(Van Dam) D.A. screwed the pooch in Crowe Murder, maybe doing it again.
Satujinn
in their own bedrooms.
Haunting questions:
The Stephanie Crowe Murder Case
Part 1 : The night she was killed
By Mark Sauer and John Wilkens
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS
May 11, 1999
Steve Crowe says he bolts awake every night, tormented by the same
dream. He hears his daughter's voice. "Daddy, help me. Please, Daddy."
But he is powerless to reach her.
Sometimes Stephanie's voice is so clear in the darkness that he calls
out to his wife, "Did you hear it? You must have heard her that time."
Haunting questions:
The Stephanie Crowe Murder Case
Main page
Part 1
The night she was killed
Part 2
The arrest
Part 3
The knife
Part 4
More arrests
Part 5
In court
Part 6
The bombshell
Reaction
Readers react to a botched murder case
Cheryl Crowe never does.
Fully awake, Crowe realizes he is miles from the ranch house at the
north edge of Escondido where his 12-year-old daughter was killed.
Most nights, he cries himself back to sleep.
The nightmare began for the Crowe family on Jan. 21, 1998, when
Stephanie was found stabbed to death on her bedroom floor.
It grew exponentially in the days to follow when her brother, Michael,
then 14, and two of his friends, Joshua Treadway and Aaron Houser,
were charged with conspiring to kill her.
Those charges were dropped on the eve of a trial in February 1999,
after last-minute DNA testing found spots of Stephanie's blood on a
sweat shirt worn by a transient seen roaming the neighborhood the
night of the killing.
That evidence forced detectives and prosecutors to start over again in
their investigation. They express optimism about solving the case but
admit that new charges may never be filed.
Many questions remain about how this case was handled, about how the
three teen-agers came to be suspects, how evidence was gathered and
what it shows.
Over the past two months, The San Diego Union-Tribune has examined the
Stephanie Crowe case from beginning to present, reviewing thousands of
pages of court testimony and documents, watching hours of videotaped
interrogations and conducting dozens of interviews.
MAP
The Neighborhood
It is a tale of tragedy and loss, of mindsets shattered and decisions
made in the quest for justice and their consequences.
An ordinary night
Crowe family members recall that the night before Stephanie's body was
found was like so many school nights in their home.
Steve and Cheryl Crowe were eating Hamburger Helper and watching TV in
their bedroom around dinner time when Stephanie appeared with a glint
in her eye and the halves of a pencil stuck in each ear.
CROWE FAMILY COLLECTION
Loved to chat: Stephanie Crowe loved talking with friends on the
phone, as she did here a month before her death.
"That's real cute," her father said. "But get that out of your ears
before you get hurt.
"Have you finished your homework yet?"
Yes, Stephanie said. Michael had helped her with it, his parents later
told police.
Stephanie liked talking with her friends so much that her parents had
given her a new phone and her own number for Christmas. She spent part
of the evening chatting with a classmate about the movie "Titanic."
The two hung up after promising they'd talk later.
Before the funeral, that girl would inscribe a large, heart-shaped
memorial with these words: "Stephanie, I'm so sorry I never called you
back."
At 9 p.m., Stephanie headed to the living room, where she watched
"Home Improvement" with Michael. He had just gotten off the phone
himself; Joshua Treadway had called asking why he wasn't in school
that day.
It was finals week, and Joshua wondered whether Michael would be back
in class the next day. Michael, who had missed school with bronchitis
and a fever, assured him that he would be there.
Stephanie and Michael huddled beneath a blanket, giggling so
persistently that their grandmother, Judith Kennedy, later told police
that she and Michael's 10-year-old sister, Shannon, went to watch the
program in their room.
About 9:25 p.m., Stephanie knocked on her grandmother's door to say
good night, and then on her parents' door.
Her father, who had come home with a headache from his job at an
auto-body shop, said he took aspirin and was already asleep. Cheryl
Crowe, who had also spent a long day at her job with a
magazine-distribution company, said she was in bed watching TV.
"I love you, Mom."
"I love you, too, honey," Cheryl Crowe said. "Good night."
Stephanie closed the door.
By 10 p.m., Cheryl had nodded off. When their daughter's alarm went
off soon after dawn, they were sleeping soundly.
They haven't since.
Start of a new day
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
It was 6:30 a.m., time for Stephanie Crowe to rise for another day of
seventh grade at Hidden Valley Middle School.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The alarm carried to the bedroom down the hall. Grandma Kennedy, 57,
stirred and wondered why the child hadn't turned it off.
