“We sat at the same table and a church member introduced us,” Williams fondly remembered. “We started dating about a month later. He’d go to church regularly and sometime[s] he’d pick me up for church.”
St. Paul’s was an interesting little church, where the parishioners sang and even spoke in tongues. According to the Reverend Paul Ellis, Watts did not participate in the speaking of tongues.
She flies, she rests confused, she seeks understanding within herself—and is once again alright—in glory.
—Elizabeth Ann Montgomery’s journal
Elizabeth Ann Montgomery always seemed to be in a hurry. It started when she was born. She rushed headlong into this world on September 17, 1955, at 1:05
A
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M
., five-and-a-half weeks premature at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her parents, Jane and Eugene, worried about their daughter from day one. Their tiny three-pound seven-ounce baby seemed fragile.
Her doctor, George McCormick, quickly dispelled their concerns.
“Mrs. Montgomery, your baby has strength and intelligence,” the doctor reported to the relieved mother.
“You don’t have to tell me about my daughter,” the headstrong Jane Montgomery informed the doctor. “My Elizabeth is mine. I love her regardless.”
The doctor looked at her and said, “Your baby is turning over in her incubator.”
“What difference is that?” she queried.
“Mrs. Montgomery, even ten-pound babies do not
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turn over.” The doctor was amazed at this tiny treasure. “She is a gifted child. She not only has strength, but the intelligence to go far in life.”
Jane Montgomery, still worried over the health of her daughter, wondered. “I hesitated to believe it,” she stated in regard to the doctor’s prognostication, “but as time went by, she proved her ability.”
By the age of three, Elizabeth displayed several abilities. One of those was reading the Sunday newspaper. Jane Montgomery marveled at how her daughter would ask her questions about current events, like the time she wanted to understand the conflict differences between the United Kingdom and Hong Kong.
“I’m trying to explain to a three-year-old that Hong Kong belongs to the British government,” her mother recalled with a sense of exasperation and exhilaration.
Jane was one of six Montgomery children. The family lived a fun, carefree life of family get-togethers, outdoor barbecues, and sporting activities. As Elizabeth grew older, she began to develop into a beautiful young woman. She parlayed her beauty into several modeling jobs in and around Massachusetts. She also became an accomplished athlete. Her specialty was long-distance running.
At the age of seventeen, Elizabeth had learned to speak French fluently. She hoped that one day she would be able to study in Paris.
Elizabeth Montgomery always set high standards for herself. She never seemed satisfied. She was not disap-pointed with herself; she just always seemed to want more. Elizabeth was an excellent student. After high school, she was accepted to Wesleyan University. At the same time, she began to date Paul Cronin Jr., son of the Cronin family who owned the Massachusetts-based Grover-Cronin retail chain
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stores. The stores were hugely successful clothing and general stores that made the Cronins very wealthy. Paul junior was in line to take over the company one day. He asked Elizabeth to marry him, and she agreed.
After graduation from college, Elizabeth and Paul moved to Houston, Texas, in late 1979. The plan was to take jobs working for the Houston-based clothing store Palais Royal so they could learn the ropes of running a major successful business and then return home to Massachusetts and run the family business. Paul also allegedly offered to purchase a horse ranch for Elizabeth as an en-ticement to travel halfway across the country.
Once they arrived, Elizabeth learned that the horse ranch deal had fallen through. Instead, she simply was hired at Palais Royal and also enrolled in graduate school at the University of Houston.
Elizabeth spoke with her mother every week. During one phone conversation, after she had been in Texas for a while, she told her mother, “Texas is great! Texas is wonderful! I love it here!”
Her mother, a tried-and-true Bostonian, asked her in a gruff manner, “What the hell is so great about Texas?” Elizabeth, with a hint of a smile in her voice, replied,
“A Texan stands tall in his boots!”
Not long after Elizabeth and Paul arrived in Texas, Elizabeth knew something was wrong. Official police reports indicate that Paul had a severe drinking problem. It was so bad that Elizabeth broke off the engagement and kicked her fiancé out of their apartment. Paul eventually packed up his bags and returned to Massachusetts. He checked himself into a rehabilitation clinic in an attempt to sober up.
