The Nobody Girls (Kendra Dillon Cold Case Thriller Book 3) Read online

  “Why is the FBI certain that Ewald is the killer?”

  “Ned Wayne Ewald was a long haul trucker in the time frame we’ve discussed. He had several encounters, violent in nature, with women who he’d picked up with the intent of hiring them for sex. In addition, and most significantly, his route matched the locations of where the bodies were found. His schedule matches, as closely as agents were able to corroborate, on the dates and locations of the victims.”

  “Were there any calling cards discovered?”

  Kendra knew some serial killers enjoyed taunting the authorities or the media. And that sometimes, this aspect of an investigation might not be shared with the public. Kendra hoped after all this time, whatever was known, would be available. Notes, poems, symbols, and even macabre collections could tie victims to the monster who killed them.

  “No, we never held anything back. Ewald was incredibly careful, and attention did not seem to be his motive. He did not leave calling cards, nor did he collect tokens from his alleged victims.”

  “What, in the FBI’s estimation, was his motive for killing these women?”

  “He hated women. His mother died under suspicious circumstances, according to our profilers. She is not the victim in the case for which he’s incarcerated, but a search of his history indicates he might also be implicated in her passing.”

  “But he’s not in prison for that crime either?”

  Kendra was confused.

  “While he is not in prison for the crime,” Agent Price explained, “nor has he ever confessed to those murders, he has been incarcerated on the sexual battery charge and murder charge since 1982, one month after the last victim that fits this pattern. The murders stopped immediately after he was incarcerated.”

  The podcast season that had been at a standstill was now overflowing with stories to tell and angles to pursue.

  Kendra asked as many questions as she could think of, and by the time they were done recording the interview, there was enough material for several episodes of The Cold Trail.

  Kendra walked Agent Price out to the lobby of WPLE.

  “So, this is the guy? You’re sure?” Kendra asked, brandishing the mug shot of Ned Wayne Ewald that Agent Price had provided.

  “As sure as we can be. As you know, from doing these types of stories, there’s no DNA evidence in these old cases. We can only go by the non-scientific, for the most part. Even fingerprints are too degraded on these victims to tie them inconclusively to Ewald. But take a look, you’ll see. The timing matches, his violent history matches, and well, that last piece.”

  “That the murders of this kind stopped?”

  “Right.”

  “You know I’m going to want to interview him.”

  “Be my guest. Maybe he’ll finally confess, do it for the fame of being a serial killer or something.”

  “But the cases are closed?”

  “All yours. You can use the files how you see fit.”

  “Why didn’t anyone inform Wilma Kay Ellis?”

  “I can’t answer that, other than to point out, we have very few next of kin contacts for any of those women in the files you’re going to read. In fact, two we were never able to identify, so they’re listed as Jane Doe One and Jane Doe Two. It’s tragic in more ways than one.”

  Kendra thought of Ophelia and Wilma Kay. They were hard to find, maybe more so forty years ago before Facebook or chat rooms. But she had found them.

  “I’m going to retrace the investigation.”

  “Good. You’re a formidable investigator, I’ve heard.”

  “Did you do any additional digging after we made the request?”

  “No one had much information on this case. It is, for all intents and purposes, closed. And it wasn’t my case, or anyone’s, really. You have to understand, this isn’t the only thing on my desk. And Ewald isn’t hurting anyone anymore. I have active bad guys to track. A hundred of those accordion files like the one in your hand are in my office. All hot.”

  Kendra understood that. She liked Agent Price’s direct style of communication.

  “I appreciate you helping tell this story.”

  “Look, any extra eyes on this stuff, it’s a good thing.”

  Agent Price walked out to her car.

  Kendra’s Nobody Girls story had gone from four to eight and from unsolved to solved. She joined Shoop back in the office.

  “Wow, I mean, they got the guy!”

  “Yeah, it’s comforting in a way.”

