No Regrets

but it was only to parties and stuff.”
    Gleason and Trent could see that the previously calm soldier was becoming agitated. They pointed out that all their investigations indicated that Bigelow was probably the last person to see Teresa alive. Gradually, they suggested that he might have been involved in her death.
    Their conversation continued for another twenty minutes or so, and then Jeff Bigelow could stand it no longer. He had a lot on his conscience, and he wanted to tell someone.
    “I lost control of myself... and I accidentally killed her,” he sighed.
    Bigelow described a party the two had attended on August 24 or 25. They had both been drinking, and he guessed that they were probably pretty drunk.
    “Teresa made me jealous—she was paying attention toall the other guys there, and deliberately ignoring me. It got to me.”
    He said he had watched her flirting and had started to seethe with envy. Just after midnight, they had left the party, riding double on his motorcycle. At that point, he said they weren’t very far from where Teresa’s body had been found.
    “A ways down the street, I stopped,” Bigelow recalled. “She kept telling me how good-looking all those dudes at the party were, and how she wanted me to take her back there. We got into an argument about it.”
    Bigelow said he’d heard enough of that kind of talk. He was tired of it. But Teresa kept on taunting him about how much more attractive the other guys at the party were.
    He confessed that he slapped her when she argued back. Once. Twice. Teresa fought back, hitting at him with very little power. And then, Jeff Bigelow said, he grabbed her around the throat. “I lost control. I couldn’t help it. She went limp, and I didn’t really think she was dead—but I dragged her back into the woods.”
    He did not leave her there. Bigelow said he stayed beside Teresa’s body for about five hours, leaving only when it started to get daylight. He had some kind of frail hope that she would open her eyes. He knew she wouldn’t, but he kept hoping that what happened wasn’t real.
    Bigelow confided he had never had sex with Teresa, despite his attempts. “She wouldn’t.”
    Now, with his head down so he didn’t have to look at the detectives, he admitted to them that he had intercourse with her body as it lay in the woods. “I asked her if she would have sex with me while we were at the party thatnight, but she told me ‘No,’ like she always did. And kept flirting with all the other guys there.”
    There was one more thing that Detective Gary Trent had to get the young soldier to tell him. No one except the police, the medical examiner’s office, and Teresa’s killer knew about the symbolic rape with the tree limb.
    As Trent asked, “Is there anything more—anything you haven’t told us?” Bigelow looked away. And then, he finally admitted that he had inserted the branch into the dead girl’s vagina. He didn’t know why he had done that, but he had been very angry with her for teasing him the way she did.
    That was the one thing that the investigators had to hear from Bigelow, the secret thing that would mark him as her murderer beyond a shadow of doubt. And now he did admit that. He gave a very detailed description of the position of the body when he left it, the foliage he’d placed over it to hide it, and the fact that he had removed Teresa’s clothing and left it beside her body.
    They had ridden only about five blocks from the party, where Teresa had taunted him for the last time. Bigelow said he knew the area well. Before he joined the army, he had worked as a greenskeeper on a nearby golf course. And he was just a short distance from his own home. With the first rays of dawn, he rode away from the peach orchard, leaving Teresa behind. “I cried over her body when I waited with her all night,” he said. “But I never wanted to go back to the woods again.”
    For three months, Jeff Bigelow had gone about his army duties, comported himself well as a soldier. But throughout those months, he must have felt that someone was going to tap him on the shoulder at any moment and tell him that Teresa had been found at last.
    Roy Gleason and Gary Trent arrested Bigelow on suspicion of murder and transported him back to Bellevue. Ironically, while Bigelow was in jail—before his name had been released to the media—Teresa’s father called from Georgia to say, “I remember one more name of somebody that Teresa knew,” he