He Buried My Mother By A Blue
Motel
Feature Story Phoenix
Magazine, April 2006
In June, we told the story of
Loretta Bowersock, a well known woman who mysteriously disappeared in December
2004, presumably at the hands of her longtime boyfriend. Thirteen months later,
her body was found, and, as it turns out, the psychics were right – she was
buried by something blue.
It was exactly what she had
seen in her dream – the same nightmare she had had three days after her mother
went missing in December 2004. There was the sand dune to the right, and
another at the foot of the grave.
When Terri Bowersock finally
stood at that place 13 months after Loretta Bowersock’s murder, she turned to a
friend and said, “I described it to a ‘T.'”
Along with the familiarity
came the relief in knowing that the rest of her dream hadn’t been true: If
coyotes had actually tried to get at the body buried beneath the sand and rock,
they surely left disappointed. Although Terri’s dream had them nipping at her
fingertips, the once-beautiful woman who had been double-wrapped in black
landscaping tarp and buried 18 inches under the sand and rocks never suffered
that indignity.
For the last year or so,
Terri had resigned herself to the belief that her mother’s body had been
hastily buried, leaving it exposed enough to be devoured, with the bones
scattered across a lonely spot on the Arizona desert. So it was comforting to
learn how much care had gone into the burial. “There was some love in how she
was buried,” Terri says generously, referring to her mother’s killer.
Less comforting, however, was
learning how her mother had died – a plastic bag from the produce department of
a local grocery store was still over Loretta’s head when the body was found.
She had been suffocated.
Like everyone else, Terri
heard the news of her mother’s discovery during a live press conference from
Florence, which is where the body was originally taken. She’d gotten lost on
her way to Florence, and, regrettably, kept the press waiting. So, when
officers offered to brief her prior to the press conference, she declined. “No,
everyone’s been waiting… let’s just do this.”
If you were watching, and
much of Arizona was watching because the announcement came in the midst of the
evening newscast, you saw her flinch in pain as an officer announced the cause
of death. Terri had always believed the psychics who’d predicted that her
mother was hit over the head and died instantly, never knowing what had happened
and never feeling any pain. “That really got me,” she admits.
Inside the Florence
stationhouse, Terri looked for some reassurance from the officers.
“Suffocation. That’s quick, right?”
If ever there were a time to
be merciful and lie, this would have been one of those times. But the Florence
police officers told the truth – it takes an eternity to enter eternity when
you’re being smothered. Four or five minutes, maybe, and all the while, there’s
no air; all the while, the victim knows she’s dying; and all the while, she’s
looking at her murderer. It’s an agonizing death. It’s a torment that Terri
will have to live with for the rest of her life.
It was the kind of murder
you’d never expect: Loretta Bowersock, a successful 69-year-old businesswoman,
always beautifully dressed, always with impressive diamonds decorating her
graceful hands, turns up missing and presumed dead at the hands of her charming
live-in boyfriend of 18 years. She was found without shoes, leading police to
believe she was most likely killed in the large, beautiful Tempe home she
shared with Taw Benderly – the same home that was filled with treasures from
yard sales and second-hand stores.
She had the house and the
first hints of success before Benderly came into her life nearly two decades
earlier. By then, she and her daughter Terri had founded a consignment company
that would make them rich and locally famous.
Terri’s Consign & Design
Furnishings became the kind of success story that’s devoured by the press – a
dyslectic daughter, with the help of her mother and a $2,000 loan from her
maternal grandmother, create a business based on “gently used” home
furnishings. Oprah noticed the story and featured Terri on her show; Avon
noticed and gave her its “Woman of Enterprise Award”; and the state of Arizona
noticed and named Terri the state’s top businesswoman. Her smile and bubbly
personality were featured on countless television ads over the years, and she
became a generous supporter of community causes. And, through it all, Terri always
credited her mother for a lifetime of love, support and help.
