Love Me or Else: The True Story of a Devoted Pastor, a Fatal Jealousy, and the Murder that Rocked a Small Town

by Colin McEvoy, Lynn Olanoff

Overview

Love Me or Else

Colin McEvoy

On the outside, Mary Jane Fonder seemed like a kindly sixty-six-year-old congregant of the Lutheran church in Springfield Township, PA. But inside, she longed for the church's handsome Pastor Gregory Shreaves, a former golf pro who sparked her most sinful thoughts.

When Mary Jane let her feelings be known, the Pastor gently pushed her away. But her obsession only grew stronger when she became convinced that he was romantically involved with a younger church member, a woman named Rhonda Smith.

Rhonda was doing volunteer work in the church office one day when she was shot to death in cold blood. The trail of evidence led police to Mary Jane, and soon other suspicions were raised: Was she also involved in the mysterious death of her own father fifteen years earlier? This is the shocking true story of love, worship, and murder in one American small town.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466801417
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/28/2012
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	428,921
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Colin McEvoy and Lynn Olanoff are reporters for The Express-Times, a daily newspaper based in Easton, Pennsylvania. They covered the Rhonda Smith murder case extensively and it was during a jailhouse interview with them that Mary Jane Fonder first acknowledged responsibility for her crime. Colin and Lynn have been married since 2008. Lynn is a graduate of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and Colin graduated from East Stroudsburg University in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. They currently reside in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Colin McEvoy and Lynn Olanoff are reporters for The Express-Times, a daily newspaper based in Easton, Pennsylvania. They covered the Rhonda Smith murder case extensively and it was during a jailhouse interview with them that Mary Jane Fonder first acknowledged responsibility for her crime. They wrote about the Fonder case in the St. Martin’s True Crime book, Love Me or Else. Colin and Lynn have been married since 2008. Lynn is a graduate of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and Colin graduated from East Stroudsburg University in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. They currently reside in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Lynn Olanoff and Colin McEvoy are reporters for The Express-Times, a daily newspaper based in Easton, Pennsylvania. They covered the Rhonda Smith murder case extensively and it was during a jailhouse interview with them that Mary Jane Fonder first acknowledged responsibility for her crime. They wrote about the Fonder case in the St. Martin’s True Crime book, Love Me or Else. Colin and Lynn have been married since 2008. Lynn is a graduate of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and Colin graduated from East Stroudsburg University in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. They currently reside in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The door shouldn't have been unlocked.

Judy Zellner slipped her key into the side door at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, but the door fell open before she could turn it. She looked down at the doorknob, surprised and more than a little annoyed. This door is always supposed to be locked, everybody in the church knows that. Even out here in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the door has to be locked.

Whoever's in here is going to get a piece of my mind, Judy thought, slipping the key back into her purse and stepping into the hallway. She was glad to get out of the cold on this winter day of January 23, 2008.

The door to the church office was shut, but through the large interior window Judy could see the light was on. She hadn't expected anybody to be there that Wednesday afternoon, when she came on her twice-weekly routine to clean the church. She glanced briefly through the window, but nobody was sitting behind the desk inside the small office. Perhaps, she thought, Pastor Shreaves is upstairs somewhere.

But first things first. Judy walked straight past the office, dropped her purse and coat onto the table in the narthex, and headed for the bathroom.

The sixty-year-old grandmother of six had been faithfully attending Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church for the last twenty-six years. Even after she moved from nearby Wassergass to Allentown, the largest city in the Lehigh Valley region, she continued to call this church her own, and encouraged her three children to regularly attend with her. Judy's home in Allentown was twelve miles away, and she had to pass by several closer churches on her way to this one, but she never once considered going somewhere else. She loved her church family here at this small parish. She loved singing in the choir and being involved with everybody's lives.

The church sits along Route 212, a winding country road that serves as a major thoroughfare in Springfield Township. The town of about five thousand residents rests five miles southeast of the Allentown and Bethlehem metropolitan area, and about forty miles north of Philadelphia. Bucks County grows far more suburban as it borders Philadelphia on its southern end, but here in the northern end of the county, Springfield Township remains an example of the area's rural heritage.

