Black Widow

CHAPTER ONE:
Death in the Afternoon
At 2:00 P.M. on Thursday, March 2, 1995, 911 operator Lynn Turner and her policeman husband, Glenn, arrived at the door of the emergency room at the Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, Georgia. Glenn was doubled over, clutching his stomach and moaning. He told the attending doctor that he had been throwing up for days. He'd also had blinding headaches and nosebleeds, and was dizzy when he stood up. It hadn't been Lynn's idea to have him seek help, she was sure that all that was wrong with him was a flu bug that would simply run its course; she wanted someone in the E.R. to take a look at a bump on her head. When Glenn heard she was going, he had come along for the ride.
He'd been ill for most of that week. On Tuesday, the motorcycle cop had called into the East Cobb 4th Precinct where he worked the 3:00-to- 11:00 P.M. shift and said he would not be reporting for duty. His shift supervisor, Sergeant Mike Archer, took the call. "He got on the phone, and he was just moaning, saying he was throwing up, had diarrhea and cramps. He said, 'Man, I've never been this sick. I feel like I'm about to die. I've been like this for days and I can't shake it. I've never hurt this bad,' and I'm like, 'Dang!'
"I said, 'You going to be all right?' He said, 'Man, I don't know. I ain't never hurt like this. I'll let you know if I'm going to work tomorrow or not.' He called in sick three days, and the last day he called in sick, you could hear it in his voice, he was shaking as he was talking on the phone."
Glenn sounded so bad that for a fleeting second, Archer wondered if his strapping friend was really as ill as he claimed. "He'd never been that sick before and I'm thinking, when you call in sick to work you have to act sick, you know, and so I wasn't sure, and then I called in the schedule to radio. The lady there said, 'Well, that's funny, because Lynn called in sick the last three days, too.' Red lights started going up."
When his lieutenant came in, he shared his misgivings. "I told him and he said, 'Something isn't right, someone's got to go out there, something's going on. Why don't you ride out there and check? Go to the house.' Well, that Thursday we got busy, and I really didn't want to go out and check on Glenn because I didn't want him to think I wasn't trusting him, but we just got so busy I never got the chance."
After checking him out, the doctor at Kennestone agreed with Lynn's diagnosis that Glenn had come down with a powerful and debilitating virus. Vomiting and diarrhea had left him dehydrated and his heart was racing. Alarming though it was for him, dehydration was easily treated. Stretched out on the hospital gurney and attached to an IV that pumped fluids into his body, he was expected to bounce back fairly quickly. When the first bag emptied out, his vital signs were checked again. The doctor frowned: the patient was not perking up as he should have. "Give him another one," he instructed a nurse.
As the second dose of lifesaving liquids finished dripping into his vein, his wife, whose knock on the head had required no treatment, stood impassively at his side whilethe doctor discharged Glenn with medication to alleviate the nausea. Four and a half hours after they'd checked in, the Turners were on their way back to their home at 881 Old Farm Walk, Marietta. Glenn felt much better.
Later that same night, his partner David Dunkerton rang. "I was working at another precinct when I heard he'd called in sick, so I called him to bust his chops over it. Nobody answered and then I found out he had gone to the hospital."
Donald Cawthon also called after hearing that his friend had been rushed to the E.R. Glenn was a strapping, 6'3", 200 plus--pound workhorse; Donald had never known him to take time off the job, never mind call in sick for days, and decided to call and razz him about it. "Hey, Fat Boy, what's up with you? What'd you do, eat too many doughnuts?" he teased. "Nah, I got flu," Glenn told him. "Then I started getting these nosebleeds and thought I should get checked out. They gave me some stuff and I feel okay now. See you tomorrow." Donald hung up, reassured.
Glenn called his sister, Linda Hardy, between 8:00 and 9:00 P.M. He told her the same thing: his belly felt as if he'd been kicked in the gut; one minute he'd be shivering all over, the next he'd break out in a drenching sweat. But he'd gone to the hospital earlier that day and been taken care of. "I feel really good now," he told her. "What did they do for you?" Linda had wanted to know. He told her about being hooked up to the IV and added that the doctor had given him a suppository to stop the vomiting. He told her not to worry, he felt good enough to suck on the frozen treat that Lynn had just given him. "I think I'm going to be all right. I am going to go back to work tomorrow, or the next day," he said before hanging up. She was very relieved. "I thought everything was great. He was great. He was eating a Popsicle while he was talking to me."
He also called Mike Archer, who had heard from another officer that Glenn had been at the E.R. "I was leaving the precinct that night when he called and said, 'Hey, I went to the hospital and got some IVs in me. I'm feeling a lot better and I'll call you tomorrow and let you know if I'm going to work.' I said, 'Okay, let me know.' I was in a hurry to get out of there and I forgot I was off Friday."


