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  Today’s call was much closer to home. A woman had been shot at a church in Upper Bucks, about seventeen miles north. Stumpo was ordered to head to St. Luke’s Hospital in nearby Quakertown, where the woman was being transported. Stumpo hung up, said a quick good-bye to Langston and rushed out to his car. Cases like this didn’t come along too often in this part of Bucks County. In fact, in the past two decades, there had been only two homicides in Springfield Township.

  Stumpo had been with the Dublin crime unit for just shy of ten years. In all that time, there had only ever been one homicide in his jurisdiction, the justified police shooting of a man who pointed a shotgun at two troopers in Upper Black Eddy. Stumpo wasn’t heavily involved in that case, and although he was the senior officer out of three in the crime unit, he had never handled a homicide case himself. Throughout his eighteen years in law enforcement, Stumpo had repeatedly tried to take homicide investigation courses, but was never approved for one.

  While en route, Stumpo got another call. The victim was being taken to St. Luke’s Hospital in Fountain Hill instead. The larger hospital included a trauma center, Stumpo realized. The woman’s injuries must be serious.

  CHAPTER 3

  Jim and Dorothy Smith looked at the answering machine as they entered their home, and were surprised to see no messages waiting for them. Rhonda should have called by now, Jim thought.

  The couple, both seventy-two, had seen their daughter’s green 1996 Plymouth Breeze in the parking lot of the church as they passed by on their way to nearby Quakertown for lunch. They had thought it was odd that her car was still there at 12:30 p.m., since she was only scheduled to work from 9 a.m. to noon.

  “Let’s stop, we’ll take Rhonda along with us,” Dorothy had said.

  “No, let her work,” Jim had replied, figuring Rhonda was trying to get in some overtime. “She only has one more day, we don’t want to interfere.”

  It was Rhonda’s third day working mornings filling in as the church secretary while Pastor Shreaves was away at a convention. It was kind of the pastor to reach out and provide their daughter with a little work, the Smiths thought. Her bipolar disorder, which Rhonda had struggled with for nearly twenty years, since her early twenties, had made finding and keeping work difficult for her lately.

  Dorothy and Rhonda had been attending Trinity Evangelical for a little over two years now, and the church had been a bright spot in Rhonda’s life ever since. The pastor had been welcoming and friendly to her, and she had made friends with several of the ladies in the congregation, some of whom she would get together with outside of church.

  Jim looked up at the clock. It was just after 2 p.m. The Smiths took a different route back from the Red Robin restaurant in Quakertown, so they hadn’t passed the church again on their way home, but they couldn’t imagine Rhonda would still be working. Jim picked up the phone and dialed Rhonda at home, but got no answer.

  He shrugged as he hung up the phone, and took off his coat as he sat beside Dorothy at the kitchen table. The couple had owned the Cape Cod–style house in Lower Saucon Township, just north of Springfield in adjacent Northampton County, for forty-seven years.

  Jim had his income tax papers spread out atop the round table at the center of the kitchen, a small room with just a refrigerator and wall of cabinets above the sink. An open doorway led to the living room, which was equally packed with couches and plush arm chairs alongside several cabinets of Precious Moments statues intermingled with photos of the family, including Rhonda and her two older brothers, Gary and Perry.

  The telephone rang, interrupting Jim from his paperwork. He picked up the phone, expecting to hear his daughter’s voice, but was surprised to hear the voice of a different woman, who identified herself as a social worker from St. Luke’s Hospital.

  “Your daughter’s been hurt,” the woman said. “There was an accident down at the church.” That can’t be, Jim thought. How can you get hurt working at a church office?

  “What did she do, fall and break something?” Jim asked.

  “No,” the woman said. “She’s been shot.”

  “Shot?” Jim said, frozen in shock. Reflecting on the call later, Jim said he was surprised his weak heart didn’t give out right there.

  “Yes,” the woman said.

