An excerpt from Deborah Halber’s THE SKELETON CREW, available in paperback July 28, 2015.
THE HEAD IN THE BUCKET
One April day in 2001, retired trucker Ronald Telfer pulled into a Kearney, Missouri, truck stop at the intersection of Interstate 35 and Highway 92, northeast of Kansas City. Telfer was curious about something. Around a month earlier, he had spied a white plastic bucket apparently abandoned in the back parking lot. He bent to pick it up and saw it was filled with hardened concrete. Now he was back and saw the five-gallon bucket was still there. He tried slamming it against the pavement. A strong odor wafted toward him.
Later, Telfer would relay to a packed courtroom that the top cracked off and he saw something that looked like meat and skin — something that smelled very bad. Thinking it was animal remains, he slid the hunk of concrete out onto the pavement and took the bucket home to use for feeding his pigs.
Months later, on August twenty-seventh, construction worker Franklin Ray Dean maneuvered his truck through the same lot. Humidity hung in the air and waves of heat hovered over the ground; it was the summer’s hottest day yet. Dean saw a cylinder of concrete blocking his path. He jumped down from the cab of his truck. When he went to shove the thing out of the way, he saw hair and what looked like a human skull protruding from the top.
Kearney police detective Fred Ferguson arrived. Under peeling gray chips, it looked like a human jaw was emerging like an artifact from an archaeological dig. Ferguson made a mental note that whoever the jaw belonged to had had quite a bit of bridgework.
Dean’s discovery set in motion a series of events that spanned five years and four states. It involved hundreds of thousands of dollars and a race between a web sleuth and law enforcement to solve a case with a ticking clock. It was a saga of luck, greed, family ties, karma, depravity, and, some believed, divine intervention.
***
Eight months earlier, in Bellevue, Iowa, an unassuming Mississippi River town four hundred miles from Kearney, Jan Buman and her boyfriend, Gregory May, were talking about sunny Florida. May, fifty-five, with blue eyes and thick sandy hair gone gray, had six months earlier moved to Bellevue from Wisconsin, where he’d led a somewhat odd dual existence: he was a pioneering tattoo artist with a passion for nineteenth-century antiques.
May owned tattoo shops and enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as one of the Midwest’s fastest, most talented tattoo artists at a time when tattoo artists were few and far between. He even taught the trade to his ex-wife, who became one of the first female tattoo artists in the United States and an originator of the concept of permanent makeup. Celebrities would one day flock to Sheila May’s LA salon for tattooed-on eyeliner, eyebrows, and lip color.
Greg May, long divorced, was dating Jan, an attractive blonde who lived in nearby Galena, Illinois. The couple often shared meals and drinks at a riverfront bar down the street from May’s rented aluminum-sided two-story house.
“Six feet tall and distinguished-looking, conservative in his politics and polite in his manner,” a Los Angeles Times reporter later described May, who was drawn to Bellevue in part so he could emulate Mark Twain in living on the Mississippi. May lived and breathed all things Civil War.
May was tired of Midwest winters. Pick out a house, he told Jan, tossing her a Sarasota
real estate brochure. On January 11, 2001, Jan was happy and excited about the future. She had spent the past three days with May, leaving only to fetch clean clothes while May went to his chiropractor and to say farewell to a friend in Dubuque.
Right before she left, Jan, May, and May’s housemate, a burly ex-bouncer with a walrus mustache Jan knew as Duke, had a smoke outside. Jan knew Greg had been friends with Duke, a fellow tattoo artist, for more than thirty years. Greg had inked many of the designs on Duke’s beefy forearms. Duke and his girlfriend, Julie, who rented out the finished basement of May’s house, were also planning to move to Florida, although Jan wasn’t happy about it.
“I don’t trust that Duke,” she had once told May over cocktails.
“Well, I don’t trust that Julie,” he countered.
That winter night, Jan kissed May good-bye. Duke shot her a mean look, which she ignored. “See you at eight,” she called to May as she drove off.
***
Web sleuth Ellen Leach and a man she introduced as her boyfriend, Chip, slid into a booth opposite me. We were in a Waffle House on a busy commercial strip in Gulfport, Mississippi. The booths backed up to the kitchen and diners sat on counter stools over mugs of coffee and plates of pancakes and eggs.
Ellen planned to show me around Gulfport on one of her rare days off from work, and although I kept assuring her that she was the one I came to see — she was the one who helped identify Greg May in the nick of time, saving prosecutors from a murder case without a body; she was the local hero featured on 48 Hours — she fretted that she was somehow disappointing me after I came all the way from Boston to see her.
I had heard that Ellen Leach was one of the most effective web sleuths around, with at least five solves under her belt. She said it had all begun with her cousin, the infamous Susan Smith.
On November 2, 1994, twenty-three-year-old Smith stood tearfully outside the Union County Courthouse in Union, South Carolina, surrounded by TV cameras. She pleaded for the black man who had stolen her car with her two young sons inside to return them unharmed: “I would like to say to whoever has my children, that they please, I mean please, bring ’em home to us where they belong.”
A thousand miles away, in Texas, Ellen watched in horror as this family drama unfolded. She combed websites for any kind of clues that would lead her to her cousins’ missing boys, three-year-old Michael and fourteen-month-old Alexander.
Even after Smith ultimately shocked everyone by confessing there was no kidnapper, no mysterious black man — that she had let her 1990 Mazda Protegé roll into a lake with the boys still strapped into their car seats — Ellen didn’t stop frequenting the sites. She found the Doe Network and signed on as a member. She intuitively started with the lists of unidentified. “You know they’re dead,” Ellen said. “You know somebody is missing them, so you just got to find the connections.”
Ellen hadn’t yet refined her technique. She would go on to appear on national media, earn a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward, be showered with gratitude by one family of the missing, and ultimately shun the group she helped put on the map.
