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Tracks Of A Wolf By Bonnie M. Wells This story is
part of the "Lookin' For A Killer" Series: And is color
coded for research purposes:
Sometimes the wolf blends into his
surroundings so well that, if he stands still, he is very difficult to see,
and if one only glances his way occasionally, his movements may never be
noticed. Often, he can dine from the same flock for many years before an
astute shepherd or shepherdess notices many of the young are missing. Every
once in a great while, a guardian of the flock comes along that will remain
as watchful as the mighty wolf; will watch the watering holes, the grassy
fields where the flock play, the open meadows where they rest at night, and
if lucky, will discover the trails by which he comes and goes; his hunger
pattern and his need to feed. / BMW
The Soft Spoken Wolf
April 26th 1990: I was sitting at Civitan Park with one of my German
Shepherds when I heard the low growl that warned of an approaching stranger.
"That's a pretty nice dog you have there," the stranger said, and I
looked up to see a bearded man standing in the darkness of the pick nick
shelter. I glanced over my shoulder and took note of the Belpre police
cruiser sitting only a few feet behind me before answering. "Yes, she's very
pretty. Who are you?" I got no answer; only
a question. I answered the question and asked again, “What’s your
name?” After three times he
muttered “Tom.” Tom what? I asked. "Tom D." he replied.
I was pretty sure I'd
heard Judy mention this guy. Seemed she said she'd dated him years ago. But, I must have been
mistaken because upon further questioning he informed me that he was divorced
and had 3 children. Ultimately it turned out that almost nothing the man told
me that night was the truth. Thus was the beginning
of a long nightmare.
Terri Lee Roach
Terri worked at Elby's
Restaurant in Belpre, Ohio. After she was murdered I couldn't help but wonder
if she had ever served Pat, Diane, Bob and me. We'd met at Elby's every
evening during the time period that Pat, Diane and I were enrolled in a small
business management class at the Career Center in Marietta. We always met our
friend Bob at Elby's and had something to eat and drink while we visited.
Usually it was late in the evening by the time we arrived and most of the
customers had eaten and left long ago. We acted silly, told jokes, teased the
waiters and waitresses and had a good time. Even the people who worked there
usually got in on the kidding around. My own daughter
Christina had worked at Elby's after she graduated high school but by the
time Terri became employed there Christina was married and living in Kansas.
She was still in Kansas when I decided to take the business management course
and when I opened Starlight Inner-Prizes. Although I didn't know
it in 1990 Terri Roach bore a strong resemblance to my daughter, or at least
the only picture I ever saw of her did. When I showed the
picture to my husband, he thought it was Christina.
A Bolder Wolf
By July I'd forgotten
all about Tom D. that I'd met at Civitan Park in April. I'd given him one of
my business cards that night because he had asked about my German Shepherds
and said he'd been thinking of getting his son a nice dog. I remember telling him
he could call for an appointment and an interview. I didn't sell my dogs
to just anyone who came walking in. The people were interviewed and if
everything was okay they could get a puppy from my kennel, Granville
Shepherds. July 18th, 1990: I
took my mother to visit her brother John's family. Uncle John was already
dead but his wife Francis was still alive as was his daughter Irene who
always lived at home with her parents. After our visit, Mom
wanted to stop at Kroger's in Belpre. As we were preparing
to leave the parking spot, a red and white Ford Ranger pulled alongside my
Trans-Am and the driver began motioning for Mom to roll her window down. Mom and I looked at
one another. Neither of us knew the man driving the truck. I put her window down
and asked what he wanted. He said he was from out of town and needed
directions to Grand Central Mall. I offered to draw him a
map and within seconds he was standing at my window with pen and paper in
hand. I drew the map and
handed it back to him. "Where are you
from," I asked. "Columbus," he replied. I had lots of dogs in
the Columbus {Ohio} area and knew quite a few people who lived there. "Oh, that's a
nice city. Where do you live?" I asked. "East side." He
replied. That's vague, I thought. "So what brings you to this
area?" I questioned. "I'm a construction worker," he replied. I gunned the tranny.
She was built to run and didn't like sitting in the hot sun on a parking lot,
and neither did I. "So, what's you
name buddy?" I asked as I prepared to leave. "Tom," came
the reply. And an old memory stirred, and a chill went up my spine. Mom said
my voice actually changed. "Tom what?"
I demanded. "Tom D." he stammered. "What the hell?