  “How is she?” Jim asked.

  “She’s not too good,” the woman replied. “She’s not going to make it. If you want to see her, you’d better get up here.”

  Jim felt numb as he hung up the phone. The cold and casual tone of the woman’s voice delivering the worst news of Jim’s life would haunt him for years to come.

  “Come on,” he said to Dorothy. “Rhon needs us.”

  * * *

  Judy Zellner sat stiff as a board inside her husband’s van, shaken and silenced by the memory of Rhonda’s body. She could still see the position of her friend on the floor, her seemingly lifeless face as it turned toward her, the small beads of blood dripping from her hair to the church floor as the paramedics carried her outside.

  Her husband, Les, sat quietly next to her in the van parked alongside the street outside the church parking lot, which was now blocked off by more than a dozen emergency vehicles. Judy stared with unfocused eyes at the glowing lights.

  Judy met Rhonda on her first day at the church two years ago. It was always Judy’s way to go up and say hello to the new visitors, and she and Rhonda hit it off from the beginning. Despite the almost twenty years between them—Judy would turn sixty-one next month—they started to get together outside of church once every two weeks or so, having lunch or just hanging out at Judy’s house. Judy was still very active and somewhat younger looking with her blonde hair, and the two shared an interest in fashion and occasionally exchanged clothes. From the very beginning, Judy had the feeling Rhonda needed a friend, and she had wanted to be there for her.

  As crestfallen as Judy felt sitting in the van, the tears just wouldn’t come. She had been on Prozac since 1992, when she found her mother dead in her apartment. Judy had gone over one day to have lunch, but there was no answer at the door. She peered into one of the windows, and could see her mother half slumped off the couch. Judy still remembers the crookedness of the eyeglasses slipping off her mother’s face. The coroner later declared she had died from a heart arrhythmia.

  It was a memory that continued to haunt Judy, along with the untimely death of her twenty-year-old son, Ricky, in 2001. He had set up candles on the back deck when his friends were over, and had left them burning after his friends had gone. While Ricky slept in the house alone, the candles sparked a fire, quickly igniting the wooden deck and the cedar-sided house.

  The authorities told Judy not to look at Ricky’s body as they carried it from the house, but Judy couldn’t help it. How do you not look? she thought to herself.

  Her mother. Her son. And now Rhonda.

  Her thoughts were interrupted when a uniformed state trooper tapped gently on the van window. Judy rolled the window down, and Trooper Anthony Rhodunda asked if he could speak to her for a few minutes.

  * * *

  The Smiths had also known hardship—the drive to St. Luke’s wasn’t the first time they had rushed to the hospital in fear of losing Rhonda.

  Dorothy had started hemorrhaging about two months before Rhonda was due in 1966. When they arrived at St. Luke’s Hospital in Fountain Hill on January 17, the doctors told them the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck and strangling her. Rhonda would have to be delivered right away, or they would lose her.

  The caesarian-section operation went smoothly, and Rhonda was born weighing four pounds and nine ounces. Looking back, Jim could still remember how happy he felt, and how he dropped down to his knees and thanked God for his new baby daughter.

  The next day, however, Jim got a call from the hospital with more bad news. Rhonda was experiencing heart and bowel problems, and would need operations to fix both. St. Luke’s wasn’t equipped to handle the surgeries, so they had scheduled
an ambulance to take her to St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia the next morning.

  Dorothy couldn’t come along because she had developed inflammations in her legs. As the doctors loaded Rhonda and her incubator into the ambulance, Dorothy cried lightly in her wheelchair, asking Jim what was happening and why. Jim couldn’t give her an answer, and simply stood there, dumbfounded. During the trip itself, however, he was in a constant state of panic.

  As they drove down Route 309, Jim watched Rhonda’s chest to make sure it was still going up and down, as he had seen it do in the nursery. As they moved closer to their destination, one of the nurses started rubbing the baby’s chest, which frightened Jim even more. “If Rhonda is alive when we reach Philadelphia, she’ll be okay,” the nurse told him.

