No Regrets

14. As her friend described her to Gleason, he realized that in four more days, Teresa would have celebrated her sixteenth birthday.
    Nancy said that Teresa had come from a large family, and that she was the youngest of five children. “She grewup in some little town outside Atlanta, Georgia. She was kind of ‘country.’”
    “What did she look like?” Gleason asked.
    “She was a tomboy—a skinny little kid with a lot of freckles, but she was pretty, too. She looked kind of like Jodie Foster, the movie star. She wasn’t very interested in school, but the only trouble she ever got into was kid stuff—just mischief.”
    “When did you meet Teresa?” Gleason asked.
    “Well, they moved from Georgia two years ago,” Nancy said. “Teresa’s dad worked for some kind of freight company for an airline and he got transferred to Salt Lake City first. Then, that same year, they moved to Bellevue. That was in July. They rented a house out by Crossroads. That’s when I met her.”
    Gleason learned that Teresa had been enrolled in the eighth grade at Odle Junior High School. Faced with two moves in one year and having to start again in two schools where she didn’t know anyone, Teresa had felt lost at first. Life for teenagers in Bellevue was very different from what it was in the little town in Georgia where she had lived her whole life. Most households in Bellevue had a higher standard of living, and street drugs were plentiful. Even in junior high, a large number of students had experimented with them.
    “I know Teresa tried marijuana,” Nancy told Gleason. “And she probably tried other drugs, too.”
    Teresa was becoming a young woman during her years in Bellevue. She was caught somewhere between the win-someness of childhood and the promise of maturity. She still wrote to teachers she’d liked back in Georgia, but she wasn’t as interested in sports as she had been. Her school-work suffered when she began to run away from home.
    “I really don’t know why she ran,” Nancy said. “All of her friends could see that she was getting in the habit of leaving her house, staying a few days with us or with other friends, and then she’d go home. Her parents really tried to keep her home, but no matter what they did, she would run away. Last March, her family finally moved back to Georgia. They just packed up, and they all went back to Fayetteville—everyone but Teresa’s older sister.”
    Nancy felt that Teresa’s parents had hoped to get her away from the lifestyle in the group she ran with in Bellevue, and that, once back home, she would settle down. But it was too late for Teresa. “She didn’t want to live in Fayetteville any longer. She wrote to me and said she wanted to live in Bellevue, and be free to come and go when she wanted. She came back here about the middle of June,” Nancy recalled. “I’m not sure just how she got here. Sometimes, she said she hitchhiked, and sometimes she said she flew or took a bus. But she just showed up here again just before the end of school.”
    “Where did she live?”
    “With different people. She just stayed with different people.”
    Nancy Dillon said that she herself had gone to California on vacation during the summer, and that Teresa had planned to join her down there.
    “But she never showed up. And when I came back, I didn’t see her either. My mother called in about Teresa because she read that description of the cotton, hooded shirt found next to the girl’s body,” Nancy said with a tremble in her voice. “I gave Teresa a shirt a lot like that about a year ago. It was yellow with white trimming and it had a zippered pocket.”
    Gleason asked her to sketch the shirt that she had givento Teresa Sterling. When she handed the sketch to him, he saw that it was exactly like the victim’s clothing. He pulled out some photos of the clothes found at the crime scene, and held them out for Nancy Dillon to look at.
    She gasped. “That’s the shirt—the one I gave to Teresa. I bought it in California. Does that mean that it’s Teresa?”
    “We’ll have to check some more,” Gleason told the upset youngster. “But, yes...it may be that it was Teresa’s body found in the woods.”
    When Bob Littlejohn—the first patrolman at the body site—heard that they had a tentative ID on the skeletonized body, he was as shocked as Nancy Dillon was. He knew Teresa Sterling, too. He had spent a lot of time trying to counsel the Sterlings about their