A triple homicide in Derby Line, Vermont, on August 2, 1983. All three victims were siblings:
Beaulac, Brendan, 8
Beaulac, Ashley, 5
Constantine, Adam, 11 months.
The killer, their mother, was a twenty-six-year-old woman, with the last name Constantine.
First name, Mary.
I cross-referenced the homicide report for local media coverage.
It brought me to an article from a 1983 Caledonian-Record in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
There was also a grainy black-and-white trial photo of Mary Constantine, seated at a defendant’s table.
Her face was thinner and younger, but the detached, stony expression was unmistakable, that look she had when she didn’t want to feel something, or had felt too much. Jesus.
The woman I knew as Mary Wagner had killed her own children more than twenty years ago, and as far as she was concerned, it had never happened.
I pushed back my chair and took a deep breath.
Here I was, finally, at the center of the labyrinth. Now it was time to start finding my way back out.
Chapter 107
“NINETEEN EIGHTY-THREE, HUH? Jeez, that’s not even this century. All right, hang on a second. I’ll try to help you out. If I can.”
I sat through several minutes of tapping keys and riffling paper on the other end of the phone line.
The tapper and riffler was an agent named Barry Medlar, of the Bureau’s Albany field office. He was the coordinator of Albany’s Crimes Against Children Unit. Every FBI office has a CAC unit, and Albany has oversight for Vermont. I wanted to get as close to the source as I possibly could.
“Here we go,” Medlar said. “Hold on, here she is. . . .
“Constantine, Mary. Triple homicide on August second, arrested on the tenth. Let me scroll the rest of this. Okay, here we go. Sentenced NGRI on February first of the following year, with a state-appointed attorney.”
“Not guilty by reason of insanity,” I muttered.
So she hadn’t been able to afford her own defense; no legal bells and whistles on her behalf. Not guilty by reason of insanity can be a tough plea to prove. It must have been a fairly clear-cut case for it to go that way.
“Where did she end up?” I asked.
“Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury, probably. I wouldn’t have any transfer records here, but that ward isn’t exactly overflowing. I can get you a name and number if you want to find out.”
It was tempting to pull a little no-I-want-YOU-to-find-out attitude, but I preferred to make the calls myself anyway. I took down the number for Vermont State Hospital.
“What about Mary Constantine’s MO?” I asked Medlar. “What have you got on the actual murders?”
I heard more turning pages and then, “Unbelievable.”
“What is it?”
“Didn’t your Mary Smith use a Walther PPK out there in L.A.?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Ditto here. Walther PPK, never recovered, either. She must have dog-boned it.”
I was scribbling notes furiously the whole time he talked. To say the least, he had me riveted.
“All right, Agent Medlar, here’s what I need. Get me a contact for whatever Mary Constantine’s local police department would have been. I also want everything you’ve got on file there. Send whatever’s electronically available right now and fax the rest.
“And I mean everything. I’m going to give you my cell number in case you find anything else worth mentioning. I’ll be on the move.”
I stuffed some papers into my briefcase while I was still talking to Medlar.
“One other thing. What airlines fly to Vermont, anyway?”
Chapter 108
EIGHTEEN HOURS AND THREE THOUSAND MILES later, I was sitting in the small, cozy living room of Madeline and former sheriff Claude Lapierre, just outside Derby Line, Vermont. It was a tiny village, as sweet as a calendar photo, and literally pressed up against the Canadian border. In fact, the local Haskell Free Library and Opera House had been accidentally built on the border, and guards were sometimes stationed inside to prevent illegal crossings.
Not the kind of place you’d imagine would keep law enforcement very busy, though. Mary Constantine had lived there all her life—right up until she killed her three young children, a horrifying crime that had made national headlines twenty years ago.
“What would you say you remember most about the case?” I asked Mr. Lapierre.