  “Yeah, except where do we go from here, with The Cold Trail? It appeared it just sort of ended?” Shoop asked.

  “We now have four more women to learn about, to make real, instead of nothings or nobodies. And I mean, this guy, this Ewald, I’m calling the prison next thing. Let’s hear him.”

  “Okay, good, so I know what I’m doing too. I’m going to double-check everything in here to be sure it matches.”

  Kendra had no doubt if someone missed dotting an “i” in this investigation, Shoop would find it.

  Kendra opened the file and pulled out the copies of the case files. “You take a look at the victims we already identified; I want to read the reports of the new names we have.”

  “Sounds good. What about writing the next episode? After Ophelia’s interview?”

  “That at least will be easy. It’s going to be all Agent Price, all the time.”

  “She was good. I liked her serious vibe,” Shoop said.

  “Agree, and this isn’t her case. It never was. This is a case that was put to bed, like she said, decades before Price or anyone who works there now ever stepped foot in Quantico.”

  “So, let’s just check the dearly departed Agent Branson’s work?” Shoop rapped a manila folder against the conference table.

  “Yep, that’s the plan.”

  “I’ll order lunch.”

  It was going to take days to comb through the amount of information they’d just acquired from the FBI.

  Chapter 16

  The smart board was filled with dates, pictures, names, and details they hadn’t had access to before. Kendra had more leads now, more than she knew what to do with. So, they prioritized. First up, they requested the interview with Ned Wayne Ewald. That would take a bit of time to process, she feared, so they couldn’t wait to move forward with the podcast.

  After packaging the interview with Agent Price into a full episode, they had leeway again to find the next episode.

  They decided to interview the original witnesses that the FBI had tracked down. The ones they could find, anyway.

  “You know, you get a gold star. That Eugene guy, he was interviewed back in the day.”

  “Yeah, I saw, just as helpful then as he is today.” Kendra thought back to the near-miss she’d experienced after her attempt to talk to Eugene. She had been just as vulnerable as the victims, decades had passed, but the same risk existed.

  After combing through the names of witnesses, Kendra was able to line up two interviews. She looked at a Venn Diagram Shoop had created of three circles:

  A. Still alive. B. Still in the area. C. Relevant.

  It was a small number of potential interview subjects. But it had been so many years. Maybe they were lucky to even have that.

  “You stay on trying to find family and friends. I really want an episode devoted to each victim,” Kendra told Shoop.

  But that, too, might be impossible. They’d only been able to find friends or family for Sincere and Linda. The rest of the women, five more, who’d been killed by Ewald, were like ghosts. They didn’t know anything more about the new victims. And it ate at Kendra’s gut that truly, right now, they were the Nobody Girls.

  Shoop was going to keep digging while Kendra went out to interview the two witnesses they could find that had been interviewed back in the day.

  The first was a man named Kevin Bunce.

  He provided vending machine services and represented specialty snack foods for several rest stops and gas stations along
the I-75 corridor.

  He agreed to meet Kendra at the Ohio Turnpike travel plaza. Port Lawrence had easy access to I-75 and the Ohio Turnpike, which was one reason it offered competitive bids for industries.

  It was a bit of a drive for Kendra, but she was eager to have a plan, thanks to the new files provided by the FBI.

  Cars and activity were just picking up when Kendra parked her Jeep. The Travel Plaza was the opposite of the truck stops or sketchy-feeling service stations she’d been visiting since starting this story. It catered to families driving to various vacations, business travelers in company cars, and soccer moms hauling vans full of kids to tournaments. There was a truck service area around the side, Kendra saw, but it felt so much less scary here. Kendra was relieved.

  On the phone, Kevin Bunce had mentioned this as a good place to meet and let her know that if it was a nice day, the plaza had picnic tables where they could sit and talk.

  Kendra arrived and scanned the tables. A family with young children occupied one. A woman, holding a leash with a tiny dog on the end, sat at another.