Ellen had grown up in a small rural farming community in Michigan and thought for a
time she might like to become a fashion designer. But her parents couldn’t pay for college, so instead she took a job in an automobile factory in Detroit. It closed and she followed her brother to Texas, where for more than twenty years she staffed the steam table of prepared foods in a Kroger supermarket, a job she wouldn’t call intellectually challenging. Ellen found herself spending more and more time logged onto the Doe Network.
Susan Smith might have led her to the Doe Network, but I thought I knew what kept Ellen there. She may have been robbed of a college education, but her considerable brainpower — like that of many of the web sleuths I’d encountered — was completely wasted on her day job. Finding the owner of a head in a bucket of cement — now, that was a challenge worthy of Ellen Leach.
***
At around eight in the evening on January 11, 2001, Jan Buman parked in the rear of 212 North Riverview Street. To her surprise, the back door was locked. Greg had told her he would leave it open for her. She rang the doorbell. No answer. Jan walked around to the front door. The shade was mostly drawn, but she saw someone who looked like May from the rear. She could only see Greg from the waist down. He was sitting, unmoving, in a kitchen chair, legs crossed and his hands on his lap. Jan recognized Duke’s girlfriend Julie Johnson, a slight, pale woman with cropped dark hair and oversized tinted glasses. Julie was pacing as if she was nervous, and wiping off something Jan couldn’t see.
Jan went to the Frontier Cafe without May, ordered a bowl of soup and a beer, and called the house. The answering machine picked up. “Why won’t you answer the door?” Jan pleaded into the recorder. “Are you mad at me?” She stopped by again. This time she saw nothing through the partially opened shade, but she heard thumps and crashes from within. Greg must be mad, she thought, to stomp around slamming doors like that.
She called the property manager, who wouldn’t unlock the door for her; she wasn’t a tenant. Freezing, she got back in her truck, wondering what she had done to make Greg so angry.
The next Sunday, Julie Johnson informed Jan on the phone that May had gone to Chicago and he’d decided he didn’t want Jan to join him in Florida after all. Jan stopped by three days later. Greg’s car, his furniture, and all his Civil War memorabilia were gone. It wasn’t the first time a guy had dumped Jan unceremoniously. But she hadn’t figured Greg May for a coward who snuck off without saying good-bye.
***
Ellen Leach’s boyfriend, Keith Glass, sat opposite me in the Waffle House booth. Bald and stocky with a full salt-and-pepper beard and round metal-rimmed glasses, Glass looked to me like Santa Claus, if Santa Claus were a biker dude in a muscle T-shirt. Glass had earned the nickname Chip as a boy because his reliable chip shot always got him to first base. He ordered only a cup of coffee, patting his rounded belly apologetically; Ellen, tall and lanky, dug into her plate of waffles and eggs and bacon.
More than five feet eight, Ellen, a onetime tomboy, has a strong jaw and cleft chin, a wide, mobile mouth, and gray hair to her shoulders. That day she cut a mannish figure in jeans, zip-front fleece jacket, and black leather sneakers. Chip told me that customers at the Hobby Lobby, where Ellen worked as a cashier, approached her saying, “Excuse me, sir.”
Then they’d take a closer look and say, “Oh, sorry, ma’am.” Sometimes, the other way around. I snuck a glance at Ellen to see if she was taking offense, but her baby-blue eyes were crinkled in amusement. With the loquacious Chip around to entertain me, she could relax.
They met — where else? — online, on a gaming website offering Monopoly, Risk, card games, puzzles of all kinds. They played Keno. You could chat in real time with other players. What did Glass say that attracted Ellen’s attention? He laughed. “Oh, ma’am, we don’t even want to get into that.” Being called “ma’am” usually drives me crazy, but from Chip it was charming. “There was a bunch of us that were joking around and stuff,” Ellen explained. “I’m always flirting and carrying on in there,” Glass said. “She just took it serious.”
What clinched Ellen’s move from Texas to Mississippi was a photo she sent Chip of herself in waders, displaying two ten-pound redfish like slick, speckled torpedoes. Ellen had regularly fished Christmas Bay off Galveston until one day a gar — she thinks it was a gar, scaly and needle-nosed with a mouthful of sharp teeth — as big as a canoe circled her lazily. She froze, hardly daring to breathe, until it swam away. Chip also liked to fish. “I just want something I can fight with for a half hour and not marry,” he quipped.
Chip was her backbone, Ellen averred. She’d show him a case and see if he thought her match was worthy. Chip looked at his hands and said Ellen was the one who put in all the hard work. Chip told me proudly that Ellen helped identify missing Pittsburgh teen Jean-Marie Stewart, whose remains had lain nameless in a Florida morgue for twenty-seven years.
The girl’s abduction and murder, the length of time she remained unidentified, and the nature of her relationship with a woman who dedicated her own web database to finding her would fuel some heated exchanges within the web sleuth community for years.
“If police in Florida had Jean’s dental records, if the remains of a young woman with an overbite were discovered only a few miles from where Jean disappeared a year later, why did it take more than a quarter-century for a volunteer advocate to put two and two together?” wrote a reporter in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Chip’s version was more colorful: How come a couple of boofunkles from Mississippi solved this case before law enforcement did?
I’d never heard the term “boofunkle” but I heard it again within an hour: it’s what Chip and Ellen named their stocky mixed-breed rescue dog, who bounded to greet us at their modest ranch in a subdivision off busy Route 49.
For a time, Ellen had parked a 1968 Cadillac hearse out front. She had picked it up at a Texas auction for a dollar. Its jet-black finish gleamed in the sun; its elongated landau roof sported a metal detail like the Nike swoosh. With a few new parts its oversized engine purred. Ellen’s brother stowed a fake casket in the back and she and Chip propped two plastic skeletons up front. The car had been a hit in Texas, drawing openmouthed stares, whistles, and admiring grins.
