A Cold Case of Killing Read online

  “My God, it’s Brownie,” Al said. “This is a big deal.”

  Indeed, it was Detective Lieutenant Curtis Brown, the head of the Homicide Division, otherwise known (but not to his face) as Brownie. He stopped on the middle of the three front steps and looked us over. We all started shouting questions and Brownie walked to the tape with his hands high above his head as a signal to shut up.

  When silence was achieved, Brownie said, “Good morning, everybody. What brings you out on this hot July day?”

  “That’s what we want to know,” Barry said.

  “I can put you on live right now,” Trish said.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “We’re looking for evidence,” Brownie said. “But you’ll be disappointed to learn that there’s no blood. It’s a cold case.”

  “How cold?” Trish asked.

  “Twenty-five years. You were probably in diapers when the victim disappeared.”

  “Ooh, thanks for the compliment,” Trish said. I was guessing that she’d have been starting junior high.

  “Who was the victim?” I asked.

  “The daughter of the couple that lives here,” Brownie said. “She was fifteen years old when she vanished. It was a Saturday morning. The parents gave her some money and sent her to the little convenience store on the corner three blocks away for a loaf of bread, and nobody has seen her since. Her parents said she never came home and the clerk at the store said she never came in.”

  “Are you here because you’ve got some fresh information?” Barry asked.

  “We have, and we’re looking for more,” Brownie said. “As I said, the case is twenty-five years old but we’ve never closed it.”

  Trish moved up to the tape so she was face-to-face with Brownie across the tape and asked, “What are the parents’ names?” She stuck her microphone in Brownie’s face as he answered.

  “Anderson,” he said. “Jack and Jill Anderson, would you believe?”

  Seizing the moment, Barry Ziebart jumped to the other side of Brownie as Trish was asking, “And what is the victim’s name?” Barry’s microphone joined Trish’s in front of the detective’s face.

  “Marilee,” Brownie said. “Marilee Anderson.”

  “Do you think she’s buried in the backyard?” Trish asked.

  “I can’t comment on that,” Brownie said. “All I can say is that we’re trying to cover every possible angle. We’ll be here for as long as it takes to go through everything in the house and the yard.”

  “Do you think her parents killed her?” Trish asked.

  “I can’t comment on that at this time,” Brownie said.

  “Thank you, Detective Brown. Trish Valentine, reporting live from St. Paul’s East Side.” Trish moved away and Barry Ziebart asked a couple of questions that brought non-committal replies before he, too, signed off with, “Barry Ziebart, reporting live.”

  Brownie backed away a couple of steps and said, “Okay, that’s it; no more questions—live, dead, or wounded. Looks like we’re going to be working here all day, and you’re free to stand outside the tape and watch but I doubt that you’ll see much. I’ll be giving a general briefing on the case at sixteen-hundred at the station. See you there.”

  “Just one more quick question,” I said. “Are the Andersons in the house while all this is going on?”

  “They’re not,” he said. “At our request, they’re staying with some relatives.”

  “Who? Where?” we all asked in unison.

  “I’ll tell you that at the briefing if they say they’re willing to talk to the press. If not, you’ll have to wait until they come back home to try to get an interview.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Call me if the Bobcat uncovers anything but grub worms.” Brownie waved and went back into the house.

  “I’ve had about enough of standing out here in this heat,” Al said.

  “How hot is it?” Trish asked.

  “It’s so hot my anti-perspirant stick is sweating,” Al said.

  “Mine, too,” I said. “Let’s see if our boss will let us go back to our air-conditioned office.” I called Don O’Rourke and told him the police were working on a cold case and that there would be nothing more to report until Brownie’s four o’clock briefing at the station. “It involves a fifteen-year-old girl who disappeared twenty-five years ago,” I said.

  “Oh, my God,” Don said. “Marilee Anderson.”