“The knife. For sure the knife. The way she cut up that poor little girl’s face, after she killed all three of them. I was Orleans County sheriff for twenty-seven years. It was the worst thing I ever saw. By far, Agent Cross. By far.”
“I actually felt kind of sorry for her.” Mrs. Lapierre sat next to her husband on the couch, which was covered in a denim-blue fabric. “For Mary, I mean. Nothing good ever happened to that poor woman. Not that it excuses what she did, but . . .” She waved her hand in front of her face instead of finishing the thought.
“You knew her, Mrs. Lapierre?”
“The way everybody knows everybody around here,” she said. “This is a community of neighbors. We all depend on one another.”
“What can you tell me about Mary before all this happened?” I asked both of them.
Claude Lapierre started. “Nice girl. Quiet, polite, loved boating. On Lake Memphremagog. Not a whole lot to tell, really. She worked at the diner when she was in high school. Served me breakfast all the time. But so very quiet, like I said. Everyone was pretty surprised when she got pregnant.”
“And even more surprised when the father stuck around,” Mrs. Lapierre said.
“For a while, anyway,” her husband quickly added.
“I assume that was Mr. Beaulac?”
They both nodded.
“He was ten years older than her, and she was all of seventeen. But they did make a go of it. Tried their best. Even had a second kid together.”
“Ashley,” Mrs. Lapierre said.
“Nobody was really bowled over when he finally took off. If anything, I would have expected it sooner.”
“George Beaulac was a real bum,” said Mrs. Lapierre. “Took a lot of drugs.”
“Do you know what happened to him? Did he see Mary or the kids again?”
“Don’t know,” said Claude, “but I’m inclined to doubt it. He was a bum.”
“Well, I need to find him,” I muttered, more to myself than to either of them. “I really need to know where George Beaulac is now.”
“Up to no good for sure,” said Mrs. Lapierre.
Chapter 109
I DIDN’T BOTHER TAKING NOTES after that. Whatever wasn’t already written down, I wouldn’t need. A whirring sound had been coming from the kitchen, and I finally asked Mrs. Lapierre about it. I never would have guessed what the sound was. Turned out she was making venison jerky in a dehydrator.
“Where were Mary’s parents during all of this?” I asked, moving back to more pertinent questions.
Again, Mrs. Lapierre shook her head. She topped off my coffee cup while her husband continued.
“Rita died when Mary was about five, I guess. Ted raised her, pretty much on his own, though he didn’t seem to put a lot of effort into it. Nothing illegal, just real sad. And then he died, too, the year Brendan was born, I think.”
“He smoked like a chimney,” Madeline said. “Lung cancer took him. That poor girl never got a break.”
After George Beaulac left, Mary fell in with another local man, a part-time mechanic by the name of John Constantine.
“He started running around on her almost as soon as she got pregnant,” Madeline said. “It was no great secret. By the time Adam was six months old, John was gone for good, too.”
Claude spoke now. “If I had to guess, I’d say that’s when she really went downhill, but who knows. You don’t see someone for a while, you just assume they’re busy or something. And then one day, boom. That was it. She must have snapped. It fel
t sudden, but it probably wasn’t. I’m sure it was building up over a long period.”
I sipped my coffee and took a polite bite of scone. “I’d like to go back to the day of the murders now. What did Mary have to say when she was caught, Sheriff?”
“This is more piecework than anything, just my memories. We never got a peep out of Mary about the murders after her arrest.”
“Anything you can tell me would be helpful. Try to think, Sheriff.”
Madeline took a deep breath and put a hand flat on top of her husband’s on the couch cushion. They both had the solid quality of old farm stock, not unlike what I’d seen in Mary at times.
“It looks like she took them for a picnic that day. Drove way out in the woods. We found the spot later, just by luck. That’s where she shot them. One, two, three, in the back of the head.
“The ME thinks she laid them down, like maybe for a nap, and I’m guessing she did the older two first, since the baby couldn’t run away.”
