ELLEN'S REVENGE

Revenge can be sweet, especially if one can get away with murder. Ellen vowed that she would kill the person that shot her lover. Oh, she knew very well who did it. In fact, it was someone she knew very well. She knew and even loved her from the time they were children.

    Ellen remembered how cruel she could be to other people as well as pets. Although the two were inseparable as teenagers, there was the time she attacked Ellen with a steak knife, stabbing her in the arm. Luckily for Ellen the knife blade missed an artery and Ellen’s older brother was able to stop the bleeding and get her to the hospital. Ellen blamed herself, as victims often do, thinking that she had been too critical of her best friend.

    The two continued to be friends after high school and attended the same business college. Ellen dated several different boys during those college years, but her friend was indifferent when it came to relationships with boys. During their final semester her friend was raped by a boy that Ellen had dated a few times. A few weeks later the boy’s body was found in a woodlot by a hunter. The boy had been shot through the heart and in the groin, totally mutilating his genitals. The authorities never did find the perpetrator, but Ellen knew who did it. Since there was no proof that her friend was guilty and it could never be proven, so she kept it to herself.

    Ellen tried to distance herself from her friend after graduating with honors at the business college. She went to work in her family’s concrete construction company as a bookkeeper. Her cousin, Carolyn was the office manager and her boss. Carolyn was very domineering and unduly critical of Ellen’s performance. If it wasn’t for her brother, Bobby, coming to her defense when Carolyn would criticize Ellen, she might had left the company early on.

    Ellen was very attractive, and part of Carolyn’s abuse may have stemmed from being jealous of her. Carolyn was shorter and rather plain looking, and she didn’t have a distinctives figure, while Ellen was quite shapely and much taller.

    Carolyn was married to Jack Williams, one of the company’s foremen.  Their marriage was one of convenience as Carolyn’s father insisted that she marry a white man after learning of Carolyn’s affairs with several different black men. Jack agreed to the marriage under the promise of quick advancement and eventually becoming one of the owners of the company. Carolyn continued to have interracial affairs but had little interest in Jack.  She also had a sexual relationship with another woman.  Jack was fine with that arrangement because he had fallen in love with Ellen.

    Jack and Ellen had an ongoing affair for several years but were extremely careful not to arouse any suspicion about their relationship. Ellen owned a house outside of town at the end of a long drive through a wooded lot that could not be seen from the road. Both Jack and Ellen drove company owned pickup trucks with exact lettering and company logo painted on the doors. When Jack was with Ellen, her truck would be parked in her garage and Jack’s would be parked in front of the closed garage door. Anyone driving up to the house would assume that the truck was Ellen’s.

    No one in the company, including Jack, knew that Ellen had devised a system that would divert certain receivables to a private bank account. When an account would reach a noticeable amount of money, she would open another account in a different bank. Over the years she had amassed a large sum of money.

    After a few years, Jack realized that he would not advance within the company and wanted to start his own competing concrete construction company and tried to convince Carolyn to fund the startup. She knew that if she went along with Jack’s plan that she would lose her job and inheritance, so she would not agree to Jack’s repeated requests. She did, however, want to buy out another company owned by James Lott, an African American located in the same vicinity as Carolyn’s family-owned company. Although considerably smaller than Carolyn’s company he was competing and winning contracts that both companies would bid for. Although he was offered extremely lucrative deals, James was not willing to sell.

    Carolyn decided that she would concoct a scheme whereas she would lure James to her hotel room during an industry conference with state lawmakers and get him to have sex with her. Her plan was to have Jack come into the room and take a video of Carolyn and James in bed. The couple would then blackmail James into selling his company. The ruse did not work because Jack arrived over an hour after James had left. It would not have worked either way because James would probably tell his wife about the sexual encounter and beg to be forgiven. There were other times when he cheated on his wife, but he was always honest about them. His wife would be angry for a few weeks but would always forgive him.

   When Jack finally got to the room he was accompanied by Ellen. They missed James but there was another person in the room. It was Carolyn’s lesbian lover in a drunken stupor lying in the bed next to her.

    Naked and somewhat under the influence of alcohol, Carolyn began screaming at Jack, calling him names for being too late to catch her with James. She then turned to her cousin and began calling her names. Suddenly Carolyn blurted “I know about your little banking scheme, and I am going to turn you in tomorrow!”

     Ellen jumped on the bed putting Carolyn in a choke hold and squeezed until it was obvious that Carolyn was dead. She then placed a pillow over her lovers face and held it until she was dead too. Jack just watched as Ellen murdered his wife and her lover. Ellen then found a set of keys that were likely those of Carolyn’s lover and directed Jack to go to the parking ramp and push the lock button on the key fab until he found her car. It was 4:00 AM when Jack returned to the room. There wouldn’t be anyone in the stairwell at that time, so they carried Carolyn’s lover to the parking ramp and shoved her into the back seat.

