CHAPTER 27
The police took two weeks to determine that the body in the Torstensens’ backyard, killed by blunt-force trauma to the head, was “likely Helena Torstensen.” The problem with an actual identification was that there were no dental records that anyone could find for Helena Torstensen, and they had no DNA from her. They could do a mitochondrial test with her two sons, but that would take months to finish and it would be expensive.
There was no evidence that she had had cancer, which was what Liam Torstensen now insisted. The stories Tobias had told about a heart condition and a car accident were both clearly out. But Liam seemed to believe that his father might have worked some kind of “mercy killing” on his young wife, and suffered for it for the rest of his life, concealing the guilt he felt, but still being enough in love with her that he did crazy things like trying to find women who looked like her to pretend with him for a while that she was still alive.
The only thing that made me consider Liam’s version was that it helped explain how Tobias Torstensen could have remarried a woman like Anna and then lived happily with for thirty more years without a hint of a criminal personality. If a man was a wife murderer, how had he changed so completely? How could a man who killed be such a kind and loving father?
The police had called Anna back from her cruise, and it had taken her ten days to find a port and book a flight home. She’d only been back since the weekend, and she, too, had not been allowed in the house.
Anna had called to ask me to go with her to meet the police. I met her at the walk leading up to her house and was delighted to see her. I hugged her briefly, then stepped back to look at her. She looked tanned and tense.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“As well as can be expected,” she said.
She already knew the news about Joseph and Willow’s baby coming, which I’d shared in a short email, excited that she and I were going to be grandmothers within a span of months. I suppose we could have emailed more, but I’ve never learned how to do real sharing via a computer screen.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Anna said.
“I’m glad you called to ask me.” I desperately wanted to find an answer here. The case with Carrie Helm seemed to have ground to a halt, and the police were not following any new leads. It seemed that her murder would go unsolved, and I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, unsettled by the thought.
“I feel like I’m reeling, like I haven’t been able to sit down since I heard about the body,” said Anna. “At first I thought it was the cruise, but even when I was on solid ground, I felt the same disorientation. The whole world keeps moving around me, and I have to keep looking at my feet or I will fall.”
“I know,” I said.
“It isn’t just that he killed someone. It’s that I never guessed. I always saw him as such a gentle man, incapable of violence for any reason.” At least she wasn’t spouting a theory like Tomas’s about Tobias’s innocence. “We all believed him,” I said. I didn’t like to think that I was gullible, but they say Utah is the con capital of the world. People who are strong adherents to a miracle-based religion are more likely to believe in other miracles. And we tend to believe the best of others, never guessing that a scam might be perpetrated on us by someone claiming to be a member of our own church.
“Thirty years,” whispered Anna. “Why did he do it?”
“Kill her, you mean? Maybe there was some terrible argument, and then he panicked and buried her? I suspect he must have thought about her every day since then, and felt guilty about it.”
“But that doesn’t mean I have to forgive him, does it? He killed his wife and then hid it. He escaped all the consequences.”
I felt more sympathy for him than she could in that moment, perhaps. Tobias had been so young at the time, and he had two sons to care for. He must have wondered what would happen to them if their mother was killed and their father was in prison for life.
“Everything was a lie. Every word that he ever said to me,” said Anna, her whole body slumped as I had never seen it before, even when Tobias was on his deathbed. This wasn’t just physical exhaustion. It was emotional dissolution.
“Surely not. He loved you, Anna. He truly did.”
“He loved her, too,” said Anna. “And look what he did to her.”
I thought again of the brand new hammer Tobias had kept by the bedside, a twin to the ruined one in the garden, and quailed.
“What’s in that?” asked Anna, nodding to the bag I was carrying.
It held the old hammer and the dress I had found in the shed. I had delayed taking it into the police several times during the last two weeks, not wanting to deal with questions about why I hadn’t called them in the first place, back in February, when Tobias had still been alive. But now I wished I had made a separate visit so that Anna didn’t have to deal with so much all at once.
I showed Anna the dress again, reminding her that I had found it in the shed. This time she saw the bloodstains immediately.
“How did I miss this? I was so blind,” she said. Then her head jerked up. “You think that it was the dress she was wearing when she died?”
“It might be.”
“And the hammer?”
I told her I’d found it in the garden.
“A hammer,” she whispered. “Like the one on his side of the bed, always within reach.”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “It might be a coincidence.”
She stared at me. “You don’t believe that.”
“I believe that people can change,” I said truthfully. And Tobias might be one of them. Wasn’t that what religion was all about?