  At the third table, she saw a man in khakis and a chambray denim shirt with Vista Foods embroidered on it, making it easy to spot her interview.

  “Mrs. Dillon, hello, I’m Kevin.”

  “Hi, yeah, call me Kendra.”

  Kevin Bunce stood up and offered her a seat opposite him. The seat was cement, like the table. They weren’t the most comfortable accommodations you could find, but she figured zero maintenance was the ticket for these tables and benches.

  “I really appreciate you being able to meet me. This story has kind of been forgotten, and it’s tough to find people to interview.”

  “Gosh, well, yes, it was a terrible time, terrible thing that happened.”

  Kendra put the mic on Bunce. He had to be in his sixties, but he looked younger, fit, and well-groomed.

  “So, we just talk. I have a few questions, mainly background stuff, if you can remember.”

  “Sure, sure, happy to help, happy to help then too. Just, well, I’m afraid I wasn’t that much of a help.”

  “You’ve always worked for Vista Foods?”

  Kendra had looked up the company. It was called Vista Snacks and Sweets back then. In recent years, it had been taken over by a larger company. But the core business, providing specialty foods for gas stations, travel plazas, and truck stops, remained intact.

  “Yeah, right out of bible school, ha, thought I’d get a job as a minister until I realized this job came with a company car.” He laughed at his own joke. Kendra smiled. “Worked this route back in my early days, then they transferred me out to Phoenix in the ‘80s, and well, happy to be back here again. I’ll probably head back to Phoenix after I do retire though, some of the weather here, you know, you forget how cold it gets! Though not today.”

  Kevin Bunce was a talker.

  “How did you hear about the murders?”

  “Well, I didn’t know there were murders. I just knew about the gal they found out by Easy On. I’d never formally met her, of course, but well, she was one I did recognize when they showed me a picture.”

  “Recognized how?”

  “Oh, gosh, I hate to speak ill, but well, that one girl, she’d come up to me a couple of times.”

  “Come up to you?”

  “She was a lady of the evening. I mean, it was day, but, well, I just politely had to let her know that I wasn’t into the at sort of thing.”

  “Ah, this happened a couple of times?”

  “Oh, it happens now and again, actually, nature of the job. When the authorities checked in with me—they called everyone who supplied Easy On, I believe—anyway, I let them know that she had approached me. I don’t hold it against her, of course. I just hoped something I said was useful, for timing or something?”

  “Sure. Anything else you can remember about that time?”

  “Well, I can tell you about the best sellers of 1978! People couldn’t get enough of Yummy Gums. It was all I could do to keep them stocked. They were featured in a movie—anyway, I was hopping. And then and now, everyone loves a bag of Caliente Chips when they’re on a road trip. I’ll be stocking those until I retire.” Kevin Bunce continued on about the ins and outs of snack treats like they were Billboard hits.

  Kendra listened and tried to find something, anything, that could help her tell the story of Sincere, or Linda, or Susan Hodges. But Bunce added little, if anything new, to the trail. He was nice, and he was there, but that was about it.

  “Thanks so much for your time.”

  “Oh, sure, for sure. Here, I have a few free samples for you.” He handed her a bag of various snack foods from the classic Caliente Chips to the Yummy Gums to stuff that looked in the neighborhood of healthy.

  “You don’t have to do that!”

  “Nonsense, I always have extra. Like boxes and boxes. If they expire, I have to pull ‘em. Them’s the rules. Just put it in your car, keep it there, and you have it if ever you’re out on the road and get hungry.”

  “Thank you.”

  Kendra took the nice gift and turned off her digital recorder. She wasn’t even sure if this interview would make the podcast.

  But, on the upside, it had been a pleasant half-hour, outside, in the open air. And Kevin Bunce was a pleasant man, who’d she’d keep on a phone a friend list in case she ever had to answer a trivia question about travel snacks.

  She put the box of odd snacks in the back of her Jeep.