   Jack then drove the car to a local abandoned gravel pit that was more than 100 feet deep and filled with water, while Ellen followed in her truck. The pit was hidden by trees and could not be seen from the road. Together they pushed the car and its owner into the pit and watched as it disappeared into the murky water. Jack then walked to the main road to watch for other cars. When there were none in sight he signaled Ellen to pull up and they left without being detected.

    “No one will ever find her.” Ellen laughed, “and with that black guy’s DNA all over the room they will pin Carolyn’s murder on him.” She laughed even louder. To Jack, Ellen seemed to relish the idea that she had just murdered two people and thought that she was not going to get caught.

    Jack didn’t think it was that funny. He had just seen the woman he loved murder two women. In some ways he was happy to be rid of Carolyn and he knew that he would collect the insurance money worth about a million dollars. He wasn’t convinced, however, that James would be charged for killing Carolyn.

    Ellen was correct about James being charged with the murder, but other DNA was also found in the bed and on the bathroom floor. The crime lab identified that DNA belonging to a female of Native American decent. The local DA wanted to get a quick conviction, but the evidence of another person in the room gave him pause.  

    James’ attorney had his firm’s private detective search for the woman. When friends of a woman known as Lucy was reported missing, some folks were beginning to think that Lucy killed Jack’s wife and went into hiding. Even the Assistant DA began to question whether they had the right person.

    Insurance companies are not quick to pay out one million dollars without an investigation of their own. That was the case with Carolyn’s murder. A company detective was dispatched to the area and began to question Jack and other people close to Carolyn. His suspicion peaked when he found out about Jacks affair with Ellen. Suddenly there was motive that pointed to Jack and he and the attorney’s detective started working together on the case. They really wanted to locate and question Carolyn’s female lover, but Jack was now the main alternative to James.

     A major break came when a local game warden came forward with a video that showed two people pushing a car into an old gravel pit. He had placed a trail camera a couple months earlier about one hundred yards from the pit to try to catch hunters poaching ducks in the pit. The camera was angled so that it could only get a partial picture of the car being pushed into the pit. When the game warden first saw the pictures, he didn’t recognize what he was seeing due to the low light until later when he was going through the pictures for the third time. The people in the pictures were just silhouettes and their identity was unknown, but they were definitely pushing a car into the pit.

   The local sheriff was called in and a wrecking company was hired to pull the car from the pit. A woman’s body was found in the back seat, and she appeared to be Native American. DNA proved to be that of the woman who was in Carolyn’s hotel room the night of the murder. At that point the District Attorney charged James with the murders of both women. He was later tried and convicted of both counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

    Although both private detectives were not convinced that James murdered either woman, they had no evidence to prove otherwise. The insurance was paid to Jack who then quit his job at his wife’s family business and contacted James’ wife to see if she would be willing to sell his business. She was not willing and told him that she would continue to run the operation until such time as James is sent to prison. She ended the conversation with, “Even if that happens, I will not consider selling.”

    Jack agreed to deposit the insurance money into a joint account if Ellen would contribute an equal amount to the account. With that kind of capital, he thought that he could fund a startup company of his own. He was beginning to become depressed and irritable, however, while Ellen seemed to enjoy reminding him that he was an accessory to the crimes. She was showing no remorse for what she had done. If fact, she seemed to get excited whenever the subject came up between them.

    Ellen was in the room when a newspaper reporter questioned Jack, first about the murders, then about how Jack would spend the insurance proceeds. After the reporter left Ellen told Jack that she would be happy to, “eliminate the reporter so he doesn’t bug us anymore.” Jack realized that she was serious and begged her not to kill anyone else. She just laughed and said, “Maybe I will just cut him or have my friend take care of it.” Ellen had told Jack about her friend and how evil she was, so that statement sent chills down Jack’s spine. As much as he loved Ellen, he was beginning to fear her. He kept asking himself, “Why is she so willing to kill again?”

    Jack decided to write out a confession in case something would happen to him. He then rented a safe deposit box at a local bank and locked the key in his safe in his home. He would never tell Ellen about it.

    After James was convicted, guilt began to get a grip on Jack. He couldn’t sleep and lost his appetite. He became more and more paranoid and wondered if someone would find out about who really killed the women. Ellen, on the other hand, was very happy. She took over Carolyn’s job at the company, got a raise and was able to continue amassing wealth with her little embezzlement operation. She was not feeling one bit guilty. That is, until Jack told her that he couldn’t take it any longer and was going to tell the authorities so that James could be set free.

    Ellen was furious and decided to let her friend deal with the situation. She told her friend that Jack would be at home getting ready to go to the police. Ellen’s friend was waiting for Jack when he left his house. She shot him twice in the chest and twice in the head. When Ellen realized what her friend had done, she vowed to kill the person, her alter ego, who killed her lover. She put the barrel of the pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

    It took the authorities a month to find Jack’s confession and a couple of weeks later James was set free.