Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (21 page)

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deep and contained only a couple of goldfish. The day after Pam died,

Mead and his brother completely dismantled the pond and filled it in

with dirt. Mead said he didn’t want anyone else to be hurt. In reality

he was erasing crucial evidence.

The medical examiner concluded that the cause of death was

drowning, although a small wound typical of blunt-force trauma

was found on the back of Pam’s head. It appeared to him that her

head had come in contact with some hard object with considerable

force— but not enough to kill her— just before she was immersed

in water. She could simply have fallen as she went to feed the fish,

hit her head on one of the surrounding bricks or rocks with enough

force to make her lose consciousness, then drowned. After all, Pam

was still recovering from foot surgery at the time of her death, and

her gait was unsteady.

Of course, a brick or rock or some other blunt object could have

been swung into the back of Pamela Mead’s head, but there was no

evidence at the time to explain how that might have happened or

who might have done it. There are many deaths in which a forensic

pathologist can determine that, indeed, someone’s skull was beaten

in with a bat or some other object with a force that could not be

caused accidentally. But Pam’s case appeared to be precisely in the

indeterminate middle—she’d been struck hard, but only about as

hard as one might expect from a sudden backwards fall. Forensics

alone cannot resolve such cases.

The Mead case is not an example of shoddy police work. A

homicide detective was called out to the scene immediately, and she

looked extensively for signs of suspicious or criminal activity. Det. Jill

Candland had previously investigated a case of apparent drowning,

about which questions of possible staging were later raised. So she

was not about to accept things on face value without a thorough

investigation.

Candland used a high-intensity lamp to examine the footprints in

the dirt surrounding the pond, looking for any sign of a struggle or of

a body being dragged, and to check the bricks and rocks making up

the retaining wall of the pond for blood and hair. She even checked

the bathtub inside the home, as sometimes a drowning in one location

is restaged at a different location that appears less criminal. She found

nothing that drew into question the story Mead was telling.

In the days that followed, the detective continued to gather

evidence, talking to people who knew the couple, and following up

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on the time line Mead provided of his activities on the day his wife

died. A series of unsettling facts about David Mead quickly emerged.

The man who had appeared so grief stricken that he had to be

restrained from hurting himself had another woman on the side. His

involvement with Winnetka ‘‘Winnie’’ Walls was not just a casual

sexual affair but a serious ongoing relationship. Winnie was pretty

and African American like his wife. (Mead was Caucasian.) When

his wife was out of town working flights, Mead, like so many eraser

killers, pretended to be a bachelor. Winnie was shocked when she

eventually found out that he was married.

Mead was an attentive and ardent boyfriend. He paid her rent in

a nice apartment and took her on exotic trips with him, using free

airline tickets his wife received as an airline employee. He told Winnie

that he didn’t love his wife and that he was planning to divorce her.

He seemed to have serious intentions toward his girlfriend, even

asking to meet her parents. Winnie certainly had serious intentions

toward him.

For the most part, Mead was thoroughly charming. But there were

a few things that disturbed Winnie. He kept some mighty strange

items under lock and key in Winnie’s apartment, such as dresses,

wigs, and explosives. He also videotaped their lovemaking.

In their talk of a future together, Mead would vaguely refer

to ‘‘taking care of everything.’’ A month before Pam’s death, an

impatient Winnie threatened to send one of the videotapes to his

wife if he kept stalling and did not leave her. Mead told her not to

worry. His wife, he said, was going to suffer a ‘‘nasty spill.’’ Over time

he got more specific, talking about killing his wife and staging it to

look like a robbery, giving himself an alibi by either being at work or

at one of his brothers’ houses.

He even blurted out something menacing in front of Winnie’s

parents over Sunday dinner shortly before Pam died. When they

pressed Mead to make things right with their daughter, he said he

was going to murder his wife. He even claimed to have run over her

feet and caused her to need surgery.