So, when news came that
Terri’s mother was missing on December 14, 2004, it felt like a family tragedy
to all kinds of people around the Valley. And it had such a vexing mystery to
it – she’d just vanished. Almost immediately, police suspected that she’d been
buried somewhere in the desert between Phoenix and Tucson.
Benderly tried to pass off a
story that he’d dropped Loretta at a Tucson mall to do some Christmas shopping,
and that she hadn’t showed up for their prearranged rendezvous, but that story
quickly fell apart.
Police traced his movements
that day, which began with the withdrawal of $24,000 from the joint checking
account he shared with Loretta at a Tempe bank. That took place at 9:20 a.m. He
then left town and headed east on I-10 in his red Chrysler minivan.
Police determined that he
spent 2 hours and 15 minutes covering the few miles between exits 198 and 200
off I-10: At 11 a.m., he used his credit card to purchase two baseball caps at
the Casa Grande outlet mall, which is located at Exit 198. At 12:30 p.m., he
made cell phone calls from somewhere off of Exit 199. Then, at 1:15 p.m., he
purchased two lunches at Love’s Truck Stop, which is located at Exit 200.
Police were convinced that he
had spent those 135 minutes picking and shoveling a shallow grave to stash
Loretta’s body. And even though Terri confronted him directly, Benderly
insisted that he didn’t know where her mother was. All he knew, he said, was
that he and her mother had promised to spend eternity together.
On December 22, without
leaving a note to guide Terri to her mother’s grave, without leaving any clues
to help end the anguish of everyone left behind, Taw Benderly hung himself in
the garage of the house he’d shared with Loretta.
Only later, as she got access
to her mother’s house, was Terri exposed to the amazing secrets that lurked
inside that seemingly ideal home. Only then did she realize that Taw Benderly
had stolen her mother’s identity and racked up tens of thousands of dollars of
bills on credit cards issued in her name. Only then did she find he’d embezzled
tens of thousands of dollars of Loretta’s money. Only then did she discover
that the house was about to be repossessed because Benderly had been stealing the
mortgage payments for months.
Terri had long been
suspicious of Benderly, and she was convinced that he had talked her mother
into a painful lawsuit over the consignment business they’d started – a lawsuit
the mother and daughter spent years learning to get over. She knew he was a
blow-hard about the “inventions” he was always tinkering with – always
promising that he was on the verge of a breakthrough. She knew because he was
always begging her for secret loans. But she’d never considered him a physical
threat to her mother.
Only later would she learn
from her mother’s sisters that Loretta had wanted out of the relationship for a
long time. “But my mother’s generation believed in standing by their man – they
aren’t women who want to be alone,” Terri says. If only… Terri wonders. If only
her mother had followed her instincts and left him. If only her mother hadn’t
been afraid of being alone.
The day Benderly hung
himself, Terri and her friends spent 12 hours searching the desert for her
mother’s body. Police had pinpointed the most likely area, based on the clues
they’d pieced together. The search party, however, returned again and again,
sometimes accompanied by strangers so touched by news reports, they just had to
help.
There were the snowbirds from
Michigan and the retired state trooper who showed up out of the blue. Indians
from the nearby reservation showed everyone how to systematically search an
area, while two guys arrived with their private helicopters. A Florida couple
searched during their Arizona vacation, and there was Jeramiah, who left a
handwritten note in the desert on the back of a cardboard box: “I’m willing to
look under any avenue or cactus yet unturned. I will march thru hell to help.”
“I never went out on the
desert alone,” Terri says with gratitude and wonderment. “When they found the
body, I asked, ‘What two miles of the desert did I miss?'”
As it turned out, they’d been
searching eight miles too far east. And Terri will forever be convinced that if
she’d driven those extra eight miles, she’d have realized where the body had to
be, because so many psychics had given a crucial clue.
The psychics were drawn to
the case early on, some saying they “saw” the murder, some saying they “saw”
the grave. “When you don’t have any other answers, it was comforting to hear
from them,” Terri says. She followed every clue – except the one that never
materialized.