Are you following me around or what? Didn't I meet you at Civitan Park in
April? Didn't you tell me you lived in Beverly and worked on the river? Now
you say you live in Columbus and work construction. What is it with you? You
know your way to Grand Central Mall as well as I do. What kind of game are
you playing?" I'd already turned the
Trans-Am off and was preparing to flag someone down and have them call the
Belpre cops for me. I didn't like to be stalked, and I had a strange feeling
that's exactly what this weirdo was doing. But Tom D. assured me
he meant no harm. He just didn't recognize me. Well, I could understand that.
I hadn't recognized him either. It had been pretty dark the first time we met
and he'd stayed in the darkest portion of the shelter so I really hadn't
gotten a good look at him. "How many
different vehicles do you own?" he asked, as he looked the Trans-Am
over. I'd been driving my
Chevy van the night at Civitan Park, because I had a dog with me. That's why I bought
the van, so I could take my dogs to dog shows and travel in comfort. It wasn't any of his
business how many vehicles I owned, so I didn't bother answering him, but I
sure got a good look at the truck he was driving. And I recalled that he'd
said he was on a motor cycle at Civitan Park although I had not seen a cycle
sitting anywhere when I left that night. I didn't connect the
bearded stranger who lied every time he met me to Terri Roach. Perhaps I
should have. I met him shortly before she was murdered and again within a
couple of weeks after she was murdered. He was the only one who had come
crawling from the shadows. He was the only one who appeared to be stalking
me. ** It would be a
few years down the road before I learned that this same man had showed up at
his job with scratches all over him at the time Terri Roach was murdered!** No one knew exactly
when Terri disappeared. She was supposed to pick up her pay check from Elby's
near the end of June. She never picked it up. Someone said they saw her
getting into a car with some guy she called Mark,
but as far as I know Mark was never found, and no one was ever
able to say when this had happened. As far as I could determine
"Mark" had nothing to do with her murder, wherever or whoever he
was.
That Is Not Tom D.
I dropped Mom off at her house and went straight home and
called Judy to tell her that I'd ran into Tom D. again. When I described the
guy to her she promptly said...."I don't know who in the hell you met,
or why he's using Tom D.'s name, but I'm telling you right now, that is not
Tom D. He doesn't look anything like that. He's a happily married man and
still lives in the same area where he lived when we were all teenagers. That
man is not Tom D." No, he wasn't Tom D. And he wasn't Mark J. either, although he
looked more like Mark J. than he did his own cousin Tom D. But it would be quite a while before I
figured it all out. Meanwhile....
The No One There Call
**September 14th,
1990**: My
phone rang and I answered it. I said hello a couple of times. I could tell
there was someone at the other end of the line but they wouldn't say
anything. I hung up and wondered who it could have been and why they wouldn't
talk to me. No one came to mind, especially the bearded stranger that I'd met
in April and July, the man calling himself Tom D. He
never crossed my mind. He should have:
Wild Bill
I had some furniture
for sale. A man named Bill called about it. I told him he could come and look
at it, and when he arrived he was a bearded man driving a red and white Ford
Ranger! He started to get out of the truck. I ran across the driveway and
shoved his door shut before he could get out. "Give me your driver’s license
...... right now!" I demanded. I intended to see who
this character was. Was he Tom, or was he Bill? The driver's license said he
was Bill and he did a lot of explaining before he ever got out of his
vehicle: His wife had left him, took half the furniture: He'd seen me and
just wanted someone to talk to and was afraid to give me his real name
because he was concerned that his wife would drag me into a divorce action!
Since when can a person not speak and talk to someone without being dragged
into a divorce action? I was irate. It would be some time
before I realized that the things he told me about his wife were all lies
too. Eventually Renay and I
met and became friends. I actually served as liaison between him and her and
their attorneys in the divorce and was the one person who was able to work
out an equitable division of property between the two of them. It was during the time
period that I was assisting "Wild Bill" move from the house where
he and his wife had lived that I came across all his old utility bills. At
first we were going to trash them, but then the subject of bankruptcy came up
and I said he'd better hang on to everything until I talked to his lawyer and
found out what all he'd need. I was glad that I did because some time later I
went through all those old bills and was astonished when I came to the phone
bill for September 14th, 1990 because it contained
my phone number! The "no one
there" call had come from him two weeks before I actually met him under
his correct name!
