To Die For (13 page)

The woman behind the counter pulled an application from a set of pigeonhole shelves behind her and turned around to hand over the form. She noticed the intense blue eyes of the woman asking for the application. Dana moved over to the side, fished for a pen in her purse, and started filling it out, placing her name, address and phone number in the boxes. She filled in her educational history and put down Jim and Jeri as references. In the work history section, she listed a job at a pharmacy between 1979 and 1981 and a staff nursing job she'd held from 1981 through 1987. For the last job, she put down that she was the owner of “Jungle Printing,” a silk-screen business she had run from her home from 1988 until 1993. She didn't mention the last job she'd held at a local hospital during the same period of time. She signed and dated the application and left.

10:15 A.M.

Greco was ecstatic and panicked all at once. He hung up the phone and walked over to where Wyatt and Lt. Gaskins had been talking. Lt. Gaskins had returned to his office. Wyatt was still there.

“I know who she is,” Greco said.

“Oh?” Wyatt said. “How do you know?”

Greco looked at him. His face was expressionless. It was no surprise that Wyatt was not as excited as Greco, but Greco was feeling too good to notice. He wanted to catch her. He wanted to move.

“Ahh, I had an informant who told me this is the suspect that did it,” he said quickly. “They ID'd the kid and the names matched.” He wanted to move. “Let's go tell Lieutenant Gaskins,” Greco said.

Gaskins was on the phone in his office. They sat down and waited. When he hung up, Greco filled him in, told him about the phone call from Jeri and told him the name of the suspect.

“I want to go out to the house and see what we've got so I can write out a warrant and make the arrest,” Greco said.

“Ahhh,” Gaskins said. “All right. Good. Go take care of business.”

Before they left, Greco wanted to call Deputy District Attorney Rich Bentley and fill him in.

“Rich,” Greco said. “I have a suspect. Her name is Dana Sue Gray.” Greco told him what he had: Jeri had named her step-daughter, who'd just dyed her hair, matched the description of the woman using June's credit cards, knew June and Norma, and was taking care of a young boy seen with the suspect using the credit cards.

Bentley listened, then said, “I don't think you have enough.”

The words deflated Greco's excitement. It made him backtrack for a minute. Didn't he have enough evidence to arrest Dana? Wasn't there enough for a search warrant? As the seconds ticked by, he tried to think. He couldn't speak.

“Maybe we should keep investigating it first before we get a warrant,” Bentley said.

Greco was in no position to question Bentley's judgment. At the same time, he was convinced he had the killer. It was Dana. He was certain.

“Well,” Greco said slowly, “if I go ahead and write the search warrant, would you still want to come out?”

“Yeah,” Bentley said. “Why don't you go ahead and write it up and see if you can get it signed, then give me a call?”

Greco told Bentley he would and hung up the phone slowly. He felt the same pangs of self-doubt that he'd been working hard to suppress. He thought he'd solved this thing and for a few moments now that certainty teetered in the balance. No one thought he could solve this case, not Charles Van Owen, the homicide detective who was June's son-in-law, not Rich, not Wyatt and, for a while, even he didn't think so. Greco took a second to straighten himself out. A few moments ago, he'd wanted to roll out of there as fast as possible to arrest this murder suspect and here he was again, wondering if he was doing the right thing. His knew in his gut that he was right. It
had
to be Dana. He shook off the negative feelings and focused his attention on what he had to do.

Greco grabbed a Polaroid camera and his keys and he and Wyatt hit the door for Dana's home on Mission Trail. It was important to preview a location before serving a search warrant. First of all, the law requires the officer filling out a search warrant affidavit to provide a precise description of the location they were asking permission to search, whether it's a home, an office building or a warehouse. And, since he was planning to arrest her at her home, he didn't want to walk into any situation blind. No cop likes surprises. He wanted to know if anyone else lived there, like Dana's boyfriend, and if she had any dogs that could prevent their entry. He would look at the position of the doors and windows to see if someone inside the house could see down the street, or if there were places through which a person could escape or aim a weapon. There's no telling what a person would do to evade arrest once they saw a horde of police officers in raid gear knocking on their front door. Jeri had told him that Dana and her boyfriend lived with his child, Jason Wilkins, and that the child would probably be present when they served the warrant. It would be preferable to get a look at everyone in person first.

