Stalking Susan (3 page)

Another explosion. Then all I see is black.

A few seconds later the tape goes to snow. That’s what TV journalists call it when the pictures suddenly stop and all that shows on the monitor is white-and-gray static. I reach for my purse and pull out, no, not a tissue—I have no tears left.

What I pull out is a wallet-sized wedding photo of Hugh Boyer and me.

T
HE NEXT DAY
searchers found my husband’s body in the rubble, a dead toddler clutched in his arms.

Perhaps now you understand why I have what amounts to a get-out-of-jail-free card from the Minnesota State Patrol.

They also found the bodies of the day care lady, barber Bill, and Chuck Hudella. His crumpled camera lay nearby, the videotape inside.

Now you understand why Governor Johnson got what amounts to a get-the-hell-out-of-office card from Minnesota voters.

Minnesota has a national reputation for the highest voter turnout. It’s a matter of state pride. While the rest of the country struggles to get 40 percent to the polls, Minnesota can count on at least 75 percent of its voters to do their patriotic duty. On the Iron Range, the figure is closer to 90 percent.

This election set two state records: highest turnout and lowest showing by a major-party gubernatorial candidate. Governor Johnson finished the night with just 17 percent of the vote.

Voters might have been able to forgive him for acting like a coward while campaigning as a war hero. But they could never forgive him for being a big fat liar.

You see, a few hours after the building collapsed, the governor figured the only surviving witnesses to his meltdown were all under the age of five and would probably remain traumatized through grade school. With his press secretary dead, he held a news conference that was carried live by every TV and radio station in the state, as well as by CNN, FOX, and MSNBC.

Tape of that news conference was in the box, too. But I didn’t bother looking at it. I remembered the sound bites, which played over and over on the news. The governor had worn a sling on his arm and tears on his cheek. He had sobbed about his own survivor’s guilt.

“I should have perished inside with them. But my close personal friend, Hugh Boyer, forced me out. He told me, ‘Governor, my job is to keep you safe.’ And he literally pushed me out the window to keep me from helping evacuate the children.”

That scenario meshed with what witnesses saw from the parking lot; so that scenario led the newscasts—until Channel 3 got Chuck’s camera back.

L
IFE WOULD HAVE
been easier for Governor Johnson if the firebomb had been an assassination attempt. Then he might have landed some public sympathy. After all, it wasn’t his fault the Iron Range Regional Center collapsed—at least not directly. The person most responsible was Roger Meyerhofer. But he was dead, and folks needed someone alive and kicking to blame.

At the same moment the governor was high-fiving the little boy in the barber chair, Roger Meyerhofer drove his ’83 Ford Ranger pickup through the Licensing Bureau wall on the other side of the building. He had a full tank of gas, plus a full load of chemical fertilizer. Kaboom.

Meyerhofer was fed up with the bureaucrats inside because they wouldn’t give him a hunting license. They told him there was no point in him having a hunting license because, being a convicted felon, under state law he couldn’t carry a gun until ten years after his probation was up. That wasn’t going to happen until 2011. Meyerhofer had been ticketed for poaching deer that season and was supposed to serve a month in the county jail, starting the next day. Authorities had already confiscated his rifle, otherwise he probably would have shot the place up instead of blowing it up. He died instantly along with three government employees and a pregnant teenage couple who were there getting a marriage license.

There were twenty-three other people in the Iron Range Regional Center that day. They might all have got out alive, except for the person second most responsible for the tragedy: Frank Skaw.

His role didn’t come out until months later when authorities concluded the investigation. Skaw was the beer-bellied Iron Ranger in charge of the construction project. Turns out, he had skimmed part of the grant money and used steel beams that didn’t meet code.

And in a classic what-goes-around-comes-around twist, the investigation also uncovered that Frank Skaw won the bid in the first place because he was a big campaign contributor to Governor Johnson.

So when Roger Meyerhofer crashed his truck, he started a chain reaction through the entire building that ended thirteen lives, one political career, and my marriage.

The person next most responsible was me.

I was the reporter who broke the story about gun-wielding felons and hunting licenses the year before. I’d had our newsroom computer genius cross the state criminal database with the state hunting license database, popping hundreds of names, including Meyerhofer’s. My report clued state law enforcement officials that some dangerous dudes were packing heat, and put political heat on them to stop it.