Only one person alive really knows what happened that night, what agonies Glenn Turner endured. By the afternoon of the following day, Friday, March 3, he was dead. When the EMT workers arrived at the house they found him in the front bedroom, lying on his left side on a carved wooden four-poster bed. He was on top of the patchwork quilt his grandmother had made him for Christmas, dressed in nothing but Jockey shorts and wrapped in blankets. On the floor were his pants and sneakers, crumpled in a heap just where he'd struggled out of them. Beside him on the nightstand were his police radio, four plastic containers of drugs and a picture of his mother. Glenn Turner was just 31.


Mike Archer was at his apartment when his pager went off around one o'clock. He called the precinct and spoke to Judith Fannon, the other sergeant on his shift. Her voice sounded flat and dull, as though she had been sucker punched. "They found Glenn Turner dead in his bed this afternoon," she told him.
Mike couldn't believe what he was hearing. Glenn dead? How could that be? If anyone was larger than life itself it was Glenn Turner. He was a big teddy bear of a man, one of the most popular guys on the force. Half a dozen of the cops he worked with called him their best buddy. They'd josh him about his fluctuating girth--although he was never fat, he carried twenty pounds ofyo-yo weight, and when he stepped on the scales, the pointer could hit anywhere between 220 and 240 on any given day. But he was in good shape. He turned up at the station house early nearly every shift. He loved being a cop and was never happier than when he was astride his police hog. "He's gone," the sergeant continued, and it had been Lynn who'd called with the news.
A rush of adrenaline went through Mike's body as an appalling notion took hold of him. "I was walking back and forth saying to myself, 'F***ing b****, f***ing b****, f***ing b****, she f***ing killed him.' That was my first instinct, I thought she had done something to him. I called Donald right after that and said, 'Hey, get over here.' I told him what happened. I called over the radio and Major Harold Turner [no relation to Glenn] of the Crimes Against Persons Unit phoned me. I immediately told Major Turner I suspected that she had done something to him. I said I'd be right over, and was told, 'Don't come to the house, we're already thinking that, we are going to look into that. Don't come over here.'"


Donald Cawthon was driving on Route 575 when Mike paged him. "We didn't have cell phones at that time, and I looked at the pager and saw it was a nine-one-one signal sixty-three, which was code for an officer down. I called Archer and he yelled, 'Where the hell are you at? Glenn's dead, Glenn's dead!'"
Donald shook his head, then said, "Don't be funny, Archer, who's down?"
"No, Glenn's dead."
Donald immediately thought his pal had been hit in the line of duty. "Did he get shot? Did he roll up on something?" he fired at Mike. He looked at his watch; Glenn didn't start work until three. It was only two thirty, so that couldn't be it. "No. Get over here right away," Mike told him.
"Did she kill him?" Donald blurted out.
"I don't know what's going on," Mike said. "Just get over here."
As he drove, Donald churned the unthinkable over in his mind: she killed him, she killed him, she killed him. Lynn had done something to him. Like Mike, he was aware that Glenn's marriage had been on the rocks--it was no secret. Half the precinct knew, and anyone who claimed not to hadn't been listening to the young officer who, for the last few weeks, had admitted it to any pal with a sympathetic ear and five minutes to spare. Donald dialed Glenn's sister and left a message: "Linda, you need to call me."
As the news spread among Glenn's friends on the force, the emergency services swarmed all over his pale gray two-story house. Major Lee Moss, Harold Turner and Detective Charlie Mazariegos had answered Lynn's call. When they got there, she told them that Glenn had been sick and that she'd taken him to the emergency room the day before. He'd felt better after being treated and they'd driven home. During the night he had been restless. She had woken up, checked the room where he had been sleeping, and found his bed empty. When she'd glanced at the clock, it was 3:00 A.M.
She had gone downstairs, but couldn't find him. Then she'd heard noises coming from the basement and had gingerly climbed down to find her husband ranting and raving. He was hallucinating, she said. He had lifted a plastic container of gasoline and nearly had the top off to drink it before she snatched it away. Back upstairs he'd told her he could fly. He had gone out on the second-floor deck and nearly succeeded in propelling himself off the top of the railing before she managed to haul him down. Eventually, she had talked him into returning to his bed.
In the morning he had seemed all right. She had told him she needed to go to the store and asked if she couldfix him anything to eat before she left. He had wanted Jell-O. When she got back around two in the afternoon, she had gone into his bedroom and saw him under the covers, very still. As she drew near, she could see the sheet that covered him wasn't moving up and down as he breathed. Creeping closer, she pulled back the quilt, and she could see that his face was blotchy and turning purple. She knew he was dead.