Beep. Beep.
Kennedy, on an extended visit from her home in Florida, flipped on a
hallway light and padded to Stephanie's room. When she got there,
another kind of alarm registered.
She found her 5-foot-tall, brown-haired granddaughter sprawled from
the foot of her bed to the doorway.
Kennedy rushed screaming to the master bedroom, where the door was
ajar: "Come quick! It's Stephanie; she's covered in mud!"
Steve Crowe got to her first. He bent down and realized that his
daughter was caked in blood, not mud. Those broken pencils in her ears
flashed in his mind.
He lifted Stephanie's head. Her brown eyes were open, but lifeless.
Her body was rigid.
Though her mother said Stephanie was not in the habit of sleeping in
her clothes, she was found in the same purple T-shirt and blue jeans
she had worn the night before. Her long brown hair was pulled back in
a ponytail.
What Cheryl heard as she rushed from their bedroom were her husband's
cries, more animal than human:
"NO! NO! MY GOD, NO!"
CROWE FAMILY COLLECTION
Family portrait: The Crowes of Escondido about a year before the
slaying (from left): Shannon, Steve, Michael, Cheryl and Stephanie.
Cheryl Crowe threw herself on her daughter's body. "Oh, Mom," she said
to Kennedy, "she's so cold."
Then the 33-year-old mother screamed: "My baby! My baby, my baby!"
Michael and Shannon Crowe were drawn by the cries and commotion.
"Please, Michael. You are the smartest person I know," Cheryl Crowe
pleaded. "Do something."
A call was placed to 911. Months later, the family would muse bitterly
that they called for help but got something quite different.
At 6:37 a.m., when the paramedics arrived, they had to pry Cheryl
Crowe from her daughter's body.
A rare crime
Murder is an infrequent visitor to Escondido. The year Stephanie Crowe
was slain, there was only one other homicide in the city of about
120,000.
But detectives have had other high-profile cases, including the 1995
stabbing death of Elizabeth "Betty" Carroll. Three teens were
convicted in that case.
The Crowe case was assigned to Detective Ralph Claytor, a 23-year
veteran of law enforcement. He had been a full-time homicide
investigator, one of three in the department, for about two years
after several years working cases involving juveniles.
Claytor got to the single-story, yellow stucco ranch house about 7:30
a.m. It is off Valley Center Road, up a paved driveway bordered by
avocado trees. The nearest neighbor is several hundred yards away.
Other officers and detectives were already there, the opening wave of
what would be among the most extensive criminal investigations in the
city's history.
Early on that morning, Claytor learned several things that would shape
his thinking about the stabbing.
One was the lack of any forced entry to the house.
Michael and Cheryl Crowe reported hearing pounding in the night, but
neither got up to investigate. When police walked the perimeter, they
found no broken doors or windows. A couple of window screens were
bent, but in place. Dust, cobwebs and other debris indicated the
screens had not been moved.
Detectives initially believed all the windows and doors were locked.
Family members told them Stephanie's grandmother had a habit of making
sure the house was secure before going to bed.
Later, though, there would be confusion about just what was locked.
Steve Crowe was in and out of various doors that panic-fueled morning
before the police arrived.
Everyone agrees now that at least two entryways were unlocked:
Stephanie's bedroom window and a sliding glass door from the parents'
bedroom to the back yard. But police considered it unlikely that
someone would have entered through either.
The screen on Stephanie's window was one of those that was bent but
appeared undisturbed; it had been pulled out in the bottom left corner
and the window left unlocked so a phone line could be run into her
room.
To get into the parents' bedroom from outside, someone would have had
to open a sliding screen door, which police did find partly open; then
open the sliding glass door, which was found closed; and then get past
plastic vertical blinds, which also were found closed. Steve and
Cheryl Crowe, sleeping just feet away, said they heard nothing.
Cheryl Crowe told police she remembered hearing her bedroom door push
open a couple of times that night -- not the glass slider, but the
door at the other end of the room, leading to the hallway. She thought
it was one of the family's two cats.
All this suggested to Claytor that the killing was an inside job.
No one was surprised by that theory. Most domestic murders are
committed by someone known to the victim. The FBI, in fact, trains law
enforcers that, when a child is killed in the home, the parents are
the first suspects.
