When I dealt with the Anne Kelley case, I knew that I was not considered a friend of the police department-I lived in the community, was directly impacted by Anne’s murder, and was a common housewife-but this was a totally different situation. This was not a personal case to me. This was not a case that I brought to them as a citizen. This was a case in which a family member asked me to see the police as a profiler, admittedly new in the field, so law enforcement might have an issue with that.
Now that I was working in a professional capacity, I thought that Art and I would sit down with the police detective and he would say, “We are kind of stuck. If you want to look at things, we’d like to hear your thoughts.” It didn’t go well. The detective in charge was not pleased that Art had the audacity to bring in an outsider to examine her case. The police were working the case and she didn’t appreciate any implication that they weren’t doing their job well in spite of the fact that they had made no progress on the case whatsoever. They did not want anything going public that would make the police department look bad.
She greeted me coldly and told me in no uncertain terms that I was not welcome.
“I refuse to discuss this case with you or the family,” she said. “If you go public you had better be careful with what you say because I have done a lot of work on this case.”
That caused a dilemma, because I obviously would have liked to see all the evidence in their possession. Should I profile a case if I can’t access the case information and the case photos?
Ideally, I want the police department’s cooperation and access to every shred of evidence I can possibly see, all of the reports, all of the photos. But the reality is that even a police investigator sometimes doesn’t have all of this when he works a case. There are many pieces of evidence that might be missing. Maybe the elements have destroyed it. Evidence may have also been negatively impacted by first responders at the scene, by the fire department hosing down a place that was on fire. Things may have gotten lost on the way to the lab. They may have been misplaced in an evidence locker. They may have degraded. A witness may have disappeared so we can’t get a statement. In a perfect world, I would have 100 percent of all possible information and evidence. But in the real world, I get what I get.
Does that mean if I don’t have everything, I shouldn’t try to be helpful?
The police department and the medical examiner’s office refused to officially tell the family the time of death and refused to allow the family the right to see the autopsy report, even after Mary Beth’s son, Art Townsend, went to court over the matter.
The family wanted to know: Why were no other suspects being considered? Was this really a death from a domestic dispute or was it a burglary-related homicide that was never investigated as such? If Mary Beth Townsend’s fiancé was really involved with her death, why did the department stall on an arrest? Were they struggling to make conflicting facts fit the story? Were they wasting time focusing on the fiancé rather than pursuing other leads?
The police also successfully resisted the local newspaper in its investigation. The newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that resulted in the release of some basic information but not the autopsy report its reporters (and Art) sought.
On the other hand, I did have information that was available through Mary Beth’s son. I was also able to interview Sam Bilodeau, her fiancé, and hear his story, and determine whether I thought it was a fabrication or whether he was telling the truth.
I decided I would profile this case and help in one manner or another. Perhaps I could develop a lead that would help the police department. Perhaps I could come up with an answer that would help the family cope. Not a perfect world, not a perfect case, but if I could do anything to help, I would.
I went forward on Art’s invitation because I was concerned that there might be a predator on the loose if Sam was not involved.
THE FIRST THING I did was hear the circumstances of the case from Art. He told me what had happened, and then he added some other interesting details.
After several months, the police finally released Mary Beth’s car. Art attempted to drive it away but couldn’t because the clutch was destroyed. He had it towed to a mechanic, who yelled at him for tearing it up so badly.
This discovery actually helped convince Art that Sam was in the clear. Art thought that if Sam had really killed his mother and was trying to dump the car on the other side of town just to make it look like the offender drove it there, he would have had to purposely destroy the clutch. Sam not only knew how to drive a car with a manual transmission, but he owned one, too. It would take clever thinking for a man who just accidentally killed his girlfriend to think, “I’ll leave the car in the ghetto and make it look like I didn’t know how to drive it. If I destroy the clutch, it won’t look like me.”
Art brought this detail to the investigating detective’s attention and she was, admittedly, surprised. He passed along the mechanic’s contact information to the police for confirmation but they never called. They were only interested in evidence that implicated Sam, not excluded him.
It’s clever but unlikely that an offender in the midst of such desperation would be smart enough to cook that up. More likely, the person who actually took the vehicle did not know how to drive a stick-shift car, and that’s why the clutch was destroyed. (The car was dusted for prints but the police never told Sam or Art what they found.)
That began the process of conclusively leading me away from believing Sam Bilodeau was the perpetrator.
I interviewed Sam and the people who could verify his whereabouts on the day of Mary Beth’s murder. He had a pretty airtight alibi for the entire day, so if Mary Beth was missing by noon, Sam Bilodeau was not involved. He could be involved only if she was alive when he returned home from work, but the fact is she did not show up for her planned lunch, so therefore she was likely dead by noon.
I WONDERED WHY Sam had confessed.
I can learn a lot during an interview. Sam was an amiable fellow-gullible, actually. The police could have led him into saying anything if they pushed hard enough. He was a teddy bear, and he was a person under great duress, an emotional wreck who found his fiancée, the woman he planned to marry, dead. The brain does not think straight under such circumstances.
Sam had slept only a couple of hours before he woke and found Mary Beth’s body. I can’t believe when he got to the hotel he jumped into bed and got a blissful eight hours of sleep. By the time he was interviewed for the second time on Saturday evening, he had been up for almost forty-eight hours. Seriously exhausted and emotionally devastated, an easygoing, guileless personality is a sitting duck for manipulation by clever, seasoned detectives. He just might make a confession that he didn’t really mean. He was so confused that he didn’t know what he was saying anymore. He had no family present, no attorney to guide him. He wasn’t a fast-talking con man, so he answered their questions as honestly as he could and he eventually gave the police what they wanted. Like many a person who has confessed after lengthy interrogation, he just wanted the questions to stop, he wanted to not talk about the horrible incident anymore, he just wanted to lie down. He simply reached a point where he was too tired to care anymore.
I was not convinced that Sam had the personality to kill. He had no violent background and no motive-there was no life insurance from which he or even Mary Beth’s son could have gained, for example. There was not any great equity in the condo that she owned alone, and her death left Art responsible for an $86,000 mortgage. Mary Beth’s son said that Sam and his mother got along fabulously. There was nothing there, no reason for him to kill his fiancée.