“The psychics kept saying a
‘blue truck,’ or a ‘blue car’ – they always saw something blue where my mother
was buried,” she remembers. There never was a blue truck or blue car in the
desert where they searched for a year. But eight miles down the road was an
abandoned motel. Its roof is blue. And it has an old gas station that’s painted
blue. What’s more, there’s a blue water tower behind it, and in the yard is a
forsaken blue truck.
Terri’s convinced that her
mother’s killer had scoped out this spot long before the day he arrived with a
body to bury. “If you pulled into the motel, you had to drive around to the
back,” she says. “There’s an old road, and once you’re out there, it’s so
secluded that no one could see you. It’s a miracle she was found. I always
thought that eventually somebody would be building and find her body, but
nobody was ever going to build out there.”
In the end, hikers found the
body when they kicked at a rock and exposed a part of Loretta’s skull. That was
January 11. The next day, police called Terri at work, cautiously telling her
that they’d found a body and it might be her mother.
“I got excited, but I’ve been
out so often and come home so depressed, I tried to stay calm,” Terri recalls.
She’d just gone through a big disappointment on December 13, the one-year
anniversary of when police believe Loretta was murdered. A truck driver called
to report that a year earlier “he’d seen a red van like Taw’s on the road right
where we had been searching,” Terri says. “I thought it was a sign from God.”
But it wasn’t, and she
figured this call from the police might turn out to be one more disappointment.
By the next day, though, tests proved that the body was Loretta’s.
“It’s a little bit comforting
that he didn’t just toss her out,” Terri says. “There was love and hate in that
relationship. He buried her to save her and protect her.”
The memorial service was
filled with laughter and love and hundreds of pictures to attest to the lovely
woman who was Loretta Jean McJilton Bowersock. There was one of Loretta holding
baby Terri and another of Loretta and Terri in one of their favorite places – a
beach in Hawaii, where Terri and her brother, Scott, intend to spread their
mother’s ashes. There’s even a picture of Loretta and Taw on the trip they’d
taken to Alaska with Terri in the fall of 2004.
About 100 friends and
coworkers came to mark Loretta’s memorial, including many who’d scoured the desert
for the body and several of the psychics who’d tried to help. They paged
through several photo albums that were put together to show the happy times.
And then there was the final album with the sad pictures. The gravesite. The
rocks. The blue motel. The mementos found on the searches, including Jeramiah’s
cardboard note.
The Reverend Kathryn McDowell
looked out over the crowd: “Quite a village has been built around this
situation,” she said. And then she glanced over at Terri: “The essence of who
Loretta was is alive in Terri.”
“The things I got to learn
this year were absolutely phenomenal,” Terri said.
In that year, she founded a
new business in honor of her mother. It’s called Still N Style, and it sits
next to her consignment store at Elliott and Hardy in Tempe. It’s still under
construction, but this is where the memorial was held, amid the particleboard
shelves yet to be painted and the drywall yet to be textured.
She plans to make Still N
Style a fashion and home décor store that also will serve as a donation center
for Doves, a Phoenix home that’s noted for being the nation’s first shelter for
elderly victims of domestic violence (see Jana’s View, page 40).
Terri is still shattered by
the realization that her mother was a victim of domestic violence. “Domestic
violence isn’t just getting hit or beat up,” she says now, with a new
understanding of the issue. “Abuse is stealing your identity. Abuse is taking
your money. Abuse is turning you away from your daughter.”
Taw Benderly did all of those
things to Loretta, who often told her daughter, “I’m too old to start over.”
Terri is convinced there are
many women out there just like her mother. Women who are afraid of being alone
or ashamed of the abuse they’re silently suffering. She hopes to help them
realize that it isn’t too late, and she hopes younger women learn to cherish
their own identity and assure their own security.
Time will tell. Meanwhile,
Terri spends a lot of time talking to her mother. “I hear her voice all the
time,” she says. “When you love someone, you’re always talking to them.”
Sometimes, Terri says, her mother answers back.
“I asked her once, ‘Are you
with Taw?’ and she answered, ‘Oh no, he’s on another level.'”