Part 16 (2/2)

On the morning of June 5, he spoke by telephone with his friend and neighbor, Mabel Lowe,* who fixed Andrew his late-afternoon supper most days. Lowe would remember McIntyre saying he felt stronger, better.

Later in the day, he went into town to buy a get-well card for his ailing pastor, and also mailed an RSVP for his grand-daughter's wedding in three weeks. Also on his forward calendar was another granddaughter's dance recital on June 18, and the father-son dinner scheduled for the eighth at his church.

At about 5:30 that afternoon, McIntyre spoke by telephone with his daughter Carla,* who lived nearby with her husband. Dad seemed in good spirits to Carla.

His next reported contact was a brief conversation with Mabel Lowe. The two spoke for maybe half an hour in the alley between their houses. Andrew inquired about Mabel's eye, which had been bothering her. She a.s.sured him it was better.

About ninety minutes later, around 8:00, Lowe heard again from McIntyre, by telephone. Once again he asked about her eye, which seemed odd to Lowe, and he made no reply whatsoever when she explained again, that her eye was okay. In retrospect, Mabel Lowe believes Andrew McIntyre was trying to send her some sort of signal with the call.

Joyce McIntyre was scheduled to leave on a business trip the next morning. That evening she expected her father to call her as he always did just to say, ”Have a good trip! I'll be praying for you.”

When she did not hear from him, she called at approximately 8:15.

No answer.

Joyce then remembered that Wednesday night was prayer meeting night.

Well, he must have felt pretty good tonight, so he went to the prayer meeting, she thought to herself.

She kept calling at half-hour intervals. When her father still wasn't home by 10:00, Joyce guessed that a fellow paris.h.i.+oner had invited him out for a piece of pie, a not unlikely possibility.

However, when her father still did not answer at 11:00, Joyce began to worry. She called Carla at 11:15.

”Have you seen Dad, or talked to him?” she asked.

Carla, who'd been asleep, told Joyce of her 5:30 conversation with their father.

”Well, he's not answering the telephone,” Joyce said.

”Do you want me to drive over and see how he is?” asked her sister. Carla had made similar checks in the past, each time discovering nothing was amiss with their father.

”I don't know,” Joyce said. She considered calling the police, but decided against it.

If they go driving up there with their lights and sirens, it'll frighten him, she thought.

Joyce told Carla she didn't think the trip was necessary.

She continued trying to reach her father for another two hours as she packed for her trip. At one point, she called the local telephone company to ask if there was trouble on the line. Joyce was told that such checks no longer were done.

Finally, trying to put her mind at ease, she hit on a possible explanation.

The previous day, Andrew McIntyre had told his doctor in Joyce's presence that he was having trouble sleeping, and wondered if it was okay for him to take Tylenol PM. The physician had said yes.

Driving home, Joyce had asked her father how many Tylenol PMs he took. Two, he had answered.

”That's what he's done,” she said to herself. ”He's taken two Tylenol PMs and gone sound asleep.”

The next morning at 7:30 Carla telephoned their father. Still no answer. Fifteen minutes later, she arrived at the old family house. The front door was closed but unlocked, which was completely out of character for Andrew McIntyre. His dog was loose in the house, and highly agitated.

Deeply concerned, Carla walked outside to the detached garage, also unlocked. Again, unusual. She opened the door, looked up, and finally found her father. He was dead, hanging by his neck from the rafters.

Andrew McIntyre, dressed in gray trousers, black belt, blue socks, an unders.h.i.+rt, and underwear, still wore his gold wedding ring.

A stepladder stood next to the body. The dead man's shoes rested alongside a box in the front of the garage. His gla.s.ses lay atop it.

His daughter was stunned speechless-”in a state of shock,” she says. Carla was barely aware of telephoning Joyce, or of summoning the police at 7:55 that morning.

The single officer who responded to the call arrived six minutes later. There was no suicide note, and no signs of foul play or physical struggle in the house. After what Carla describes as a perfunctory look around the residence, the officer said, ”Well, it's obvious what happened here,” meaning suicide.

Not to Andrew McIntyre's family. He simply was not the sort of person to kill himself, they believed, and certainly not in the way the police thought McIntyre had killed himself. For one thing, his body was hanging in front of a windowed door, so that anyone pa.s.sing by that morning could easily have seen him.

McIntyre was as private as he was proper. His family knew Dad never would allow himself to be discovered in that way. Moreover, he had been in an automobile accident not long before, and had suffered a shoulder injury which made it very difficult for him to raise one arm above his head. Joyce believed it was physically impossible for her father to have attached the ligature to the rafters unaided.

Yet who could have murdered him? McIntyre had no enemies. There was no evidence of a robbery. No one in the family stood to gain by his death.

Later that day, however, as his children and their families prepared to gather at his house, another possibility was raised. Carla's husband telephoned Joyce to remind his grieving sister-in-law of something she'd shared with the family many months before.

In late 1995, Joyce's then-husband, Mike Jones,* had threatened to kill her father, she claimed. George now reminded Joyce of the incident, and asked her to think about reporting it to the police.

Andrew McIntyre's death overwhelmed Joyce so completely that she hadn't thought of her ex-husband, or the threat, until the moment Carla's husband mentioned it.

Once reminded, however, she needed no time for reflection. ”There's no thinking about it,” she said over the telephone. ”I'll call the police right now.”

”You need to take my father's death very seriously,” Joyce told the police, ”because his life was threatened by my husband.”

The story begins in a restaurant bar.

Joyce was visiting an out-of-town friend, and the two were enjoying a meal together when a strange man several years Joyce's junior ”zoned in on me,” as she puts it. ”He wasn't bad-looking, although he had big ears.”

Joyce was not interested in a relations.h.i.+p. She had married her first husband at age nineteen. Three years later, he died accidentally. A second marriage lasted sixteen years before she filed for divorce. Highly dubious of men under any circ.u.mstances, Joyce had vowed at the time she definitely was through with marriage.

But she hadn't reckoned with the likes of Mike Jones.

That evening, Jones told Joyce and her friend that he was a professional and produced a business card that said so.

The following night, he took both women out to dinner. Then the three of them took a day trip together.

Joyce had hoped Jones would focus his considerable energies on her friend. However, she was hardly home and back to work the next week when Mike started calling, frequently. Soon they were chatting together for three or four hours a night. He told her he'd graduated from a prestigious midwestern private college, and that he was a former soldier with top-security clearance. Mike had the papers and card that seemed to prove these claims, too.

Weekend visits soon began.

”I said I'd never get married again, but I guess he knew what I needed to hear,” says Joyce. ”He played me like a violin.”

Joyce married Mike within months of their first meeting. In retrospect, she says she should have sensed something was a little wrong when none of his relatives or friends attended the wedding.

But Joyce was blinded.

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