If the parents can be ruled out, move next to siblings and others
living in the house. Then move to those who had frequent access to the
child, a baby-sitter, for example, and then to friends and business
associates of the parents.
The final option, under the FBI's protocol, is to look at strangers.
Police investigators the world over follow this line of thinking.
Detectives looked first at Steve Crowe, wondering whether maybe he was
molesting his daughter and killed her to keep her quiet.
But they also wondered about Michael Crowe.
Family members had been ushered into the living room and told not to
talk to each other -- standard police procedure to guard against
witnesses' sharing information and contaminating the investigation.
Although the first officer at the scene reported that the Crowes "all
appeared to be very upset," others found the 14-year-old boy curiously
unemotional.
CROWE FAMILY COLLECTION
Last photo: Michael Crowe posed with sisters Stephanie (left) and
Shannon on Sunday, Jan. 18, 1998, three days before Stephanie was
found stabbed to death on her bedroom floor.
Claytor would testify that while the rest of the Crowes sat close
together on the couch Michael played a hand-held video game. The
family disputes this.
Claytor also learned that Michael had been overheard saying he got up
in the early morning, about 4:30, and went to the kitchen to take a
painkiller. He said he had a headache.
Michael's bedroom was directly across the hallway from Stephanie's.
How, the detective wondered, could the teen have left his room and not
seen his sister's bloody corpse in her doorway?
House taken over
Claytor got a search warrant about noon, and the Crowe house was taken
over by detectives and evidence technicians. Eventually, as many as
100 members of the Police Department would be involved.
Working in some cases 15-hour days, they inched their way through the
1,800-square-foot house. They took hours of videotape and dozens of
still photographs. They measured distances and drew diagrams and
compiled detailed lists of what was where.
Technicians had no trouble finding fingerprints; almost 90 would be
analyzed later. Among them were bloody prints on Stephanie's bed
frame, on her door, and on the hallway door frame of her parents'
bedroom.
Stephanie's body, which remained at the crime scene for almost nine
hours on that first day, yielded clues, too. There were several hairs
in her hands, including one woven between the ring and middle fingers
of her right hand. It seemed to Claytor that some of the hairs might
be Michael Crowe's. Near the top of her head was a twig.
Days into their investigation, police found the phrase "kill kill"
penciled in small letters on the bedroom windowsill.
From the beginning, the location of Stephanie's body was critical to
the police. Their videotapes and reports placed her lying on her right
side, with her head just outside the doorway, which is in an alcove
about two feet from the hallway. In that spot, her door could not be
closed. Her right foot was resting on one of her books, a mystery
novel titled "The Twisted Window."
Large pools of blood were on the bed, at the foot of the bed and near
the door. Did someone move her? Had she somehow gotten out of bed
after being attacked and then crawled 10 feet to the door in a futile
effort to get help?
Inside the room, the top drawer of Stephanie's dresser had been pulled
out and was on the floor near the bed. The blood-stained bedding,
including a flower-print comforter with numerous slices in it, was
pushed to one side.
A leading blood-spatter expert from the San Bernardino County
Sheriff's Department would spend two days in the home helping
investigators interpret the scene.
George Durgin, manager of Escondido's crime laboratory, spent many
hours at the house, too, maneuvering around in a wheelchair because of
recent knee surgery.
A police officer for 20 years, Durgin believes in a fledgling
blood-detection procedure using the chemical mixture fluorescein and
has made Escondido a pioneer in its use. The process has not been
widely adopted by law enforcement.
Durgin used fluorescein at the Crowe house, with mixed results. Later,
fluorescein would figure prominently in the case -- once for finding
possible blood on a piece of evidence, and once for missing it.
Taken to headquarters
Shortly after Claytor arrived, the Crowe family members were taken to
police headquarters in downtown Escondido.
The Crowes are working-class people. They have never owned a home.
They buy their cars used. But they said there's always enough to cover
the monthly bills and provide a comfortable home for the kids, as long
as they don't splurge.
Steve and Cheryl Crowe had been sweethearts at Orange Glen High, the
same school their son attended. They started dating when Cheryl was a
freshman and Steve a junior. They were married in August 1982, three
years after Steve graduated from Orange Glen and one year before
Michael was born.
Cheryl has lived in the area her entire life. Her father, who lives in
Hatchet Junction, Ariz., was a hospital corpsman at the naval hospital
in Balboa Park.
