“Welcome home, Ernie,” Joanna said, making her way to her usual chair. “Turns out we need you.”

“So I hear,” he said.

For the next forty-five minutes they each briefed Detective Carpenter on everything that had happened. Then, when Jaime left for the medical examiner’s office and Ernie went to handle the interviews with Eddie and Marcus Verdugo, Joanna retreated to her own office. She was surprised Kristin hadn’t called in to say she would be late. Nevertheless, having worked all weekend long, Joanna appreciated the absence of that first load of morning mail. It meant her clean desk could stay that way awhile longer.

Reaching for her briefcase, she withdrew the first thing that came to hand – the envelope containing the Anne Rowland Corley materials. The first article she removed from the envelope was the one from the Denver Post titled:

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES

CAN BE DEADLIER THAN THE MALE

Conventional wisdom holds that serial killers are usually disaffected white males. But what happens when women turn deadly? How do they differ from their male counterparts, and how are they treated by the criminal-justice system?

In this series of six articles, award-winning Denver Post staff writer Susan DePew focuses on six notorious female killers, each of whom escaped detection far longer than she should have due to the fact that law-enforcement agents weren’t looking for murderers from the second sex.

Today’s installment deals with Arizona copper heiress Anne Rowland Corley, whose jet-set lifestyle underpinned a decades-long pursuit of misguided vigilante justice, which ultimately ended in her own death as well as in the deaths of at least two innocent people.

On a sunny May morning six years ago when Anne Rowland Corley married her second husband, Jonas Piedmont Beaumont, the groom was a homicide detective with the Seattle Police Department. The bride told the presiding minister that she intended to continue using the name of her first husband, Milton Corley, a Phoenix-area psychologist who had died several years earlier.

Hours after the wedding ceremony in one of Seattle’s waterfront public parks, Anne Rowland Corley was dead of a gunshot wound received during a fatal shoot-out with her new husband. Her death was subsequently ruled self-defense. It was only afterward that the truth about Anne Rowland Corley’s life of homicidal vengeance began to surface.

Serial killers often manifest their murderous tendencies early on. Stories abound of how an adolescent history of torturing and killing small animals is an early indicator of a troubled youth who may well end up becoming a serial killer. But Anne Rowland Corley skipped that intermediate step. At age twelve, she went straight for the gusto and allegedly murdered her father. Not that she was ever convicted or even tried for that offense.

Roger Rowland was the well-heeled heir to a pioneering Arizona copper-mining fortune who carried on a family tradition of hands-on involvement in the mining industry by moving his young family – a wife, Anita, and two daughters, Patricia and Anne – to Bisbee, Arizona, where he oversaw one of the family holdings.

Patty, the older of the two and developmentally disabled, died at age thirteen in what the Cochise County coroner’s report declared “an accidental fall” in the family home. A few days later, Roger Rowland was dead as well, as a result of what was officially termed “a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

That double family tragedy was made worse when, prior to her father’s funeral, Rowland’s younger daughter, Anne, rocked the official boat by insisting that she had shot her father because he had been molesting her sister. The molestation allegations were never substantiated. Instead, twelve-year-old Anne Rowland was shipped off to a private mental institution in Phoenix, Arizona, where she remained for more than a decade.

While hospitalized, Anne Rowland came under the care of Dr. Milton Corley. She was released shortly after her mother’s death, and, at age twenty-four, she married Dr. Corley. She remained with him until his death seven years later. Corley suffered from colon cancer but he, like Anne Rowland Corley’s father, died of what was subsequently ruled to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Dr. Myra Collins, a longtime friend and colleague of Milton Corley, says that even at the time she doubted Corley would have taken his own life, but no one was interested in hearing what she had to say. They still aren’t.

”By that time Anne was the sole heir to her father’s fortune,” Dr. Collins stated. “She also picked up a nice piece of change when Milton died. She had the financial resources to hire high-powered attorneys and to get away with murder, which I continue to believe to this day is exactly what she did.”

When asked if she thought Anne Rowland Corley was responsible for her father’s death years earlier, Dr. Collins replied, “Anne always claimed she was the one who killed him. No amount of so-called treatment ever made her retract that statement. She was a smart, beautiful, and utterly ruthless young woman. I never had any reason to doubt what she said.”

After Milton Corley’s death, his widow lived a shadowy, vagabond lifestyle, never staying long in any one place. Her bills were sent to Scottsdale-area attorney Ralph Ames, who handled her finances and paid the bills as they came in, leaving her free to come and go as she wished.

People who had dealings with her during the next ten years said she looked like a movie star, drove a series of bright red Porsches, and stayed only in first-class hotels. It is also thought that she left behind a trail of murder.

Her victims were most likely people free on bail and awaiting trial in cases of suspected child abuse. Local law enforcement agencies, freed of the necessity of trying, convicting, and incarcerating yet another pedophile, were usually happy to close the books on those cases after only cursory investigations.

After Anne Rowland Corley’s death, there is some sketchy evidence that her widowed husband and her longtime attorney contacted several jurisdictions around the country, quietly closing several of those far-flung cases.

In one of them, Jake Morris, a forty-six-year-old drifter suspected of kidnapping and raping a six-year-old girl, was shot dead in Bangor, Maine. In another, twenty-three-year-old Lawrence Kenneth Addison, suspected of luring and molesting numerous children who lived near his parents’ home in Red Bluff, California, disappeared on a sunny Friday afternoon. His body was found two days later at a deserted I-5 rest area.

In both of those cases, witnesses mentioned something about a stranger – a good-looking woman – who was seen talking to both victims shortly before their deaths, but no one ever bothered to track her down. She was never thought to be a viable subject. Since there was no communication between the two affected jurisdictions, no one ever made the connection or noticed the similarities.

”That doesn’t surprise me,” Dr. Collins says. “There are plenty of male chauvinist homicide detectives out there who don’t believe women are smart enough or tough enough to be killers.”

Both Anne Rowland Corley’s widower and her long-term attorney refused to respond to repeated requests for interviews in conjunction with this story. Perhaps the possibility of a series of wrongful-death suits contributed to their reticence.

Anne Rowland Corley usually dispatched her victims with a single bullet to the head. She believed in being up close and personal with her victims. Once her identity was established, some local police investigators in those far-flung cases admitted that she had befriended officers in both locations as a way of gaining information and access to her intended victims. She did so by claiming to be writing a book on convicted child molesters, although no such manuscript has ever surfaced.