But it was also true that if people changed, part of the evidence of the change was the willingness to face consequences for their past sins. And Tobias had not shown that. He had done everything he could to obscure the truth about his wife’s death, until he himself had been too far gone to tell any more.
A police car drove up and a detective got out. He introduced himself to us as “Detective Eric Dun,” then motioned to us to follow him into the house, so we did. He was younger than I would have imagined, and he had startlingly blue eyes. He smelled faintly of motor oil, though I could only guess at why.
As we stepped through the front door, I felt surprise rinse through me like cold water. The house seemed completely changed. It wasn’t just the plastic on the carpet and the stale smell. The furniture had all changed. I had seen it when the Gearys moved in, but it was strange to be here now with Anna at my side. It made the change feel more permanent. The house had died, too, not just Tobias.
“Can you think of anything that your husband might have told you about his first wife that would tell us why he killed her?” asked the detective, when we were all sitting in the front room.
“He never spoke of her to my recollection,” said Anna.
“Never? Did that strike you as odd?” asked Detective Dun. He was sitting across from us on an upholstered chair the Gearys must have brought in.
Anna looked at me, and I smiled at her reassuringly.
“It was a painful topic and it didn’t seem to have immediate relevance to our lives. She was dead and he was married to me,” said Anna.
“Well, what about your life with him? Was there anything about it that made you suspicious about the kind of man you had married?” He took notes on a small pad of paper spread over his lap.
Anna told him about an argument over checking accounts, when she had wanted to have hers separate from Tobias’s. She claimed it was the only time she had ever heard Tobias raise his voice to her. “It was right here. In this room,” she added, pointing at the space between us, and I could see that she was imagining it in her mind.
“And what about his sons? Was he ever angry or violent with them?”
Anna shook her head. “He sometimes shouted at them to get their attention, but I never worried he would hurt them. He was a very good father and loved his sons devotedly.”
“Hmm. So if his wife had threatened to take the boys away with her?” Detective Dun asked.
This wasn’t what I had expected. I hadn’t realized the police took this case so seriously. I thought this was only a formality.
“I don’t know,” said Anna. She looked at me again.
If someone had threatened to take my boys away when they were that age, I might have been capable of murder. But then again, I might have been capable of murder on any day of the week. I didn’t have grand notions about some people being born killers and others not.
“This is hard for her to take in, of course. We all thought of Tobias as a wonderful man,” I said as tears started to drip down Anna’s face. I handed over the dress and the hammer and explained where I had found them.
“Damn,” said the detective as he opened the bag and held up each piece in the light streaming in from the front window.
“Can you still test the blood on the dress?” I asked. “Or whatever is on the hammer? Could it be the murder weapon?”
“It could be. The problem is the chain of custody. You took the hammer from the garden and to your garage, where it has been for months now. And as for the dress, we don’t know anything about how the blood got to be on it. If you’d called us immediately, we might have been able to question Tobias about it while he was still alive.” Detective Dun was staring at me accusingly.
“But there was no body at the time,” I said. “You would have thought I was crazy, thinking a dying old man had killed his first wife some thirty-odd years ago.”
“I wouldn’t have,” he said.
I rolled my eyes at him.
He let out a breath and seemed to sink into himself a bit. “I’ll tell you a story about why I would have listened to you, all right?”
“Okay,” I said. I looked at Anna and she nodded.
“My sister was killed by her husband. Three years ago. She called me the day it happened, asking me for help. I thought I could wait to get to her. I thought she was exaggerating.”
I bristled at that.
“That evening, when I finally got to her house, she was dead. So I take women more seriously now. I listen, and try to step in when I can still save a life.”
He was breathing heavily, and it looked like he felt a little ill. I knew what that was like, giving away too much of yourself when you hadn’t expected to and then waiting to see how it was received.
“I find myself telling that story more and more often now. I wish it wasn’t applicable in so many of the cases I investigate, but it is.”
“Even here in Utah?” said Anna.
“Maybe especially here in Utah,” said Detective Dun.
It humanized the detective for me, seeing why he felt called to his profession. I’d never faced a tragedy like that in my own life—before this. “But it’s not as if Tobias could be prosecuted now,” I said. “I don’t see what the point is in making a fuss over all of this.”
Detective Dun straightened his shoulders, back in his authority role, his head rising above the line of the chair. “The point is that people like you think they have seen enough detective shows on TV to do things on their own. But they shouldn’t. If there were a possibility of a real case here, you would have jeopardized it to the point of making the D.A. wonder if he should even try to go to trial. Any defense lawyer would have a field day with the possibilities of what might have happened to the dress and hammer in the time it was in your garage.”
