She couldn’t believe her eyes. Standing in the middle of the appliances section of the Walmart Supercenter in Cincinnati, and there she was. That woman of her dreams—her nightmares. She would never forget her face because, even as young as she was then, she had memorized every detail of it.
God must be behind it, she thought. She had to find Darrell Lee right away. He said he’d be over in automotive looking at car stuff. She had to break her stare from the woman who was checking out blenders and mixers.
“You won’t never believe it, baby,” Jolene whispered in his ear.
“Huh? Believe what?” Darrell was half-listening, more interested in the two packages of LED flexible strip lights he was comparing.
“That woman, you know, the one,” she whispered and pinched his bicep hard.
“Damn, baby, that hurts,” Darrell said much too loud and then it clicked when he saw the look in her eyes. “Oh shit, you mean that woman, her?”
“Damn right I mean her,” she said.
They followed her out the store to the parking lot and then to the yellow house.
“You sure, baby?” Darrell asked her for the tenth time. “You gotta be sure.”
“Don’t you doubt me again, Darrell,” she said and gave him a look. That look.
“That’s it, then,” he said; “we gonna do it or ain’t we?”
“We got to,” she said. “God would never forgive us if we don’t.”
Darrell wanted to use his over-under shotgun he kept in the truck, but she nixed that fast. It has to be some other way, she told him. “It has to be quiet, like.”
“How many, you think?” Darrell asked her again. She knew he was worried about the men.
“You love me, you’ll do this,” she said.
His face unfroze from that hard look he could get at times; she was still young, but she knew what power a woman could have on a man. Darrell first tried to talk her into getting just the woman, just her, the one who had undressed her on the bed and made her do those nasty things with little boys. She remembered one little boy vividly: he wouldn’t stop crying until his mother slapped him across the face and shook him so hard she was terrified she would be next.
“No,” she said to Darrell without a trace of emotion. “We got to get everybody in that house at one time, no witnesses.”
It was as if God Himself had guided her to the mailbox at just the right time. She strolled casually up to the row of plastic colored mailboxes and opened the one belonging to the yellow house. She took out the card and hurried back to the car and showed it to Darrell.
“See now?” She pleaded. “God’s own hand in it, Darrell. There’s a baby in that house and all of them are coming over tomorrow.”
Darrell read at a third-grade level. “What is this saying? Is it a . . . birthday party, like?”
“No,” she said. “It’s a ‘christening.’ It means they’re going to dedicate the child to Satan the way they done me and who knows how many other little kids?”
Her big blues eyes welled with tears.
“Don’t you cry, hon,” Darrell Lee said, rubbing her tears away with his thumbs. “They’re all gonna die for what they done.”
* * *
The prosecutor began his opening statement to the jury trial of the two teens by quoting Psalms: “Like sheep, they are led to the grave, where death will be their shepherd . . .”
The jury was out just two hours. The boy was given death. He’ll be on the row in Lucasville for the next twenty years. The longest debate was over the girl. They were torn between LWOP, life without parole, and fifty-seven years, parole in twenty-five. They chose the latter penalty. They thought the girl’s youth and her abuse at the hands of the Nelson-McGroeder clan was worth something.
Two days later the Charleston grand jury concluded it had sufficient evidence to bring forth a true bill against several people involved in a multi-state child-abuse sex ring. The first name on the indictment list was Angela Nelson Poncell, a supervisory caseworker in Child Welfare.
At an awards ceremony honoring the Cincinnati PD in early July, several officers received commendations for their work on the “Baby Christening” murders. The traffic cop who had pulled over their car was given a special recognition for his “keen diligence.” The emcee concluded the presentations with a kudo to the department: “Cincinnati can depend on this caliber of police officer in a crisis like the one we now face with this scourge of drugs in our streets.”
A paragraph at the bottom of page nine in that same issue noted that a man identified as Bradley Poncell, 42, of 6562 Dewar Street of the city was found hanging from a rafter in his basement two days ago. The Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide.