At over thirty square miles, Springfield Township is the county's second largest municipality in terms of land area, and about half of it remains undeveloped, preserved as agricultural open space or completely vacant land. More than 44 percent of the township consists of heavy woodlands, and much of the land is characterized by large rocky hills cut by valley streams and creeks.

And that's just fine with the residents of Springfield Township. Most of the township's residents — 98 percent of which are white — fall between ages forty-five and sixty-four, and are perfectly content to drive outside the area for goods, services, and places of employment if it means maintaining Springfield's rural character. In a survey, when asked what types of stores, businesses and professional services were needed most in the township, 51 percent responded, "none needed."

Judy passed the church office again on her way up to the pastor's office, where she found his door was locked. Judy was surprised. Since he joined the church nearly three years ago in March 2005, Pastor Gregory Shreaves was almost always here. Judy hadn't yet met the new secretary, Megan, who was hired a few days ago. Maybe she's here somewhere, she thought.

Judy grabbed her cleaning supplies from the closet down the hall and went back downstairs to the church office. Nobody was behind the desk, so Judy started walking toward the cubbyhole of file cabinets in the corner of the room.

"Megan?" Judy called, tilting her head to see if anybody was in the corner. "Megan, are you back there?"

As she passed the corner of the desk, Judy froze as something caught her eye. Crumpled behind the desk lay the body of a woman, her legs folded at the knees, her head and upper body curled forward, pointing toward the ceiling.

There was a great deal of blood. The woman's head was soaked in a crimson puddle, strands of her long brown hair flowing outward in all directions. Judy looked at the woman's chest and found it motionless. Then her eyes drifted to the wound on the right side of the woman's head.

Judy's thoughts immediately turned to her many hours spent watching CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on television. Don't touch the body, she thought.

She froze. What if the person who did this was still in the church? Oh my God, she thought. Somebody could kill me.

Judy grabbed the cordless phone sitting on the desk and ran outside. Fumbling with it, she dialed 911.

"911, where is the emergency?" an operator said.

Judy screamed into the phone: a primal, fearful sound that was impossible to decipher. The operator tried to calm her down and instructed her to stop screaming, calming Judy long enough to find out the address she was calling from.

"Okay, what's the problem?" the operator asked.

"There's a girl murdered in our office!" Judy said, her voice loud, nearly hysterical.

"There's a girl what?" the operator asked.

"Murdered!" Judy shouted back, breathing long, panicked breaths.

"Ma'am, listen, calm down," the operator said. "What do you mean? What's wrong with her?"

"She's lying behind the desk, full of blood!" Judy said, her voice growing higher, her breaths getting so heavy she started to gasp between phrases. "I'm the cleaning lady at the church ... and I just got here. ..."

"Is she awake and able to talk to you?"

"No, it looks like she's dead!" Judy said. "There's blood all over her head and around her head! Oh my God!"

"Okay. And ma'am, you don't want to go near her?" the operator asked.

"I don't know if somebody else is in there! It's a big church!"

After asking for Judy's name, the operator continued, "All right Judy. Just breathe for a sec, okay? Don't touch anything, okay?"

"I didn't, I didn't," Judy said, sobbing. She was starting to find it difficult to say anything at all. "I ... I ... ah ..."

"Okay, where do you see the blood on her?" the operator asked.

"It's all over her!"

"All over her?"

"Yes, it's all over the floor!" Judy said, crying even harder. "She must be dead!"

"All right Judy, just try to calm down. I know it's not something pleasant to see. Does she look like she's breathing at all? Does she look pale? Does she look blue?"

"She looks blue," Judy responded. She explained that a new secretary was recently hired, but that Judy didn't know what she looks like, and didn't know if the woman inside the church is her or not.

"Okay, all right Judy, listen. We have someone on the way, okay?"