Steve's dad, who retired to Louisiana, was also in the Navy. Steve was
born in the Mojave Desert town of China Lake, and his family bounced
from base to base before settling in Escondido when he was in second
grade. His mother, ill off and on for years, died when Steve was 16.
At the police station, the Crowes were not allowed to see or talk with
one another. Each of the five family members was taken into a room and
ordered to undress, one piece of clothing at a time, until they were
naked. They were photographed at each stage.
This is standard procedure. Detectives were looking for scratches,
cuts, marks of any kind that could have been caused by either a knife
or a struggling victim. They found none.
Police confiscated the family's clothes for further testing and took
blood, hair and fingernail samples.
Steve Crowe resisted but was told he could either allow himself to be
photographed then and there or wait, perhaps for days, in a cell while
a court order was obtained. He submitted to the camera.
Judith Kennedy, who had surgery for breast cancer several years
earlier, successfully fought the detectives' inclination to impound
her custom-made prosthetic bra.
Strange-looking roamer
Back at the Crowe house that morning, on the public side of the yellow
crime-scene tape, a handful of neighbors gathered. Some of them told
officers about the strange-looking man with dirty blond hair and beard
who was roaming the rural neighborhood the night before.
The description rang a bell instantly with Escondido police.
Richard Raymond Tuite, then a 28-year-old drifter with a long history
of arrests and severe mental illness, was no stranger to street cops
and narcotics detectives.
Tuite, pronounced "too-it," had been questioned by police the previous
day after he followed two kids into an apartment complex. He had
served time recently for methamphetamine possession and vandalism and
was diagnosed while in custody with paranoid schizophrenia.
Around 8 on the night Stephanie Crowe was stabbed, Tuite peered in the
windows of Sheldon Homa's house, across Valley Center Road from the
Crowes'. Homa confronted him, and Tuite said he was looking for
someone named Tracy (who used to live in the neighborhood).
Thirty minutes later, Tuite was seen by Homa's son and his son's
girlfriend walking along the road toward the Crowe house. They were
sufficiently alarmed to stop at a nearby church and warn leaders of a
youth group.
Next, Tuite knocked on the door of Dannette Mogelinski. She told him
to come in. He asked for Tracy. Mogelinski said no one by that name
lived there. Moments later, Tuite walked in again, unannounced, and
they repeated their conversation.
About 9:20 p.m., Tuite crossed to the Crowes' side of the road and
knocked on the trailer of Patrick and Misty Green. Again, Tuite asked
for Tracy. Again, he was told no one named Tracy lived there. Tuite
then headed to the main house on the property, where the Rev. Gary
West, the Crowes' immediate neighbor to the south, lived.
West told Tuite to go away and not come back. And, like Sheldon Homa
before him, West called 911. An officer arrived in the neighborhood at
9:37 p.m. but became lost and had to call dispatch for further
directions.
Soon after, he drove his squad car up the T-shaped drive shared by the
West and Crowe homes. The officer wrote in a report that he did not
see Tuite, but he did notice the laundry-room door by the Crowes'
garage closing.
The officer headed back down the driveway and noted in his report that
the suspect was "GOA," gone on arrival.
Two other Crowe neighbors told police they saw Tuite at 12:30 a.m. --
six hours before Stephanie's body was discovered -- standing on the
family's driveway looking up at their house.
Spotted at an Escondido laundry the following evening, Tuite was
brought in by police for questioning.
In his report, Detective Barry Sweeney notes he told Tuite that
"possibly a homicide had occurred out on the east end of Escondido."
He asked Tuite whether he had had contact with anyone there; Tuite
said he talked to several people at the homes he approached.
"Tuite said he absolutely did not go inside any houses," Sweeney wrote
in his report.
Police took fingernail scrapings and clippings and photographs of
Tuite. They found that the transient had scrapes on his body and a 1
1/2½-inch cut on his right palm. Sweeney also confiscated his
clothing, black jeans, black Nikes, a white T-shirt and a red
turtleneck sweat shirt.
Tuite was given sweat clothes and released.
The following day, a patrol officer was sent out to find Tuite again.
The police had forgotten to fingerprint him during the earlier
interview.
Tuite didn't mind going back to the station.
"I want to help you guys out," he told the officer who picked him up.
Three days later, on Super Bowl Sunday, a patrol officer was summoned
to the Best Western motel on Seven Oaks Road, where a transient had
been seen looking into car windows.
The officer found Tuite and asked what he was doing at the motel.