* * *
Lieutenant Mike LaPlante’s retirement party at Nick’s Bar & Grill, a precinct cop bar, was a rousing success if you counted the number of hangovers and sick calls into Cincinnati PD the next day. Mike told Sgt. Bill Peterson, his longtime partner and the cop who handled the first Poncell interview that day, he had no problem leaving an open case like this, even one this big. Cops were supposed to be “haunted” in retirement by cases they couldn’t close—another TV myth that sometimes happened to be true, if you were ever a good detective.
Peterson let out a mock groan as he recalled the two-day hangover from the celebration at Nick’s. “Lordy,” he said, “Barb put me in the doghouse for a week because I had diarrhea all over the new coverlet and puked up half my stomach.”
Bill’s drinking prowess was legendary. Cops drank. That was no TV myth. “The bedroom smelled like a backed-up sewer.”
“It still bugs me a little bit,” Mike admitted, “we didn’t get a solid lead until Poncell called the tip line.”
Cops weren’t supposed to care what happens after they closed a case on the homicide board—send the guy to jail, to death row—or if the D.A.’s office is run by a politician type —watch it got stetted or nolled. “Stet,” jargon for “we-might-charge-the-perp-later” and nolle prosequi meant, basically, “We-know-the-perp-but-we-won’t-prosecute.” For cops, once it goes from red to black on the board, it’s done. Move on to the next one.
LaPlante said, “There’s one thing about Poncell that still bugs me. Why he divorced in the first place.”
Bill said, “We looked, remember? He and his old lady got tired of each other. One fart in the bed too many. Happens every day. Married for twenty years, then ba-boom, somebody wants out.”
Mike shook his head. “I listened to fifty hours of surveillance on that guy’s calls to his ex in West Virginia. They talked about every dumbass thing going—sweating toilet tanks, cat hairs on the pillow cases, recipes, the cable bill—every boring thing a man and woman say to each other after being married for years.”
“And your point, Mike?” Bill asked.
He made a finger-flutter to signal the bartender to refill their glasses.
“The point is he knew what she was doing and he let it go on and on.”
“The prosecutor was set to indict, remember, before he did the goodbye act with the rope? She was paying him off—”
“No,” Mike said, “I never believed that. Delaney wanted to indict so he could turn him against her. That guy couldn’t find his balls with both hands and a mirror.”
“You could be right,” Bill said but his tone said he didn’t care one way or the other. He drained his glass and tapped the bottom against the bar counter to get the bartender’s attention.
“Bring us couple shots of Bush Mills,” Bill said. “And a couple drafts.”
“What are you celebrating tonight, Officer Peterson?” Said with a smirk.
“Your head on a plate, kid, if you don’t get those drinks over here pronto,” Bill said.
Mike knew Bill made many a rookie’s life miserable with that tone. “You’ve got that academy stink still on you” was one of his pet expressions still used around the station house.
“Remind me to meet you in a coffee shop next time,” Mike said. “It would make a conversation easier.”
Keeping pace with Bill wasn’t possible so Mike didn’t try. By the time he and Peterson closed Nick’s down for the night, he was feeling no pain. He knew the headache and cotton mouth in the morning were a fair penalty for exceeding his limits.
He didn’t like the idea of worming information out of his friend, but the “Baby Christening” murders, as the papers had called them, nagged at him in retirement. Bill told him that Poncell’s marriage had collapsed but not why. That was the one thing not dredged up in a sweeping investigation that had consumed hundreds of police hours on the task force.
His own marriage was a casualty of the “Baptism” investigation. Mike’s wife had walked out on him after eleven years of marriage. She left a note on the fridge held there by a kitchen magnet. Mike knew she’d put more thought into her grocery list than this one telling him she was dumping him. It wasn’t the years of long work hours, absences from family gatherings, and broken plans necessitated by a homicide cop’s career. She said she wanted to live on her own and that was the extent of her introspection about ending their married life together. She never even made eye contact with him at the divorce proceedings. Yet he had learned from Bill she was already dating a fireman in the next town over. He could see her settling into the exact same routine she once had with him but maybe that was just his bruised ego talking.