*
Matthew Compton and Michael Maguire were just finishing a late breakfast around 1 o'clock at the local diner, Vera's Country Cafe, when they received a call on their pager. "Possible expiration," the page read. An unresponsive female had been found in a puddle of blood.

The two paramedics with Upper Bucks Regional Emergency Medical Services rushed out to their ambulance, Maguire taking the wheel. Fortunately the church was just a tenth of a mile up the road.

Probably an elderly woman who took a spill and hit her head, Maguire thought. If this were the nearby city of Bethlehem, where he also worked as a paramedic, he might have been expecting something more serious, but little ever happens in Springfield Township. In his fourteen years as a paramedic, most of his calls from Upper Bucks have been limited to medical situations or traffic accidents from motorists unaccustomed to the winding country roads.

Back in the late 1980s, when Interstate 78 was expanded into the area, it was thought Springfield Township's vast open space would become subject to extensive growth and turn into a bedroom community of sorts for residents who traveled to New York City or Harrisburg. This prediction proved false. While neighboring towns like Richland, Milford, Williams, and Lower Saucon Townships all experienced significant growth, Springfield Township generally saw a few new single-family homes on a couple acres of land. In fact, it was the only municipality among its neighbors to actually see a decrease in its population.

So as its neighbors saw the rise of brand-new large-lot residential subdivisions, Springfield Township continued to maintain the character of an earlier time, with numerous farms, inns, historic villages, and even a covered bridge still intact. Perhaps the township's biggest claim to fame is the old home of Eric Knight, author of the 1940 book Lassie Come-Home. Knight wrote the book right there in Springfield, and his family dog, Toots, on whom the famous fictional collie was based, is buried on the property in what was the dog's favorite hill.

The ambulance pulled into the church parking lot, and Compton and Maguire stepped out and rushed toward the church. A gray-haired man wearing a blue sweater, alerted by the sirens, greeted them as they approached the door.

"Can I help you?" the man asked confusedly.

"Somebody called for an ambulance?" Maguire asked.

"No," the man shook his head. "I'm the only one here. Nobody called."

Maguire pulled out his pager and read off the call with the church address: "Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church at 2170 Route 212."

"That's the other church," the man responded, pointing to a sign that read "Trinity United Church of Christ," at 1990 Route 212. "Happens all the time."

The other church was a half mile up the road, and Maguire and Compton pulled in just a few minutes later. As they arrived, Judy Zellner stood waving at the bottom of a small stairway leading up to the side door. "She's inside!"

The paramedics stepped inside with Judy in tow. She pointed toward the office and Maguire peered inside, but didn't see anything out of sorts. "Where?" he asked.

"She's behind the desk," Judy replied. "She has a lot of blood on her. I think she's dead. I don't know what happened."

As Maguire stepped further into the office, he saw the woman on the floor, and he could immediately hear that she was still breathing. The high-pitched gurgling reminded him of the sound of a brewing pot of coffee.

"She's still alive," Maguire said to Judy. "Stay in the hall."

It was immediately clear the woman had been shot. Most of the blood appeared to have come from the right side of her head, and Maguire spotted what appeared to be a bullet wound just above her ear. Compton felt for a pulse and found one, but the woman was otherwise nonresponsive. Maguire grabbed his radio and contacted Bucks County dispatch, calling for a state trooper to respond to the scene.

As Maguire finished the call, Compton pointed toward a shiny piece of metal on the floor that appeared to be a bullet fragment. A quick scan of the room turned up no weapons. Compton took off his ball cap and placed it over the bullet so police could quickly find it later.

When Compton went outside for a backboard, Maguire grabbed a black Magic Marker from atop the desk. He knew he had to move the woman, but he also wanted to leave the crime scene as intact as possible for police. After outlining the body on the floor, he and Compton lifted the woman and placed her onto the backboard.

As the two men lifted the board, the woman's head tilted to the side, facing Judy as she watched from the other side of the office window. Judy gasped at the blood-streaked face of a woman she had seen so many times before.

"Oh my God," Judy said. "That's my friend Rhonda!"

