Killer In The Pews

By John Ellis

A horrific and mysterious series of events starts to unravel around the life of Special Agent Richard Haley with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. Along with his partner, Terri Waters, they determine that not only are these events tied to the church that he has attended for years but also that the culprit could be someone that no one would have ever suspected. The investigation not only affects his church but will also ultimately consume his entire family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639856909

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 John Ellis

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books, Inc.

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2022

This is a work of fiction. Although its form is that of an autobiography, it is not one. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s.

ISBN 978-1-63985-689-3 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63985-690-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter 1

The creators of nightmares and the merchants of fear. Maybe you have heard of them. Ted Bundy, the Craigslist Killer, John Wayne Gacy, or the I-70 Strangler just to name a few. Do these names sound familiar? They are all people that walked among their neighbors, families, and friends for years without anyone having a clue about them. By all accounts, they were completely normal with the exception of one thing. They killed people. They killed multiple people. Throughout history, there have been what seems like an endless number of examples related to seeing people on a regular basis and not realizing the demons that were living inside of them. They were out among us, living their daily lives. They were at the grocery store in line with us, the gym, the park, the church, and more. Then an event or a series of events causes them to lose control, and they can no longer contain those demons. Once the demons take control, then several lives are affected. Those that are killed and those that survive. This is just another example that can be added to that list in a story of multiple cases being linked to one single source of evil living under the disguise of righteousness.

I will begin with my name is Richard Haley, and I am a special agent with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation assigned to Special Operations in Raleigh, North Carolina. Helping to protect a state of one hundred counties and over ten million people has its rewards and challenges, but I would not trade the job for any other one. I am telling this story at the request of my two daughters, M. J. and Paige, who have asked me to make a record of some of my strangest cases so that they will have them and one day be able to share them with others. This is the first of many.

To start, let me tell a little about me. I am a North Carolina native born in Fayetteville, close to Fort Bragg, home of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. My father, who was from Tennessee, was a sergeant in the United States Army who instilled the values of protecting our country and its citizens to my sisters and I at a very young age. My mother, from South Carolina, was an insurance agent with a local agency who was a star at keeping us all together even when my father was deployed. My parents had their hands full with my three sisters and I, but they did an amazing job considering where the four of us are today. In my youth, my father and I would go hunting and camping as often as possible. Although I did not realize it at the time, he was preparing me for the job that I would love and excel in for the rest of my life.

In my high school years, during the summer, I would pick tobacco to earn extra money and then go to football practice after that. I was blessed to have a great group of teachers, coaches, and friends in high school which made it a great time. After high school, I decided that college was not right for me at the time, so I enlisted in the United States Navy and was stationed at Nimitz Operational Intelligence Center in Suitland, Maryland, as an intelligence specialist.

My responsibilities were to assist in every phase of the collection, processing, and dissemination of intelligence information. I would also assemble and analyze multisource operational intelligence of surface, subsurface, and air weapons in support of intelligence briefings, reporting, and analytical programs. Just a few of my other responsibilities were to prepare and present intelligence briefings, prepare material for use in planning an attack and photographic reconnaissance missions, prepare graphics, plot and prepare multi-sensor imagery, and draft intelligence reports. After a few years, while I was in the navy, I realized that I did want to further my education, so I also started working on my criminal justice degree which I obtained remotely from Western Carolina University.

After I completed my enlistment in the navy as a petty officer first class, I moved back to North Carolina and settled in Knightdale, which is located just to the east of the Raleigh city limits. I started with the Raleigh Police Department in June of 1991, assigned to the northeast district. At the time, that was mostly a rural area that has now exploded with growth over the years. In October of that same year, at the North Carolina State Fair, I met the most beautiful woman that I had ever laid my eyes on. Her name was Stephanie Brady, and she was working in the emergency tent when I escorted an elderly man there that was feeling lightheaded from extensive walking in a large crowd. She was five feet eight inches tall, had blond hair and blue eyes as well as a smile that put everyone around her at ease. She was a registered nurse at Capital Medical Center, and her very presence commanded the room. I was blown away by how she took care of the patient and just put him at ease. He was fine within just a few minutes, and she thanked me for helping the man make it to the tent. For the rest of the evening, all that I could think about was her.

When the State Fair was closing, I went back to the medical tent and volunteered to walk her to her car. The temperature had already dropped down to the low thirties, so I offered her my jacket since it was a little heavier than the one that she was wearing. When we arrived at the vehicle, I asked her if she would like to meet for coffee later that week, and she agreed. A few days later, we met for coffee, and we just had a connection. We started dating shortly after that, and it turned out that she was from Hope Mills, North Carolina, which is only about ten miles from Fayetteville. She had graduated from East Carolina University and was also an All-American in cross country. About two months into our dating relationship, we introduced each other to our respective families. My mother and sisters fell in love with Stephanie almost immediately. My father just put his arm across my shoulders and winked. Her mother and I did not really get along because we both had different ideas as it relates to a future in law enforcement. Regardless of that, six months later, I asked Stephanie to marry me, and she said yes. In March of 1993, we were married at her home church in Hope Mills. After a honeymoon in the Caribbean, we came back home and started on the greatest path that I could have ever imagined.

