Empty Promises

fellow.”
    This time, it was Carole who took action. They had come too far to turn back. She threatened to leave Teri if she didn’t go right back in there and kill David.
    Fortified with more beer and some tranquilizers, Teri was finally ready to try again. She muttered to the sleeping victim, “I’m sorry but I gotta do this,” and she swung the sash weight with all her might. There was a terrible crunching sound as David’s skull shattered and a spray of blood made an arc on the pale wall. Tearfully, Teri went out to tell Carole that it was all over.
    But it wasn’t.
    They could hear David’s voice, very faint now, but they knew he was still alive. Carole shoved Teri back in to finish the job. “I hit him some more,” Teri said, “until his head looked something awful and I knew he was dead.”
    Their final, icy plan had worked. Carole was now a widow. She and Teri worked frantically to clean up all signs that murder had been committed in the neat little house. Somehow, they hadn’t expected it was going to be so messy. Working in the dark of night, they were like two women from the movie Diabolique , in a scene that was half horror and half comedy as they struggled to cover up their murderous handiwork.
    Every time they got the blood washed from David’s head, he would bleed again from the ears. Teri took some adhesive tape and taped his ears closed to stanch the blood flow.
    Then they tried to carry David’s body out of the house; they were shocked to find how heavy “dead weight” could be—they could barely lift him. Somehow they managed to get him down the outside stairway in the back of the Hargis home to the carport and finally into the bed of the Hargises’ pickup truck. Teri drove off to dump him in some lonely spot. She found what she was looking for on a bridge along Black Canyon Road near the Mesa Grande Indian Reservation, east of the small town of Ramona, California.
    Pulling and tugging, Teri managed to get David’s body out of the truck bed on her own, and she rolled him to the edge of the bridge and pushed him off. It was too dark for her to see where he landed; all she heard was brush crackling and the sound of rocks displaced and tumbling somewhere beneath where she stood. Exhausted, Teri drove back to the house where Carole was waiting. It was 4:30 A.M. when she got back to Laurel Street.
    While Teri was gone, Carole had washed all the sheets and blankets, but she couldn’t get the blood that had sprayed the walls and ceiling to disappear completely. Despite all her scrubbing, a faint shadow remained. They realized that they had to paint the room. Somehow, by the time Carole’s sons woke up, everything looked clean and normal again.
    The women agreed that they shouldn’t stay together—so Teri left. They agreed that Carole would call and report David missing, but didn’t work out the details. Whether unconsciously or deliberately, Carole put Teri in the spotlight in her first call to the San Diego County sheriff’s office.
    It was early morning on July 21, when a sobbing Carole Hargis called the San Diego Sheriff’s Department. The dispatcher listened as Carole said her husband, a marine sergeant, had left the evening before with their next-door neighbor. “It was about 10:30,” she said, “and they were going to go snake hunting somewhere in the east part of the county. I’m actually calling from Ramona,” she said. “Our neighbor—Teri Depew—is back, but my husband isn’t, and I’m so worried. She said some guys may have hurt him …”
    Teri and Carole had what they considered to be a very convincing story to explain how David had “disappeared.” It would be dicey for a while, but they were confident that things were going to be fine now.
    By noon, a sheriff’s helicopter headed for the rugged country in eastern San Diego County; if the missing man was injured or alone out there in baking July heat and they waited the usual twenty-four hours to look for him, all they could expect to find was a corpse.
    Of course, the hapless David Hargis was already dead. As the helicopter pilot passed Ramona, he swept his eyes over the Santa Ysabel Creek below and spotted what looked like a body lying beneath a bridge. He radioed the location and San Diego County Homicide Detectives Joe Cellucci and Fred Balmer headed out from downtown San Diego for the mountainous, pine tree-dotted wilderness. It took them forty-five minutes.
    David Hargis had been dead for over