Because both perpetrators were killed at the scene, questions about what happened to the Planks will never be fully answered. What linked Scott Barbereaux, Jack Warner and Todd Long? The only connection I could find was that they went to high school together. I can tie Barbereaux and Warner to the Carriage Stop Country Store. But I’m left wondering: Is that where they met Mary? Did her natural beauty and innocence bring out some dark and primal hunger in them? Did they think her na?veté would make her an easy target? Did her being Amish make her easy to exploit? I’ll probably never have definitive answers, but we did uncover evidence that helped fill in some of the blanks.
Several law enforcement agencies, including the Painters Mill PD, the sheriff’s office, and BCI, conducted a search that produced dozens of disks, drives, computers, a laptop and hundreds of photographs. I’ve seen a lot in the nine years I’ve been a cop, but the outrages inflicted upon Mary Plank top all of it.
Because Glenda Patterson alibied Barbereaux, Glock and Pickles brought her to the station for questioning. Handcuffed and surrounded by cops, she spilled her guts. She claimed no knowledge of Barbereaux’s involvement in the murders, going so far as to suggest he drugged her, left the house, and then sneaked back before she regained consciousness the next morning. We’re still trying to decide whether to put her before a grand jury. She wouldn’t be the first woman to lie to protect her lover.
Mary Plank’s journal continues to haunt me. Throughout all of this, I worried I would never be able to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Barbereaux was the man she wrote about. The man she loved. Just this morning, I learned that the DNA from the sperm found inside Mary’s body was matched to DNA taken from Barbereaux. Evidently, he didn’t know human sperm could live for up to three days.
Since the fetus and placenta were never found, there was no way to extract paternal DNA from the child Mary Plank was carrying, making it impossible to ascertain the identity of the father. But I know in my heart it was Barbereaux’s.
T.J., Pickles and Mona spent two days in the woods surrounding Miller’s Pond before finding the tree where Mary Plank carved her and her lover’s initials. M.P. loves S.B. forever. Next to it, she’d carved a heart pierced with an arrow. While it didn’t mean much in terms of evidence, it meant the world to me on a personal level. I had my proof.
I’ve spent the last couple of days piecing together a theory. I believe Scott Barbereaux delivered gourmet coffees to the shop where Mary worked. He also fancied himself an amateur photographer and did a few wedding and family reunion–type shoots at the store. I believe he met her there, charmed her, pursued her and seduced her. Unaccustomed to that kind of attention from an attractive male, Mary was swept off her feet. In the following weeks, he bought her gifts that seemed lavish to a na?ve Amish girl. English clothes. Lingerie. Jewelry. He introduced her to music, sex and drugs. Once her judgment was skewed—either by her feelings for Barbereaux or the drugs—he began drugging her with dangerous barbiturates and sedatives, such as Rohypnol. At that point, he began photographing and videotaping her in pornographic situations, using his friends Todd Long and Jack Warner as actors.
There’s no doubt in my mind that in some way, Mary loved Barbereaux. She wanted to marry him, have his child and lead a normal life. She was malleable; she wanted to please him. Her na?veté brought out something vicious in Barbereaux. He was a classic sociopath. He knew he could push her and he just kept on pushing. The power of that must have been heady. Toward the end—after he’d raped her body, mind and soul—it wasn’t even a problem for him.
But what was the impetus for murdering the entire Plank family? I have a theory on that, too. After Mary confessed her sins to her parents—telling them about her relationship with Barbereaux, the drugs, the porn and the child she was carrying—her parents broke Amish protocol and decided to take the information to the English police. But they never got the chance to follow through. Somehow Barbereaux found out what they were going to do and decided to eliminate the entire family. But he didn’t stop with just murder. They filmed the killings and sold the video on the black market as a sort of snuff film.
Mary Plank was not the first young woman the three men had exploited. Evidence discovered at Barbereaux’s home proved there were others, ranging from fifteen to twenty-two years of age. We also discovered a bank account in the Cayman Islands. Records indicated Barbereaux was raking in a lot of foreign cash. In the last six years, he’d earned over five hundred thousand dollars from the sale of pornographic videos. Mixed in with the sex, were several snuff-like productions. The bulk of the money came from the Philippines, China, Nigeria and Ukraine. Since international borders were crossed, the feds stepped in. For the first time in the course of my career, I was glad to relinquish control of a case.