The phone conversations between Poncell and his ex-wife ate at him for a similar reason. They were divorced, living in different states, yet Poncell’s role as “a person of interest” in the worst spree killing in Ohio history wasn’t even brought up. Mike had listened to their phone-sex fantasies until his stomach churned with squirmy distress. One tape of their mutual orgasmic frenzy made the rounds of the station house and earned four officers serious disciplinary actions resulting in letters of reprimand in their files.
Mike knew there was something between this former couple that wasn’t right. It didn’t feel right to his cop’s instinct. When he told the FBI profiler about it, the man merely shrugged and said, “In all ideation there is aggression.”
“What does that mean?” Mike asked.
“Don’t blame me,” the profiler laughed. “Freud said it.”
One night while watching the History channel in his La-Z-Boy, he listened to thunder echoing up from across the Ohio River. Spring had settled in by then and the nights were less chilly. The fuggy smell of the river as he drove over the Roebling Suspension Bridge to Covington, Kentucky wafted as far as the Bengals’ stadium. That was a sure sign of warmer days ahead, and that always meant an uptick in crimes of every sort.
The narrator of the program was talking about cannibalism breaking out during the Battle of Stalingrad; the entire city was surrounded and sealed off by the Wehrmacht’s invading forces. Dead bodies lay in the streets while people shambled past the camera lens, mostly elderly or very young children, all of them dressed in rags and wearing faces bit by intense cold and starvation.
A loud clap of thunder jolted Mike in his reclining chair. He felt his heart racing and feared the onset of a heart attack. But it wasn’t his heart at fault, he knew, when his breathing finally resumed a regular pace; it was his mind that was agitated. Though a long-lapsed Catholic, he wondered why the family sent invitations to a “christening,” not a “baptism,” as the papers first called it. He googled the difference. “Baptizing a baby,” he read, meant “claiming a child for God and the church”; the christening itself had to do with the naming of the child. The family were all Protestants with a mix of Southern Baptist, Lutheran, and a sprinkling of Church of God. Few attended any church regularly, they discovered. Poncell himself was a self-professed agnostic.
He swore to the walls of his living room, lit only by the greenish glow from his set. You must have had a reason to call that tip line. . . What was it, you love-sick fool? No ghostly voice answered him back. He returned his attention to the program; the Russian army beat back the Nazi war machine in fierce, house-to-house combat, but he couldn’t let it go. He mentally reviewed the case while he sat in his La-Z-Boy. Blunt-force trauma was a contributing cause in most deaths but the primary cause was exsanguination caused by cutting their throats. The pathologist wrote that no tox reports were ordered. She told him at the first set of autopsies that “you can’t ‘cook’ blood and expect results.” The fire set by the killers after the bodies were lumped into a pile had turned the place from a murder scene into a holocaust of body parts seared into one another’s remains.
* * *
They looked like young teenagers in love, although the boy’s date of birth meant he was eighteen by two weeks. She was seventeen, looked fifteen, and wore too much eye shadow—almost a goth look. She also wore huge gold hoop earrings and a charm bracelet that seemed to be made of shiny glass beads. They just didn’t look like a pair of vicious killers.
In separate rooms, they told similar stories. Neither blamed the other. “It was like we were on a holy mission,” the girl said, “to save that baby.” After several hours, detectives felt they had all they were going to need. Both had waived Miranda and signed their confessions. Hers in big loopy letters with circles over the i’s the way schoolgirls did.
Bill called Mike as soon as the pair were led off and told him to meet him at Nick’s around nine. “Sorry I couldn’t let you in on the confessions. Cap loves you, you know that, but he said we shouldn’t do anything ‘unorthodox’ to fuck this up.”