She had dialed 911, acutely aware how often she'd been on the receiving end of many similar desperate calls. Within minutes, an ambulance and police cars, lights flashing and sirens blaring, came roaring down the drive. The EMT guys had checked Glenn's vital signs, hoping for something, anything that would signal he could be revived. But the man they were looking at had been dead for a while. They had turned to Lynn, shaking their heads. "There's nothing we can do for him," one of them told her gently.
Right from that moment, Glenn's fellow cops had been skeptical. Goddamn it, healthy 31-year-olds don't just die of the flu, they said to each other back at the precinct, where they milled around trying to make sense of this tragedy. But though they talked about little else to each other, they knew that publicly they would have to keep their doubts to themselves and wait for the medical examiner's report to determine the real cause of death.
Donald and Mike had no such reservations. "The afternoon he died, within an hour of finding Glenn's body, and while his body was still at the house, we talked to the people at the police department. They told us to stay away, don't point fingers at anybody. We were still talking [to them] the next day when they still had his body down there doing the autopsy, and they assured us that everything was being done. He was a police officer, they would check into it," says Donald. A post-mortem would uncover the truth.
For the department, it was a double tragedy. Not only had they lost a veteran officer, a guy without an enemy in the world, but his young wife, now his widow, who had made the shocking discovery, was also one of their own. As a 911 operator, she worked with them every day.
The officers on the scene had been amazed how Lynn was in control, stoic even, despite her dreadful loss. There were no tears. They saw nothing suspicious about her calm exterior, since, if their experience with the bereaved had taught them anything, it was that people react to the deaths of loved ones in many different ways. Some become hysterical, others are too overwhelmed to even cry, yet others go into denial. There was no concrete reason for believing anything was amiss; the medics were leaning towards a finding of heart attack, and a cursory look around the premises revealed no sign of foul play.
They asked Lynn how they should get in touch with Glenn's family, since a search of his belongings had failed to uncover a phone book. She shrugged and shook her head; she said she couldn't help, as she wasn't in touch with any of them. The sympathetic investigators put this down to shock. They asked if there was anywhere they could take her, anyone they could call to come over to be with her. She told them her mother and a friend were on their way.
"The major called Archer and asked if anyone knew how to get in touch with the family," recalls Donald. "Archer says, 'Yes, Cawthon's standing right here, he does.' They had done some change with phone numbers and they couldn't find Glenn's book. They later found it with his motorcycle. The major said, 'Tell them we apologize.'"
Linda was dumbfounded when she was told her sister-in-law didn't know how to contact her. "She told them she didn't know any of our phone numbers or where any of us lived even though she had been to my house on numerous occasions," she says. "She knew where we lived,she knew everything, and she told them nothing. It was the biggest crock. Captain Green tried to hunt us down. [The cops] were out on the road trying to find us because they didn't want to tell us on the phone."
Donald kept ringing Linda until he finally reached her. She and her husband Jimmy Hardy had a drywall-finishing business and as they usually did at the end of the working week, they had gone out for a bite to eat. "Most Friday nights we went to a Chinese restaurant up in Cartersville. I was sitting having dinner with Jimmy and he wanted us to go to Tennessee for the weekend. Sometimes we did that, we'd go to dinner, then drive somewhere and take a hotel room for the night. I didn't want to go. I remember I was adamant. Jimmy kept asking me why I didn't want to go, and I didn't have a reason, I just didn't want to," she says.
When they got home it was after nine and the light on their answering machine was flashing. She flicked it on and heard Donald's urgent voice: "Linda, you need to call me." The next call was from Mike Archer. His message also sounded serious: "Linda, you have to call me," he said. As she was going through the rest of her messages, the phone rang.
"It was Donald," she remembers. "He said, 'Linda, Glenn's dead.'
"'No!' I said.
"'He's gone.'
"'No!'" I said again.
"'He's gone.'
"I screamed at him, 'What did she do? Did she kill him?' I just lost it. Jimmy started freaking out. He got in the car and left to tell Dad. I was in the house alone trying to make sense of it. How could this have happened? I had talked to him last night and he was perfectly fine. How could he be dead? She must have killed him," Linda remembers thinking.
Glenn's mother had called him on the morning he died. She was leaving for a family reunion in Jacksonville, Florida, and was concerned because the nasty bug that had put him on his back earlier in the week showed no signs of quitting. She had just wanted to make sure he was okay before heading south. When she got no answer she decided that if there was no one home, then Glenn must have recovered to the point where both he and his wife had gone back to work.