  “You remember it?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Twenty-five years ago I was seventeen, living on a farm in southeastern Minnesota and not giving a damn about missing teeny-boppers in St. Paul,” I said.

  “Well, it was a very big story. And I was working the weekend police beat when it broke on a Saturday. Come on in and go through the clips in the library. You can do a background piece while you wait for your four o’clock briefing. God, I can’t believe it. After all these years. Marilee Anderson.”

  “What did Don say?” Al asked when I put away my phone.

  “He said I’m going to be very busy for the next few days.”

  “What about me?”

  “Every good story needs good pix to back it up.”

  As we neared our car, we met a reporter and photographer from the Minneapolis paper trotting toward the Andersons’ house. Both were sweating from the effort. “What did we miss?” the reporter asked.

  “Everything,” I said. “Briefing downtown at the PD at four.”

  “Just in time for the five o’clock TV news,” he said.

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought about that,” I replied. My only hope was to combat immediacy with comprehensive reporting.

  Chapter Three

  Background Check

  BACK AT THE DAILY DISPATCH, I immediately went to the paper’s library—for some reason they don’t call it the “morgue” anymore—looking for twenty-five-year-old stories about Marilee Anderson’s disappearance. I was rewarded with a deluge.

  The first story was from the Sunday morning edition, under Don O’Rourke’s byline. Marilee Anderson, fifteen, had been reported missing by her parents, Jack and Jill Anderson, at about eleven thirty Saturday morning. They had told police that they’d sent Marilee to the corner store to buy a loaf of bread at about nine o’clock, and when she hadn’t returned within an hour, Jack went looking for her. James Bjornquist, the nineteen-year-old clerk who’d been on duty at the store that morning, had told Jack that the girl had never appeared in the store.

  Jack told police that he’d spent the next hour walking all around the neighborhood looking for Marilee and calling her name. He’d stopped at a couple of houses with young people her age and zigzagged through a small park where she sometimes went to “be by herself.” Finally, fearing that Marilee had been kidnapped, he’d gone home and called police.

  This was before the era of ubiquitous surveillance cameras, so there was no photographic record of activity nearby or inside the store. Police searched the area and put out an APB. They questioned the parents and learned that Marilee, their only child, was moody and sometimes rebellious, but otherwise a normal teenage girl. Nearby neighbors told police they’d occasionally heard loud voices, including Marilee’s, quarreling at the Andersons’ house.

  The parents went on TV and made the usual tearful pleas: “Marilee please come home if you’re free”; “kidnapper, if you have our daughter, please release her or contact us.”

  After three days of no response, police stopped searching for a missing person and began looking for a body. The case officially became a suspected homicide and a young detective named Curtis Brown was assigned to the investigation. There was a photo of Brownie, proving that he’d once had hair on his head. However, even a full head of hair could not hide his ears, which stuck out like the side mirrors on an eighteen-wheeler, just as they do to this day.

  Staff writer Don O’Rourke had interviewed many of the potential murder suspects. Chief among them were the young store clerk, James Bjornq
uist, who’d been alone behind the counter; Marilee’s Uncle Eddie, Jack Anderson’s brother, who lived next door in the house now occupied by Fred and Donna Waldner; Patrick O’Brian, described by Don as looking dark and malevolent, who lived two houses east of the Andersons; and, of course, Jack and Jill Anderson.

  Young Bjornquist had sworn he’d never seen Marilee in the store that morning. In addition, several people who had shopped there that morning had told police that they had seen no one matching Marilee’s description.

  Uncle Eddie, who lived alone, had been extremely upset by what he viewed as an accusation and claimed to have slept in late that day. The only co-occupant of Uncle Eddie’s house who could provide an alibi was his poodle, Bruno, but police eventually stopped questioning him for lack of evidence.