A traffic cop had pulled them over on Chukov Street near the railroad tracks for running a red light; the officer noted the busted taillight and the crooked license plate hanging by a twisted coat hanger. At the driver’s window, he saw a boy with greasy black hair uncombed and the girl’s eyes popped in fright. He got a good whiff of marijuana, too, so he called it in instead of giving them the break they were pleading for. Cops found bloody clothing in a pair of Giant Eagle shopping bags in the trunk.
“The girl, she was so young,” Bill started. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at this late stage of my career but . . .”
“She was the key,” Mike interjected. “She was the Judas goat.”
“A what-goat?”
“A lead goat who takes the sheep to slaughtering pens. They follow him but he turns off before the ramps to the killing chute.”
“Whatever,” Bill said. “That still don’t explain it.”
“I can see it,” Mike said. “You’ve got this young girl standing on the porch, weighs ninety pounds, slender, all smiles, greeting the relatives. They don’t recognize her, but they think she’s maybe a third cousin, twice removed or something. She sends them in, makes sure they don’t all bunch up together in the doorway so her boyfriend gets overwhelmed and then has to deal with men.”
“Yeah, that’s what she said,” Bill admitted, “but still . . . She knew when to send in the next victim or two ahead. Like an assembly line.”
“You mean a greeting line, like in a wedding,” Mike said. “Except he was in there, the butcher, all set to clobber the next one stepping into the living room.”
“Just shit-lucky,” Bill replied. “They had music going to muffle sound of a body hitting the carpet. A couple, boyfriend and girlfriend, walk in together, he’d do the man first with that stupid homemade sap—”
Mike winced at the thought of it: six rolls of quarters in two pairs of socks—a jailbird trick from way back. Not enough to kill necessarily, but knocked to their knees, Darrell Lee finished them off with a knife across the throat later. Exhausting work considering most of two entire families were wiped off the face of the earth from all that sawing through tendons and muscle, not to mention the sheer horror of it. Fifteen bodies with bashed-in heads; some of the corpses not fully burned had eight-ball hemorrhages in the eyeballs; the worst of the burn victims held the classic boxer’s pose of fire victims even inside the body bags.
Jolene said if a wife or girlfriend opened her mouth to scream when that thing would come down on her man’s head, he’d coldcock her with that thing. “It’s a miracle it didn’t bust open and throw quarters around the room,” she giggled, sipping on her Diet Pepsi in the interrogation room.
Mike shivered at the memory. In the earliest stages of the investigation, given the various positions of the bodies in the house, Darrell Lee must have dragged them by the legs around the corner of the living room just out of sight when the next guests entered. He had to use the kitchen, Darrell admitted after Mike and Bill had tag-teamed him, ripped through his flimsy story when they put him in the room. “Why the kitchen?” Bill had asked. “It got to be too many,” Darrell said. She couldn’t believe her eyes. Standing in the middle of the appliances section of the Walmart Supercenter in Cincinnati, and there she was. That woman of her dreams—her nightmares. She would never forget her face because, even as young as she was then, she had memorized every detail of it.
God must be behind it, she thought. She had to find Darrell right away. He said he’d be over in automotive looking at car stuff. She had to break her stare from the woman who was checking out blenders and mixers.
“You won’t never believe it, baby,” she whispered in his ear.
“Huh? Believe what?” Darrell was half-listening, more interested in the two packages of LED flexible strip lights he was comparing.
“That woman, you know,” she said and pinched his bicep hard.
“Damn, baby, that hurts,” Darrell said much too loud and then it clicked when he saw the look in her eyes. “Oh shit, you mean that woman, her?”
“Damn right I mean her,” she said.
They followed her out the store to the parking lot and then to the yellow house.
“You sure, baby?” Darrell asked her for the tenth time. “You gotta be sure.”
“Don’t you doubt me again, Darrell Lee,” she said and gave him a look. That look.
“That’s it, then,” he said; “we gonna do it or ain’t we?”
“We got to,” she said. “God would never forgive us if we don’t.”