Tuite replied that he thought "the family of that kid who got killed"
was staying there.
Tuite again was cooperative. Finding no weapons or drugs after
searching him, the officer sent Tuite on his way.
'Mountain of evidence'
Everybody working the case was encouraged by what several would later
call "the mountain of evidence" they were gathering at the house.
They believed it was highly likely that the killer, or killers, was
splattered with blood during the attack.
"It would be hard, if not impossible, not to get blood on at least the
hands and arms, I think," Brian Blackbourne, the county's chief
medical examiner, would tell a county grand jury four months after the
slaying.
Blackbourne went to the Crowe house the day Stephanie was found for a
preliminary examination, then performed the autopsy the next day. It
took almost 4 1/2 hours.
He determined that Stephanie had been stabbed nine times: twice on the
top of the right shoulder and once each on the left cheek, the left
ear, the right ear, the left side of the neck, the back of the neck,
the back of the right shoulder and the left side of the chest.
Blackbourne said the wounds to the back of the right shoulder and the
left side of the chest were lethal. Each penetrated more than five
inches into Stephanie's body and cut major arteries. He later told the
grand jury that the stabbing was done rapidly and that she went into
shock and died within minutes.
The autopsy also showed the girl had not been molested.
Blackbourne estimated the time of death as somewhere between 2 1/2
hours after she last ate and 6 hours before her body was discovered.
In other words, she died no later than 12:30 a.m. and as early as 9
p.m., according to when her sister said Stephanie ate a salad.
Claytor attended the autopsy. He noted cuts in the girl's clavicle and
vertebrae and began forming an opinion about what kind of knife was
used.
Police found many knives at the Crowe house. In one kitchen drawer,
there were 23. In the garage, 16. A wooden block with six knife slots
was sitting on a kitchen counter; one of the slots was empty.
But none of these knives appeared to police to be the murder weapon.
So they kept looking.
They pulled apart stereo speakers. They cut holes in the walls. They
brought in plumbers, who uprooted two toilets and ran a camera through
the sewer lines. No knife. No bloody clothes. Nothing.
Police dogs named Maxx, Cezar, Hero, Quno, Giomo and Gazan searched
the hills around the house. They found an Igloo cooler and a pair of
old, blue socks. But no knife.
Officers used metal detectors to scan the property. They located a
knife, but it, too, was dismissed as the murder weapon.
Inside the house, the combing went on for days. Steve Crowe had told
police his son loved video games, and inside Michael's room was the
proof. There were numerous Nintendo and Sony PlayStation offerings,
games with names like "Underground," "Final Fantasy VII," "Gauntlet"
and "Double Dragon."
There were also books and drawings and Lego sets decorated with
Medieval imagery. One handmade booklet mentioned "Dungeons and
Dragons," the role-playing game, and included this saying: "Many have
entered, none have left alive."
In the parents' master bathroom, a cabinet door in the closet was
locked. Police opened it and reported finding "narcotics paraphernalia
and a white powdery substance."
In a purse on a nightstand in the parents' bedroom, they reported
finding a similar powdery substance in a small glass vial. Later tests
identified the 1.7 grams of powder as crystal methamphetamine.
Thirteen months after that discovery, when it was first made public,
the Crowes denied any involvement with narcotics. They declined to
discuss the matter further.
Regardless, police never arrested the parents for drug possession, and
District Attorney Paul Pfingst said he agreed with that decision.
"To arrest them for this on the day of their daughter's death, that
would have been inhumane," Pfingst said.
As a first offense, the charge, if proven, would have resulted in
court-ordered counseling, he noted.
Still, the police wondered, could drugs have something to do with the
killing?
Under suspicion
In the hours after Stephanie's body was found, detectives treated
Steve Crowe as their main suspect.
He was placed in a small upstairs room at the police station. From
time to time, tears flowed. Crowe remembers an officer telling him,
"Quit crying. Be a man."
At 1:35 p.m., Detective Sweeney interviewed Crowe. Unlike Tuite's
interview with the detective, this one was videotaped. Steve Crowe
detailed the family's activities of the previous night and that
morning.
He described Stephanie as very outgoing and well-liked. He noted that
she recently got an award for volunteering at the Escondido public
library.
According to Sweeney's report, she was a "heavy church goer and Steve
used to kind of like it because on Sundays it was his and her chance
to go have breakfast prior to him taking her to church."
Crowe talked about how guilty he felt for not being able to prevent
his daughter's death.