Mississippians’ reactions were different. On Halloween, Chip and Ellen noticed that trick-or-treaters avoided their house. At the drive-in, they never got served with the skeletons in tow. A neighbor who ran a hair salon out of her home complained that her customers were being scared off. Mississippi mechanics were too superstitious to work on
it. After nine years of owning the iconic car, Ellen was forced to sell it.
Before we walked inside the house, Chip and Ellen warned me about the cats: there was Stinky, rescued from fueling the bloodlust of thirteen fight-to-the-death pit bulls; diabetic Francis, who needed injections twice a day; gray six-toed Grasshopper; Cali, a calico bequeathed to Chip by an elderly lady entering a nursing home; and Solo, a tailless white fluff ball prone to ambushing people’s feet. In addition to the cats and Boofunkle, since Ellen had moved in, the couple had nursed three-legged lizards, one-eyed fish, and a shepherd who lost three legs to bone cancer.
In a garage converted to a spare room, Chip’s and Ellen’s computers sat on adjacent desks, Chip’s covered with overflowing ashtrays, video feeds from a security camera aimed at the driveway, wallets, lighters, sticks of incense, vitamins in bottles, and a ragged bouquet of pens in an old flowerpot. Cali sprawled on my lap and Ellen started poking the power button of her Hewlett-Packard like a parrot pecking a tough nut. In front of her were two monitors that allowed her to compare, side by side, a missing-person report with details about unidentified remains.
A few years earlier Ellen had been at her computer, the predecessor of the one with the balky monitor, perusing the Doe Network. She spotted a photo of a bust. At the time, she didn’t know that forensic artist Frank Bender was legendary for his uncanny representations of the dead based on nothing more than a skull. This one, created from a skull found at a Missouri truck stop embedded in a bucket of concrete, depicted the head and shoulders of a kindly-looking middle-aged gentleman. It was so lifelike it could have been done from a living model. Ellen had sat back in her chair, absentmindedly stroking one of the cats.
She knew the case wouldn’t appeal to your everyday web sleuth, who tended to scrutinize identifiers such as height, weight, hair color, eye color, tattoos, personal effects, broken bones, and previous surgeries. Without a body, there was no quantifiable description for this victim; almost everything Bender had done was a guess. No self-respecting web sleuth would waste time on just a skull. It was crazy. It was so crazy, such a stupendous long shot, that Ellen was instantly intrigued. She liked the challenging cases. She adopted them like abandoned kittens.
***
By mid-January 2001, Greg May’s son, Don, was worried. The last time Don saw his father had been at his grandfather’s funeral in Chicago the previous April. Don lived in California, but father, son, daughter, and ex-wife were in frequent contact. Don and his sister, Shannon, both in their thirties, hadn’t heard from their father in more than two weeks. They changed their phone answering machines to say, “Dad, if this is you, leave us a message.” It wasn’t unheard-of for Greg May to be temporarily out of touch. He led a nomadic existence, living in forty or fifty different places in his lifetime. It wasn’t uncommon for his children to get a message listing yet another new number and address. He often traveled the country seeking out Civil War treasures.
In addition, he’d told friends he was considering moving to Florida. Bellevue had turned down his request to open a tattoo shop; perhaps he was unreachable because he was scouting out other potential locations, or driving south. But Don couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. The last straw came in mid-February. Greg May’s phone was disconnected. Don and Shannon May flew from Santa Monica to Iowa to file a missing-
person report with the Bellevue police.
***
Soon after the grisly discovery of the skull in the bucket, Kearney police enlisted cadaver-sniffing dogs to scour the Kearney truck stop. They didn’t locate any other body parts. Later, dogs trained to pick up the scent of human cadavers would detect such a scent in an older-model black Volvo, but that car was hundreds of miles away, waiting to be junked; it would be years before it came to anyone’s attention.
Kearney police sent the skull to a forensic odontologist and anthropologist, who hoped the face had left an impression in the contours of the concrete. No such luck: the head had been covered with a stocking cap. They were able to determine the skull belonged to a forty- to sixty-year-old man with existing teeth in good condition and extensive dental work.
***
In his garage turned study in Gulfport, Chip took over pushing the power button on Ellen’s recalcitrant computer. None of the web sleuths I’d met had gleaming, state-of-the-art MacBooks. Not the least bit wealthy, the volunteers all owned clunkers that needed to be wrestled into submission. Ellen’s screen flickered. She was lucky, not only because her boyfriend supported her addiction, but also because Glass, a cable TV technician, knew his way around electronics. We watched him wedge his stocky frame underneath the desk. Ellen and I looked on the way the driver of a disabled car hovers helplessly while a mechanic pokes around under the hood. We heard muttering, something about “power distribution . . . source code . . . video card.”
“Still won’t come up?” Ellen asked after a few minutes.
“Negative,” Chip responded.
“I knew something else was going to go wrong.” Ellen turned to me despairingly. “I wanted your visit to be perfect.”
I’ve known women like Ellen Leach. They worry. They plan ahead. They try to think of everything. Before I flew to Mississippi, Ellen had kindly helped me book a room in an ancient white-pillared former mansion on an isolated, rural side road just past what appeared to be defunct railroad tracks. At night, the motel-like strip of rooms in the rear of the antebellum-style main building was eerily silent, apparently hosting no other guests except some peacocks and ducks paddling around in a stream opposite my door. Writers need solitude, Ellen said. She didn’t seem to know that former New Yorkers sleep better with the wail of sirens outside their windows. I passed a sleepless night thinking about ax murderers.
***
May moved between two worlds, a friend told the Los Angeles Times.