Darrell wanted to use his over-under shotgun he kept in the truck, but she nixed that fast. It has to be some other way, she told him. “You seen the people in the windows,” she said. “It has to be quiet, like.”
“How many, you think?” Darrell asked her again. She knew he was worried about the men.
“You love me, you’ll do this with me,” she said.
She saw his face unfreeze from that hard look he could get at times; she was still young, of course, but she knew what power a woman’s pussy could have on a man. Darrell first tried to talk her into getting just the woman, just her, the one who had undressed her on the bed and made her do those nasty things with little boys. She remembered one vividly: he wouldn’t stop crying until his mother slapped him across the face and shook him so hard she was terrified she would be next.
“No,” she said to Darrell without a trace of emotion. “We’re going to get everybody in that house at one time.”
It was as if God Himself had guided her to the mailbox at just the right time. She strolled casually up to the row of mailboxes and opened the one to the yellow house. She took out the card and hurried back to the car and showed it to Darrell.
“See now?” She pleaded. “God’s own hand in it, Darrell. There’s a baby in that house and all of them are coming over tomorrow.”
Darrell read at a third-grade level. “What is this saying? Is it a baby shower, like?”
“No, you jerk,” she said. “It’s a ‘christening.’ It means they’re going to dedicate the child to Satan the way they done me and who knows how many other little kids?”
Her big blues eyes welled with tears.
“Don’t you cry, hon,” Darrell said, rubbing her tears away with his thumbs. “They’re all gonna die.”
* * *
The prosecutor began his opening statement to the jury trial of the two teens by quoting Psalms: “Like sheep, they are led to the grave, where death will be their shepherd . . .”
The jury was out just two hours. The boy was given death. He’ll be on the row in Lucasville for the next twenty years. The longest debate was over the girl. They were torn between LWOP, life without parole, and fifty-seven years, parole in twenty-five. They chose the latter penalty. They thought the girl’s youth and her abuse at the hands of the Nelson-McGroeder clan was worth something.
Two days later the Charleston grand jury concluded it had sufficient evidence to bring forth a true bill against several people involved in a multi-state, child-abuse sex ring. The first name on the indictment list was Arianna Poncell, a supervisory caseworker in Child Welfare.
At an awards ceremony honoring the Cincinnati PD in early July, several officers received commendations for their work on the “Baby Baptism” murders. The traffic cop who had pulled over their car was given a special recognition for his “keen diligence.” The emcee concluded the presentations with a kudo to the entire police department: “Cincinnati can depend on this caliber of police officer to find the killer responsible for those women in the woods.”
A paragraph at the bottom of page nine in that same issue noted that a man identified as Bradley Poncell of 6562 Dewar Street of the city was found hanging from a rafter in his basement two days ago. The Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide.
* * *
The cops never got to Jolene in the course of the investigation because she had changed her name, borrowing the name of her maternal grandmother. Besides, Bill said, covering an obvious lapse in the investigation, she moved around too much. She was a runaway from her last foster home, and for a few weeks lived in Moundsville. A month before the murders, she had moved up to Columbus and crashed at different people’s houses—mostly street people hanging around Front Street near the Ohio State campus. Living by her wits, scavenging in dumpsters for food, panhandling for quarters. She got high as often as possible. She offered sex in alleys behind bars for the money to buy weed. The boyfriend Darrell was working in a Harley Davidson bike repair shop when she met him. He had a friend in Cincinnati and they decided to try their luck there. Two weeks later, she was shoplifting in a Walmart and spotted a woman she recognized instantly. It was the woman from the Child Welfare office she told police in her confession, who had talked her drug-addled and desperate mother into meeting “a man at a motel,” which led to the nightmare that “ruined her life.”
“He got lucky with those twins,” Bill added; “it was the only time two men walked in together and they were big boys who could have overpowered him. Just happened she caught the attention of one of them, and as he turned, his brother had his forehead opened up by a swing from that sock. Frank figured out he was next, when the sock caught him on the side of the face. Knocked six teeth out of his head according to the autopsy and broke his jaw. The boy’d had plenty of practice by then.”
