04.Die.My.Love.2007 (34 page)

Mac then told her that he’d talked to his sister, an attorney, and she’d advised him to consult a lawyer friend of hers in Houston, Matt Hennessy, who worked in criminal law, in the firm of Houston’s well-known defense attorney Dick DeGuerin.

“You’ve managed to keep an arm’s distance from this,”

Freed said she told Mac.

The following morning, Tuesday, Freed was driving down the street with her girlfriend, Patti, who she described as “a wise individual.” When she filled her in on all that had transpired, Patti advised her to talk with an attorney. About that time, they saw Tina following in her car. They pulled over. Tina was crying, Freed said, and she and Tina talked.

During the conversation, Tina said she’d made an appointment to talk to an attorney on Friday.

“Don’t talk to anybody about any of this,” Freed quoted Tina as telling her and Patti.

Freed agreed, but didn’t keep the promise, instead going to her own attorney the following day. “I was not going to ride the coattails with good advice from a hysterical woman,”

she told the investigators. “I wanted to find out for myself where I stood.”

When Freed told the attorney of her concerns, he offered to represent her but wanted a $10,000 retainer. Her best 248 / Kathryn Casey

alternative, he suggested, was to take the items she’d gotten from Piper, which were still in the back of her Geo Metro, and turn them over to the police.

Instead, Freed decided to return the bags and computers to Piper.

“Where’s your sister? I want to give her things back to her,” Freed said she told Tina on the telephone.

As soon as she left the attorney’s office, she called Patti and asked her to meet her at the Houstonian, where Tina said Piper was in Room 220. “The attorney had told me to go, do not pass go, just go,” Freed told Kelley. She said she’d arrived about dusk on that Tuesday, pulling up in front of the Houstonian Hotel with Patti in her own car behind her.

“I was a mess,” Freed said.

She approached a valet and asked him to help her. She unloaded the bags and the computer onto his cart, gave him a five-dollar bill, and asked him to deliver it all to Piper Rountree in Room 220. Then she and Patti left and drove to a nearby Starbucks to recuperate from the turmoil.

On Friday morning, when she went to meet with Tina to go to the attorney, Freed told Kelley and McDaniel that Betty Rountree, their mother, was also at Tina’s house. As usual, Tina was running late, and when they got to the office, she went directly inside to talk to the attorney. When Tina came out, she asked Freed to talk with the man. In his office, Freed told Tina’s attorney what she knew, and he recommended she retain the services of her own attorney.

He picked up the telephone and called an attorney for her.

“I felt like he was putting a panic rush on me,” she said.

At times, during the lengthy interview, Kelley and McDaniel both had the feeling Freed was holding back, that there was more. Yet she continued to talk, adding pieces to the puzzle of the two sisters and Fred Jablin’s murder.

After they left the attorney’s office, Freed said she asked DIE, MY LOVE / 249

Tina how much money her family intended to pitch in to help cover her legal expenses.

“We’ll certainly help you,” Tina said.

“I figured Tina had no idea how much it could cost,”

Freed told the officers. She did go to the attorney Tina’s lawyer referred her to, she said, and he “scared the bejesus out of me.” When she’d gotten the call that Kelley and McDaniel were looking for her, she at first wondered if it were some kind of a joke. Then the receptionist handed her McDaniel’s business card, and she knew it was serious.

That morning, after she called McDaniel and before she’d come in, she said she and Mac had met at a restaurant called the Ragin’ Cajun. Over lunch, Mac verified what Tina had told her earlier: that Piper was a good shot at the shooting range, once he taught her how the gun’s sights worked.

Much of what Freed had told Kelley and McDaniel was damaging for Tina Rountree. Yet Freed insisted she had no malice toward her friend. In fact, Kelley realized Cari was deeply troubled by turning on Tina. When McDaniel typed up her statement, Freed went so far as to ask him to insert a comment in the report that said Carol Freed “loves [Tina]

very much,” and “this is far bigger than both of us.”

At 3:46 that afternoon Freed signed her written statement and McDaniel notarized it. Then Freed mentioned one more thing: At one point Tina had talked about going to the police herself. Despite all she’d been willing to do to protect Piper, it appeared, Tina wasn’t unaware of the possible legal consequences. Tina, after all, had a lot at stake, her nursing license and her freedom.