I waited patiently for him to go on. I knew that the passage of time didn’t make this kind of thing any easier to remember and talk about.
“She carefully wrapped them each in a blanket. I still remember those old army blankets she used. Terrible. Then it looks like she took them home and did the knife work on Ashley there. All over her face and just on her for some reason. I’ll never forget it. I’d like to, but I can’t.”
“And were you the first one to find them?” I asked.
He nodded. “Mary’s boss called and said he hadn’t seen Mary for days. Mary didn’t have a phone at the time, so I said I’d go over. I thought it was just a courtesy call. Mary came to the door like there was nothing going on, but I could smell it right away. Literally. She’d put them all in a trunk in the basement—in August—and just left them there. I guess she blocked that smell out like everything else. I still can’t explain any of it. Not even now, after all these years.”
“Sometimes there is no explanation,” I said.
“Anyway, she didn’t put up any resistance whatsoever. We took her in quietly.”
“It was a huge story, though,” Madeline said.
“That’s true. Put Derby Line on the map for about a week. Hope it doesn’t happen again now.”
“Did either of you see Mary after she was committed?”
Both Lapierres shook their head. Decades of marriage had clearly linked them.
“I don’t know anyone who ever visited her,” Madeline told me. “It’s not the kind of thing you want to be reminded about, is it? People like to feel safe around here. It wasn’t that anyone turned their back on her. It was more like . . . I don’t know. Like we never knew Mary in the first place.”
Chapter 110
VERMONT STATE HOSPITAL was a sprawling, mostly redbrick building, unassuming from the outside except for its size. I had been told that almost half of it was unused space. The women’s locked ward on the fourth floor held forensic patients, like Mary Constantine, but also civilly committed patients. “Not a perfect system,” the director told me, but one born of small population size and shrinking budgets for mental health care.
It was also part of the reason Mary had been able to escape.
Dr. Rodney Blaisdale, the director, gave me a quick tour of the ward. It was well kept, with curtains in the dayroom and a fresh coat of paint on the concrete-block walls. Newspapers and magazines were spread on most end tables and couches: Burlington Free Press, The Chronicle, American Woodworker.
It was quiet—so quiet.
I’d been on locked wards many times before, and usually the general noise level was like a constant buzz. I had no idea until now how oddly comforting that buzz could be.
It occurred to me that Vermont State had the still, slow-moving quality of an aquarium. Patients seemed to come and go in response to the quiet itself, barely speaking, even to themselves.
The television was on a low volume, with a few women watching the soaps through what looked like Haldol-glazed eyes.
As Dr. Blaisdale took me around, I kept thinking about how vivid a scream would be in here.
“This is it,” he said as we came to one of many closed doors in the main hallway. I realized I had stopped listening to him, and tuned back in. “This was Mary’s room.”
Looking through the small observation window in that steel door, I found no clue that she had ever been there, of course. The platform bed held a bare mattress, and the only other features were a built-in desk and bench, and a stainless-steel blunt-edged shelf mounted to the wall.
“Of course, it didn’t look like this then. Mary was with us for nineteen years, and she could do a lot with very little. Our own Martha Stewart.” He chuckled.
“She was my friend.”
I turned to see a tiny middle-aged woman standing with one shoulder pressed against the wall opposite us. Her standard-issue scrubs indicated she was forensic, though it was hard to imagine what she might have done to get here.
“Hello,” I said.
The woman raised her chin, trying to see past us into Mary’s room. Now I saw that she had ragged burn scars up and down her neck. “Is she back? Is Mary here? I need to see Mary if she’s here. It’s important. It’s very important to me.”
“No, Lucy. I’m sorry, she’s not back,” Dr. Blaisdale told her.
Lucy looked crestfallen. She quickly turned and walked away from us, disconsolately trailing one hand along the concrete-block wall as she went.
“Lucy’s one of our few really long-term patients here, as was Mary. It was hard for her when Mary disappeared.”
