“That’s her name, Elizabeth Greer.” Karen squinted at me, frowning. “What? Is she famous? Should I try and get an autograph?”
I put my hands on the desk. My fingers were tingling, my cheeks going numb. “No,” I said. “No, you don’t want her autograph.”
“Whatever,” Karen said. The phone rang, and she turned away to answer it.
Elizabeth Greer, I thought, glancing at the woman again. Beth Greer. She sat reading her book, unaware I was staring.
Of course I knew her face. I’d seen dozens of photos of her, news footage. I’d put photos of her on my own website. I hadn’t recognized her because the photos on my site were from forty years ago, and no one had a photo of what she looked like now.
The woman sitting twenty feet away from me, reading a book, was Beth Greer.
And in 1977, she’d been Claire Lake’s most famous murderer.
* * *
—
In October of 1977, a man named Thomas Armstrong left work at six o’clock at night and got in his car. He left downtown Claire Lake and drove toward his house at the edge of the lake, taking the smaller roads out of town. He never got home. At seven thirty, his car was found, the lights on and the engine still running as Armstrong lay dead on the side of the road.
Armstrong was a family man, with a wife, two children, no criminal ties, and no debts. It appeared that he’d pulled over on his way home, possibly to help someone who needed aid. He was shot twice in the face, one bullet piercing his brain and killing him instantly. Next to him was left a note written in a woman’s hand that said: Am I bitter or am I sweet? Ladies can be either. Publish this or there will be more.
Murders were rare in Claire Lake, so there was no question the case would receive front-page press. But the note put the local police in a quandary. Keep the note quiet and don’t encourage a possible copycat? Or give the killer what she wanted? There didn’t seem to be a right answer. Finally, they handed the note to the press, who immediately dubbed the murderer the Lady Killer.
No one could understand it. Had a woman really shot a strange man point-blank in the face, like the Zodiac Killer or the Son of Sam?
Thomas Armstrong had no enemies. No one could think of anyone who would have wanted to murder him; he seemed to be an everyday husband and father on his way home from work. No one could see a reason why he was targeted. But there he was, dead by the side of the road, the lenses of his glasses smashed and a note in a woman’s hand left by his body.
And then things got worse.
Four days after Armstrong’s murder, family man Paul Veerhoever left work to go home. He, too, pulled over to the side of the road on the outskirts of town, where he was shot twice—one bullet hitting his jaw and one his right temple. This time a witness walking his dog heard the shot and came out of the trees to find a woman get in a car and drive away. She had red hair and she was wearing a trench coat.
Next to Veerhoever’s body was a note in the same hand as the first one: Catch me!
The town panicked. No one in Claire Lake had ever seen crimes so violent, so brutal, so random. who is the lady killer? was the headline from the Claire Lake Daily. The next day, in the Claire Lake Free Press: police warn claire lake residents to “stay safe after dark.” People—men especially—were warned not to pull over and help anyone on the road. The news wires picked it up, and within days the case had gone statewide, with reporters from Portland and Eugene coming to town to cover it.
It was a great story: two innocent, upstanding husbands and fathers, gunned down execution-style in cold blood. A dark predator on the streets of a quiet seaside town, apparently hunting for victims. The victims, in this case, were men, and the cold-blooded killer was quite possibly a woman.
The witness to the second murder identified the woman he saw as Beth Greer.
In 1977, Beth was twenty-three, beautiful, and rich. Her family lived in a mansion in the city’s wealthiest neighborhood, Arlen Heights. Her father had died in 1973, shot during a home invasion that was never solved, and her mother had died in a car accident two years later, leaving Beth alone in the house with an inheritance of millions. Beth had red hair, and she owned a trench coat. She also owned a car like the one the witness had seen. She said she’d been home at the time of both murders, drinking alone.
Beth was photographed coming out of the Claire Lake police station after an interview, looking beautiful and cold and carefree. No one liked her; her neighbors said she was standoffish, and she tended to have unsavory people at her house. Her car was seized and her mansion searched, but no evidence was found. No one could come up with a reason for a rich girl with no problems to start killing random men. But someone had. And Beth Greer sold papers.
The Portland papers ran a story with a photo of Beth Greer laughing, looking beautiful and sexy. It was a photo from a year before, but no one cared. They ran it with the headline is she the female zodiac killer? Then the New York Times picked up the story, though the photo it ran was more recent and the headline was subdued: murders by apparent female killer baffle oregon police. The article said: “local socialite Beth Greer has been identified as a person of interest,” and Beth Greer became the most famous murder suspect in America.
The woman who had sold all of those papers was sitting in my waiting room right now, quietly reading a book.
I remembered the photos of her from 1977—Beth was sleek and gorgeous, her body in tight-fitting seventies tops and high-waisted pants, her long red hair cascading over her shoulders and down her back. She had big, dark, perfectly even eyes that were hypnotic and somehow sexual. Even as she was being led from jail to the courthouse and back, wearing an ill-fitting jumpsuit, she looked like a movie star.
My fingertips were numb as I moved files around, as I typed patient information on my computer and answered emails. Beth Greer glanced at her watch briefly, then turned another page. They had arrested her as the Lady Killer and taken her to trial, which had been covered in a nationwide spectacle. She was acquitted, but that didn’t stop the headlines: has a deadly female killer gone free?
No one knew the answer. I’d written an article about the Lady Killer case for the Book of Cold Cases, and all I’d found was an endless spiral of speculation. There were so many details, so many what-ifs. So many questions. Why those two men? Had they known Beth? Was she a young woman grieving her parents’ tragic deaths or a seething psychopath with a sexy body? Did the notes even mean anything, and if so, what? Why had the state gone to trial with no murder weapon and no forensic evidence? If the killer wasn’t Beth Greer, why had the killings stopped when she was arrested? The killer had written Catch me! Had they caught her? Was Beth an innocent victim or a femme fatale?
I’d spent five weeks writing the article for my website, and three times I’d taken the bus to Arlen Heights so I could walk past the Greer mansion. I’d found Beth’s birth certificate, her DMV records, her property taxes. I’d read the local newspaper coverage and compared it with the national coverage, including articles in Newsweek. I’d read every rumor—there were hundreds—and every wild conspiracy theory. I’d looked at every photo of her, including the baby and childhood pictures I could find. I’d even tracked down a pirated copy of the 1981 TV movie made about the case, starring Jaclyn Smith, and bought a ripped DVD that cost me $300 because the movie wasn’t available digitally. I’d dug up every scrap, searching for answers, just like so many others before me. I’d been obsessed. I still was. And Beth Greer was at the center of it, in all her unreadable complexity.