He had an eagle tattooed on one shoulder and a clipper ship on the other. Although his collection of Civil War rifles, swords, uniforms, muskets, Western movie posters, photographs, and documents was valuable, he wasn’t a flashy dresser, given instead to straw cowboy hats, denim jackets, and “gentleman’s loafers,” as Shannon put it. The Times reported that May strolled Bellevue’s Riverview Street with Duke, also known as Moose, who was tattooed from arms to thighs. The two eventually found jobs in a tattoo parlor across the river in Illinois. They would shoot pool at night and swing by the Frontier Cafe for breakfast. Waitresses remembered May as quiet, friendly, but reserved. Duke was the boisterous one, always cracking jokes. They stayed pretty much to themselves.
After Duke’s girlfriend, Julie Johnson, came to town and moved in with them, waitresses noticed a change in Duke: he would sit alone in a corner with Johnson, looking somber and quiet.
“My father did not mince words,” Don May told me years later. “He described Julie as a sneaky bitch, and that’s a lot coming from a man who did not use profanity.” Don had, as a teenager, met Duke (or Moose) back in Kenosha and recalled him as a sketchy character who could turn from jovial to sharp-tongued without warning. Don suspected his father felt sorry for Duke. Greg May’s son had long known about his father’s trusting nature and occasionally misguided generosity.
Although Greg May grew up in Lake Forest, a swanky Chicago suburb, and moved easily among the largely conservative crowd of Civil War buffs who frequented antique shows and museums, his love of tattooing sucked in ex-cons like Duke. Many tattoo artists are secretive about their craft, but May taught Duke about shading and coloring, showed him the machines that drove tiny inked needles like pile drivers deep into the dermis; showed him how to sterilize the needles in an autoclave, how to push the foot pedal with just the right amount of pressure to pierce the skin with even, solid lines of color and no so-called holidays, or gaps, but not so deeply as to cause excessive pain and bleeding. Finally, May would have shown him how to gently dab away drops of blood or plasma and bandage the new, raw tattoo with clean gauze.
Besides the occasional game of pool and their shared love of tattooing, May and Duke sometimes went fishing together. They used a white plastic bucket to carry their bait.
***
On January sixteenth, five days after Jan left May’s house for the last time, one of Greg May’s neighbors saw the woman Jan Buman knew as Julie Ann Johnson loading some of May’s antiques into a yellow Ford Ryder moving truck. An acquaintance helped Duke carry a large replica of a clipper ship from the house. Into the truck went bayonets, canteens, 140-year-old newspapers, vintage and modern guns, medals, and engravings. Duke told the landlord he and May were breaking their lease and leaving town. He gave away May’s furniture to neighbors. Then he and Julie drove off.
***
Crime in Bellevue, Iowa, in the late 1990s consisted primarily of small-time thefts and traffic violations. With Dan and Shannon May insisting something bad had happened to their father, the local police chief called in the state Division of Criminal Investigation.
They found no record of a Julie and Doug Johnson, which was how Julie and Duke were known around town. The police had no plates to run on the Ford Ryder truck the neighbors had noticed outside May’s house, but they did get a lead on Greg May’s missing car. A 1996 red Chevy Blazer with Wisconsin plates had turned up abandoned in a parking lot 145 miles away, in a suburb of Chicago called Aurora, Illinois. Police found May’s keys and wallet inside.
They tracked Duke through a part-time job he had held for a time in a Galena, Illinois, tattoo shop and learned his real name was Douglas De-Bruin and he was on parole for weapons possession and domestic assault in Wisconsin.
At home in Santa Monica, a sharp-eyed friend of his father’s showed Don May a brochure from an auction company in Illinois that specializes in antique firearms and military artifacts. Don was shocked to see more than seventy pieces from his dad’s collection, historic items he had known since his childhood, listed for sale. He knew his father would never auction off such cherished artifacts.
The police questioned the auction house and learned a woman identifying herself as Julie Johnson had said her uncle had died, leaving her and her mother an impressive collection of Confederate swords and Civil War–era uniforms valued at more than seventy thousand dollars. The paperwork putting the items up for sale went to a Mary Klar in Webster, Wisconsin. A little digging unearthed the fact that Mary Klar is the mother of Julie Johnson, whose real name, it turned out, is Julie Miller.
In April 2001, investigators drove seven hours to Wisconsin. They told Klar a man was missing and that her daughter’s boyfriend was a person of interest in his disappearance. Julie, Klar told them, was with DeBruin, living in the back of a Ryder truck in a trailer park in Flagstaff, Arizona.
On April 10, 2001, Miller and DeBruin were arrested in Flagstaff. Their truck contained a notebook with an inventory of May’s collection, Civil War antiques including a rifle worth ten thousand dollars, a Confederate sword valued at fifteen thousand, and other items the pair claimed Greg May had given them. They had “no idea” where May might be. Inside the truck investigators also found a green jacket belonging to DeBruin. There was a suspicious-looking stain on the lower part of the right sleeve.
***
Two days later, Gary Chilcote was in his office at the Patee House Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. St. Joseph is around four hundred miles southwest of Bellevue, Iowa, but it’s only an hour’s drive from Kearney, where the head in the bucket showed up at the truck stop. The whole region is Jesse James country.
In an ironic parallel to May’s own fate, in 1882 Jesse James, in what turned out to be a serious misjudgment of character, took in two boarders, brothers Robert and Charlie Ford, and concocted a plan with them to rob the Platte City Bank. Set on collecting a five-thousand-dollar bounty on James’s head, the brothers shot him to death in his home.
Chilcote, a Wild West buff and a fan of James, was especially proud of the museum’s acquisition of the house located a block away where Robert Ford fatally shot James behind the right ear in 1882. Chilcote founded the museum in 1963 and served as its unpaid director. That day in April, he saw that a package had arrived from an establishment called Pack N’ More in Glendale, Arizona.