  All O’Brian would say to Don was that he was not at home the morning of Marilee’s disappearance and knew nothing about her except that she acted like “a snotty little brat” whenever they met on the street. Don’s description of O’Brian as dark and malevolent-looking intrigued me, so I cross-referenced him on the computer. I found stories about him being arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of raping and strangling a fourteen-year-old girl three years after Marilee vanished. I made a note to check if he was still serving his life sentence in the federal prison at Sandstone in northern Minnesota.

  Jack and Jill Anderson had expressed their deepest affection for their daughter and had no objections to a thorough search of the house and grounds. I noticed in the accompanying photos that there had been no flower gardens in the backyard at that time. The search had produced no evidence of any extraordinary activity either inside or outside the Anderson residence.

  The most interesting non-suspect questioned by Detective Brown and reporter Don O’Rourke was Eleanor Miller, a sixty-six-year-old widow who lived next door. She had a lot to say about the Andersons, none of which was complimentary. She described Jack and Jill as loud, controlling parents and Marilee as a rebellious brat—there was that word again—whose main line of defense was high-volume screaming fits that sent shivers up Mrs. Miller’s spine. “Her voice was like broken glass on a blackboard,” she said to Don.

  Now this was a person I wanted to talk to. I wondered if she was still in the neighborhood. Possibly she’d be living (if she was still living) in some sort of senior facility, because she’d be ninety-one now. I’d have to try to track her down.

  By the time Al and I left for Brownie’s four o’clock follies I had put together a cogent, compassionate, and comprehensive background story on the Marilee Anderson case. I’d included a description of the girl—basically five-foot-two, eyes of blue, with blonde hair in a ponytail—and her clothing when last seen—cut-off jeans, a pink Michael Jackson T-shirt, and pink sneakers with white soles. All I needed now were some words of wisdom from Brownie to put in the lead.

  Al gave Don an especially sorrowful picture of a rosebush covered with red blossoms as big as a grapefruit dangling from the jaw of the Bobcat’s bucket to accompany my story about Marilee’s mysterious demise. We’d have every apprehensive parent and anthomanic gardener in the city sobbing in the morning.

  I was just about to leave when my desk phone rang. “This is Donna Waldner,” said the caller. “You wanted me to call you if my husband Fred knew what Jack Anderson did before he retired.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Thanks for the call.”

  “Will this get me another fifty bucks?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, knowing the answer would be no. “What kind of work did Jack do?”

  “He was a butcher in one of the Mall of America restaurants,” she said. “You know, cutting up the steaks and stuff like that with big sharp knives.”

  * * *

  I HAD AN IMAGE of big sharp knives in mind when Detective Lieutenant Curtis Brown stepped out of his office to greet the assembled reporters and photographers at the St. Paul Police Department. I pictured them in the hands of Jack Anderson, whose twenty-five-years-ago photos I’d seen while rummaging through the old stories. He was a wiry, athletic-looking man when those pictures were taken.

  Brownie skimmed through some of the background on Marilee Anderson’s disappearance that I had put into my story, but I was pleased at his omission of the names of the potential suspects who’d been interviewed. Let the others—and every news outlet in the Twin Cities was represented at the briefing—conduct their own research.

  “Even though the Marilee Anderson missing person case is twenty-five years old, we have never closed it,” Brownie said. “We’ve had many tips over the years but none of them has produced either a dead body or a live missing person. This week’s activity is in response to a tip from someone claiming to know that something, not necessarily Marilee’s body, was hidden in one of the gardens that the Andersons began creating in the months following her disappearance.

  “All of the gardens some of you saw today have been dug and planted since Marilee vanished. There was nothing but grass and a couple of shrubs in the backyard at the time of her disappearance. We are also sifting through several cartons of material removed from the house. This intensive investigation will continue until everything has been examined carefully. Unless, of course, we get quick results. Now I’ll take any questions you might have.”

  Trish Valentine was in the front row, as she always is, and Brownie looked at her first, as male officials always do.

  “Where are the Andersons?” Trish asked.

  “They’d rather not talk to the media until they get back home,” Brownie said. “So I can’t tell you where they are.”

