Years ago I stood in a rainy, windblown cemetery in south Phoenix talking to a grieving mother whose sixteen-year--old son’s bullet-riddled body had been found iii the garbage-strewn sands of the Salt River four days earlier. Her son, a gang member, had been gunned down by two wannabe members of a rival gang as part of an initiation requirement. I’ll never forget her words.
“Cops don’t want to tell me nothin’,” she said. “Just what they think I
That woman’s words came back to me today with a whole new impact as I tried to come to grips with the horror that someone has murdered my forty-three-year-old sister, Constance Marie Haskell.
I didn’t hear the news over the phone. The cops actually did that part right. Connie’s body was found Friday night in Cochise County, near a place called Apache Pass. Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady herself came to see me Saturday to give me the terrible news. But somehow, in the process she neglected to tell me several things, including who it was who had found the body.
I suppose that oversight should be understandable since, in addition to being sheriff, Joanna Brady is also the mother of a twelve-year-old-daughter, and mothers—even mothers who aren’t sheriffs—are known to be protective, sometimes overly so.
Jennifer Ann Brady and an equally headstrong friend, Dora Matthews, slipped away from a Girl Scout camp-out on Friday night to have a smoke. It was while they were AWOL from their tent that they discovered my sister’s naked and bludgeoned body.
Most of the time juveniles who find bodies are interviewed and made much of in the media. After all, in reporting a crime they’re thought to be doing the “right thing.” Sheriff Brady told me none of this, but the information was easy enough for me to discover, along with a possible explanation for Ms. Brady’s apparent reticence.
After all, what law enforcement officer wants to reveal to outsiders that his or her offspring is hanging out with the child of a known criminal? Because that’s exactly what Dora Matthews is—the daughter of an alleged dealer in illegal drugs.
The fact that convicted drug dealer Sally Lorraine Matthews was reportedly running a meth lab out of her home in Old Bisbee may have been news to local law enforcement authorities who called for a Department of Public Safety Haz-Mat team to come clean up the mess last night, but it certainly wasn’t news to some of Sally’s paying customers, the drug consumers who hang out in city parks or wander dazedly up and down Bisbee’s fabled Brewery Gulch.
With my sister’s chilled body lying in the Cochise County Morgue, all I had to do was ask a few questions to find out what was really going on. I suspect that Sheriff Brady could have discovered that same information earlier than yesterday—if she’d bothered to ask, that is. But then, maybe she thought what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, either.
Moving on to the Cochise County Morgue brings me to something else the sheriff failed to mention—the fact that Cochise County Medical Examiner Dr. George Winfield happens to he married to Sheriff Brady’s mother. I’m sure if I had asked her why she didn’t tell me that, her answer would have been the same—I didn’t need to know.
Which brings me back to that heartbroken mother standing in that Phoenix cemetery. What all did police officers fail to tell her that she, too, didn’t need to know?
At this moment, the only thing I know for sure is that Connie, my baby sister, is dead. I can’t think about her the way she was as a sunny six-year-old, when I taught her how to ride a bike. I can’t think about how she almost drowned when I tried to teach her to swim in our backyard pool. I can’t think about how we sounded when our mother tried, unsuccessfully, to teach us to sing “Silent Night” in three-part harmony.
No, all I can think about is the way Connie looked tonight, lying on a gurney in the awful fluorescent lighting of the Cochise County Morgue. I am appalled by remembering her once beautiful face beaten almost beyond recognition.
There’s much more that I need to know that I haven’t yet been told—the why, the where, and the how of her death. Why, where, and how are the Holy Grails that keep all journalists and cops seeking and working and on their toes. But this time, I’m experiencing that search in an entirely different manner from the way it has been before both in my life and in my career. I’m seeing it through the eyes of that grieving mother, cloaked in her pain, standing in that lonely, desolate cemetery.
I’m not much of an expert on the grief process. I’m not sure which comes first, anger or denial. I can tell you that, right this moment, hours after learning about Connie’s death, I any consumed with anger. Maybe I’m taking that anger out on Sheriff Brady when I should be taking it out on Connie’s killer. The problem is,