By 1981, twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Montgomery was finally starting to realize that things in her life were all
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right. She met another man, and much to her mother’s chagrin, she got engaged to him as well. She and her fiancé, thirty-two-year-old truck driver Willis “Bill” Daigle, shared an apartment together at the Pasada del Rey Apartments on the 6200 block of Marinette Drive, near Sharpstown Mall. They were engaged to be married the following summer. While it would be Montgomery’s first marriage, it would be Daigle’s third.
According to Elizabeth’s coworker, Elizabeth and Bill’s relationship was a tempestuous one. Elizabeth believed that Bill had cheated on her several times while he was out on the road. In retaliation, Elizabeth allegedly slept with three or four men while Bill was away. It was not the healthiest of relationships.
On Saturday, September 12, 1981, Elizabeth was at her apartment with Bill. She decided to slip outside and walk her two white dogs. She had the larger dog on an eighty-five-inch leash. The smaller dog was not restrained.
It was just after midnight.
She spoke with a neighbor in the parking lot, who complained about her letting the dogs take care of their business in the apartment courtyard. Daigle heard the encounter and stepped outside. He told Montgomery to take her pets over to a nearby grassy knoll near the street.
Daigle walked back inside and left the door open. He wanted to get ready for a good night’s sleep. Suddenly he was startled by a shrill noise of “Bill! Oh God, Bill!” Then he heard a piercing screech of “He’s got a knife!” “I heard her scream when she got into the courtyard and
I ran out there,” Daigle recalled. Montgomery stumbled toward him. At first Daigle noticed she did not have the smaller dog with her. The next thing he noticed was the color red. Elizabeth clutched her throat as blood seeped
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through her lithe fingers. He grabbed her and pulled her into their apartment. The large white dog and Daigle’s weimaraner began to attack each other. Daigle separated the dogs but stopped when Montgomery slumped onto him.
“She finished bleeding to death in my arms.”
Elizabeth Montgomery had been stabbed in the heart with a knife. The single infliction killed her.
Suzi Wolf, born in 1959, was the third of four daughters born to parents John and Romaine. Her father, John, was an attractive, outgoing man who had been a star athlete at Bay City Central High School. He even landed a tem-porary career as a semipro football player. Romaine loved to play cards with the men in the Wolf family when they gathered together in Suzi’s grandmother’s old wooden white house.
Two years after Suzi was born, disaster struck. Soon after giving birth to her fourth daughter, Michelle, Romaine Wolf suffered a severe stroke. The debilitating attack left Romaine severely disabled with immobility and slurred speech. In essence, Romaine lost most of her motor skills. Suzi’s oldest sister, Judy, who was ten years older than Suzi, took over the maternal role in the Wolf family. Judy took care of Suzi, Michelle, and their other sister, Barb. In addition, she also became the housekeeper for her father. Her father developed an unusual habit of sleeping all day and sometimes not waking up until six o’clock on certain nights. It was not because of work
either.
Despite the heavy workload, Judy relished the opportunity to help the family. She had a special affinity for Suzi.
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“She was my baby,” Judy told her cousin and
Min-nesota Star-Tribune
reporter, Larry Werner. “She’d take one of those little fat hands of hers and she’d put them on my face when I’d cry because I was feeling sorry for myself and she’d say, ‘Don’t cry, Judy, don’t cry.’ She was really just a delightful child.”
Suzi developed a voracious appetite for life and ex-ploration at an early age. She started with vicarious travels through books. Oftentimes she would head over to the public library and grab piles and piles of reading material.
As she got older, she would live out several of the adventures she read about.
“She was kind of a crazy kid,” her sister Judy recalled. “She was sweet. Rarely difficult. She was kind of a people person.”
Two of the people she became closest to were her best friends, Keri Murphy and Lori Bukowski. Lori recalled that Suzi loved to dance and loved the Rolling Stones. Suzi and Keri definitely gathered no moss.