Bill mimed conking an imaginary head across the bar top with a sap.
Mike stared at his face in the mirror. He wasn’t sure he liked what he saw looking back.
“You want to say they had to be batshit crazy to do something so bad like that, don’t you?”
Bill bristled at the mere mention of any good homicide cop needing a motive to solve a crime. “Who cares? What I want to know is how the holy hell did they waltz out of that house, dripping blood from head to toe, broad daylight, carrying a tiny baby in their arms—and nobody on the street sees or hears a thing?”
They used a pair of knives—genuine “lamb skinners” purchased at the feed store a block from the Walmart in Covington—to cut their throats and bleed them out.
Both cops knew something about crime scenes with arterial spray. Tapes at the store revealed the two of them paying for their purchases at the checkout line: two pairs of thick hunting boot outdoor socks, duct tape (never needed), two Forschner lamb-skinning knives with upswept blades, a box of 30-gallon heavy-duty garbage bags, and two LL Bean rain jackets (needed to disguise their bloody clothing), a red plastic 5-gallon jug for gasoline, a Bic lighter.
Mike shook his head in disgust and muttered into his beer. “You just can’t plan this kind of thing and have it work out right. You just can’t.”
“Beginner’s luck,” Bill said. “Darrell had a juvie record for small stuff, no felonies. Never been printed as an adult so he wasn’t in any database. The girl? Not so much as a traffic ticket. She even bragged in her confession to Missy about her good grades in school—when she attended, that is.” Motherly, kind-faced Missy Showalter was their go-to for interrogating young female suspects. Missy had the foulest mouth in the department and loved smut jokes.
“‘A holy mission,’” Mike scoffed. “Saving that poor, innocent baby from those monsters—what the hell.”
It was the final link in the investigative chain that led from Brad Poncell to Poncell’s wife, who worked in the Bureau of Child Welfare. Angela Poncell, maiden name Nelson, was the one who tipped relatives off to prospective “customers” for a finder’s fee. Welfare mothers, mothers with too many kids or single moms with abusive men. Parents who were hooked on cheap heroin or opioids and thought that “renting out” their kids for a photo session wasn’t really that wrong. As time passed, she put some distance between her and the negotiations with parents of the children by hinting she could “put someone in touch with them if they needed quick cash until their applications for assistance were resolved.”
“Yeah, that mess,” Bill said. “We’re still liaising with West Virginia state police to clean that up.”
“Why did Poncell wait so long? He told his ex he was going to inform on them if they didn’t stop. He must have loved her despite what she was doing to those children.”
“Beats me,” Bill said. “I’ll wipe my ass with motives every day of the week.”
Another famous Peterson saying around the homicide bureau.
It seemed to Mike that Poncell was tortured by his weakness for his wife and couldn’t bear the thought she had been providing names for the McGroeder and Nelson clans to exploit. It was a family operation in the most literal sense: a McGroeder uncle negotiated fees with one or the other, sometimes both, parents. They’d pay them a cash fee—so much an hour like a rental car—drive to a motel nearby for videotaping, and handle the sleazy end of the business. Always had some heroin or meth available if the parents wanted to relax while their child was posing. The children were often given a sweet drink laced with cough syrup to relax them and make them docile. Sometimes the parents were used to position the kid to get the desired effect. The Nelsons handled the technical side of things including the distribution, uploading, and money exchanges.
Bill stared morosely at his glass. “God, people make me sick,” he said.
Mike said, “No rest for the wicked, laddie. You boys still have those fentanyl overdoses.”
The headlines in the papers and news channels beat a constant drum roll over the ongoing opiate crisis and the fatal overdoses. The Cincinnati morgue announced it had no more room for all the dead addicts. It was like trying to pick up litter in a hurricane.
Bill grunted, his version of a laugh. “Thank God for Detroit.”
The FBI’s annual crime report was released yesterday. Detroit had recaptured the title of America’s “Murder Capital.”
-END-