“About that,” I said. “What happened that day?”
Dr. Blaisdale nodded slowly and bit into his lower lip.
“Why don’t we finish this in my office.”
Chapter 111
I FOLLOWED BLAISDALE through the locked door at the end of the ward and down to the ground floor. We entered his office, which was high-end generic, with brass in boxes and pastel-colored mini-blinds. A poster for Banjo Dan and the Midnite Plowboys was framed on one wall and definitely caught my attention.
I sat down and noticed that everything on my side of his desk was several inches from the edge, just out of reach.
Blaisdale looked at me and sighed. I knew right away that he was going to soft-sell what had happened with Mary Constantine.
“All right, here goes, Dr. Cross. Everyone on the ward can earn day-trip privileges. Forensic patients used to be prohibited, but we’ve found it therapeutically unconstructive to divide the population in that way. As a consequence, Mary went out several times. That day was just like any other.”
“And what happened on that day?” I asked.
“It was six patients with two staff, which is our standard procedure. The group went to the lake that day. Unfortunately, one of the patients had a meltdown of some sort.”
Of some sort? I wondered if he knew the exact details, even now. Blaisdale seemed like a hands-off administrator if I’d ever seen one.
“In the middle of the hysterics, Mary insisted she had to go to the rest room. The outhouse building was right there, so the counselors let her go. Mistake, but it happens. No one knew at the time that there were entrances on both sides of the building.”
“Obviously, Mary knew,” I said.
Dr. Blaisdale drummed a pen on his desktop several times. “At any rate, she disappeared into nearby woods.”
I stared at him, just listening, trying not to judge, but it was hard not to.
“She was a model patient, had been for years. It took everyone very much by surprise.”
“Just like when she killed her kids,” I said.
Blaisdale appraised me with his eyes. He wasn’t sure if I had just insulted him, and I certainly hadn’t meant to.
“The police did a major search—one of the biggest I’ve seen. We left that job to them. Of course, we were eager to have Mary back, and to make sure she was all right. But it’s not the kind of story we go out of our way to p
ublicize. She wasn’t—” He stopped.
“Wasn’t what?”
“Well, at the time, we didn’t consider her any danger to anyone, other than herself perhaps.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking. All of Los Angeles had a somewhat different opinion of Mary—that she was the most vicious homicidal maniac who ever lived.
“Did she leave anything behind?” I finally asked.
“She did, actually. You’ll definitely want to see her journals. She wrote almost every day. Filled dozens of volumes while she was here.”
Chapter 112
A PORTER, MAC, who looked as though he lived in the basement of the hospital, brought me two archive boxes filled with tape-bound composition notebooks, the kind a child raised in the fifties might have used in school. Mary Constantine had written far more in her years here than I would ever have time to read today. I could requisition the whole collection later, I was informed.
“Thanks for your help,” I told Mac the porter.
“No problem,” he said, and I wondered when it was, and how, the response “you’re welcome” seemed to have disappeared from the language, even up here in rural Vermont.
For now, I just wanted to get a sense of who Mary Constantine was, particularly in relationship to the Mary I already knew. Two archive boxes would be enough for a start.
Her cursive was tidy and precise. Every page was neatly arranged, with even, empty margins. Not a doodle in sight.
Words were her medium, and she had no shortage of them. They slanted to the right on the page as if they were in a hurry to get where they were going.
The voice, too, was eerily familiar.
The writing had Mary Smith’s short, choppy sentences, and that same palpable sense of isolation. It was evident everywhere I looked in the notebook.
Sometimes it just seeped through; other times, it was right on the surface.
I’m like a ghost here. I don’t know if anyone would care whether I stayed or left. Or if they even know I’m here at all.
Except for Lucy. Lucy is so kind to me. I don’t know that I could ever be as good a friend to her as she is to me. I hope she doesn’t go anywhere. It wouldn’t be the same without her.