He was right, of course. After the fact, I could see that I had taken too much on myself. It stung to hear him treat me like a child who had stepped into the street without looking both ways.
“Promise me you won’t ever do something like this again. Call the police if you find something. Immediately,” said Detective Dun. There was just a hint of pleading in his voice now, underneath the demand. He stood up, putting everything back in the bag. “I will tell you what I am most afraid of, Mrs. Torstensen,” he said, towering above her now, since she was still on the couch.
“What’s that?” asked Anna, her hands shaking until she put them flat on her knees.
“If your husband was able to fool you and all your neighbors, and keep this body buried right under your noses, it makes us concerned that we may yet find other bodies,” said the detective. “It could be years before we figure out the extent of what he did.”
This struck me as both far-fetched and insensitive to Anna’s emotional state. Surely the police didn’t assume that there were serial killers behind every body found buried in a garden. Although, I suppose a body having gone undiscovered for so long was a sign of careful planning. Sociopathic serial killers are good at covering up their crimes, because their strategy is never compromised by remorse.
Not that I was any expert on serial killers. As Detective Dun had said, I was relying on what I’d seen on TV and what I’d read about Ted Bundy and Arthur Gary Bishop, both Mormons, in the days when I’d been an atheist and looking for reasons to stop believing in the church.
I stood up and tried to meet the detective’s eyes. “What makes you think that there are any other bodies?” Had they found something in the garden that we hadn’t heard about yet? Were there unclaimed murder victims in Draper from the last thirty years they think could be linked to Tobias?
“We don’t know if there are, but a man who has killed once and gotten away with it is more likely to try again,” said Detective Dun.
“Now aren’t you the one who is making assumptions?” How pompous that sounded. He was the detective here. I was just a stay-at-home mother and a bishop’s wife. That was my life. It just so happened that this one murder had impinged on my world. Well, two murders, I suppose.
The detective reopened his notebook and wrote a few scrawled words. I imagined they were warnings about not talking to me again.
“He wasn’t a dangerous man,” said Anna. “If you’d known him, you’d have seen how carefully he controlled his temper.”
“Then he had a temper? You saw that?” asked Detective Dun.
“Well, we all have feelings that we can’t control,” Anna said. She was still seated on the couch and had to look up to talk to him. I wished she’d stand up and not let him intimidate her like that. “But we control how we act on those feelings.”
“So you’re saying he often suppressed his feelings?” said Detective Dun. “He was a very controlled person?”
“Tobias was a good man. A good husband and father,” said Anna.
“Have you considered the fact that you were in danger every day of your life with him?” asked Detective Dun.
Anna put a hand to her throat and shook her head.
Detective Dun seemed to realize finally he had gone too far. But the burden his sister’s death had left on him was heavy. I could understand that.
“If you could guide me through the rest of the house,” he said.
Anna stood at last, and led him through the house then, showing him every little corner or cubbyhole she could think of. She insisted she had cleaned them all when she moved, but then the detective pointed out a wall that was strangely placed, considering the footprint of the rooms overhead. While Anna and I waited in uncomfortable silence, Detective Dun went up to Tobias’s shed and got a pry bar. Then he came back and used it to break through the wall with a few well-placed taps. There was only sheetrock there, no studs.
“What do you think you’re going to find?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You never know. But sometimes people keep things they shouldn’t. They don’t want to let go.”
Then the space was open, dust flying all around, and I saw him lean in and pull out a book and some papers. The book, when he opened it, was clearly a diary written by Helena Torstensen, more than thirty years ago, beginning the day of her wedding. The papers were her wedding certificate and other legal documents and photos.
Detective Dun turned to the last entry in the diary.
“Does it say something about being afraid of Tobias killing her?” I asked after watching him try to read it in the dimly lit basement.
He shook his head. “Not that I saw. But I’ll read through all of it.” Then he leaned into the space again and pulled out some clothes. I didn’t know why Tobias had kept the other dress in the shed when he’d kept all these clothes here.
The detective packed everything up, keeping notes on it all. “What happens now?” I asked.
“We still have to prove the identity of the woman. And then the autopsy will have to show us conclusively how she died. But even after all that, I don’t know if we’ll ever be absolutely certain about who killed her at this stage. We may leave the case open,” he said.
“And what about the body?” I asked.
“After we’ve finished the investigation we can release her remains to the family to bury.” He nodded to Anna. “That would be your sons, I assume.”
“Yes,” said Anna quietly. She looked at me.
“I’ll make sure the arrangements are made for that, Anna. If it happens.” Another funeral for the Relief Society to put on. I could make sure this part was done right for the long-dead woman, even if we had done so much else wrong.