So in a way, crazy old Roger Meyerhofer was my fault. Of course, I was the only one who blamed me; but anyone would understand why I’ve been messed up for the last year or so and why the Susan story might be just the thing I needed to rescue myself from the emotional disorder of my life.

CHAPTER 4

O
ne quick glance in the mirror the next morning and a quick step on the scale confirmed the status quo: I’d let myself go in the personal grooming department. I wasn’t used to looking like the “before” picture. Sallow complexion. Shapeless hair. Drab brown. No highlights. I definitely needed a trip to the salon. But cosmetic fixes are easier than making over damaged psyches. I practiced smiling, closemouthed as well as with teeth.

Knowing the right break could turn today from a research day into an on-camera day, I added powder, blush, and my favorite rust-colored lipstick to my reflection. Mascara around my brown eyes, a dab of foundation over a small scar at the corner of my left eyebrow, and I was ready for air.

Surveying my closet, I selected a loose-fitting vintage jacket made of black wool to hide the fact I was still down fifteen pounds. The loss didn’t bother me, but I tire of people telling me I look too thin. Don’t they know the camera adds ten?

Most days, television reporters need to look good only from the waist up, so I slipped on a pair of jeans and headed out the door.

B
EING A GEEK
is better than being a nerd. Nerd suggests uncool while geek implies shy genius. Lee Xiong wasn’t just any geek. He was an alpha geek.

“I got a job for you,” I told him that morning in the newsroom. He was hunched over one of his computers and didn’t look up.

“I already have a job, Riley.”

Geek isn’t really a job description. Technically Xiong was a news producer, but the bulk of his workload consisted in keeping the newsroom computers running. Just as magicians love pulling rabbits out of hats, he loved pulling clues out of computers.

My trip to the tape morgue the night before had yielded nothing but heartbreak. As I had predicted, the only tape saved from the Susan slayings was what had aired the day after the murders. The camera never got close enough to capture any actual evidence. Just police and police tape. Thirty-five seconds total. Shot from a distance. If I was going to break any new ground, I’d have to look in places the cops hadn’t. I thought I’d start with a kazillion gigabytes of death records.

Like thousands of other Hmong, Xiong had come to St. Paul as a child from a refugee camp in Thailand after the Vietnam War. His parents kept their old country ways, but Xiong was young enough to grow up on Saturday-morning cartoons and American video games. He excelled at computer training and landed a job at Channel 3, where he developed a knack for crunching obscure numbers into meaningful stories.

His most vivid coup occurred a few months back when the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed during rush hour and fell into the Mississippi River. While most journalists chased heroes and victims, Xiong analyzed bridge inspection data and produced an unsettling, widely copied story about the safety of America’s bridges.

Reclusive, like most geeks, he dressed more like Mr. Rogers than a recent college graduate. His only fashion flair was his funky wire rim glasses. On his desk sat a souvenir photo of him and Eeyore taken at Disney World several winters ago during spring break. He preferred e-mail over face-to-face communication, but since I hadn’t bothered him for several months, and since I didn’t feel like typing up a ten-page memo, I simply pulled up a chair and gave him the verbal backstory on the Susans.

“Interesting,” he said.

“I want to look for others.”

“Others?”

“Other victims,” I told him. “Other Susans. I want to look for a pattern. If I find more murders, it’ll be harder to dismiss these two cases as coincidence and it may become easier to connect the dots.”

“Well, we still have the death certificate database,” he said.

A few years back we had used that information to match death certificates with voting records for a story on voter fraud. We called it “Dead Man Voting.” We found cases of people casting ballots from the grave in tight local races. While Minnesota allows more flexibility than most states when it comes to registering on Election Day and absentee balloting, election law does insist that each voter have a pulse.

“I bought even more,” Xiong said. “So we can check thirty years of records starting in 1976. It won’t take any longer than running the last decade.”

Besides name and date of death, the computer records contained other useful fields: date of birth, cause of death, zip code, race, and marital status. In all, more than a million deaths.

“Let’s check the death date of November 19 without a year, so we can be open to whatever comes up,” I suggested.

“All homicides? All Susans? What are we looking for?”

“Let’s do a run of all Susans who died on that date, in case a murder fell through the cracks. Then let’s do another run of all homicides that day in case the Susan name is a fluke.”

“National or just Minnesota?”

I hesitated. If we searched too narrowly, we might miss the big picture. If we searched too wide, we might be overwhelmed by unrelated cases. It’s much easier to find a needle in a pin cushion than in a haystack.

