He always said two things about me: “You’re honest” and “You’re intelligent.” Those were the two things he respected about me, but he didn’t think I could take what intelligence and schooling I had and apply it practically. He didn’t see me as being able to understand psychology and getting into profiling and detective work. To him, that was something completely foreign. He thought I was being grandiose in my goals.

When I later wanted to pursue criminal profiling as a career, he said he couldn’t see the point, I was already a successful sign language interpreter, and he didn’t seem to understand I wanted to achieve something different at this point in life. He was a man who didn’t like change and wasn’t interested in risk taking; he thought I should just give up my mission.

So when I came home at the end of a day of being insulted by local law enforcement, he didn’t say, “Don’t worry, honey. I believe in you.” He went about his business and I went about mine.

I wish I had been a criminal profiler before I got married; then maybe I could have seen the writing on the wall before I stepped up to the altar. After twenty-five years of marriage, I ended up divorced, my family torn apart. If I feel even one hundredth of the pain a family destroyed by the murder of their child experiences, I can’t begin to imagine how they endure. I at least still have all my children. They don’t.

CHAPTER 3.WALT:THE SUSPECT

In 1990, the police did nothing with the evidence I brought to them following the murder of Anne Kelley. But in spite of my nerve-racking, dead-end experience at the police station, I still assumed the detectives would be knocking on my front door within an hour to interview Walt Williams. If they had, they might have gotten the evidence they needed to make him a person of interest. The day after the murder, Walt went off on a hike. He put on long pants and a long shirt to leave the house, and I thought, God, that looks uncomfortable. It was a hot, muggy day in June, and while I knew he was headed to a wooded area where it made sense to cover your legs for mosquito and tick protection, he’d never done it before. Why all of a sudden, when he always wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, was he suddenly covering himself from head to toe? Was he covering scratches on his body?

If the police had interviewed him right away, as I begged them to, they could’ve said, “Roll up your sleeves,” and they might have seen scratches.

Anne Kelley was murdered on Saturday and the evidence was in their hands on Monday, less than forty-eight hours later. They’re gonna come. They’re gonna do what they have to do, I thought. We’d all breathe a sigh of relief, and that would be it. I didn’t want to be a hero. I just wanted the case to be handled, my life to return to normal, and Walt to go away.

TONY TOLD WALT -on my insistence-that he had to leave our home. The day after I went to the police, Walt walked out my door and kept right on going, without ever being considered a suspect.

I was left in a complete void, not understanding what the heck had happened. It was like being in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. It shook my sense of reality. Was I making connections where there were none? The police were not impressed by anything I told them, making me feel that I was a delusional housewife and just making stuff up.

But I never said I knew Walt Williams was the killer of Anne Kelley. What I said was that his behaviors were in line with a person who could have committed her murder, that if one put together his admission of being on the path that night with the evidence I found in his trash and his bizarre behavior, an investigator should want to learn more about this guy. That’s what my brain told me. My information should have led the police immediately to consider him a suspect in this crime, yet it didn’t. That meant either the police were incorrect in their perceptions or I was a pitifully amateur armchair detective.

I COULDN’T GET what had happened out of my mind. I got the newspaper every day expecting I would open it and read, Walt Williams has been arrested for the murder, and I would go back to my normal routine. But time moved on and there was not another word in the paper about the crime. I waited and waited, and finally, confused, I stopped expecting to see a newspaper story with any developments in the investigation.

I went back to homeschooling my children and working nights as a hospital sign language interpreter. As for the police, they never called.

A rumor went around town that the killer of Anne Kelley was another young man, Michael Potter, age eighteen, who lived with his parents in a house that stood right where the path intersected with the road. Michael was known to have hung out with other teenagers in the area where Anne Kelley’s body was found. It was a woodsy area where they would party and smoke pot. The word was that this young man shot himself five days after the crime and that he was the one who murdered Anne.

I was stunned. That was why the police never contacted me. I guess it wasn’t Walt. I must be wrong.

It seemed that it was simply coincidental that Walt exhibited such strange behavior, had circumstantial connections to the crime scene, and junk tossed in his trash; maybe this other young man was equally as disturbed but the one who had actually committed the crime.

I tried to put it out of my head. I was wrong. Michael Potter was the guilty party.

Michael was said to have broken up with his girlfriend the same week Anne was killed. He called his girlfriend in the days following the homicide to tell her he was not happy about something he had done in his life. The thing he was “not happy about” was alleged to be the murder. Yet he never confessed to murdering anyone and no one seemed to know exactly what he was feeling despondent about.

I heard through the police grapevine that there was also supposed to be some blond hair at the scene. The boy had blond hair. And, more important, his DNA was there, and he had scratches in his genital area from the briar bushes.

I thought, Well, that’s pretty good. I don’t know if I could argue that one. There’s DNA, and there’s hair, and scratches. DNA is solid proof. His hair on her, if there was a root still attached, could provide mtDNA for analysis, not as absolute as DNA, but pretty useful as supportive evidence if the mtDNA matched his. And how would he get scratches in the genital area unless he had his pants off and he was raping somebody? If the rumors were true and the evidence existed, he must be the guy.

MEANWHILE, KIM TOLD me that Walt was let go from his job.

Right after he left, the company received a series of unusual bomb threats. Kim said that the man sounded just like Walt.

But as suddenly as the calls started, they stopped, and Walt dropped from sight. Kim never saw him again.

I WOULD HAVE left this whole miserable episode behind me if something hadn’t kept nagging at me. The police never actually stated that Michael Potter killed Anne Kelley, and nothing was ever written up in the newspaper about the case being closed. In theory, it could have been administratively closed because the suspect was dead, but with all that supposed evidence I would think they would let the community know that there was no longer a killer out there. This lack of clarification on the part of law enforcement irked me. Was the case closed or wasn’t it? Did they have positive proof that Potter was the killer or were they only guessing it could be him and no one was challenging their assumption?

I decided to talk to the Potter family. When I told Michael’s parents that I thought their son might be innocent of the murder of Anne Kelley, they welcomed me into their home.