Secrets in the Box

It was the spring of 2008. Susan Waller was a detective now. Amateur, of course, pouring over documents, contacting law enforcement.  Obsessed by the idea that her father murdered her mother.

Foolish, perhaps, to think she could solve a case if trained detectives couldn't.

And anyway, her sister, Shana, made it perfectly clear: Susan was not just obsessed, she was wrong.  Dead wrong.

Shana Thomas: My dad would not kill my mother.

What could she do?  Look for a body?  Where? Her father wasn't about to help her; and then, just a few weeks after she had opened the box, an opportunity.

Shana Thomas: He was passed out in his bathtub. 

It was Shana who found the old man like that. Out in his motorhome.  He'd been abusing his body with gallons of booze and an endless stream of cigarette smoke.  Too much for a heart to take. The ambulance came.  He was airlifted, half dead, to the hospital in Las Vegas, where the doctors hooked him up to a tangle of tubes and wires and monitors.

Shana called Susan to let her know.  Least she could do, father dying and all. And Susan?  Called the cops. Persuaded the Las Vegas police to descend on Robert's hospital room and question him - maybe this would be the last chance - about what she, Susan, believed was a murder.

Shana, hearing what Susan was up to, confronted her kid sister.

Shana Thomas: I went ballistic.  I did.  I said, "How dare you send anybody.  He's almost dead.  He's-- he's dying.  What are you doing?

Over Shana's objections, the detectives went to the hospital.

Susan Waller: They said, "Well, we have the luxury of having him connected to a heart monitor machine," and they said every time they asked him about Jan, his machine would go spike way up high.

Keith Morrison: That was like a polygraph?

Susan Waller: Uh-huh (affirm).

Betrayed by a racing heart. Except, Robert Kirkup did not actually confess to anything.

He didn't kill his wife, he told those Las Vegas detectives.  And there was nothing they could do to prove otherwise.

Keith Morrison: So there he was, in that hospital room.  And he was not a well man.

Susan Waller: No.  He was on life support.

Keith Morrison: He was expected to die.

Keith Morrison: So there he was, in that hospital room.  And he was not a well man.

Susan Waller: Uh-huh (affirm).

Keith Morrison: How did that feel?

Susan Waller: Horrible.  Because that would have been it.  It was over.  And I would have never known the truth.

So this prayer for a dying father was perhaps unique.

Susan Waller: "Please, God, let him live.  Please.  Because he needs to pay for what he's done."

And he did!  Live, that is.  Whether by divine intervention or not, Kirkup pulled through.  

Susan Waller: he was released, sent back home.  Or to his motor home, on Shana's property. 

Still, the old man's time was running out.  Susan felt sure of it.  As sure of that as she was desperate that he did not die with his secret intact.

Perhaps one last chance remained.

She packed up the box, and with it, all the information she and her sister sherry and those detectives had  gathered over 16-years, and got in her car and drove to the san bernardino county sheriff's department -- where the very first item in that box, janet's missing person report, had been filed all those years ago.

Susan Waller: And I went up to the front and asked to speak with a detective.

Keith Morrison: Just somebody walking in off the street?

Det. Greg Myler: Just walked in off the street.

Here's the man who came out to see her.  Sheriff's detective Greg Myler.

Det. Greg Myler: She had a case file in her hands.  And she believed her father killed her mother. 

A woman walking in off the street, a case folder 16 years old.  A mother mysteriously vanished.  For Myler, who was part of a newly formed cold case unit, it was perfect.

Det. Greg Myler: Well, her timing was remarkable. We were looking for work.

And that's how the box of documents moved again, migrated from Susan's closet to Greg Myler's desk.

And into his head.

Det. Greg Myler: I read the case. And I told her that I had the same feelings that Robert did in fact kill her mother, Janet. 

Keith Morrison: What would, if anything, ever solve this case?

Det. Greg Myler: A confession.  It needed a confession.  I told her that I was gonna go for it.

Det. Myler now prepared himself to face the old man, vowing not to leave until he found out what happened to Janet. But Robert Kirkup had his own story to tell.  Not necessarily the one that any of them expected to hear. The young detective might learn as much about the mysterious loyalties of sisters as he did about an old man's secret.

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