In April of 1995, I was promoted to detective, working primarily in the intelligence unit. It was then that I was partnered with Detective Theresa (Terri) Waters. Terri was originally from Harrisonburg in Northern Virginia. She had been married to her high school sweetheart, Paul, who was tragically killed in a car accident on New Year’s Day of 1989. She then joined the United States Marine Corps, finishing her enlistment at Camp Lejeune. She fell in love with the area and joined the Onslow County Sheriff’s Department once her enlistment was complete. She quickly became a valuable asset within their department in the areas of fighting cybercrimes and also serving as the department’s hand-to-hand combat instructor. In November of 1994, she was at a workshop in Raleigh when she was recruited by the Raleigh Police Department. She joined the department two months later as a detective, and it was the best thing that could have happened to me professionally as she has always been a reliable and trustworthy partner. We have had each other’s back ever since. She lived in Garner, right outside of Raleigh, with her two Great Danes, Semper and Fi.

In June of 1996, my oldest daughter, Melissa Jo—she prefers M. J.—was born, and I thought that life could not get any better than this. That was until September of 2001 when my second daughter, Paige, was born. Stephanie had left the hospital and had taken a nurse supervisor position at Wake Medical Group so that her schedule would be more of an eight to five Monday through Friday. As the girls got older, our lives got busier. Both girls were involved in your normal kid’s activities such as cheerleading, dance, and both developed a love for tae kwon do. They both had achieved their first-degree black belt by the age of fifteen. The only time that I recall that they had to use it was when some bullies were harassing their cousin Michael at the park. Michael had been born deaf, and he was staying with us for a month one summer while his parents were working abroad. The boys were mocking him when M. J. and Paige came along. It did not end well for the bullies who came out of it with bruises, and one had a broken nose, but honestly, I was fine with that.

In June of 2014, Terri left the Raleigh Police Department to become a special agent with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. She was assigned to the Raleigh branch, so we still saw each other from time to time as she was close to my wife and godmother to my two daughters. My children will always refer to her as Aunt Terri. She was recruiting me every time that we were together, so in February of 2016, after lengthy soul-searching and conversations with Stephanie, M. J., and Paige, I made the change and joined the bureau. Luck would have it that I was assigned to the Raleigh office, so there would not be any relocation for my family, and that I was also partnered with Terri.

By this time, M. J. had already graduated from high school and was working on her education to be a hairstylist. She was also in a pretty serious dating relationship with Robert Williams who was two years older than she was but had already started his own construction company. I never really liked the boys that my daughters chose to date, but Bobby seemed like a keeper. Paige was a high school sophomore enjoying life and working part-time at Johnny’s, which was a local fifties style diner in Knightdale, so staying at her school and her job was very important to her.

This now brings us to the events that led to the story at hand. There were three different cases that eventually would all tie together in a way that I never would have imagined, nor would I ever forget. We started attending our local church, Faith Community, in April of 1994. It was a small church of approximately 250 members when we started. It had a brick exterior, and it was a two-level building. On the top level was the sanctuary, the office, three classrooms, the nursery, and a bathroom. On the lower level was a larger room along with four classrooms and a prayer chapel. Also on the property was a side building that was once the parsonage. It had been remodeled to have a large multipurpose room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and another classroom with storage. The church’s cemetery was also on the property, which contained several graves of people that had been related to current members, showing a long history of families that had belonged to the church .

Stephanie was always more involved with the church than I was as she went on mission trips, assisted with the children’s ministry, and sang in the choir while I was more of the crowd that would attend when they could but did not really get involved in the works of the church. Both of our daughters were baptized there and grew up attending on a regular basis with Stephanie. Overtime, as Knightdale grew, so did the church, and like all churches, they had turnover in the pastor’s position. The church had grown to a membership of over five hundred people. Plans were being made to build a new location, but the pastor of the last ten years, Keith Anson, was retiring. In June of 2016, the church welcomed its newest pastor, Bryan Graves, his wife, Lisa, and their five-year-old daughter, Courtney.

Bryan was from Indiana, in his midthirties, about six feet eight inches tall, and had graduated from Central Indiana University with an electrical engineering degree while on a basketball scholarship. He had met Lisa during his freshmen year. After graduation, he decided to go into the ministry and obtained his pastoral credentials from Gethsemane Theological Seminary in Indiana. Lisa was from Michigan and had graduated with a political science degree from Grandview University, which was about a thirty-minute drive from Central Indiana. She was an incredible athlete that participated in local, state, and even national triathlons. As a matter of fact, on a side note, I had gone bike riding with her once, and it almost killed me while she seemed to be able to ride forever. After Bryan finished his requirements at Gethsemane, they were married, and Bryan took an assistant pastor position at a church in Humboldt, Tennessee. That is where Courtney was born, and they were there until the position became available at Faith Community.