Listening to Freed, Kelley and McDaniel both wondered if Tina could be convinced to turn on her sister, and help their investigation.

Then, as they finished their session, Kelley put Carol Freed on the telephone with Wade Kizer, in Richmond. Kelley 250 / Kathryn Casey

wanted the prosecutor to hear her story fi rsthand. When Freed finished talking, Kizer thanked her for coming forward and told her, “Based on what I’m hearing, we’re not interested in prosecuting you. I can’t speak for Houston, but if they ask for my recommendation, as long as you’re cooperative there won’t be any charges brought against you.”

As Freed left, McDaniel was impressed with all she’d done, that she’d admitted her involvement, without shielding herself with an attorney. Now they had evidence that suggested if Tina hadn’t helped plan or commit the crime, at the very least she’d been involved in covering it up.

Later, Kelley and McDaniel drove to the Houstonian Hotel, where they asked to see the head of security. As they’d hoped, the front area of the hotel, where the valet worked, had surveillance cameras recording the comings and go-ings. As they looked through the tapes for that Tuesday at dusk, they uncovered, at 7:11, Carol Freed driving up in her Geo Metro. They watched as, just as she said, she got out of the car, opened her trunk, and flagged down a valet, and then unloaded the bags and computer onto his cart. She handed the man a tip, and at 7:13 she drove away.

When the officers left the hotel, they took the copy of the tape with them, more evidence in what was becoming a strong case.

The day wasn’t over, however. Later that afternoon another call came in for Kelley, this one from Jerry Walters.

“I’ve been thinking, and I remember a .38 caliber gun Tina had,” he said. As he talked, he told Kelley that he’d found a bullet at Piper’s house, a .38 special. He’d kept the bullet and still had it in a cup in his truck.

“Do you want it?” Walters asked.

Kelley, of course, said he did.

That eve ning, Kelley drove to the airport to pick up Danny Jamison, the Henrico crime scene specialist working the DIE, MY LOVE / 251

case. The search warrant was coming together, and Kizer and Stem wanted Jamison in Houston for its execution.

In the past couple of days, Piper had called Kelley off and on, asking how the investigation was proceeding. Kelley had the impression she was trying to feel him out, to fi nd out if she’d be arrested if she showed up at the custody hearing in Richmond on Monday morning.

“Will you be able to testify in my favor at the custody hearing?” Piper asked Kelley.

“If I’m back there, certainly I’ll testify to whatever is truthful,” Kelley replied.

“Okay,” she said. “Good. Because I’m worried about going there.”

The following day, Sunday, Kelley and Jamison refi ned the search warrant, working with Ashman in Richmond. McDaniel had the day off but called in regularly to help. Kelley Siegler, the Houston assistant district attorney they were working with, said she thought they could have it signed on Monday morning. The concern was that the warrant had to fulfill not only Texas but Virginia criminal law, so that whatever evidence they found and collected would be admissible at a trial.

That finished, in the afternoon the two offi cers drove to a sandwich place on the outskirts of Houston to meet with Charles Tooke. Piper had mentioned an e-mail to Tooke and a call from her the afternoon of the murder as part of her alibi. She was eager for Tooke to talk to the police, and just that morning she’d called Charles saying, “Coby Kelley, the Virginia investigator, wants to talk to you about when you talked with me that week.”

“Okay,” Charles agreed.

For his meeting with Kelley and Jamison, Tooke brought 252 / Kathryn Casey

a copy of the e-mail from Piper that had arrived at 3:29 that Saturday afternoon. It read, “I’ve got a brief question for you.” Tooke had also printed a copy of his response for Kelley: “I’m a boxer shorts. Not briefs.”

He also had with him a copy of his cell phone bill, showing the time he’d received a voice mail from her that same afternoon, the day of the murder. Although she said again that she had a question for him, when he called her back, he told them, she failed to respond.

Hard of hearing, Tooke asked them to repeat themselves often as the conversation progressed. He believed Piper was being wrongly suspected and that she’d had nothing to do with the murder, and he was eager to assist the police.

“I kind of had a thing for Piper,” Tooke admitted. “But don’t tell her.”