It took about twenty minutes to get to Lake Elsinore. On the way, Wyatt suggested that they call ARCNET, Allied Riverside Cities Narcotics Enforcement Team, a task force comprised of area police departments, including Perris', that specialized in undercover narcotics work and particularly in surveillance.

“Why don't we get them to sit on the house while you write the warrant?” Wyatt said.

Greco nodded his head.

“That's a good idea, thanks,” he said.

Monitoring Dana's movements while Greco got the paperwork signed would allow the service of the search warrant to go smoothly. Once Greco and Wyatt got what they needed for the search warrant from observing Dana's house, ARCNET could pick up on the surveillance and keep tabs on her. By the time the warrant was written and a judge reviewed and signed it, ARCNET would by then, hopefully, have a line on Dana's whereabouts and could assist in executing the warrant.

Wyatt used his cell phone to call the ARCNET office in Hemet, about an hour away. Fortunately, the seven-member task force was able to take the assignment. By this time it was close to 11 a.m. Wyatt and Greco planned to watch Dana's house for about an hour. ARCNET said they could be there by early afternoon.

Wyatt, driving Greco's aquamarine Taurus, turned down the street where Dana lived, flanked by trailer homes on one side and by the vast, dried lake bed on the other. When they got to the house, Greco snapped pictures as Wyatt slowly cruised by. No brown Cadillac, no dark pick-up. They saw no cars in the carport, the driveway, or in front of the house. Looked like no one was home. A chocolate-brown labrador retriever and a light-colored dog with brown and black spots milled around inside a fenced backyard. McElvain parked down the street and they watched the house for a while. No one came in or out. Greco took down the license plates of a Chevy and a Nissan parked down the street in front of neighbors' homes. After a few minutes, Wyatt went farther down the street, turned around and parked directly in front of the house. Greco took more photos. They stayed for a while, then moved the car again down the street to watch the house some more, to see if anyone came home, before eventually going back to the station. No one came or left during the time they were there.

Greco found it ironic that, after all their strife, Wyatt was with him to catch this woman. But he was too excited to care. He wanted to catch this woman so bad. The only thing he had on his mind was to get Dana Sue Gray into custody and talk to her. Why, he wanted to ask her, are you killing helpless old ladies?

10:49 A.M.

“Good to see you, Mrs. Beebe.”

The receptionist greeted the 87-year-old woman as she entered the eye doctor's office, holding her cane in one hand and opening the door with the other.

“How are you today?” she answered.

The receptionist jotted down the time on the office log: 10:49 a.m. She showed Dora Beebe into a waiting room and, within a few minutes, the ophthalmologist came in and examined her eyes. The appointment didn't last long. On her way out, the receptionist made another appointment for Dora to return in six weeks. It was 11:10 a.m.

It took Dora about five minutes to drive from her eye doctor's office to her home in Sun City, an entire neighborhood of low, flat homes. Dora's house had bright orange shutters and a garden full of rose bushes and irises. It was fifteen years to the day since her husband, Ernest, had died. She was active in the community, a prominent member of her church and involved in in clubs. She stayed current with the news and liked keeping statistics on football and baseball games. She rarely missed a golf tournament on TV. She was expecting a call from her daughter, who lived in Brentwood, a tony suburb of Los Angeles. Despite the sadness of the day, she would see her longtime companion, Lou, later in the day and take him to a doctor's appointment.

She pulled her white Toyota station wagon halfway into the driveway, got out to open the garage door, then eased the Toyota into the garage. Since she was planning to leave again in a few hours, she left the garage door open. She also left her cane in the car. She had only been carrying it for a few months, and hated using it. Besides, she had another one in the kitchen.