  At that moment, Jim looked up and looming atop the ambulance, he saw an angel. In the decades to come, Jim knew that others didn’t believe him when he told this story, but Jim remained convinced for the rest of his life that an angel was in the ambulance that day. And once he saw it, he knew Rhonda was going to be all right.

  When they arrived, doctors examined Rhonda and found she didn’t need the operations anymore. The heart murmur had cleared up, and the excitement of the ambulance ride had caused Rhonda to have a bowel movement.

  And now, almost forty-two years later to the day, Jim and Dorothy felt that old panic again as they pulled into St. Luke’s Hospital. Jim tried his best to stay hopeful, reflecting back to those first hours of Rhonda’s life. That girl’s been a fighter since the day she was born, he thought.

  CHAPTER 4

  Judy Zellner followed the two state troopers into the church sanctuary, a place that had brought her so much comfort every Sunday for twenty-six years. In front of her lay the two even rows of warm, maple-colored pews, surrounded by a sea of red carpet. Sunlight shined through the tall, narrow stained-glass windows, illuminating the second-floor balcony that held the sanctuary’s extra seating. Judy’s eyes went to one of the banners on the walls: REJOICE, THE LORD IS AT HAND, it read in white writing between candles on a purple background. It made her sad to think of such a horrible crime happening in the Lord’s house.

  Trooper Anthony Rhodunda motioned for Judy to sit in the first pew, and he and Trooper Richard Webb filed in after her. She recounted the sequence of events leading up to her discovery of Rhonda. Her arrival at the church, the unlocked door, the light in the office, her trip to the bathroom. Going upstairs to the pastor’s office, gathering her cleaning supplies, going back downstairs into the office.

  Judy explained that several parishioners had keys to the church, and she had one because she was the sexton. Although it was unusual for the church door to be unlocked, she told the troopers, she wasn’t surprised to see the office light on. Pastor Shreaves often left the light on after leaving, and usually left a radio going, too. There was a green car in the parking lot, Judy recalled, but she hadn’t recognized it and thought it may have belonged to the new church secretary.

  Then she described the image she would never forget for the rest of her life: Rhonda, dying on the floor in the large pool of blood. The image was so vivid in her mind, she felt she could do a perfect sketch of the scene if asked.

  Following her call to 911, Judy recalled how she screamed at car after car that passed the church, but no one stopped to help. When the ambulance arrived, she led the EMTs into the office and realized it was her friend, Rhonda, who had been shot.

  Rhonda had been a member of the church for two years, Judy told the troopers, and her mother was also a member. Rhonda and Judy sang in the choir together. She knew about Rhonda’s mental health issues, and described how Rhonda would sometimes call Judy when she was depressed. Judy took Rhonda’s calls at any hour of the day.

  “I think I would help her out, make her laugh,” she said.

  Rhonda had talked about killing herself in the past, Judy told the troopers. During one of her calls, Rhonda told Judy she was on her way home from a shooting range where she had thought about killing herself. They talked for about an hour, and Judy thought she had cheered her up, but the next day, she found out Rhonda had been hospitalized.

  That was how it went, Judy said. There would be days and weeks she was fine, but every couple months she would fall into a deep, dark hole of depression.

  Rhonda had had a boyfriend, Judy said, but they had broken up about two weeks ago. It was a mutual breakup, she said, and Rhonda seemed fine with it. Ray lived one hour south, and he had taken Rhonda to the movies and dinner on several occasions. But Judy didn’t know much more about him.

  She didn’t know of any enemies or people who would have wanted to harm Rhonda either, she said. She didn’t know why Rhonda was at the church and could only assume Pastor Shreaves had asked her to assist with secretarial duties. Nothing appeared to be missing from the church, and not much money is kept around as the Sunday collections are deposited in the bank weekly, she added.