The Detective
I can't honestly say
there was ever a time that I fully trusted or believed Wild Bill. His early
actions had made that impossible. After I found my phone number in those old
records, and after I found a few other things in his possessions that didn't
look just right to me, Judy and I began working some of those old dreams that
we'd written down and tucked away. Things were looking
mighty strange where Wild Bill was concerned. Eventually, after Detective
John Winstanley was hired to head up the unsolved, cold cases of our area, I
turned everything I'd found over to him. I'd carefully documented everything;
had all the times, places, dates, and as many eyewitnesses as I could get,
just in case any of it was ever needed. And in those early
days, I was just sure it would all be needed some day. But, it never was.
Nothing was ever enough; ever good enough. And yet, I had the biggest
mountain of circumstantial evidence ever gained by a non-professional in the
history of this nation. I knew what I had, and they knew what I had.
Lookin' For A Killer
Christina returned
from Kansas at the end of 1990. In those early days of
1990, 1991 and even into 1992, I had not put all the pieces together and
never once considered that Wild Bill might have been involved in things that
he should not have been involved in. By 1993 I was waking
up to a few facts and by 1994 I was wide awake! Sometimes it was the
things that Wild Bill said himself that made me suspicious, and made me
wonder about his extracurricular activities. Still, there were some things
that wouldn't occur to me until years after Wild Bill and I had parted ways
and was no longer friends. By this time I was
convinced that Wild Bill had been stalking people for years. I couldn’t
determine though if he was stalking my daughter, my sister, my friends, me
… or all of us! By 1993 I had come to
believe Wild Bill was stalking all of us and had been for several years. In 1995, I learned
from two of his girlfriends that he had a picture of me that had to have been
taken during the Christmas parade of 1987 when Judy, Diane and I
designed a Granville Shepherds float for the parade. That was more than two
years before he stepped out of the shadows of Civitan Park and introduced
himself as Tom D. Like I said, it's all been
reported to local police. No one ever put the pieces together. No one ever
cared what he was doing to me or my friends ..... at least not here, no one ever cared. Oh, that the wolf had not howled at our door... We could have lived in naive bliss evermore. And when at last, he took us away... "Coincidence," no doubt.....they'd say. But in their hearts, suspicions would grow... Toward husbands, boyfriends, brothers, fathers...and all we
know. And never would they see the gray wolf, or his deadly game. Satisfying his hungers through death and name. / BMW
Thinking Back
I remember telling
Detective Winstanley, "When the
end is the beginning, know that we have come full circle and the answer is
trapped within." If he bothered to read
it, he in all likelihood dismissed it as nonsense. A lot of the things I say
sound like nonsense, for a while. They aren't. Terri Roach's murder
was ‘the beginning’ for me. I believe I've found
her killer. I've watched as people
have been murdered on the birthdays of my husband, my mother, my dead
brother, my sister and my daughter.
I've seen people
murdered on anniversaries known by me – and Wild Bill. I've watched as
women were murdered who had the same first name and sometimes the last name,
as my daughter, my sister, and my friends. By 2000 I've seen (and
kept track of) murder victims who had the same names, birth dates,
anniversaries, etc. as women in 'Wild Bill's' life -- his sister, his
girlfriend's sister, his ex-wives' sisters, etc. It has not been easy.
I have spent thousands of hours and thousands of my own dollars in pursuit of
a killer. A killer that wants to possess everything that he ever had in his
life, but lost. I think he wants to deprive others of those things he cannot
have. He's convinced no one will notice except me.
The Native American Medicine Cards
I did some card
readings one time in an effort to determine who would eventually catch our
killer. The cards said it would be John Winstanley. He was represented by the
"Wolf" card which stands for "teacher, path finder, and
leader." Yesterday, when I did the reading he was a detective. Today he
is a teacher. Tomorrow? We'll see. [see
footnote **] Meanwhile, I have a new
friend named Bob. [see footnote ***] We
talk about "our" cases sometimes, and just last night he asked me
if I'd seen anything about the Falco case in Pennsylvania. I hadn't heard of
it. I looked it up on the net and here's what I found.....
The Falco Case
Bits & pieces of information copied from various sources
on the internet: *******************************************
So far, no witness has emerged to say what happened to
25-year-old Elizabeth Falco, who disappeared in the early hours of Sept.