As they listened, Jamison and Kelley heard nothing from Tooke to convince them they were looking at the wrong suspect. What was clear was that Piper wasn’t at work, answering Tooke’s calls, on either Thursday or Friday of that week. The last time he’d talked with her on the telephone, although they routinely conversed almost daily, had been at 12:45 p.m. on the Wednesday before the murder. As to the e-mail and voice mail on the day of the murder, while police believed she was in the air flying back to Houston, those could have been sent by anyone using her e-mail account and a tape recording of her voice.

Something Tooke said did, however, interest the two investigators: On the call from Piper urging him to talk with them, Tooke said that she’d mentioned she was on her way to the airport, to fly to Virginia to attend the following day’s custody hearing.

After they left Tooke, Kelley called Wade Kizer. “She’s flying in today, and she’ll be at the hearing tomorrow,” he told him.

“We need to find her,” Kizer said.

DIE, MY LOVE / 253

For the rest of that Sunday, officers in Richmond attempted to find out where Piper Rountree was staying in Richmond. They wanted her under surveillance so that as soon as Kizer had a signed indictment from the grand jury, they could quickly move in and make an arrest. They called hotels and motels, but came up dry. Officers staked out the airport and didn’t find her. As Monday morning broke, neither Kizer nor the police knew where Piper Rountree could be found.

That Monday morning David Ferguson, McDaniel’s partner, was on a long anticipated vacation, hunting in Mississippi. It was one of his favorite things. He loved getting the deer in his sights, lining up the rifl e, and then slowly squeezing the trigger. Yet, this day, he was having a difficult time keeping his mind on the woods and the deer, instead wondering what was going on in Houston. When he called in about 9:00 a.m., he talked with his partner.

“We’ve got the search warrant,” McDaniel said. “We’re going in this afternoon, after they arrest her in Virginia.”

“Hope you have better luck with your hunt than I’ve had with mine,” said Ferguson, who hadn’t seen a buck all day.

On the warrant were the items the police would be searching for when they entered Piper’s house: ammunition, wigs, Tina’s identification, bills, bank and cell phone documents, computers, luggage, clothing and cell phones. Among the justifications for the warrant were listed all the reasons Piper Rountree was a suspect, including the purchase at the CVS

pharmacy of size small latex gloves.

“Your affiant has found that criminals wishing to conceal their fingerprints wear gloves,” McDaniel had written.

It was a busy morning for McDaniel, who had a second document signed by a judge: a warrant for Tina Rountree’s arrest. Virginia didn’t have laws to punish those who tried to cover up a crime for a family member, but Texas did, and 254 / Kathryn Casey

the pocket warrant—so named because it was theoretically kept secret until removed from a pocket and presented at the time the arrest was made—charged Tina with a felony, tampering with evidence.

“All the tiny puzzle pieces were fi tting together,” Owen Ashman says of that Monday morning. Sometimes the pieces of evidence were small, seemingly insignificant, but when joined with all the other evidence, they formed a persuasive picture. One such fact was something Ashman noticed on the Homestead Suites registration form. Instead of her rented van, a Ford Windstar, Piper had listed her vehicle as a Chrysler Voyager, the type of van she’d received as part of her settlement in the divorce.

All around, those involved were starting to feel better about the Rountree case, including Captain Stem. Despite the spats he and Kizer had over the case, that morning he had to admit he felt better about the evidence they’d collected than he would have if they’d made the arrest the previous week.

To set events in motion, before the custody hearing started that morning, Owen Ashman went to see the family court judge, to explain that Wade Kizer was, at that very moment, in front of a grand jury, and that he hoped momentarily to have an indictment ready to arrest Piper Rountree for Fred Jablin’s murder if not before the custody hearing began, immediately after she left the courthouse.

In the grand jury’s meeting room, Kizer and Kelley’s partner, Robin Dorton, outlined the evidence that they said proved their case, all the documents and witness statements collected by Hanna, Kelley, and the others working the case.

When they finished, the jurors voted to issue two indictments that charged Piper Rountree with unlawful use of a fi rearm and first degree murder, the victim one Fredric Jablin.

At that point, late on the morning of the custody hearing, DIE, MY LOVE / 255

with the signed indictments in Kizer’s possession, all that remained was to find Piper Rountree and make the arrest.