“Take Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas,” I decided. “If we find any leads, we can always expand our search.”

“I’ll split the name field into two new fields,” Xiong explained. “First and last names. That way we can do a unique breakdown on the Susan theory. I need to write a program and let the computer run. Then clean the data. Might be done sometime tomorrow, but that does not mean we will come up with anything. Also, did you run this by Noreen?”

Noreen Banks, our news director, had a talent for spotting talent. She could look at an anchor audition tape and predict which blonde with the earnest eyes and sparkling smile would click with viewers in which market. Corporate bigwigs in the television news business highly value that particular skill. But when it came to deciding what story should lead the ten o’clock news, Banks untraditionally favored warm and fuzzy tales of small children and cute animals over the lurid lore of crime and punishment.

“Did Noreen approve?” Xiong repeated.

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m waiting to flesh out the story more before I pitch it. I hate to get her hopes up if I can’t deliver.”

Actually, I was waiting to see if Noreen might possibly win the lottery and move to Polynesia, or if her appendix might suddenly rupture, or if she might even meet Mr. Right and become a stay-at-home trophy wife. I didn’t care which as long as she didn’t let the door hit her on her way out.

Noreen Banks surrounded herself with a team of news managers who had no clue as to why the term “totally destroyed” is redundant. I suspected she handpicked her staff to make herself feel smarter. The average tenure for a television news director is just over eighteen months. Live by the ratings; die by the ratings. Banks had two years under her belt at Channel 3, and so far the ratings were on her side. Turns out Twin Cities viewers embraced warm and fuzzy, and under Noreen, Channel 3 moved from a solid third place in the market to a close second. The only way she’d likely leave the newsroom was a promotion to general manager. The big office upstairs.

“Don’t wait too long.” Xiong nodded. “She makes me justify everything I do.”

He dismissed me by leaning over his screen to write computer code, which might as well have been Latin for all it meant to me. I felt a flash of geek envy, and then I left him to the solitary click-click of his keyboard.

CHAPTER 5

S
usan Chenowith’s parents had an unlisted telephone number. That gave me a good excuse for not calling them before knocking on their door. Trial and error had taught me it’s usually better to just show up. Calling first gives them a chance to hang up, or a reason not to answer the door, or maybe time to change their mind. But since Ken and Tina Chenowith didn’t know I was knocking with questions about their dead waitress daughter, they didn’t hesitate to open the door.

“You’re here about Susan? Ken,” she called out, “a reporter’s here about Susan.”

If I can get someone to open the door, I can usually get invited inside. If they offer me coffee, that usually means they’ll eventually go on camera. That last part is crucial. No video, no story. Newspaper reporters have it easy, they can land a story without leaving their desk.

Things went well on the Chenowith doorstep and five minutes later, Ken and Tina and I were having coffee at their kitchen table. They hoped I had found their daughter’s killer and were clearly disappointed that I was asking the same questions the police had asked fifteen years earlier.

“If they had any leads, they never told us,” Ken said.

“I hope it was a stranger,” Tina said. “I hate to think it’s someone we know. That would make it worse, if it was somebody we had ever shaken hands with or smiled at. I couldn’t bear that.”

I heard sound bites as she spoke. Sound bites are the magic part of an interview. The words that make it on the air. A good sound bite can make pain real. It can leave a viewer breathless. An interview can stretch an hour without ten seconds of magic, but Tina spoke magic fluently.

“Sometimes I watch men on the street and wonder, was it him? Or was it him?”

“I’d kill the guy if I knew,” Ken said.

I didn’t doubt him. A former construction worker, he still had burly shoulders, strong hands, and a lot of body hair. His bulk made his wife’s petite frame seem feeble. But while her voice was strong, his was low and slow, that of a broken man.

She handed me a picture of Susan. “She was wearing this exact raincoat that night.”

I recalled the raincoat from the crime scene photos. It was knee length and tan. “May I make a copy of this?”

“Take whatever you want,” she said. “Maybe someone will see the story and come forward.”

“She didn’t deserve to die like that,” Ken said.

Susan was their only child. They had her late in life and their modest south Minneapolis rambler, while not a shrine to Susan, was proof enough of her existence. Eight-by-ten school photographs from kindergarten to high school hung in two rows down a long hallway.