CHAPTER 2

State Trooper Kevin Hibson was the first officer on the scene, pulling into the church at 1:08 p.m. Springfield Township has its own police department, a modest force of a police chief and three officers. But when one of the officers isn't on duty, state police are called in.

Judy greeted Hibson at the church door and directed him to the office, where two paramedics in royal blue uniforms were hoisting a middle-aged woman onto a backboard. He immediately noted what appeared to be massive head trauma, the victim's long brown hair stained and matted with blood.

Maguire and Compton carried the backboard past Hibson and Judy, where they were met at the door by another state trooper, Andrew Mincer. Mincer grabbed hold of the board and helped them carry the woman down the small stairway to the waiting ambulance.

"She has a single, possibly double gunshot wound to the head," Compton informed Mincer.

The paramedics placed the woman into the back of the ambulance, then got to work, setting up an IV, starting up the heart monitor, and running a breathing tube into her mouth. As they worked, Trooper Louis Gober, a forensic service unit officer, pulled into the parking lot. Noticing the paramedics were busy attending to a woman, Gober grabbed his camera and headed inside the church to photograph the scene.

Standing just inside the entrance, Judy explained to Hibson what had happened. She described arriving at the church, checking out the pastor's office, finding the body in the downstairs office.

"It's Rhonda Smith," she said. The forty-two-year-old woman had been coming to the church with her mother for a couple years now. "We're pretty close friends."

Hibson directed Judy to wait outside with Trooper Mincer, then started searching the church along with Gober. The office sat on the bottom floor of a relatively modern two-story section of the church. The 12 × 12 foot room was stuffed with office equipment including file cabinets, a copy machine, and a tall stack of mailboxes for church officers, all centered around an L-shaped desk. Several laptop computers were found readily available, but whoever shot the woman was seemingly uninterested in taking them.

Upstairs, the police found a long hallway with about a dozen doors to various rooms used for Sunday School classes, storage, and teen gatherings. A door marked PASTOR'S STUDY was locked, but a glance through a vertical window revealed nobody was inside the tidy office. Back downstairs, the small hallway led to an older section of the church, including the wood-paneled narthex lined with bulletin boards of church announcements. The narthex had two sets of double doors, one of which led to a large multipurpose room filled with tables for dining, with a stage at the far end. The other double doors led to a high-ceilinged, mid-eighteenth-century-style sanctuary with rows of wooden pews affixed toward an altar.

The search proved to be fruitless. Nobody else was inside the building, and no weapon was found.

*
Ugh, Greg Stumpo thought to himself as his cell phone started to ring. I can never have an uninterrupted lunch here.

The forty-one-year-old state trooper dropped his napkin onto his plate and answered the phone. Wearing a neat suit and tie, Stumpo almost resembled a military officer, with his close-cropped haircut, strong jaw, and broad shoulders. His shy, almost sleepy eyes betrayed an extremely close attention to detail that helped him rise in the ranks from road patrol to the crime investigation unit. He was noted among his colleagues for his intelligence and thoroughness, which they considered so intense it was almost a fault.

Stumpo sat at a table across from Greg Langston, a former state police colleague now working as a detective with the Bucks County District Attorney's office. They were dining at Roman Delight, a casual Italian restaurant not far from Stumpo's headquarters at the state police barracks in Dublin, a borough in the middle of Bucks County. One time while eating here, he received a call about two sheriff's officers being shot and killed outside the area. The call sent him to Bradford County, way up in the northernmost part of the state, and kept him there for two full days.

Today's call was much closer to home. A woman had been shot at a church in Upper Bucks, about seventeen miles north. Stumpo was ordered to head to St. Luke's Hospital in nearby Quakertown, where the woman was being transported. Stumpo hung up, said a quick good-bye to Langston and rushed out to his car. Cases like this didn't come along too often in this part of Bucks County. In fact, in the past two decades, there had been only two homicides in Springfield Township.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Love Me Or Else"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Colin McEvoy and Lynn Olanoff.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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