Mead also spoke of collecting insurance money he had on his

wife. He told Winnie that he had several policies and that he had

specifically purchased ones that paid double indemnity—meaning

they would pay out twice the face value of the policy in the event of an

accidental death. He claimed he couldn’t simply divorce Pam because

his business was in his wife’s name and was largely kept afloat by

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loans from her parents. Although all this talk was disturbing, Winnie

believed it was just talk. She didn’t believe that a man who was so

good to her could be capable of that kind of violence.

Winnie’s ultimatum was not the only thing impinging on Mead’s

half-married, half-bachelor life around the time of the murder. The

airline his wife worked for discontinued service to Salt Lake City.

Unwilling to move, Pam was out of a job. She was home all the time

now, interfering with Mead’s extracurricular activity, and she wasn’t

bringing in any income either. In his mind, Pam was now nothing

but dead weight. The plan for her that he had long fantasized about

kicked into high gear.

Two weeks after that Sunday dinner, Winnie got a call from

Mead’s brother, who informed her that Pam had died in a tragic fall

and that David would not be able to contact her until after the funeral

had been held. Suddenly her world came crashing down around her.

The man she thought she knew—charming, generous, loving— had

a diabolical side she never let herself believe was really there.

Q

Continuing her investigation, Detective Candland had gathered

other bits of information pointing to some shady business activities in

which David Mead may have been involved—a side business, using

his unsupervised access to airplanes, as part of a drug-smuggling ring.

His secret life was deeper and darker than anyone had suspected.

Candland contacted the medical examiner to go over her findings

with him. The doctor did something he had every right and reason to

do— but something too few medical examiners are willing to do: he

took a fresh look at the case. The physical findings had not changed;

they were still ambiguous. But based on the new allegations and

information presented to him, he changed the manner of death in

his report from accidental to pending.

It was a critical turning point in the case, as an erroneous deter-mination of cause or manner of death can become not only an

impenetrable roadblock to further investigation but also an albatross

that a defense attorney can hang around the state’s neck. The change

sent a positive signal to the police, an assurance that their work would

not be stymied by a supposedly definitive finding that Pam Mead

died in a simple household accident.

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By this time it wasn’t just the Salt Lake City police who were

looking into David Mead. His dead wife’s family did not believe the

fishpond story for a minute. Their daughter did not like water and

did not like the dark. They did not believe that in her hobbled state

she would have ventured out at night to feed the fish. In a face-to-face

confrontation with her son-in-law, Pam Mead’s mother questioned

what looked like scratches and bruises on David’s upper chest. He

explained that they must be the result of all the flailing around he

had done in the pond after finding his wife dead. The family hired an

aggressive private investigator to do some digging.

On a third front, the insurance company from which David had

purchased the unusually high double indemnity policies began its

own investigation. As the colorful district attorney who ultimately

prosecuted Mead, Howard Lemcke, puts it in a 2005 book he wrote

about the case, ‘‘When someone makes eight $137 monthly payments,

then files a claim for half a million dollars, most folks would have a

few questions they’d like to ask.’’

David Mead hoped to throw suspicion off himself by agreeing to

take a polygraph. The test was administered not by the Salt Lake

City police but by two very competent polygraphers, both of whom

were former cops. Mead passed the test with flying colors— his

score far above the ‘‘questionable’’ range. Although the mere fact of

being a fearless psychopath could explain how he was able to pass

a polygraph, it was also revealed later that he bragged to his cousin

Jack how he had obtained every book he could find on lie detector

tests and studied every possible way of cheating.

With a seemingly solid alibi and a squeaky-clean polygraph result,

David Mead believed he had gotten away with murder. But Candland

discovered that his alibi was not really airtight. Mead claimed he

was at work at the time of his wife’s ‘‘accident’’ and came home at

11:00 P.M. to find her dead. Although the time he arrived at the Salt

Lake City airport that night was recorded as 8:50 P.M.— suspiciously

at an airport gate he had never before used, as if he were purposely

attempting to construct an alibi—he was only seen briefly cleaning

one plane. No one else saw him for the rest of the night. That gave

him ample time to return home and commit the murder.