After their arrival at Faith Community, Stephanie and Lisa hit it off almost immediately, and Paige would babysit Courtney on occasion. We would get together for dinner and other activities from time to time. We got to know each other fairly well. Bryan had a fixation for crime dramas that he would see on television, and he would pick my brain occasionally on just how realistic the shows actually were. Lisa had taken a job as a senior aide to United States Senator Thomas Rawlings in his Raleigh office. Out of both of them, she appeared to be the dominant one in the relationship, and she was most certainly a type A personality.

Like I stated earlier, the church was increasing in membership and outgrowing its current location, so the decision had been made by the congregation to build a new facility that would enable the church to hold its growing numbers as well as be able to also offer additional ministries and programs to the community. Bryan wanted me to be involved in the process, so he asked me to offer feedback on security in the new building. I offered what little time that I had and told him that I would make what recommendations that I thought would work.

On a Saturday morning in March of 2017, Stephanie received a call that the Sunday school coordinator had died in a boating accident while fishing on Falls Lake. His name was David Crowder, and he was the information technology director for the Town of Rolesville, which is located just northeast of Raleigh. He was only about three years away from retirement. I did not know him very well as we had only a few casual conversations at church events mostly dealing with college athletics. I was impressed by the knowledge that he displayed about so many different players regardless of what school they were playing for.

The morning of the accident, he had taken his Pond Prowler ten-foot fishing boat with its Minn Kota twenty-four-volt trolling motor on the water around dawn. David had been a lifelong fisherman and knew the lake like the back of his hand, so he did not have a life jacket with him. The park ranger was making his rounds to unlock the rest of the gates, and when he returned to the fishing dock, he saw the boat engine was on fire, and David was lying facedown in the water between the boat and the dock. The ranger dove into the water and swam David back to the dock. After pulling David out of the water, the ranger attempted to revive David with mouth-to-mouth. His attempts were unsuccessful as David was already gone.

The ranger found his life jacket in the back of his truck. The consensus was that David’s boat engine had shorted out because of a faulty connection with the battery, which caused a spark. He must have jumped out of the boat. He thought that he could swim back to shore but did not make it. There was also alcohol involved as evidenced by the open containers in his truck and the boat. Since the death was determined to be an accident, the only investigation would be to determine what happened with the boat. It was sent to our crime lab in Raleigh, but it could be weeks before any determination was made.

Bryan officiated the funeral, and since I was off duty, I attended out of respect for David and his family. After the funeral, Bryan invited me back to his office to look at some ideas that he had for security cameras in the building and parking lot at the new facility. I had never been in the pastor’s office before, and as I was walking down the hall, I felt like a high school kid walking to the principal’s office all the while telling myself that I had done nothing wrong. His office was what you would think as typical for a pastor. On the shelves were books on subjects such as discipleship and church leadership. He also had pictures of his wife and daughter as well as art that Courtney had done. There was a picture of he and Lisa scuba diving down in Florida as well as a picture of an older couple who I assumed to be his parents, with an engraved plate at the bottom that simply read Matthew 5:30. He also had some team pictures from his high school and college days. I asked, Which one are you? And he responded with Number forty-five because it has always been my number. That was definitely the truth because he was wearing the number forty-five in each picture. We looked at the notes that he had written and then went out to the building site to start looking for blind spots that would exist based upon his notes.

When we were done, I had to leave to meet Terri so that we could go over some notes for a presentation that we were doing the next day. The presentation would be on investigating fraud for cadets at the Raleigh Police Academy. We had remained close with Chief Rhodes from our days with the department, and he often asked us back to do various investigative presentations.

The next afternoon, Terri and I had completed the presentation as well as the question-and-answer session around four. She had a softball game that evening, and Stephanie had asked me to join her for a visit to take food to David’s widow, Karan. I wished Terri luck, and I drove by the house to pick up Stephanie, and we headed toward Smithfield Road in Knightdale. They lived just south of town in a less developed area. There were only five houses within a three-mile stretch, and their house was around two hundred yards from the road, on a wooded lot. It was a two-story brick home with immaculate landscaping and a pool in the backyard. I estimated that it was around two thousand eight hundred square feet with a three-car garage. We went up to the house, rang the doorbell, and their daughter Amanda answered the door. Amanda was around twenty-five years old, slender build with blond hair. She also had a small birth mark on the right side of her neck. She was down from Buffalo, New York, where she worked as a pharmacist for Walmart. She invited us in and took us to her mother who was sitting in the living room with their French poodle, Cookie.

Karan was in her midfifties, with red hair and a pleasant personality. Stephanie gave Karan a hug and then told her about the heating instructions for the lasagna that she had prepared. I extended my sympathy, and Karan proceeded to tell us about David since neither Stephanie nor I knew him other than from church. David was from Henderson, North Carolina, and a graduate of North Carolina State University with a degree