Inside was a yellowed letter, written in a flowing, handsome script and mounted in a wood frame. Chilcote recognized the letter. He’d seen it years earlier, hanging on the wall of his own museum. The owner, a collector from Illinois, had mounted an exhibition of his historic possessions. Written in 1883, the letter is from ex-soldier and alcoholic newspaper editor John Newman Edwards, who is credited with creating the myth that Jesse James was a kind of noble Southern Robin Hood.
The letter offered encouragement to Jesse James’s older brother, Frank, on the eve of Frank’s 1883 trial for murder and robbery. It was a prize worth at least a thousand dollars, one any Civil War–era historian would be proud to own, and particularly significant to Chilcote because of its local connections. In his day, Edwards had worked at the St. Joseph Gazette, the same newspaper where Chilcote had spent forty years as a court reporter, and the letter was written on stationery of the Pacific House, a rival hotel to the Patee House.
Chilcote reached into the package and pulled out what looked like a photocopy of a handwritten note. “I would like to donate this letter,” the note stated. “I’ve read about them and now may contribute to their memory.” The note was signed Greg May. Chilcote told me he didn’t find this too surprising. Things sometimes just showed up at museums. But who was this Greg May? Curious, Chilcote phoned the Illinois collector, who confirmed that he had sold the letter to a Greg May around eighteen months earlier.
That same day, the James Farm Museum in Kearney received a similar package with the same photocopied note. This time the unexpected gift was a letter to Frank James written in 1885 concerning legal wranglings involving a Minnesota robbery. Museum director Elizabeth Beckett told a reporter from the Dubuque Telegraph Herald that although some might consider it odd to receive a valuable historic letter out of the blue, nothing to do with the James brothers surprised her anymore.
The messages within the letters themselves were curious; the one Chilcote received expressed hope that a murderer and robber would beat the charges against him. But the directors didn’t seem to read too much into the letters’ content. They were simply grateful that generous history buff Greg May thought their museums worthy recipients of these very interesting artifacts.
***
A crime lab in Des Moines confirmed that the stain on Duke’s jacket sleeve was blood. Using samples from Don and Shannon May in a reverse paternity test that links parents and children, the blood was determined with 99 percent certainty to belong to Greg May.
***
DeBruin was returned to Wisconsin to do time for his former parole violation. Investigators sat down in Arizona with Julie Miller. Chilcote, who later saw Miller in the courtroom, described her as a typical forty-four-year-old middle-aged person. She looked like a store employee with her hair pulled up on top of her head. She looked, he said, like someone you might meet in a bar.
Miller was charged with theft and interstate transport of stolen property. The notion that May was alive and well, donating Jesse James letters to museums, didn’t fool investigators. As they pressed Miller on May’s whereabouts, she confirmed what they suspected: May was dead. She told them she was in the basement that day in January. She heard a ruckus upstairs. It sounded like May and DeBruin arguing. She ran up to the kitchen to find May lying on the floor and DeBruin saying, “I killed him, it was an accident. I hit him too hard and I killed him.” She and DeBruin wrapped the body in plastic bags and sealed them with duct tape. She helped DeBruin drag May to DeBruin’s Volvo. She cleaned up the blood. He was gone for hours. He returned and told her, “Greg always liked the Mississippi River.”
***
Soon after the Missouri museums received the letters and DeBruin and Miller were arrested, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation dredged the Mississippi and asked farmers and hunters to keep an eye out for anything wrapped in plastic that might be human remains. For Don and Shannon May, wishful thinking was over. They printed five hundred color posters offering a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who came across the black trash bags wrapped in duct tape containing their father’s remains. They drove grimly through two counties and a stretch of Illinois plastering gas stations, bars, grocery stores,
post offices, parks, and churches with the flyers.
***
But despite Miller’s confession, Iowa assistant attorney general James Kivi knew what he was up against. Before he could prove Doug DeBruin killed Greg May, he had to prove May was dead. Most of the evidence was circumstantial, Jackson County attorney John L. Kies pointed out later. It was true that Doug DeBruin had gotten caught with Greg May’s goods; that no one had heard from Gregory May since he was last seen with DeBruin; and that May’s car and wallet had been abandoned in Aurora. But all they had of Greg May himself was a spot of his blood on the sleeve of a jacket.
***
In December 2001, Julie Ann Miller, also known as Julie Johnson and Julie Ann Kern, pleaded guilty to stealing seventy thousand dollars’ worth of May’s antiques. It had been an eventful year for Miller and Doug DeBruin. Around a week after a neighbor had seen May’s replica clipper ship loaded into a yellow moving van that January, the pair drove to Missouri, then to Corpus Christi, Texas, stopping along the way to sell May’s possessions at flea markets. A photo taken around this time shows DeBruin sitting like a peddler surrounded by his wares at a Texas flea market. Behind him are items Don May was sure belonged to his family.
***
Back in Kearney, Missouri, police had exhausted all leads on the identity of the man whose head was found in the bucket. Lieutenant Tom O’Leary had seen busts done by forensic sculptor Frank Bender profiled on America’s Most Wanted. Bender, with a pointed goatee, shaved head, and hooded eyebrows, had over thirty-three years done more than forty busts for law enforcement, earning a reputation as eccentric but astoundingly effective at giving faces to the unidentified. Bender sometimes sat with a skull for days, as if trying to channel the spirit of its owner. What would the dead man’s expression be like? How would he wear his hair? “I call myself the re-composer of the decomposed in the classical fashion,” Bender reportedly once said. Law enforcement had come to rely on him for conjuring — with very little information — an incredibly accurate portrayal of what a person had looked like in life.
What did this particular skull tell him? That the individual was middle-aged. A little on the heavy side. Balding.