The report concluded: "Steve didn't know anyone who would want to hurt
her, and if he did he said that he would hurt that person first before
he would let him hurt his daughter."
The interview struck Steve Crowe as oddly superficial. He said he was
not asked whether he had heard anything in the night, whether anything
was missing, whether anything unusual had happened the day before.
Judith Kennedy and Cheryl, Shannon and Michael Crowe were interviewed
individually as well. Each related details of a routine evening that
preceded the morning's shocking discovery.
About 5:30 that afternoon, Michael Crowe was allowed to make a phone
call from the police station. He called Joshua Treadway.
Michael, who was crying, told his best friend that his sister was
dead, that somebody may have broken into the house and killed her and
that he had seen her body on her bedroom floor, according to
statements he gave police.
Tammy Treadway did not know whom her son was talking to, but she
became concerned when he hung up the phone. All color had drained from
Joshua's face, she recalled.
Children's center
At 7 p.m., Steve and Cheryl Crowe were told by Detective Mark Wrisley
that their two surviving children were being taken to the Polinsky
Children's Center, the county's shelter for abused and neglected
children in Kearny Mesa.
With an in-home killing on their hands, police believed it was
important to place the two surviving children in the shelter,
detectives said later.
But Steve Crowe exploded.
He bellowed that nobody was taking his kids away and demanded that
they be brought to him. Several officers rushed in from adjoining
offices to quiet him. Crowe recalled being told, "We were going to let
you say goodbye to them, but you have lost that privilege."
After prolonged pleadings, the officers allowed Cheryl to meet briefly
with Shannon and Michael.
The sobbing children begged their mother not to let the officers take
them away. But she told them to be strong, to trust the police because
"they are here to help us."
When Cheryl Crowe returned to her husband, he told her that an officer
acknowledged that they were not under arrest and were free to leave.
The Crowes headed downstairs about 8:30 p.m.
When they reached the main exit, however, the Crowes say, they were
suddenly surrounded by police officers with guns drawn. Officers told
the Crowes to go back upstairs. The couple said they complied.
Escondido police deny this incident took place.
An hour or so later, police decided to put the Crowes up in a motel
overnight. Two officers took them first to a Best Western motel, but
there was no vacancy. They found a room at a Comfort Inn.
The police officers left, but not before asking the Crowes to let them
know of their whereabouts at all times.
As they waited for an elevator, the Crowes, dressed in sweat clothes
and sandals the police had provided, felt people in the lobby staring
at them.
Sometime after 10 p.m., they checked into their room. They remember
collapsing together on the bed and crying all night.
Children crying
When Michael and Shannon Crowe arrived at the Polinsky center, they
were met by social worker Sharon Gordon.
Whatever inappropriate grieving the Escondido police had observed in
Michael was absent now. Both children were very upset and crying, the
social worker later told investigators.
Michael and Shannon were not allowed to see their parents for the next
two days, but they had other visitors. Detectives came and talked to
them separately.
Twice Michael was taken away for hours at a time. Shannon wondered
where he was. She said she was told he was on a field trip.
The parents said they had no idea police were interviewing the
children again. They checked out of the motel and were staying with
relatives, wrestling with the demons of loss and guilt.
Why hadn't they woken up during the killing? Did Stephanie scream, and
did they miss it? They cursed the house for being a place where sound
didn't travel. They recalled numerous times being in the master
bedroom when other people came to the house, knocked on the door,
wandered into the kitchen, called their names. They heard nothing.
They beat themselves up, too, for something else. When they first
moved into the house, the sliding door off the master bedroom --
unlocked the night of the slaying -- made grinding noises, the parents
said. The kids were always going in and out of that door on their way
to the back-yard pool.
Cheryl said she bought new rollers, and Steve oiled it.
"That door was almost silent," Steve said. "I guess that was a
mistake."
These were the kinds of things that kept them up at night. In the
first couple of days, Steve Crowe said, he didn't sleep more than two
hours at a time. On the third night after his daughter's body was
found, he took sleeping pills and drifted off.
Just after midnight, Crowe said, the phone rang. Detective Sweeney was
on the line. He said he had more news he needed to break to the
family.
"We have arrested someone for your daughter's murder," the detective
said.
"What?" Steve Crowe replied, groggy, uncomprehending.
"We arrested your daughter's murderer."
"Oh? You did? Who is it?"
"Your son, Michael."