  Then it was onward to the next interview, with hopes that it would help her better tell the story.

  The next interview was half a day’s drive away. Kentucky bordered Ohio to the south. Kendra had driven over five hours and arrived across the state line, marked by the Ohio River. Kendra drove over the bridge, leaving Cincinnati, and continued past Covington, Kentucky.

  She continued on, and just outside of Crittenden, her GPS let her know she was in the right place, the home of Chuck Fairly. Fairly had worked at a weigh station for fifteen years before getting his certification as a truck dispatcher.

  He’d found a body that was identified as Jane Doe Two in 1981. There was still no positive identification for this victim.

  Fairly had agreed to talk. Kendra could have probably done the interview by phone, but they only had two interviews from crime scene witnesses. She needed to see Fairly in person and make her own judgments about what he told her. She’d go wherever she could to try to fill in more details.

  Fairly lived in a ranch house on a couple of acres. It was out in the country, but it didn’t look like he farmed the land. It just looked isolated to Kendra.

  These days Chuck was a part-time dispatcher for several trucking companies, and he did the work outside of his home. Kendra parked the Jeep, walked up, and rang the bell.

  It took a moment for Chuck to answer the door.

  “Oh, the podcaster lady! Come in, come in.” Fairly opened the screen and gave Kendra a smile. “My wife is due back from the grocery store in a half hour or so, which then means we won’t have quiet, but for now, we do.”

  Somehow, it made Kendra feel relieved to know his wife was on the way home. She had been uneasy since the incident at the Easy On Truck Stop, though it was ridiculous. She was the one who set this up. It wasn’t some trap.

  “I’ll try to be quick,” Kendra said.

  Fairly wore a Cincinnati baseball hat and a plain red t-shirt over baggy jeans. He had significant jowls and shiny cheeks.

  “I work in the garage. My stuff’s there. I have a room air conditioner in there, but it’s so hot today the thing naturally quit on me. The kitchen is a little less like Satan’s back porch.”

  “This is good, truly.”

  Kendra and Fairly sat at a farmhouse table. She put the mic on his t-shirt. It was moist with perspiration.

  “As I explained, I am just trying to piece together several deaths, murders, from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and you’re one of the only people listed that’s,
uh….”

  “Still alive? Yeah, that was a long time ago now. I’m pushing sixty. Where does the time go, right? Any way I can help though, fire away.”

  “Can you tell me what happened that day?”

  “I can. I wish I could get it out of my head, but, you know, I still get flashes of it. When I blink or turn out a light.”

  Kendra did know what it was like to see flashes of things you didn’t want to see. It had gotten better. These days, she wasn’t ripped from one place to another, from one time to a worse time, because of sound or a smell.

  But she knew.

  Chuck Fairly was there now, in his mind, the time and place he’d found Jane Doe Two.

  “I’ll never forget it. I mean, I saw some weird things at my post over those years, but that day was nuts.”

  “What was going on? How did you find it?”

  “You know, I’d seen something from my car. The weigh station I worked at was a state-run one back then, so it looks like a highway exit. You’ve seen that kind, right?”

  Kendra nodded.

  “It caught my eye, this mound, in the distance, off the road. But I had a busy shift, a lot of trucks through that day. Thursday is always busy because they’re trying to get home before the weekend.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw a dark spot where there shouldn’t be one. But then I forgot about it. I did my day’s work and was walking back to my car. The station was shut down. I normally would just drive home.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “I had a handle on my door, and maybe I should have opened it and driven home. Ha, now I know I shoulda. But it felt like something was calling me out there. That I had to quiet something down. Almost like, I don’t know, haunted.”

  “Like a ghost?”

  “Not so much a ghost but a sound or a feeling. I knew there was something about that dark lump that was unresolved. That I had better just deal with it so I could have some peace.”

  “Peace?”

  “Well, peace of mind, maybe that’s a better way to say it.”