Ollie Clark—Thursday, June 27, 2019
Deborah left immediately to go downtown and be with Dad while they did whatever they did after an arrest—Ollie figured Eli could tell her, but she didn’t want to ask just now—and Cindy decided that she should go, too, even though that wasn’t on her list of orders. She was, in fact, supposed to stay put where neither police nor Roger Porvoo could question her.
Cindy clearly thought she knew better than some lawyer with years of experience, so she ran a brush through her hair, freshened her lip gloss, and told Ollie to lock up.
Right. So.
Eli took a slow breath and got up to freshen his coffee, moving slowly. In shock? Deep in thought? When he turned around and leaned against the counter, cup in both hands, he asked Ollie, “Have you and I ever been alone in this house?”
Ah. Deep in thought. “Uh.”
“I’m just saying. This is weird.”
Right. That was the weird thing about today.
He slurped some off the top. “What did you do last time?”
“Last time?” They’d never been alone in Dad’s house before.
“Yeah, last time. I get arrested and you … did you text people?” He frowned, pondering this as a sort of academic exercise instead of something deeply personal. “Do we text people that your dad just got arrested? Is that rude? Because I can’t see us calling everybody, and even if we do that, the first people are going to keep us on for so long the last people will get it from the grapevine before they hear it from us.”
Ollie pulled out her phone and just looked at it. “Honestly, I can’t remember.” She didn’t have an iPhone back then, but what phone had it been? A flip phone? The one with the full keyboard that pulled out with actual buttons instead of just a touch screen? “There’s a lot about that time I can’t remember.”
“Lucky,” he sighed, grabbing the pad of paper off the fridge and drinking more coffee so it didn’t spill as he sat down again. He plunked the mug on the table and tore off the shopping list on the first sheet before clicking open the tiny pen. “Okay. Jared, my mom … Harper and Brad, hey? And …?”
“Serena.”
Eli made a face. “Jared can tell her, thanks. She agrees with your dad.”
“With …?” Oh. Well. True, things had been tense between Serena and Esther for years, but Ollie had always assumed it had to do with the brothers they’d married.
He sighed and clicked the pen again. “Well. That was a good use of paper.”
“Group chap with Harper and Brad?”
He nodded, pulling out his own phone. “I’ll leave you out of the Jared one.”
“If he’s awake.”
“Shit.” He lowered his phone and leaned back to try to see into the mudroom. “You think his apartment key’s on your dad’s ring?”
“No clue.” And at least she had the easy ones to inform. Ollie pulled up the proper group chat and typed So Dad was just arrested for Mom and Birdy’s murder. There wasn’t any reason to pad it, and it wasn’t like she had any evidence she could share. Maybe Len started the police looking at Dad, but the suppositions of some hotshot true crime writer weren’t enough to get a judge to sign the warrant. They had to think they had something, but what? Seriously, after a decade … what?
Eli had his phone to his ear, but his mouth tightened and he sighed before saying “Hey Jare, when you get this, call me right back.” He lowered his phone, hesitated, and ended up texting someone.
“Your mom?” Ollie guessed.
“Jared. But we’ll probably have to go down there. Now I’m texting Mom.”
God, it was awful. Ollie couldn’t remember what happened to Esther after Eli got arrested. Someone came to get Ollie—was it Dad?—but Esther … well, she probably went downtown, like Cindy, because even if she couldn’t do anything, it still felt better to do nothing close by instead of sitting out here where you couldn’t be there in an instant if there was something you could do.
Her phone buzzed. WTF. Do you have any more information? Harper wanted to know.
Sort of. He’s got a lawyer and Len thinks he did it, but I don’t know what the police think they have on him. She didn’t really want to go into how Cindy called them up to the house and they got to see Dad get arrested, thanks. Clearly Harper knew how their last encounter went, since they volunteered Brad to perform the wedding ceremony, but … some things were just too much right now.
Okay make that most things. Maybe this was why she couldn’t remember what happened last time. Who wanted to move second by second through the minutes television and movies turned into montages? This was the boring stuff. She wasn’t even doing a training regimen so she could defeat her enemy in the epic battle sequence.
Waiting really was the hardest part. Being set to music didn’t make it any less poetic.
“Can I be weird for a sec?” Eli asked, eyes still on his phone.
Uh. “Sure.”
“I’m fine with being the one to barge in on Jared, but I’d feel better if you were the one who handed me your dad’s keys.”
