The case dated from December 28, 1992. A duck hunter had a floating duck blind on a small pond on a farm his brother owned, and got there just before daylight that morning. As soon as it was light enough to see what he was doing, he used a small-flat bottomed boat to set his decoys out and then went back to his blind to wait.
After two hours, he'd seen a few ducks fly by, but none of them were coming close enough to the pond for him to get a shot. That was unusual for that time of the year because every year before at this time, there had always been ducks that used the pond. After three hours, the duck hunter gave up and rowed out to collect his decoys.
He'd put the last two decoys next to some cattails that grew along one side of the pond, and when he got close to them, he could see what he thought was a large dead fish floating on the surface. When he got closer, he realized the dead fish was the calf of human leg floating just below the surface. He rowed a little closer and saw the rest of the body lying inside the stand of cattails. That was why no ducks had come close to the pond. From the air, the body would have been in plain sight to any duck venturing toward the pond.
When Harry and the coroner and the Crime Scene techs got there, the EMT's had already taken the body out of the cattails and had it lying on a plastic sheet. The sex of the victim was obvious because she was nude except for the one high-heeled shoe still on the left foot.
What wasn't obvious was what killed her or how she got there. The techs combed the area for vehicle tracks or footprints, but didn't find any. They also didn't find anything that might have contributed to the woman's death.
The coroner's autopsy report said the woman was between twenty-five and thirty, appeared to have been in good health, and had never had children. He didn't find any evidence of sexual assault.
The coroner wasn't certain about the time of death. He had measured her internal temperature at the pond and found it to be 58.8 F. At the outside temperature the night before of 29 F, that internal temperature would indicate she'd been dead for about six hours, but he stated that was probably incorrect because of several contributing factors. The body was partly in the water of the pond up to the thighs and the water temperature was 40F, and the rest of the body was in contact with the moist bank of the pond with no clothing to insulate the body. The temperature of the soil of the bank was about 50 F because the day before had been sunny and the soil had absorbed a lot of heat. Both would have impacted the cooling rate of the body, but the cooling rate was nearly impossible to calculate. His best guess was between ten and twelve hours based upon the state of rigor mortis of the body.
It wasn't until the coroner opened the woman's skull that he was able to determine the cause of death. That cause was a brain hemorrhage. Nothing in the body told him the cause of the brain hemorrhage, so his diagnosis was extremely high blood pressure that had caused one of the arteries in her brain to rupture. He couldn't identify any specific cause of the extremely high blood pressure. She wasn't overweight, the lab tests on her blood didn't show the presence of any alcohol or drugs, and she wasn't diabetic.
He was unsure how to classify the death since the woman appeared to have had no problems that could have caused the brain hemorrhage. Based on the fact that she was found beside a pond and naked, he classified it as potentially murder.
The only thing about the body that seemed abnormal other than the brain hemorrhage was what looked to the coroner like faint marks on her ankles, but the one high-heeled shoe had straps that wrapped up the ankle and had a buckle to fasten them there. The coroner attributed the faint marks to the straps on the shoes.
Since the woman's hands hadn't been in the water the coroner was able to get a full set of fingerprints from the body. He also took DNA samples from the woman including one sample from her vagina in case some residual DNA from a rape had remained.
There was no match to the prints in either the TBI database or in IAFIS. The DNA samples were a little more revealing, but still inconclusive. The DNA sample from the woman's vagina revealed two different sets of DNA, both female. One sample matched the DNA from the body tissue samples, but neither the TBI nor CODIS had a match to either.
It was a day after the nightly news reported the finding of an unidentified body at the pond that the desk sergeant transferred a call to Harry's phone. The caller just said the woman was Bridget Mayes and then hung up. To Harry, the caller sounded like either a man with a high voice or a woman with a low voice, but the caller hadn't said enough to tell for sure.
The desk sergeant had written down the number because it showed on his desk phone. When Harry tracked down the number it was placed from a payphone at the corner of Elm and Riley in Knoxville.
There was a dry-cleaning shop on that corner, so Harry had interviewed the owner and employees. None of them had seen anyone using the payphone, but said they seldom looked out the window at it. They did have a list of people who'd dropped off or picked up clothes about the time of the call. Harry interviewed them as well, and one said she'd seen a man making a call from the payphone when she went into the shop.
Harry sent a Crime Scene tech to dust the phone for prints and the tech found many, but all were too smudged to be of use.
Harry also looked up Bridget Mayes in the TBI records, NCIC, and the Tennessee DMV database. All that yielded was the address of an apartment building on the North side of Knoxville that was on her driver's license and her birth date. She was twenty.
When Harry went to the apartment, he found a young couple living there. When the wife of the couple said they'd rented the apartment six months before, Harry talked to the apartment super.
The apartment super told Harry that Bridget Mayes had moved into the apartment in August of 1990. He remembered her because she'd just turned 18 and he'd been reluctant to rent the apartment to her. He told Harry he only did because she paid him the first and last month's rent in cash. She'd moved out of the apartment in January of 1991 and didn't tell him where she was going. He said he figured she didn't tell the Post Office either because the couple now in the apartment kept getting credit card bills for Bridget Mays. He gave Harry the bills the couple had given him.
Harry got the credit reports for each of the three credit cards and only found out that Bridget Mayes hadn't used any of the cards for the last six months. In spite of having almost a five thousand-dollar balance, she hadn't made any payments to any of the credit card companies either.
That's where Harry basically hit a brick wall. He did try to find out if Bridget Mayes had any living relatives, but couldn't find any. When he turned the case over to me, he just frowned.
"This one bothered me for a long time. I'm sure the girl was murdered somehow, but there was nothing that pointed to how or who did it. If I'd been able to find the son of a bitch who killed her, at least I'd have felt like I'd done the best I could for her. Maybe you'll have better luck."
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In case you haven't read my other stories, I'm Detective Richard Owens of the Knoxville Police Department. I work Homicide and I have somewhat of a reputation for solving cold cases. In fact, cold cases are mostly what I spend my days and often nights working on now. The other Homicide detectives handle most of the day to day cases.
Rochelle is my partner, but she's not another Homicide detective. She's a writer who asked my old Captain in the Nashville PD if she could work on a cold case with a detective. She writes crime and mystery novels based on real cases. Together we solved a cold case and also figured out that we fit together really well in other things. One of those things is temporarily curing the attacks of libido that Rochelle seems to have fairly often. I transferred to the Knoxville PD to live with her, and we've solved several cold cases together. We've also decided we might get married some day, but for now, we're content to live together.
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