A few minutes after she'd gone into the house, a brown Cadillac slowly pulled up in front of the house with the bright orange shutters. A stocky woman with reddish-brown hair hopped out of the driver's seat, walked to the house and knocked on the front door. Dora was normally cautious, but she opened her door to the woman standing on her front porch.

“I'm so lost!” the woman said. “Can you tell me how to get out of here?”

“Well, I'm not sure,” Dora said. “But I have a map book inside that you can look at. Why don't you come in?”

“Thanks!” the woman replied, her intense blue eyes shining brightly.

12 NOON

“Excuse me, can you tell me where the Dayrunners are?”

An attractive but somewhat stocky woman with reddish-brown hair, wearing a dark shirt and dark pants, had been wandering around Sun City Stationery for about 15 minutes.

“Yes, they're over here,” said clerk Dennis Valencia.

A few minutes later, she asked about the briefcases and Valencia helped her make a selection.

She put the Dayrunner and more than a half-dozen other stationery items in the black leather briefcase, wrote a check for $110.05, signing the name “Dora Beebe.” She waved off the offer of bagging the briefcase and headed for the health food store across the way.

12:45 P.M.

Greco had written exactly one search warrant. This was his second. He knew that if the police seized something that tied Dana to one of the murders, maybe a blouse with Norma's blood on it, that evidence could be tossed out by a trial judge if he found that the warrant was legally faulty. On the other hand, he knew that it didn't have to be perfect. As long as it was served in good faith, the police officers had a little leeway. The main thing was that he wanted to avoid making a fatal error. There was no one on the department who was an expert on search warrants, but he knew James had done countless searches on drug cases, so he asked him for help with some of the wording.

The search warrant generally fell into four major components. The first was the search warrant itself, which was a full, legal description of the location they wanted to search and an explanation of exactly what they were looking for. Joe typed in: “32524 MISSION TRAIL, IN THE CITY OF LAKE ELSINORE, COUNTY OF RIVERSIDE: further described as a single wide mobile home, white and brown in color. The number ‘32524' is in black on the front of the mobile home. The home is on the east side of the street…” James told him that he had to spell out specifically what he was looking for. “Credit cards in the name of June Roberts, purchases made from the use of the credit cards, trace evidence, handwriting samples, keys, telephone bills, papers and documents…” Greco was required to provide a description of his career in law enforcement, referred to as the “hero sheet.” He already had his input saved on the computer from the last warrant. Now he inserted his hero sheet, about a page and a half, into the computerized document. From cop to cop, they all read about the same: “Your affiant is Joseph K. Greco. I am currently employed by the Perris Police Department as a police officer and have been so employed for more than 5 years. I currently hold the rank of corporal…”

12:47 P.M.

A poster outside the door of Crain's Health Foods advertised a natural weight loss product. The red-haired woman in the dark shirt and dark pants wandered around the store for a while, then approached the store owner.

“You've got a sign outside that says something about losing so many pounds,” the customer said. The customer picked up a bottle of Thermagenics, described as a weight loss aid for $29.95, as well as a dozen other bottles of vitamins.

She wrote a check for $133.20, signing the name “Dora Beebe.” When the proprietor asked for her phone number, she gave a phony one.

2 P.M.

The seven-member ARCNET team, each in separate, unmarked cars, had spread out around Dana's house. One officer sidled up to a liquor store parking lot several blocks down the street. Another was at a car wash a half-mile away in the other direction. One car was parked far down the street, but within sight of Dana's house. The others were spread out, but close to major intersections. The officers had tiny binoculars, microphones, earpieces and radios. If anyone spotted the brown Cadillac, they would radio the team and let them know her location and direction and the officer closest to the direction in which she was headed would pick her up. At 2:15 p.m., the two officers closest to her house changed positions so the second officer could watch her house, but from a distance. Jeff Smith, a Perris police officer, had been assigned to ARCNET for a year. The other officers were from other local departments in Riverside County. The cities of Banning, Beaumont, San Jacinto, Hemet as well as the state Department of Justice contributed officers. They rotated positions a couple of times an hour.