All we can do for the dead is remember

On April 27, 1982, as the sales staff of Norman Realty in Bossier City, La., convened for their morning sales meeting, a call came in from a man who asked for a particular agent—40-year-old Jean McPhaul—by name.

McPhaul didn’t leave the meeting to take the call, but when the man, who identified himself as Dr. Zack from Midland, called back a few minutes later, she arranged to pick him up at the Sheraton and drive him to a new subdivision just north of town called GreenAcres Place. Her colleagues remembered that she was excited about this prospective client, who said he needed to buy something in the area soon and that price wasn’t a consideration.

Tom Kennedy, a building contractor who was at the subdivision that morning, remembered seeing McPhaul arrive in her Pontiac Phoenix around 10:30 a.m. with a man in his 40s, with prematurely graying hair and sunken cheeks. A little while later, a young woman who worked in the GreenAcres Place sales office realized that the lock box that held the keys for one of the houses McPhaul intended to show her client had been moved. When she drove out to the property to show McPhaul the new location, she noticed that the client held a newspaper over his face.

McPhaul’s boss, Norman Hood, didn’t notice she was gone until about 2:30 p.m. He knew she’d gone out to show a house, but he didn’t know where she intended to take the client. He and another agent went to the Sheraton, where they found McPhaul’s car unlocked and empty except for a pair of McPhaul’s shoes. Then the GreenAcres Place sales office called Norman Realty: McPhaul hadn’t returned a set of keys she’d checked out that morning.

At first, the police were dubious. I remember an officer told me his first thought was that McPhaul, who had recently separated from her husband, had become friendly with the presumable rich doctor and they were off partying. He was more annoyed than concerned, though Hood and McPhaul’s daughter assured them McPhaul was a conscientious person who’d never take off without giving notice.

The police staked out her car, hoping McPhaul would eventually stagger back to it. Meanwhile Hood retraced her probable route through the subdivision. He found nothing suspicious except for a few bits of insulation on the carpet of a newly built house on Highland Drive.

When McPhaul didn’t come into work the next morning, Bossier City police detectives Glen Sproles and Doug Payne retraced her route. In the tiny attic of the house on Highland where Hood had discovered the stray bits of insulation they found McPhaul’s body hanging from a rafter brace. She had been strangled with a three-foot long denim sash (probably a woman’s belt), tied to the rafter, then stabbed twice in the heart. It was clear that the killer had wiped his bloody knife on her white blouse.

There was no evidence that she’d been sexually assaulted, and though her purse was never found, police doubted robbery was the motive for the killing. They suspected that the murderer just wanted to kill someone.

The man who killed Jean McPhaul was born in Little Rock in 1940. His name was James Mitchell “Mike” DeBardeleben. Though he was never convicted or even stood trial for murder, he killed at least two other real estate agents and left another for dead in a criminal career that spanned a quarter of a century. Eleven months after McPhaul’s murder, DeBardeleben was arrested in a Knoxville, Tenn., mall for passing counterfeit bills. By the time the feds and a couple of states had gotten through with convicting him on counterfeiting, kidnapping and assault charges, he was looking at a minimum of 375 years in prison, rendering any expensive murder trials moot.

I do not believe that many human beings are born without a capacity for love and empathy. I think all of us are capable of committing any crime we can imagine. But “evil” is more properly used as an adjective than as a noun, and even the worst of us deserve a compassionate hearing. But the most disturbing thing I’ve ever heard in my life was an audio tape police found in DeBardeleben’s car after his arrest. At first they thought it was a recording of a woman being tortured to death. It turned out that the woman was alive. It turned out that the woman was DeBardeleben’s third wife, with whom he had “rehearsed” various rape-murder scenarios.

I never heard the tape or saw the photographs he made of another woman, a 20-year-old he kidnapped while she was walking home from work. He raped and sodomized her and locked her in a closet. And then, after 24 hours, he drove her home.

DeBardeleben was also one of the few career criminals I’ve ever known who could legitimately be described as “highly intelligent.” For 10 years he eluded federal authorities who considered him one of the most successful counterfeiters in history. He probably saved himself from the death penalty by never admitting anything to the police, forcing them to build cases based on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of witnesses. In law enforcement circles, it’s generally assumed that he murdered, raped and tortured many more victims than have been attributed to him. Some of them think he may have been as prolific a serial killer as Ted Bundy. For a long time, he was my chief suspect in the 1978 disappearance of Magnolia real estate agent Bobo Shinn.

Law enforcement sources tell me they think DeBardeleben is an unlikely suspect in the Shinn case, since he was working as a barber in North Carolina at the time of her disappearance. On the other hand, by the time Sproles and Payne found McPhaul’s body, Dr. Zack had put 800 miles between him and the house on Highland Drive.

It’s obvious why I’m thinking about Jean McPhaul this week.

My parents knew her a little; they lived maybe a mile or so away from the murder house in GreenAcres proper, the next subdivision over. My parents were inveterate real estate lookers, and my mother remembers touring the house on Highland Drive a few weeks before the murder. When I came to work at the Shreveport Journal, it was the first big murder case I took on.

I kept up with the progress of DeBardeleben’s various cases over the years. And when he died, I felt a little frisson of something like relief.

I do not advocate killing people we have contained and rendered harmless. I think capital punishment has made our country needlessly cruel; it’s a failed and discredited policy that only endures because our so-called political leaders lack the courage to face down the mob. But that doesn’t mean some acts aren’t tantamount to a forfeiture of the right to be cared about. I believe in due process. And in punishment.

I also believe that while we can do many things for the living, we can’t erase their grief or tell them why bad things happen. And all we can do for the dead is remember them.

So I do. I remember Jean McPhaul. I remember Bobo Shinn. And I will remember Beverly Carter.