Using charts developed by anatomy experts that determined the thickness of tissue at various points over the skull, Bender molded clay directly on the skull, made a plaster cast, and sanded, filed, and painted the resulting bust. Early in his career Bender had used wigs, but ultimately decided he’d have more control if he sculpted the hair himself.
On September 26, 2002, Bender’s bust arrived in Missouri. Lieutenant O’Leary was blown away. He had sent off a skull; what he got back was almost human.
The man in the bust had a wide mouth, receding hairline, jowly neck. His nose was straight and somewhat prominent, his eyes deep-set under bushy brows. He looked like a pleasant enough fellow, a man you’d exchange the time of day with at the post office.
The reconstruction sat on O’Leary’s file cabinet. It stared at O’Leary when he walked in in the morning. It was the last thing he saw when he went home at night. O’Leary had faith that one day the right lead would come in — the lead that would result in an identification.
Around a year after Bender completed the bust, O’Leary posted photos of it on a site he had come across called the Doe Network.
***
Ellen Leach saw the photo of Bender’s reconstruction and the details of the discovery at the truck stop. She was convinced the head in the bucket was Jimmy Hoffa’s.
At first, this struck me as laughable. Ever since former Teamsters leader Hoffa vanished in 1975 on his way to meet two mafiosi, his name was on everybody’s lips whenever a body turned up in the Hudson River or inside a cement bridge piling. There’s an Aimee Mann song about how Jimmy Hoffa jokes are passé, yet Hoffa could be the poster child for the whole cold case movement. He’s missing. There’s no body. He was almost certainly murdered.
The bust did look a little like pictures I’d seen of Hoffa. Ellen believed for a time that the head in the bucket had to be a mob hit, the MO reminding her of cement shoes. Thirty years too late, her theory didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I realized that a web sleuth’s ability to brainstorm, to extrapolate, to make leaps of faith, might be correlated with her success rate.
The bust showed up under listings for the unidentified, but the Doe Network’s parallel database for the missing did not include Greg May. Volunteers who scoured the media for missing-person cases simply hadn’t come across him. Other national and international sites dedicated to missing persons didn’t include May, either, so his name did not come up when Ellen tried to match characteristics of the middle-aged man Bender had depicted to men reported missing.
Not finding what she was looking for in all her usual haunts, Ellen started to scan sites posted by medical examiners and police departments in individual states. Since Mike Murphy launched Las Vegas Unidentified in 2003, more states had been mounting sites devoted to the missing and unidentified, although by no means all states had them. So if, for instance, a body surfaced in Iowa, Ellen would check that state’s missing first because, in her experience, the unidentified often turned up relatively close to home. If she didn’t find anything, she would circle out geographically — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas — and expand the time frame.
Iowa’s Missing Person Information Clearinghouse posted a weekly list of the missing, arranged alphabetically by name, with age, gender, date of last contact, originating agency,
and not much else. It could, with some effort, be searched for physical characteristics and date of disappearance. But it was painstaking, tedious, and potentially fruitless to search record after record for a male of a certain height and age, say, when the estimated height might be off by as much as five inches and the age by ten years.
One day in 2004, Ellen spotted a new listing. Iowa had just posted (re-posted, but Leach didn’t know that) a photograph of Gregory May, missing since 2001. The photo was of a man with shaggy hair, a mustache, and a warm smile.
***
In Kearney, Lieutenant O’Leary got an unrelated tip from a Colorado member of the Doe Network. It wasn’t unusual for multiple volunteers to work on cases simultaneously. This can result in law enforcement being inundated with proposed matches, each one time-consuming to investigate. The Doe Network, trying to be sensitive to this, submits only its members’ most promising tips.
One of the conundrums of web sleuthing is this: law enforcement welcomes a positive match and abhors a waste of time. Web sleuths provide both. The trick to minimizing the time wasters, a California death investigator believes, is education. He spends hours on the phone encouraging web sleuths to submit to him only potential matches that have dental records, fingerprints, or DNA on file. He cajoles police into entering those identifiers into missing-person and unidentified records whenever they have them. It’s a sad fact that many unidentifieds will never be matched to a missing person because their dental records are languishing in a filing cabinet, inaccessible to investigators.
The Doe panel sent a tip — not Ellen’s — to O’Leary suggesting a missing Texas man could be a match for the head. The reported victim was last seen on or about September 1, 1998. O’Leary looked at pictures of the missing man. He thought they looked pretty damn close. A year after Bender fashioned the bust, O’Leary let himself hope. This tip felt like it was about to hit pay dirt.
***
On January 9, 2004, almost exactly three years after May was killed but still with no body in evidence, Iowa prosecutors charged Douglas DeBruin with his murder.
It wasn’t easy to get DeBruin back to Iowa to stand trial. From federal custody in Arizona, he was sent to Wisconsin, where he’d violated parole on a firearms violation. DeBruin fought extradition to Iowa; requests and motions flew back and forth, with DeBruin steadfastly filing his own motions to dismiss because, he claimed, his right to a speedy trial had been violated.
DeBruin’s trial was set for November 2004, then continued to January 2005. Just as jury selection was slated to begin and Don and Shannon May, bags packed, were about to board a plane to Iowa, DeBruin’s public defender asked for a continuance. It was denied, then appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court, which ordered a temporary stay. It would be three more months before the May siblings traveled to Iowa.
Prosecutors Kivi and Kies were frustrated by the delays but also worried about the challenge ahead of them. Prosecuting Douglas DeBruin would be a landmark case: Iowa’s first murder trial without a body.
***
In 2003, dental charts had ruled out O’Leary’s missing Texas man as a match for the
Kearney truck stop victim. O’Leary looked at the bust, still sitting in his office. He imagined the eyes under the bushy brows glaring at him reproachfully.
