot land lay peaceful and white under March snow. “Go get her now, Mike.”
Annelise had never truly believed Shiloh would catch her. When he came to her that afternoon, in her study at the church, she at first thought it was with more futile, probing questions. When Shiloh began to Mirandize her, she finally realized what was happening.