Ollie shrugged and got up to look at the various options on the key hooks. Yeah, maybe it was kind of a strange dividing line, but she was used to working with boundaries. You could respect them without fully understanding them. She picked up Dad’s usual key ring and spread the keys out: his car, Cindy’s car, front door, back door … “There’s extras on this one,” she told Eli, holding it up. “But there’s more still on the hooks.”
He chewed on his lip. “How do you feel about grabbing them all?”
Ollie held out her hand because hey, the mud room really wasn’t that far from the kitchen table. “Toss me my phone?” She took a picture of the rest of the keys before grabbing them. It felt halfway between being nice and wanting to put them back in the proper place so Dad didn’t get annoyed, and being sneaky and wanting to put them back in the proper place so Dad maybe wouldn’t find out she’d touched them. Don’t darken my door again probably included don’t take my keys.
Eli held out both hands so she could pass them off with a jingle. “Thank you. You don’t have to come with me.”
She smiled, and it actually felt natural. “Like I have anywhere better to be.”
From a file on Len Wilcox’s laptop created June 24, 2019
Wendy and Birdy Clark were murdered late on June 19, 2009. Within forty-eight hours the police closed in around suspect Eli James Chapman and made the mistake of shutting off all other avenues of inquiry. Evidence contained within the case file remained there for me to find almost a decade later. It was neither hidden nor concealed, but rather overlooked. If it didn’t fit or support the theory of Eli Chapman as murderer, prosecuting attorney Carson Denomie had no use for it.
One of the biggest questions surrounding the double murder is “Where did the murderer get the gun?” Although shotguns are not uncommon in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, neither the Clark family nor Eli Chapman owned one. That is, none of them could be found to have purchased one legally.
In early June 2009, Ensio Kurtti pulled up to his camp outside of Covington, Michigan, and discovered that it had been broken into since he was last there. “Camps” in the Upper Peninsula refer to cabins in the woods, generally rustic and off the grid, mostly used for hunting. The Clarks were not hunters, but Kurtti was, and a number of his guns had been stolen. As of this writing three of them, including a shotgun, have not been recovered.
Kurtti’s closest neighbor in the woods is the camp owned by Randy Clark. It was here that Randy and his older daughter, Ollie, spent the night on June 19—according to their testimony. We cannot blame a nineteen-year-old girl in shock from the brutal murders of her mother and sister for insisting that she spent the night stargazing with her father, especially when the pair had indeed done so many times before. In the confusion, Ollie could easily agree that Randy was there all night without even realizing her mind had crossed the wires from a different night. Ollie could be hooked up to a polygraph machine and give her dad that alibi without moving the needles so much as a millimeter … but that doesn’t mean it’s true.
With the gun stolen from Kurtti’s camp, Randy had a weapon that could not be traced back to him and the means of committing the murders. The opportunity came during a daddy-daughter weekend when he unilaterally declared that the daughters should swap, feeding Ollie a half-baked lie that her sister would never be able to explain or deny. This only leaves the question of motive.
Birdy was not an easy child. Even her friends admitted it, breaking the taboo and speaking ill of the dead. Each one was defensive, but they all said it, even when declaring it was against their better judgment. Ollie was universally loved by her teachers, the “easy” child, but Birdy made up for that in spades. During Birdy’s senior year, when Ollie was out of the house as a college freshman, Birdy dialed it up to eleven. It took the murder trial and evidence displayed in court to start untangling the lies she told her friends … and that her friends believed.
As her father, Randy Clark endured the accusations that he favored one daughter over the other as an incompetent and unfairly biased parent as the rumors spread through the teenage grapevine and permeated the community. Without undergoing the embarrassment of throwing the family accounts open for public scrutiny, there was no way Clark could counteract Birdy’s claims. Teenagers delight in aggravating their parents.
Like the stolen guns from the Kurtti camp, there is another fact that was overlooked in the police’s scramble to pin the murders on Eli Chapman. Even Birdy’s friends seem to have forgotten it, perhaps because it shows a more generous side of the murdered girl: at the end of her senior year, despite a long-stated phobia of needles, Birdy donated blood for the first time at a local blood drive along with other members of her senior class. She brought the paperwork home where it was pinned up on the kitchen cork board so she wouldn’t lose it before she was able to donate again. This paperwork clearly displayed her blood type.
Bury the Dead 21 – coming April 21
Rebecca Frost 