***
After sending a few possible matches to the Doe Network area director for Missouri, Ellen heard nothing. This was not unusual; an area director, a volunteer like all other members, reviewed a possible match and then submitted it to an administrative group for a consensus on whether it was a convincing enough match to submit to law enforcement. Ellen got tired of waiting. (Eventually, what some web sleuths saw as the Doe Network’s bureaucracy — the review by the potential match panel, the waiting for decisions to be handed down on whether a match is good enough, the rules prohibiting members from contacting law enforcement directly — caused a rift so serious that it temporarily shattered the organization.)
At the time, Ellen’s proposed match went from the area director to O’Leary and then tumbled into a computer-glitch black hole. The area director sent it along again. Ellen got back in touch with her a couple of months later and learned that O’Leary had never received it.
There was some confusion, O’Leary recalled. The Doe Network was always sending him potential matches, sometimes two or three at a time. The batch that included Ellen’s tip had apparently slipped through the cracks.
Leach was frustrated, to put it mildly. On March 17, 2005, O’Leary saw the Doe Network suggestion — Ellen Leach’s suggestion — that Bender’s reconstruction looked just like a photo of a Gregory John May missing from Bellevue, Iowa. It was four months after she had submitted it. The age estimate and time of discovery of the skull indicated a possible match.
O’Leary decided to call the Bellevue police department, but he wasn’t holding out much hope. He had pursued leads on forty-two men over the years and, he told me, the funny thing was, he had thought the Texas man who was ultimately ruled out looked a lot more like the head in the bucket. He tried not to get too excited about leads. He had been let down too many times.
***
Ellen had just gotten home from her shift at Home Depot. The phone in the kitchen rang. The voice was a stranger’s, but Ellen instantly recognized Doe Network area director Traycie Sherwood’s name. She and Sherwood had been trading e-mails for months. Ellen hung up and fist-pumped, yelling, “Awwright!”
She was elated, she told me later. She was happy to help out the police, the family. And Greg May was her first solve. She’d been web sleuthing for six years. So, yeah, she said, after the thousands of possible matches she’d put in over the years, to finally get one was a good feeling.
***
In Iowa, prosecutors Kies and Kivi couldn’t believe their luck. Days before the DeBruin trial was scheduled to begin, pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place. It looked like they might even have the body — or part of the body — they so desperately needed. Later, Kies told a TV crew, “I am not one to readily believe in karma, or perhaps the spirit of Greg May directing things. But wow, it certainly makes one think there may be forces out there working for justice other than us.”
“If this doesn’t make you believe in a higher being,” the state’s investigator said, “nothing will.”
***
The skull had been sent from Missouri to Iowa, where Greg May’s dentist identified the restorations he had completed on May’s teeth — the bridgework the Kearney detective had seen emerging from the concrete. Soon afterward, police called Don May to tell him that, after four years of searching, they finally had some of his father’s remains. Don was relieved; the family had yearned to be able to put Greg May to rest. Don asked what they had found. The investigator hesitated. “Are you sure you want to know?” he said.
Working on information that Julie Miller had recently divulged, Don and Shannon May spent a Friday in mid-April pursuing, as one Dubuque reporter put it, “a morbid treasure hunt” along a steep, densely wooded hillside along US 52. Don, grimly rummaging among deer carcasses and trash, came upon what looked like a human bone. State forensic experts confirmed it was a right femur, sliced through with what looked like the blade of a saw. The siblings couldn’t imagine things getting any worse.
The state had granted Julie Miller immunity in 2002. In exchange, she agreed to testify against DeBruin. Just before the trial in 2005, Kies and Kivi decided to talk to Miller one last time, expecting a routine pretrial interview between prosecutors and witness. To their surprise, Miller changed her story yet again. The scene she described shocked and horrified them.
***
In a crowded courtroom a few days later, Miller, wearing a prim blouse and her oversized glasses, said that in January 2001, DeBruin covered the basement laundry room with plastic sheets. Later, up in the kitchen, he asked May to check out a tattoo of a wolf DeBruin was doing on Miller’s back. As May sat, bent over Julie, DeBruin snuck up behind him, slipped a yellow cord around his neck, and pulled it tight. Moose — six-four, 250 pounds — and Miller — five-three, 110 pounds — staggered down the stairs with May’s six-foot frame supported between them. (The slamming Jan heard may have been May’s corpse thudding down the stairs.) The pair dragged May’s body to the basement.
DeBruin’s version was somewhat different. In the courtroom, he was barely recognizable as the burly ex-con who used to be seen around town with Greg May. Clean-shaven, his graying hair combed back neatly, he wore glasses and a suit that made him look like a kindly fifty-something businessman. He testified that on January 11, 2001, he was smoking in the basement. He heard odd sounds coming from upstairs. “Then [Miller] came downstairs mad, slobbering, mumbling and making no sense,” said DeBruin. After climbing the stairs to the kitchen, he noticed a large kitchen knife and rag, and saw May slumped over the table. He had blood on his chest. DeBruin felt his neck for a pulse, he sobbed from the witness stand. Miller had stabbed May in the chest as he sat at the kitchen table, DeBruin said. He laid May on the floor, went back downstairs, and vomited. “He’s my best friend,” he said. “I didn’t want to do what she said.”
Nevertheless, Miller and DeBruin both testified that the next morning they drove together to a Lowe’s in Dubuque and bought concrete and an electric chain saw.
When they arrived back at the house, they went to work.
After placing May’s body on a washing machine, they sawed off his head over a utility
sink. Blood flowed down the drain. DeBruin used the chain saw to dismember the rest of the body. Miller used a kitchen knife. They sliced off the feet and hands, severed the legs above and below the knees. They tucked the pieces in black plastic bags and secured the bags with tape.