Linda frantically began trying to find her mother. Kathy Turner hadn't left the number where she'd be staying, she had promised to get in touch when she arrived in Jacksonville. "I called someone in the church trying to figure out how to find my mom, and I got her friend, Mrs. Tryon," says Linda. "She said, 'I'll make some calls to figure out where she's at.' She called back and said they had found her. 'Do you want to tell your momma or would you like Doctor Tryon to do it?' she asked me. I remember thinking that her husband had experience doing this kind of thing and maybe it would be better coming from him. I said, 'I don't think I could tell my mother that.' She said, 'I'll have Bill tell her, he'll know what to say.'
"I also called the house trying to get ahold of Lynn, to find out what happened, but there was no answer. Then I tried to find her mother. I called directory assistance and got nowhere. And I didn't have her cell phone number."
That night, with Glenn's body lying in the city examiner's office and an autopsy scheduled for the next morning, his family kept trying unsuccessfully to talk to his wife. His brother James, his Aunt Becky and his father all called her. Linda rang twice. The first time Lynn picked up and said, "I have to call you back." The second time she told her, "I can't talk to you right now."
Linda's house in Acworth began to fill up. "Jimmy came back from Dad's, then Bubba [James] came over, Scotty and Becky Halter came in [Scott was also a cop atthe 4th Precinct] and then Donald and Mike arrived. Friends, people from the church, they were coming and going--that Friday night was unreal. Donald was with us the whole time."
A few hours after her husband's body had been removed to the morgue, Lynn finally contacted her sister-in-law. "She called me after eleven that night to give me her side of the story," says Linda. "She told me she was in her car driving very fast and talking on her cell phone. 'I don't know where the hell I am going,' she said. I couldn't take it in. It's eleven and she's driving around? She wasn't crying, she wasn't upset ..."
Quite the opposite, Lynn was all business. She matter-of-factly launched into a lengthy account of what had happened since Glenn returned from the hospital. Linda was numbed into silence as her sister-in-law recounted her brother's nighttime ramblings. He had been fine in the morning. He'd asked for some Jell-O and crackers and she'd left him nibbling on them when she'd gone out around 9:30 A.M. When she'd returned at 2:30 P.M., Glenn was dead. "While she was talking, I took notes. I wrote down what she was saying. I don't really know why," Linda says.
She was dumbfounded by how calm Lynn was, how glibly the details tripped off her tongue. But the story just didn't wash. Linda kept thinking: Glenn was so sick he had dragged himself to the hospital the day before, then during the night he'd suddenly become unhinged, and first thing in the morning his wife leaves him alone to go shopping? When she hung up the phone, Linda repeated the tale to the family and friends gathered in her living room.
It was met with snorts of derision. "Wouldn't you have said, 'Wait a minute, maybe he's having an allergic reaction'? You can die from that," says Donald. "As a trained 911 officer, Lynn was well aware of that. They had just come back from the hospital, yet she didn't pickup the phone, doesn't call anybody. But six hours later she takes her ass out of there and goes to the store. Now, your husband's deathly ill and you go to run errands?"
Robert Tressell, an investigator for the Cobb County medical examiner's office, spoke to the new widow. She told him Glenn had been sick for three days and had gone to the emergency room because his nose had started bleeding. She said the nursing staff had been concerned about Glenn's fluctuating blood vessels. But he had been discharged when he'd shown signs of improvement. When they got back from the hospital he'd tried to eat a Popsicle, but it had upset his stomach.
She repeated her story of being wakened in the middle of the night by Glenn stumbling around, knocking things over, acting irrationally, convinced there was someone in the house. She said she'd calmed him momentarily by promising to search for the intruder. Then she'd heard him go down to the basement and followed him. He began to complain about being thirsty and reached for a small container of what she thought was gasoline. Lynn told Tressell she'd removed it from his grasp and persuaded him to go back upstairs with her. She'd helped him into bed and brought him a large glass of water.
The autopsy, carried out the next day, failed to uncover anything that would suggest a crime had been committed. That winter a particularly virulent strain of flu had swept the area, and all signs pointed to Glenn being its tragic victim. He'd been fighting textbook symptoms all week. His blood and urine were put through routine drug-screening tests and revealed nothing suspicious, but Cobb County medical examiner Dr. Brian Frist did find something totally unexpected--Glenn's big, generous heart was just that: too big. The enlarged organ had simply given out. He ruled that Glenn died of natural causes.
To his devastated friends and family Glenn's death wasanything but natural. Linda describes her nagging unease: "Rigor mortis had already set in when they found him. The time of death was approximately between nine and nine fifteen in the morning, and according to Lynn, she ran her errands at nine thirty. She left when she knew there was no recovery. He was dead when she left."
Copyright © 2007 by Marion Collins.