Death Dealer. Kate Clark Flora
they were taking the situation seriously, Cummings showed David the reports in the provincial papers of Maria’s disappearance, noting that usually the papers don’t react to missing persons so quickly.
“It’s out of character for her, we told them. Run this story,” Cummings said. Then he asked David to start wherever he thought relevant and describe the circumstances leading up to Maria’s disappearance.
David then described in detail how Maria would come with him to his counseling sessions with addiction services and how Maria was reluctant to give him any time to himself, so the counselor had proposed that one of them should get away from the other. He explained that initially he had wanted to stay at his brother Joe’s house, but Maria disliked Joe’s girlfriend and insisted that there would be “too many girls around.” He had also suggested going to his mother’s in Saint John, but again Maria believed that there would be a problem with too many women. Maria countered that she would travel to Saint John instead and stay with her friend Cathy.
David said he had phoned home on the 11th from the pay phone in the lobby of a grocery store to ask if he should get more dog food. She told him that they didn’t need it, they still had half a bag and added that she would be leaving the following day on the bus. Initially, he thought that her threat to leave was just a ploy to make him come home, so he went back to their apartment. When he realized she was serious, they discussed her plan to leave. He told the detective that Maria thought it would be better for him to be at home where people were around who could look after him.
David said that the following morning, January 12, he brought Maria coffee in bed and they discussed her plans—how she was glad to be seeing her old friends and maybe she’d go drinking with them. She already had some stuff packed and she said she was leaving on the bus at 2:00. They promised to always be good to each other. Soon he left to go to his friend’s house to work on his three-wheeler. When he got back around five, Maria was gone. She hadn’t left any note, but she’d said she would be gone about a week and that she’d be in touch with his mother, who lived in Saint John, so he should call his mother if he wanted to contact her.
Cummings asked whether he had heard from her since, or spoken with anyone who had seen her. David said that the closest he’d come to any sighting or word about Maria was that Darlene Gertley claimed to have seen her on the 15th at their house. Since in his version of events Maria had already gone, he thought that this meant Darlene must have been taking too many prescription pills and only imagined it. And no, he told the detective, there were no bank cards or credit cards she might have used that could help track her because he had screwed up their credit.
When Cummings asked for more information about who the person was that Maria had gone to visit, David repeated that her name was Cathy and added that earlier in the month, Maria had had a call from an old friend named Cathy who lived in Saint John. When he’d gone down to Saint John to look for Maria, he’d spoken with a friend who had told him it was probably a woman named Cathy Penny.
Getting down to identifying details, Cummings asked what Maria was wearing on the day she left. David said she was still in her pajamas when he left, so he didn’t know. He did describe her yellow and black winter jacket in detail and agreed that while he knew nothing about women’s pants, he thought she was likely to be wearing jeans and hiking boots. He told Cummings Maria would have had over eight hundred dollars with her, money she had taken (David actually said that Maria had stolen the money) from their safe, funds they had been saving for their headstones.
Then he described Maria’s tattoos. On her right breast there was an open locket that read “In Memory of B.J.” and the date of her son’s death, with his high school graduation picture. She had a pink bunny on her right shoulder, a trillium flower on her left ankle and the name “Billy Joe” on her left forearm.
Asked if he knew for sure that Maria had taken the bus, David said he’d considered calling the bus station, but decided that wouldn’t prove anything because he’d taken the bus many times and knew you could buy a ticket on the bus. She probably didn’t pre-purchase a ticket because she was a homebody who never left the house except for grocery shopping, bill paying or cleaning B.J.’s grave.
David described Maria’s jewelry, saying that she wore a lot of it, often fifteen or twenty rings at a time, which Cummings agreed he remembered seeing in the past, and David told the investigator that he hadn’t seen any of her jewelry around the house so he presumed she had taken all of her jewelry with her, including some rings that had belonged to B.J. that she wore for sentimental reasons. He described some of Maria’s favorite pieces in detail.
Afterward, they discussed the idea of Cummings coming by the apartment and looking at pictures of Maria, to get a better idea of what jewelry she had and often wore. Later they did this, and David used some photographs of Maria wearing her jewelry to help remember what she usually wore, including her 90% Devil pendant.
What she had left behind, though, was her prescription medication, David said, along with the red devil teddy bear that she called “Baby B” for her son B.J. and her “sooky” blanket that she wrapped around herself for comfort when she curled up on the couch. David told Cummings that Maria kissed the bear every night, made him kiss the bear and would not go to sleep unless it was on her pillow.
Because state of mind is such an important factor in evaluating any disappearance, they next discussed David and Maria’s relationship at the time she left. Although the interview up to that point had been generally cordial, things got tense when the detective tried to explore the state of the relationship between husband and wife.
Cummings reminded David that he had told Constable Seeley that things hadn’t been good between them because of Maria’s refusal to give him space. David agreed, saying that things actually hadn’t been good between them for years, but that it had gotten much worse after Maria was diagnosed with Hepatitis C back in late August or September. While the couple hadn’t had physical fights, they had argued often about David’s drug use. David resented her interference, which was persistent and stifling, even though he understood that she did it out of genuine concern for his health. Maria would tell him to go look in the mirror, because he was killing himself. But he couldn’t see it, even after his son came to visit and his altered appearance made the boy cry.
David admitted sometimes injecting hydromorphone, readily acknowledging buying pills on the street as well. He had last used drugs, he told Cummings, about a week prior to the interview.
He had started getting worried after Maria had been gone for a week without him hearing from her, and around the 17th or 18th he began calling people, though he couldn’t provide the names of the people he’d called, referring Cummings to the list he’d given to Constable Seeley and the people he’d contacted in Saint John. David said that he had a list of the people he’d contacted at home, pages and pages of them, which they agreed Cummings would come to the apartment to pick up.
David had brought to the interview two prescription bottles for pills prescribed to Maria. Both were dated January 6. The first was an antidepressant. The bottle had initially contained sixty pills and the label instructed Maria to take one half tablet daily for the first seven days. When Cummings later counted the pills, there were fifty-five and one half. The second prescription was for an anti-anxiety medication. That bottle was empty. The recent prescriptions led to a discussion of Maria’s state of mind, and David said that she was tattered. Since her Hepatitis diagnosis, she’d been convinced that her life was over. Maria, he said, cared more about what happened to him than about anything else in the world.
When Cummings started going back through his notes of their conversation and writing out the details for a formal statement, David objected and became angry, stating that none of the stuff about their relationship or his drug use was going to help them find Maria.
In response to the question, “What do you think happened to Maria?” David admitted to being of two minds. A part of him thought she was staying with a friend, maybe had hooked up with someone, maybe was back on drugs herself. Another part worried that something might have happened to her. What he wanted, he said, was for someone to come and tell him she was all right.
When