As a child, she smiled a shy, crooked grin. As a teenager, her smile was closemouthed and self-conscious. If her family had money, she’d have had braces by fifth grade, perfect teeth by eighth.

I listened as they told me about a girl who wasn’t smart or social, but was friendly enough if someone was friendly first.

Yes, Susan dated. But while her friends became fiancées and brides and mothers, Susan remained simply their daughter. From time to time, she would be somebody’s girlfriend and he would pick her up at the door. But those relationships generally measured weeks, not months.

It’s possible she had been on her way to meet someone that night. Her parents had stopped asking, and Susan had stopped telling. She was the kind of waitress who could flirt well enough for tips at a casual diner, but not at an upscale restaurant. For her, waitressing was a dead-end job in more ways than one.

Her bedroom was as it had been the last night she left home.

“We talk about clearing out her stuff, but can’t seem to do it,” her mother told me, almost apologetically.

“I know how hard it can be to let go,” I said. Boy, did I know. Boyer’s State Patrol uniforms were still hanging in my closet. His golf clubs sat in the garage. Everything was where he had left it. Except his gun. I keep that under my bed. Loaded.

I opened the closet and found several black skirts and white shirts.

“That’s what she wore waitressing,” Tina said. Pinned to each shirt was a black plastic nametag reading
SUSAN
.

K
EN AND
T
INA
held hands tightly as they sat on the tattered couch. They slouched down more than I liked, but it was important that they be comfortable. They’d sit higher if we used the straight-back chairs from the kitchen, but they’d also be tense.

I wanted the interview to be emotional. That means, I wanted them to cry. This, after all, was television.

I phoned Malik Rahman and told him to bring in the camera. He’d been waiting on standby outside in the van. He did a careful job with the lighting, pulling the living room drapes shut and then setting up two light stands with a rose gel over the bulbs. The shot felt warm and the room looked rich. He eliminated the shadows on their faces. I wasn’t crazy about the two-shot because Ken was so much taller than Tina, but Malik convinced me it would work.

I briefly rested my hand on theirs and assured them we could stop the interview at any time, but this was their chance to tell viewers how special Susan was.

“Remember the interview is taped, not live. If you stumble, just start over.”

The secret to getting an interviewee to cry is trust: making them feel safe. If you’ve frightened them or made them nervous, it won’t work. Their words will seem stilted. You can’t scare someone into crying on camera. It’s also important that they not look directly at the lens, otherwise they’ll have an unnatural, deer-in-the-headlights appearance. I instructed Tina and Ken to look only at me and ignore Malik.

Our audio check found a low buzz coming from their refrigerator. I unplugged the appliance and put my car keys inside to remind me not to drive off without plugging it back in.

I set a box of tissues between Susan’s parents, and then we started.

They were good talkers. They had waited more than a decade for someone like me to knock on their door and clip a microphone to their collars.

“Susan was our life,” Tina began.

I had asked them not to speak with any other media until after Channel 3’s story aired. Other stations often try to undercut a competitor’s exclusive by airing a “spoiler” ahead of time. Sometimes newsmakers, either to be polite or to go for maximum exposure, decide to talk to all the media. This often backfires, diluting their story because no station feels ownership. Instead of being one channel’s lead story they get short shrift in multiple newscasts.

This television business may seem calculated, but I have personal limits that have evolved from reconciling what I do for a living with how I live with myself. For example, I won’t seek an exclusive in the case of a missing person, when time is critical. A family facing that horror needs all the publicity they can get. They can’t risk turning down
any
interview, because that station or newspaper just might be the one that leads to the tip that brings the return of their loved one. I carry enough job-related guilt; I don’t need that on my conscience.

Since I was the first reporter to contact the Chenowiths since their daughter’s death, they readily agreed to stick by me.

“I can’t solve her murder,” I explained to them. “But I can make sure she’s not forgotten.” For them, that was good enough.

“I feel like we’re not a family anymore,” Tina went on. “A family should be more than two people.”

The magic came with my fourth question: “What was it like when the police came to your house that morning?”

There was a long pause. “Our world ended,” Tina told me, the camera rolling. “A policeman saying ‘murder’ and ‘your daughter’ and our world ended.”

Tina began to weep. Ken wrapped his hairy arms around the mother of the murdered waitress and leaned his cheek against her forehead.

“Sound up, tears,” I thought in TV lingo, hating and congratulating myself at the same time.