Page 79 of The Lost Heiress
“What about local missing persons?” Church asked.
“No matches,” Leland said. “And I checked the entire staff list. Everyone is accounted for. Whoever our John Doe was, he was an interloper. He wasn’t supposed to be there that night.”
They were both quiet for a moment.
“Listen, all that stuff the sheriff and sarge said the other week,” Church said. “Don’t take it too personally. They went a little hard.”
“I deserved it,” Leland said, “a boneheaded move like that.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it, is all I’m trying to say,” Church said. “It’s not like you’re the only one who’s ever fucked up a case before.”
“Yeah?” Leland said. “Somehow, I can’t see you making a mistake like that.”
“Yeah, well,” Church said. He scratched the back of his head. “You’d be wrong.”
Leland looked up.
Church hesitated a moment. He glanced over at the door and wondered how long he had until McPherson returned from his break. He didn’t want an extended audience for this particular story.
He perched on the edge of Leland’s desk and kept his voice low. “There was this case, several years ago,” Church began. “The Riley case.” It had been one of the first cases he was assigned to when he took over the Cold Case Unit. “I got a call from this woman, Lindsay Banks,” Church went on. “Apparently, her mother, Ruth Blackwell, had just passed away after a long, drawn-out battle with colon cancer, and on her deathbed, well, she’d made a confession.”
Church still recalled Ruth Blackwell’s last words, the three sentences that had sent his life into a tailspin: “Those two little girls,” she’d said. “He did it. Ben did it.”
Lindsay didn’t need to ask her mother what she meant; she knew. The Blackwells had lived two streets over from the Rileys when Peyton Riley had gone missing in December of 1973.
Peyton Riley had been only seven at the time. The school bus had dropped her off in her neighborhood in Bishop Falls. Between the bus stop and Peyton’s house, which was only five houses away, Peyton had disappeared.
There was another little girl who shared the same bus stop as Peyton—Ashley Lewis, age eight—and she had been the only witness. She’d told the police that she and Peyton had seen a young man walking his dog. It was a white terrier mix with big brown spots, and Peyton stopped to pet him. They struck up a conversation with the man, who told them the dog could do the most marvelous tricks if only they had some treats to feed him. Ashley ran across the street to her house to get some peanut butter, and when she came back, Peyton, the man, and the dog were gone.
The police had been called immediately. They’d canvassed the neighborhood, set up search parties, but found nothing. It was a local hunter who found Peyton—or, rather, her remains—in the woods in the town over the next spring. There’d been a frenzied investigation after—the police had interviewed over one hundred suspects. But slowly, the list had dwindled as alibis checked out and leads went nowhere. The case grew cold.
“Ruth Blackwell had been Ben’s alibi the day of Peyton’s disappearance,” Church went on. “She’d told the police that Ben had been home that afternoon, helping her organize donations for the church rummage sale that would take place the following Saturday. Besides, the Blackwells didn’t own a dog. So the police had dismissed Ben as a suspect. But Lindsay told me that not only had her mother recanted Ben’s alibi, but that Ben had volunteered regularly with the local humane society, where he cleaned kennels, washed dogs, took them for walks. That was where he’d really been that day that Peyton Riley went missing.”
“Holy shit,” Leland said.
Church nodded. “So I visited the SLO Humane Society,” Church said. “I spent hours in that back room, going through boxes and boxes of administrative paperwork. And then I found it: the old volunteer records from 1973. There was a handwritten sign-in sheet, and on December seventh, 1973, Ben Blackwell had scribbled his name. Time in: one forty-five p.m. Time out: five thirty-eight p.m. It was exactly the window in which Peyton had gone missing.”
“Wow,” Leland whistled. “That must have felt like striking gold.”
Church nodded. “It did. There wasn’t any DNA evidence to go off of in the case,” he said. “The original investigators had found a hair that didn’t belong to Peyton on her remains, but there was no root, so it couldn’t be tested. So I conducted a photo-identification lineup instead.”
Church recalled arranging an old photo of Ben from around the time the disappearance had taken place with a slew of other headshots. He’d held his breath as Ashley Lewis—the only witness, who was now in her early fifties—leaned over the table, examining each photo, crinkling her forehead as she strained to remember. Then she sat back, tapped her finger on Ben’s photograph.
“Him,” Ashley said. “That’s him.”
The jury had deliberated for only an hour after the prosecution and defense had finished presenting their cases. The verdict came back: guilty.
“The paper did a write-up on me,” Church said. “Local Detective Solves Decades-Old Cold Case.I was the town hero, the department golden boy.”
“This isn’t really making me feel any better,” Leland said.
“Just wait,” Church said and trudged on.
Ben Blackwell had protested his innocence and appealed his conviction, not once but twice. By the time of the second appeal, ground had been broken in DNA hair analysis—they now no longer needed the root. The hair that had been found on Peyton Riley was tested, and the results came back: Ben Blackwell was not a match. Instead, it matched a seventy-six-year-old inmate of Kern Valley State Prison: a man by the name of Larry Ferguson, who was serving life in prison for the murder of his ex-girlfriend.
“Holy shit,” Leland said.
“Yeah,” Church said. “Holy fucking shit, indeed.”