They mixed cement and water in one of the five-gallon plastic buckets that the friends had used when they had gone fishing together. DeBruin encased May’s severed head in a stocking cap and plunged it into the bucket. They piled the body parts into DeBruin’s Volvo and drove toward Dubuque, pitching sections of limbs over the edge of US 52 into a steep ravine south of the city across from a housing development. They wrapped May’s torso in plastic and tied weights to it before dropping it off the Mississippi River bridge between Sabula, Iowa, and Savanna, Illinois.
DeBruin and Miller left the chain saw and some of May’s clothes at a Goodwill collection site in Dubuque. They ditched the Volvo at a Bellevue auto body shop. Miller testified that she drove May’s car from Bellevue to Dubuque and finally abandoned it in Aurora, Illinois, where investigators found it with May’s wallet and keys on the front seat.
A few days after packing May’s collection and the bucket containing his head into the truck, they drove north to Missouri and pulled into a truck stop in Kearney to spend the night.
The truck stop was on the west side of the interstate. Under the highway and across a set of railroad tracks you can find the Mount Olivet Cemetery, where Jesse James is buried. From where the bucket sat, you could practically see the outlaw’s grave, Jesse James fan Gary Chilcote told me.
Was it a coincidence that the pair stopped in Kearney? Investigators found a weigh-station receipt in the Ryder truck. The bucket may have been ditched in Kearney only to lighten the truck, which was laden down with May’s Civil War collection. Others believed the location was deliberate. Chilcote told me that at the trial Julie Miller insinuated that leaving May’s head there was the ultimate insult: the pair decided that Greg May loved Jesse James so much, they’d leave May’s head where he could “keep an eye” on James’s grave.
On April 21, 2005, the jury took an hour to declare DeBruin guilty of the murder of Greg May.
Contradictions between Miller’s testimony at DeBruin’s trial and her prior testimony in the stolen property case led the state to indict her for perjury. Miller pleaded guilty, and the district court judge sentenced her to a maximum term of sixty months.
Miller’s former pastor testified that she was a person of good character who deserved a break because she had been abused as a child. A divorced mother of three, “Julie has never had a traffic ticket,” Julie’s mother, Mary Klar, told the Inter-County Leader. “She’s a gentle and good person.”
***
More than a decade after Jan Buman saw Greg May for the last time and kissed him good-bye outside his Bellevue home, she remembered him as “the best boyfriend” she had ever had. A tattoo of an eagle that May had started for her remains unfinished. Greg himself never got more tattoos than the two on his shoulders because he couldn’t take the pain, Don May ruefully explained to me.
“Greg May ruled!!!” a Chicago aficionado who had bought an antique tattoo machine
from May in 1994 posted as part of an online tribute to May. Another tattoo buff uploaded a flash design May had designed and inked years ago on a friend’s bicep. Hand-drawn on paper, flash is displayed on the walls of tattoo parlors and in binders to show walk-in customers. Artists painstakingly draw and hand-paint the flash of their original designs using unforgiving watercolors. It can take months of work to paint enough flash to fill an average tattoo shop, and Don May recalled, when he was a small child, his father painting his flash long into the night after working all day in his shop. “He was a very hard worker, my dad.”
The tattoo posted on the forum was of the head of a panther, fangs bared, nostrils and tongue bloodred, eyes orange and fierce, black fur slick and shiny. The lines are clean and bold; the head looks vaguely classical, as though May had been influenced by the ancient Greeks. Below the design are the words “by Greg.” The cursive capital G is finished with a fanciful curlicue; the e mimics a curvy number three. Out of deference to his father, a successful businessman who wasn’t thrilled with his son’s choice of profession, May never signed his creations with his last name. The finely wrought details of the panther are proof enough of his skill, recognizable as May’s work by those in the know.
***
DeBruin was sentenced to life without parole. He claimed to spend sleepless nights wishing that someone would shoot him and put him out of his misery, gazing at the tattoos on his body, tattoos the man he had described as his best and only friend had once meticulously inked.
The sparse remains of Greg May were buried in a tiny casket in Des Plaines, Illinois. Don May didn’t buy Miller and DeBruin’s story about dropping the torso off a bridge. Checking meteorological records, Don saw there was a layer of ice up to eight inches thick on the Mississippi that January.
Don’s theory is that his father was shot, not strangled, and that the torso would have provided evidence of a bullet, potentially traceable to both DeBruin and Miller. But May’s torso has never been recovered. Perhaps a case for the web sleuths, I suggested. “That’s true,” Don mused. “It could be out there listed on a website somewhere.”
Miller completed a five-year sentence for perjury and was released from federal prison in Pekin, Illinois, in 2011. She has never been charged in connection with May’s murder, a fact that Don May finds unconscionable. He has vowed to find a way to put Julie Miller back behind bars. Inspired by the case, the Iowa legislature passed a law that makes it a felony to “mutilate, disfigure, dismember, hide, or bury a human corpse with the intent to commit a crime.”
After DeBruin’s conviction, Ellen Leach felt like a hero. She and Glass used the fifteen thousand dollars in reward money from the May family to fix their house — Hurricane Katrina had ripped open their ceiling and torn off part of the roof — but only after Ellen fretted for weeks over accepting the money, even though Don May assured her she deserved every penny. He still sends her Christmas cards. Kies wrote to her, “The efforts of volunteers like you are in the finest tradition of community pursuit of justice.”
The Greg May case — and Ellen Leach’s subsequent appearance on 48 Hours — propelled web sleuthing into the public spotlight. But behind Ellen’s next spectacular solve lurked an ugly backstory.
An excerpt from The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber, reprinted with the permission of the author and Simon & Schuster. For more information, or to purchase a copy, visit Simon & Schuster, or visit DeborahHalber.com.