The investigation got one lucky break. Mead’s cousin Jack was

picked up on a burglary charge. Jack Hendrix had never really held

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down gainful employment; he was always in and out of prison on

some robbery or burglary charge. He was also a drug addict. Jack

made a deal with the police to get some charges cleared up in

return for telling the detectives everything he knew about his cousin’s

involvement in the death of Pam Mead.

The story he told was a stunner. David had first tried to hire

him to help stage a crime—the burglary-gone-bad scenario he had

mused about with Winnie. While Mead was safely away at work, Jack

was supposed to kill Pam, ransack the home, and take off with some

valuables.

Mead promised to pay his cousin $30,000, and gave him $1,000

and sixty grams of coke as down payment. It was a fatal error on

Mead’s part because Jack went on a bender and failed to show up at

the agreed-on time to commit the contract killing.

Presented with all this new and even more incriminating informa-tion, the medical examiner amended his report once again to read:

‘‘Pamela Mead died as a result of drowning. Contributory to death is

blunt-force injury of the head. Investigation indicates the decedent’s

death was the result of action(s) by another person.’’

If this conclusion by the chief medical examiner sounds easy or

obvious, it is only because few people understand how difficult,

time-consuming, and possibly career-damaging it is for medical

examiners to completely rethink cases on which they have already

made assessments. The fact that the medical examiner amended

his findings would be challenged both at trial and on appeal, but

the manner in which the medical examiner made his changes and

explained them in court was upheld as completely proper by the Utah

Supreme Court.

Q

As police uncovered more evidence from interviewing Pam Mead’s

family and friends and additional mistresses of David Mead, the story

became even more ghoulish. Pam’s distraught parents revealed that

about a year prior to her death, Pam was at home and happened

to pick up the phone to make a hair appointment. As soon as she

put the receiver to her ear she heard her husband on the line talking

apparently to someone with whom he was on intimate terms.

But it wasn’t the intimacy that was so upsetting to Pam. She could

clearly make out the steady voice of her husband telling his lover that

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he was thinking about murdering his wife. Pam heard David say that

he wanted out of his marriage but would not divorce Pam because

she held the strings to his business. Instead, he said he wanted to kill

Pam and collect the insurance money.

Horrified, Pam packed up and left, heading for the safety of her

parents’ home in Colorado, confessing the details of the frightening

phone call to her sister. But as a smooth-talking con man, David

somehow reassured her that he never really intended to hurt her, that

he loved her and only her.

Because of the difficulties encountered in rounding up uncoop-erative witnesses, and delays caused by civil litigation over the fat

insurance policy David Mead had planned to collect, it took four

years, until 1998, to bring the case to trial. Just as it was fortunate to

have an aggressive and skeptical investigator, it was a happy accident

that the case was assigned to a veteran prosecutor who did not flinch

at the prospect of circumstantial evidence. The passion Howard

Lemcke brought to the case, however, was not a relentless drive

to convict David Mead so much as a determination to ensure that

Pamela Mead received some form of justice. As he says, ‘‘She is the

person I’m really working for. In a case like this, I’m the only voice

she has left.’’

Despite the fact that at least three people testified independently

that they had heard David Mead talk about killing his wife, there

was no direct evidence that Mead had committed the murder—no

witness who saw him or heard him do it. Lemcke had to present a

‘‘total tapestry of evidence’’ in which any one small piece may seem

insignificant, but when woven together as a whole makes the sum

total of evidence overwhelming. The jury was convinced, finding

David Mead guilty of first-degree murder.

After the 1998 trial, most jurors said they did not believe that Mead

conceived of the fishpond as a home improvement, as he claimed,

but solely as a means of murder—the set on which he would stage

the death of his wife, disappearing his involvement in that death right

before our eyes. As one juror said, ‘‘He’s just playing us. He’s played

everybody.’’ Although he came very close to getting away with his

crime, the audience was not taken in by his smoke and mirrors.

As the jurors looked even closer at the evidence in Mead’s backyard

‘‘stage,’’ they found something that was a clear and direct indication

of premeditation. Mead had actually unscrewed the bulbs in the

backyard floodlights, making it nearly pitch dark the night of Pamela’s

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