After high-school graduation, Suzi headed out west to California with a friend of hers. Suzi marveled at the Pa-cific Ocean. She told Keri that she loved standing in the sand looking out upon the vast expanse of the ocean on one side, then turning around and seeing the beautiful, lush green mountains behind her. Suzi loved California, but was not such a big fan of the state’s inhabitants. She came back to Michigan.
Suzi and Keri were ready for something more. The two free spirits set out to see the country. Their first stop was Ypsilanti, Michigan, just six-and-a-half miles southeast of Ann Arbor. It was the first time that either girl had their own apartment; the first time they were responsible for their own well-being; the first time they were on their own.
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And they loved it.
Keri Murphy recalled their first Thanksgiving meal together that year. Neither girl could cook. They traded ideas about how to fix the turkey, including putting it into a plastic bag and cooking it in the dishwasher. They opted for the turkey in the brown-bag trick. They placed the festive bird in a brown grocery bag and placed it into the oven at 335°. Only problem was, it was already 11:00
A
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M
. and the girls had no idea how long it took to cook a turkey. After a few hours of waiting, Suzi declared that she was already hungry. To alleviate this problem, she pulled a chicken pot pie out of the freezer, placed it in the oven alongside the turkey, and turned the temperature up to 450°. The increase in temperature ignited the paper bag which, in turn, ignited the turkey. The girls realized they needed to put the fire out, grabbed the near-est container—of salt. They poured the contents of the salt dispenser all over the flaming bird. In the process, they created turkey jerky for their holiday celebration. The girls also got fired for the first time in their lives while in Ypsilanti. They both secured jobs at the small local airport as part of a nighttime cleaning crew. They were assigned to clean the outside windows of the control tower, as well as at least thirty offices every night. Keri enjoyed freaking out the air traffic controllers, who were already a little high-strung as it was, by wrapping her legs around the tower pole, instead of using a secured wire, while cleaning the windows. The windows were at least
four stories high.
One night while Keri cleaned the tower windows, Suzi called up to Keri to give her the keys. Keri reached in her pocket, grabbed the keys, and dropped them down to Suzi, not quite understanding distance, weight, and ve-locity. Suzi failed to catch the keys, which rocketed to the
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concrete below. They were bent in the process. Subsequently the girls could not get into the offices to clean them that night. They called their boss up at home and explained the situation to him. He drove to the airport, and instead of giving them backup keys, he gave them their walking papers.
Suzi and Keri took their pink slips and converted them into travel vouchers. They were restless and eager to leave their home state. They heard from friends that Houston, Texas, was the place to be. Jobs were plentiful and the weather was much better than in Michigan. In February 1981, they took off in an old beat-up van.
Instead of making the 1,330-mile trek in two or three days, the girls decided to venture onward. They made a stop in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where they camped out under the stars. They eventually made their way down to the beaches of Florida, where they camped out and slept on the beach for a week.
Suzi was determined to sleep underneath the stars with the sound of waves crashing at her feet. She informed Keri that she was going to sleep in her sleeping bag.
The following morning Keri was startled awake by screams coming from Suzi. When Keri ran to her to find out what had happened, she stopped, stared at her friend, and began to burst into laughter. Suzi was covered with hundreds of snails, which had sought out the warmth of her sleeping bag. The freaked-out Suzi could not help but join her best friend in laughing.
They made it all the way to Houston. “Just kind of an adventure led us down here. No plans,” Keri recalled.
They moved in together into the Louisville Apartments on the 9200 block of Clarewood Street, one block north of Bellaire Boulevard. The girls immediately landed jobs as waitresses at Pizza Hut. The free spirits resumed
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their partying ways, but they quickly fell on hard times. Despite what they had heard, President Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economic theory seemed to bypass the girls and most other middle-and lower-class Houstonites. The girls bickered about bills. Mainly, Keri was mad because Suzi was not contributing. It got so bad that Suzi moved out and moved in with her boyfriend, Michael Bogh, in the same apartment complex. Eventually that did not work out because, according to another friend, Karen Mankiewicz, Bogh allegedly hit her. Wolf moved in with Mankiewicz, who also lived in the Louisville Apartments complex, on September 5, 1981. By this time Suzi and Keri no longer spoke to one another.