14, 1990. She was last seen pedaling a bicycle toward her Center City
Philadelphia apartment after leaving the Bank, a nightclub at Sixth and
Spring Garden Streets. Her body was found a month later near Philadelphia
International Airport, in a grassy area off Tinicum
Avenue. The body was clad only in black, high-top Reebok's, and had been
shoved partway into a green plastic trash bag. Medical experts who examined the near-skeletal remains believe
that she was strangled. Because of the decomposition of the body, authorities were
unable to determine whether Falco, 25, had been raped. Nor could they
determine the exact cause of death. Although police and family members said
Falco had been known to use drugs, no evidence of drugs was found in an
autopsy. ************************************
Elizabeth Jane Falco
grew up in Cherry Hill, where she devoted much of her time and energy to the
care of her younger brothers. She moved to Philadelphia about a year ago and
was out of work when she died. Her life was
unremarkable. Her death drew the attention of the medical examiner, several
police detectives and an FBI agent. Falco spent that
Thursday evening {September 13th, 1990} at the Bank, a popular nightspot in a
converted bank building at Sixth and Spring Garden Streets. It's an old
building of stone and wrought iron, with two snarling gargoyles guarding the
front doors. Falco was last seen
about 1 a.m. that Friday, pedaling her boyfriend's bicycle toward their
Center City apartment. "I knew
immediately that something bad had happened," said Joanne Falco, Liz's
mother. " . . . I had this terrible feeling that I had to talk to her,
but I couldn't reach her on the phone." Because she couldn't
reach her daughter, Joanne Falco went to Philadelphia and to her daughter's
apartment on Race Street. It was unsettling, she recalled. She called the police
to report Liz missing. Meanwhile, her sons
posted fliers across South Jersey and Philadelphia, offering a $2,000 reward
for information on Liz's disappearance. A Philadelphia FBI agent, acting on a
request from a family friend, also made some checks. Nothing panned out.
The bike was never found. Paul Falco, 13, said
he knew on Oct. 13 that his sister was dead. That was his birthday, he said,
and he was sure she would have phoned if she were alive. A week before
Thanksgiving, Joanne Falco called Robert Kane, a private detective with
Joseph Brignola Inc., Investigators & Consultants in Philadelphia. "I felt from the
get-go that something had happened to her," said Kane, who spent 13 years
as a city homicide detective. From Philadelphia
Detective Neal Aitken, Kane learned of a body that had been found Nov. 14 by
a man walking his dog. Kane checked its height and hair color, and got a
description of the clothing found nearby, which included a jacket with the
logo "Bad Boys Club." "I called Mrs.
Falco," Kane said. "Without me even telling her, she asked if it
had 'Bad Boys Club' on it. I knew this was the right girl." Kane rounded up Liz's
dental charts, took them to the Medical Examiner's Office and then to a
forensic dentist in Bricktown, N.J., who confirmed
his suspicions. Then he drove to Cherry Hill to inform the Falco family, his
investigation over. "I was hired to
locate her," Kane said, "and she was located."
What Can I Say?
Is there anything I
haven't already said a hundred times or more? Did I tell everyone my
daughter's middle name is Jane? Did I tell Winstanley a dozen times or more
that "the no one there calls
always come just before or right after someone is murdered; almost as if the
caller wants me to know that he's killed someone else that I should be aware
of? Sure I told
him. I told the world. Today, I still wonder - Where was
Wild Bill the night Elizabeth Falco was murdered? And why did he call me a
few hours later and say nothing?
This page is dedicated to the
memory of Terri Lee Roach and
Elizabeth Jane Falco
Barbara Barnes / Ohio to Pittsburgh 1995 Kimberlie Krimm
/ 14/ Pittsburgh / 1998
Starlight Inner-Prizes / Homepage Lookin' For A Killer / Homepage
Footnotes: **
[2006] John Winstanley is now back with the sheriff's department and is 3rd
in command; Major John Winstanley. **
[2006] The Bob I mentioned remained in close contact with me for several
months. He was interested in police work, and we discussed the possibility of
him coming to this area someday. However, when Dru Sjodin disappeared, Bob
wrote to me and asked me to work the case [psychic work], which I did. I sent
him all my work on Dru's case, well ahead of the discovery of her body. He
never responded in any way, shape or form; not even when she was found and he
could see for himself just how accurate my information really was. So be it.
I hope he gets himself a good job someday. Hope he makes it to this area as a
cop, because the day is coming when he might see something else that's
amazing - maybe then he'll speak to me. Maybe I'll speak back. **2013:
John Winstanley is now retired from the sheriff’s department. None of
our cold cases have ever been solved.
Special
Notes: My friends
Pat and Diane are now both deceased. Diane died January 20th, 2011
and Pat died February 12th, 2013: PS: Psychic
Georgia Rudolph also died on February 12th, 2013: "When the end
is the beginning, know that we have come full circle and the answer is
trapped within."
Posted/Updated: 6-27-03 / 2-15-04 / 3-18-04
/ May 1st, 2006 / March 2007 / 2008 / Feb. 2013 // BMW |
