“Why?” Genevieve asked.
“Because she knew how he was,” Mom answered. “Russell had beaten her, too, when she was a kid.”
“Sandra told your mother to clean herself up and leave with her for Bible study. So we put Caroline’s ripped clothing and the broom and anything else that we thought might incriminate me in a black garbage bag. Sandra took your mother to Bible study,and I drove the garbage bag to a public dumpster a half hour away. Then I drove half an hour in another direction and ran my car into a tree near a field where some kids were playing. I went to them for help, and one of their mothers drove me to a rural hospital. I claimed that the accident had caused the eye injury.”
“No one questioned your claim?” Genevieve asked.
“No. They were focused on trying to save my eye. But they were unsuccessful.”
“What happened next with you, Mom?” Natasha asked.
“Sandra took me home after the study. She dialed the police, then handed me the phone.”
“Were the two of you in contact immediately after that?” Natasha motioned between them.
“Not for the month that I remained in Camden.” Weariness had begun to drain some of the rigidity from Mom’s posture. “That month was a nightmare. The funeral. The media attention. I was grieving for a man I’d loved very much at one time. I was terrified that your father and I would be arrested. It wasn’t until after I moved back to my parents’ house that I called your father.”
“We agreed that we’d relocate to Savannah,” Dad said.
“You wanted to be close to each other,” Genevieve guessed.
“Yes,” Dad answered. “We wanted a chance to get to know each other again in a place that could offer us a fresh start. Savannah was far from where either of us had lived.”
“Your family members never mentioned your first marriage to us,” Natasha said to Mom.
“Before I married your dad, I asked them not to speak to me or to anyone else about Russell again. Before you girls were born, I made it especially clear that I didn’t want anyone telling you about my first marriage or the murder. My relatives didn’t want to saddle you girls with that ugliness, either.”
Genevieve pushed her hair behind her ears. “So Sandra’s the one who sent me the letters.”
Dad inclined his chin.
“She was your accomplice at the time,” Genevieve said, “but the letters were threatening. Why the change of heart?”
“With Russell for a brother, her life had never been easy,” Mom said. “But it became even more challenging in some ways after Russell’s death. Her father drank himself into a grave. She, her mother, and her sister struggled financially. She’s had three husbands. As time passed, I think she became bitter.”
“Two weeks before she sent you the first letter, she asked us for one hundred thousand dollars to buy her silence,” Dad said. “We told her no. The letter she sent you was her way of applying pressure to force us to change our minds.”
“And?” Natasha asked. “Have you changed your minds?”
“We haven’t paid her anything yet,” Mom said. “But we haven’t ruled out the possibility of paying her, either. We met with our financial planner to see if there’s a way to come up with that sum.”
“If we pay her now,” Dad said, “I’m convinced that she’ll ask for more in the future.”
“You can’t pay her.” Natasha’s jaw hardened. “She’s blackmailing you, and blackmail is illegal.”
“She wouldn’t be able to blackmail us if we hadn’t done illegal things, too.” Mom’s words were brittle. Irrefutable. “We have two terrible options. Pay her. Refuse to pay her. We can’t afford to do either.”
Genevieve’s brain searched for avenues of escape. Mom and Dad couldn’t pay this woman again and again in an effort to guarantee her silence. But the alternative—not paying her and then having Sandra go to the nearest news station with her story—was even worse.
Natasha and Dad were the two attorneys in the room, but even Genevieve knew that there was no statute of limitations on murder.
If Dad was charged with murder, the only eyewitness would be biased Mom. Sandra hadn’t actually seen Dad’s altercation with Russell.
If Sandra’s heart really had hardened over the years, would she testify to Russell’s abuse when she was a child? Would she testify that she knew her brother had been abusing his wife? Or might she throw Mom and Dad under the bus?
The Shoal Creek Killer had been featured in a recent Netflix series, true crime books, and conspiracy theory blog posts. If word got out that her parents had pinned Russell’s death on Terry Paul Richards, the story would likely become national or world news.
Her ... her ministry had earned quite a huge sum of money. She’d only felt comfortable living off a small percentage. She’d given much of it away. The rest she’d invested, because she’d never had any sense of how long her ministry might last.