  “When will they get home?” I asked.

  “Not sure. Maybe Wednesday.”

  “Will you notify the press?” asked the guy from Minneapolis.

  “No, you’re on your own on that,” Brownie said. “We’re not going to set off a mad rush to the house by issuing an APB.”

  “Can we stake out the house?” Barry Ziebart asked.

  “As long as you stay outside the tape and don’t pester the troops. If you start sticking microphones into people’s faces—either ours or the neighbors’—we’ll most likely ask you to leave. And if you happen to be there when the Andersons are brought back, they will be escorted past you and into the house by armed police officers.”

  “Can you describe what Marilee Anderson looked like?” Trish asked.

  “She was fifteen years old, and, according to the medical chart from her school physical examination, she was five-foot-two and weighed a hundred and eighteen pounds. Her hair was blonde, usually done up in a ponytail, and her eyes were blue, and she had a mild case of acne, according to her mother.”

  “Was she . . . uh . . . physically developed?” Barry Ziebart asked. This brought snickers from some of the men in the crowd.

  “If you’re talking about breast development, the answer is very little,” Brownie said. “From the photos we were shown, she was still pretty much a child, body-wise.”

  “Do you have those photos?” somebody behind me asked.

  “All photos have been returned to the family,” Brownie said. “You’ll have to ask the parents if you want to see or reproduce them.”

  “That’s what we need, an original photo,” Al said in my ear. “The ones printed in the old papers aren’t worth a damn.”

  I nodded. “How are we going to get one?”

  “You’re the investigative reporter. You figure it out.”

  After a couple of more questions, the session was over. When we were outside, walking back toward the office, I said, “We need to find out where her parents are and ask them to get us a photo we can use.”

  “Good luck with that,” Al said. “You got any idea what hill Jack and Jill might have gone up?”

  “Maybe we can find the source of their water.”

  “I pail at the thought of it.”

  “Jack had a brother named Eddie living practically next door, remember? What if Eddie is still somewhere close by?”


  “It’s possible. So how do we find out?”

  “The same way we find out everything in the twenty-first century,” I said. “Google it.”

  Damned if a Google search didn’t turn up three Edward Andersons living within the St. Paul city limits and six more within a twenty-five-mile radius.

  “We have a surplus of riches,” I said.

  “Who wants Riches?” Al said. “Aren’t we looking for Eddies?”

  Two of the Edward Andersons were close to Jack Anderson in age; one was sixty-three and the other sixty-eight. The younger Edward lived in St. Paul; the older one resided in the adjacent northern suburb of Roseville.

  I looked up the phone numbers and tried the St. Paul resident first. A woman answered and I asked if Jack Anderson was there. “You’ve got the wrong number,” she said. “This is the Edward Anderson residence.”

  “Does he have a brother named Jack?”

  “He’s got a sister named Jackie. Is that who you’re looking for?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re right; I’ve got the wrong number.”

  Next I called the Roseville number and a man answered. Again I asked, “Is Jack Anderson there?”

  There was a moment of silence. Then the man said, “He’s . . . uh . . . no, he ain’t here. I mean, he don’t live here.” The receiver went down hard in my ear.

  I smiled at Al and said, “Bingo. We get a car and go to Roseville as soon as I finish writing my story.”

  Chapter Four

  Up the Hill

  APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, we had to drive up a short, steep hill to reach the address we’d found for Jack and Jill’s hide-away. It was on a tree-lined side street off a heavily-traveled Ramsey County road. The neighborhood was made up mostly of cookie-cutter homes built during the post-World War II housing development boom.

  The address we sought was a white, one-story rambler with a large picture window displaying the obligatory table lamp, right out of the cookie cutter. Three steps led up to a small concrete deck that held a trash barrel, a recycling bin, a bamboo fishing pole, and a round plastic container that I assumed contained dog food. There was a narrow pathway in between these items to allow access to the front door.