  When Judy had finished, Rhodunda asked her to again recall the specific moment she found Rhonda.

  “Did you see a gun in the room?” he asked.

  “No,” Judy replied.

  “Could you have kicked a gun when you came into the room?”

  “No.”

  “Which would be more upsetting to you? If Rhonda killed herself or if someone did this to her?”

  Judy paused for a moment. She decided it would be worse if Rhonda were killed because Judy herself often worked alone in the church.

  “Did you help Rhonda do this to herself?”

  Judy was shocked. That thought hadn’t even crossed her mind.

  “No. I would not do that.”

  * * *

  Only a few more hours, Pastor Shreaves thought to himself. Amen, hallelujah.

  It was the third and final day of his orientation conference in Malvern, Pennsylvania, a requirement for all new pastors, which Shreaves not-so-affectionately called the “baby pastor convention.” For three days every year, all the new pastors in the Lutheran Theology Seminary would get together outside Philadelphia, talk about their successes and their challenges, attend presentations, talk to each other. The theme of this year’s retreat was “Solid Word, Shaky Ground.”

  These conferences made sense for the twenty-something new pastors, but for the second-career types like Shreaves, it felt like the kind of college orientation they had long ago outgrown. This was the last year Shreaves had to attend the conference, and he was more than pleased to leave it behind.

  Just a few years ago, Shreaves never would have expected to have been where he was today, surrounded by pastors-in-training, learning how to be a man of God. Just ten years ago, he was a golf pro working in a high-profile job out of Philadelphia as director of section affairs for the Professional Golf Association. Even today, at age fifty-six, Shreaves still looked more like a golf pro than a pastor. Standing over six feet tall, lean, with a touch of blond in his graying hair, his striking bright blue eyes made him especially attractive for a man his age.

  Shreaves had loved golf since he was eleven years old, when he hijacked a set of golf clubs his father received as a Christmas gift. Shreaves would hit balls out of his backyard and found he had a gift for the sport, and by age thirteen he was traveling all over the country to play the game. As an older teen, he was the runner-up in the USGA junior amateur golf championship.

  But around 1999, Shreaves started to feel a pull toward a life of ministry. There was no major epiphany that led to this decision, except that one of his friends had noticed gifts in him that Shreaves hadn’t seen himself. Shreaves treated his fellow man with respect and compassion, the friend said, traits that would serve him well in the job of pastor. This friend had been a drinker in his past and nearly killed himself in a car crash, but was saved by his Christian faith, and the vision he saw for Shreaves slowly started to grow on Shreaves himself.

  Shreaves joined the Lutheran Theology Seminary in Philadelphia in January 2002 and graduated in the spri
ng of 2005, in two-and-a-half years instead of the normal four. Shreaves liked to say this didn’t happen because he was smart, but simply because he worked hard at it. He took classes in the summers and during his internships, and by March 2005 he was interviewing for the job of pastor of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church.

  It was a place of worship with a strong sense of history. The Lenni Lenape Indians were the first inhabitants of what is now Springfield Township, and the first white man settled in the land in 1728. The Trinity church was established just twenty-three years later, making it one of the oldest churches in the area. A log building doubled as a church and a schoolhouse until 1763, when the first formal church building was constructed on the same plot of land where the existing church remains today, although it has undergone much growth and several renovations since.

  The congregation had been worshipping regularly there “since before there was a United States of America,” Shreaves was fond of saying. Many of the congregants were descendants of the families buried in the graveyard behind the church. It was the kind of place where even if you’d been there for fifteen years, there was probably still somebody who would consider you a “newcomer.”

  Immediately upon setting eyes on the place, Shreaves could tell the church was a perfect fit for him, and he thought the church council felt the same way. Shreaves loved the rural atmosphere, and wanted to find a place where he could settle and call home for a long time, which is exactly what the congregation was looking for in a pastor.