Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

the manager of Annie’s Parlour was locking up for the night when he noticed someone huddled up against the outside wall. He thought it was a homeless person and bent over to offer to take them to a shelter. When they didn’t respond, the manager pulled the scarf away from their head and discovered the lifeless face of Beverly Anderson.

Samantha:

[Through tears.] All anyone could focus on then was Beverly. Everyone was horrified, you know. This sweet, innocent, smart girl—dead. I couldn’t believe it. I barely left our apartment for weeks after that, I was so afraid. Turns out, I had good reason to be.

Elle:

Do you remember when you found out about the other victims?

Samantha:

They didn’t say anything on the news until they realized that second girl, Jillian Thompson, died the same way Beverly had. And she was missing for the same length of time—seven days. I think they found something on Jillian’s body that linked her to Beverly, some DNA or something.

Elle voice-over:

It was skin cells on her jacket. The police figured Jillian must have offered it to Beverly when she got cold, wherever they were kept together. Jillian Thompson disappeared from a parking lot at Bethel University three days after Beverly did. Her family thought she had run off with a boyfriend they disapproved of. He was the primary suspect until the cases were finally connected.

[SOUND BREAK: A chair squeaking; a man clearing his throat.]

Elle:

Can I ask you to introduce yourself for new listeners?

Martín:

Uh, yes, I’m Dr. Martín Castillo, and I’m a medical examiner, an ME, for Hennepin County.

Elle:

And?

Martín:

And, full disclosure, I’m Elle’s husband.

Elle:

Regular listeners might remember Martín from seasons one and three, where he provided expert insight about the autopsies of Grace Cunningham and Jair Brown, respectively. His identification of an oddly shaped lividity mark on Jair’s back helped us make a connection to a sofa in his uncle’s house, which was key to helping the Minneapolis Crimes Against Children Division solve that case. I’ve brought him back into the studio to discuss the other way the cases of these murdered girls were connected, before the DNA test from Jillian’s body even came back.

Martín:

The simplest answer is that they were killed in the same way. The same, unusual way.

Elle:

Explain that.

Martín:

While Beverly Anderson showed signs of trauma on the right side of her head, her autopsy revealed that she had been struck several days before she died—likely on the day she was kidnapped. She passed away after suffering gastrointestinal distress, dehydration, and multiple organ failures. Those symptoms are consistent with a huge variety of poisons, and the pathologist might never have narrowed it down if it weren’t for her stomach contents. It took a few weeks, but eventually tests determined she had eaten castor beans—likely several. Ricin poison takes days to work, and often people survive ingesting it, but it was clear the killer fed the toxin to her multiple times. She had also been whipped on her back shortly before death. Twenty-one lashes.

Elle:

How could you tell it was shortly before death?

Martín:

The way the scabs formed indicated that her blood stopped flowing soon after the wounds were inflicted. Her heartbeat was probably already slowing when she was beaten—meaning she was already dying, which led the ME to determine that the whipping was part of a ritual, not an attempt to kill her faster. This was confirmed when they found Jillian’s body and she had been killed in exactly the same way. Organ failure due to castor bean poisoning, and exactly twenty-one lashes across the back, made with a switch.

Elle:

What do you mean by “switch”?

Martín:

A stick or branch of some kind—thin but sturdy. There was evidence both bodies had been in the woods or the country somewhere. Leaf particles in their clothing, dirt under their nails. They figure the killer found a branch wherever he took them and completed the ritual then.

Elle voice-over:

Jillian’s body was also found seven days after she was taken, but not in the same place she’d disappeared from like Beverly. That would have been too easy. Instead, she was left on the lawn of Northwestern College—now called the University of Northwestern–St. Paul—a rival to her own Christian university, Bethel. However, despite the fact that both young women were college students, held for the same length of time, killed in the same manner, and left in a public space, their deaths were not immediately connected. Two different homicide squads worked on the cases, and while there were centralized police databases for things like DNA and fingerprint collection, there was no modus operandi database—nothing that collected the way victims were killed and analyzed whether cases might be connected based on the method of killing.

Police investigated for months, even arrested Jillian’s boyfriend, but the charges were eventually dropped and both cases went cold. There were no similar murders, no new leads. Not until the following year.

[SOUND BREAK: A waterfall roaring.]

Elle voice-over:

This is Minnehaha Falls, fifty-three feet of limestone and cascading water rushing on its way from Lake Minnetonka to the Mississippi River. The famous Song of Hiawatha poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow solidified its name, Minnehaha, which Longfellow interpreted as “laughing water.” The Dakota name would be better translated as “curling water” or simply “waterfall,” both of which are more apt. The intense, almost violent noise of charging water belies the idea of laughter. It was here, beneath the controversial bronze Hiawatha and Minnehaha statue, that the body of eighteen-year-old Isabelle Kemp was found.

The recording you heard was taken last spring, when the falls were swollen with melted snow. But when Isabelle was found, the water was frozen—a thick, rough mass of ice stuck in the act of falling, as if enchanted. She almost wasn’t seen; a fresh blanket of snow was halfway finished covering her body before a tourist couple who came to view the falls noticed her red jacket peeking through the powder.

[SOUND BREAK: Background noise from a diner.]

Elle:

When Isabelle Kemp’s body was found in January 1997, police quickly connected her