Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps

of eight years on the job.

      “When I turned thirty,” Thomas recalled, “I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I don’t want to do this all my life.’”

      Thomas originally thought being a prison guard might help curb an urge she had for change, but realized quickly after taking the job that she “definitely didn’t want to do that.”

      There had been an opening at the GCSO for a dispatcher in February 1990, so Thomas applied and, subsequently, got the job. Working dispatch offered Thomas a taste of life as a cop. She was the first one to take calls, listen in on what was transpiring out in the field, and would go on rides from time to time with cops to further her skills as a dispatcher. Knowing the layout of the towns helped her dispatch with “hands-on” experience, but that approach only lit the fire. Soon after, she developed a calling for law enforcement work that could only be satisfied one way.

      Happily married for a second time—“[My second husband is] the most wonderful man to myself and my children any woman could ask for”—Thomas saw an opportunity when a job was posted for a sheriff. With no formal law enforcement experience, she assumed she’d fill out the application and never hear about it.

      Nevertheless, after applying on a Monday and taking the written test on Tuesday, only a year or so into her career as a dispatcher, Thomas got the call later that afternoon. If she wanted the sheriff’s job, she’d have to report to the academy the following Monday to live and train for thirteen weeks.

      “I had four or five days to get everything I needed together…then I spent the next thirteen weeks getting screamed and yelled at and running my little tail off.”

      Among the many mental and physical challenges that potential cops had to face at the academy, Thomas learned criminal and traffic law. Thirteen weeks later, though, she was let loose as a deputy sheriff—ready to take on any type of situation filling up a cop’s day: from the clichéd cat-in-a-tree to a sniper picking off innocent people from atop a building, to investigating reports of sexual abuse against children, and everything in between. The outstanding criminal profile of Safford then (and even today) consisted of methamphetamine labs and sex crimes. Thomas viewed the job as a springboard to helping make the community a stronger, safer place. Safford was Thomas’s home. She wanted to do her part to make it the best it could be.

      Not two months into her new job, she got a taste of what the reality of police work was going to be like. She had been on her own one afternoon. The sheriff was out of town and her supervisor was patrolling Graham Mountain, a four-hour swing of time from start to finish.

      While patrolling the city, Thomas received a rather odd call from dispatch. The mail lady had opened a mailbox and found a handwritten letter: “Call the sheriff’s office, I have just killed myself.”

      “As I’m driving out there to get the letter,” Thomas recalled, “I was thinking about what I had been taught at the academy. They told us to think about what you’re going to do when you arrive at a crime scene.”

      She was worried the guy might be holed up inside his home with a weapon, threatening to do himself in, and if anyone tried to stop him, he might use the weapon to hurt somebody.

      When she pulled up, the place appeared quiet, uninhabited.

      “I had my weapon drawn when I got out and began approaching the house,” Thomas continued. “I got to the back of the home and…peeking around the corner, saw this gentleman laying on the front steps of a travel trailer he was using as his home while the main house was being built.”

      Pointing her weapon at the guy, Thomas called out.

      No answer.

      She could see a shotgun near his leg.

      Again, “You okay, sir? Can you hear me?”

      Silence.

      “Slowly, as I made my way up to him, I could see he was deceased,” Thomas said. There was blood everywhere. He had, in whatever turmoil he faced in life, chosen to end it, like thousands of others, with one blast to the head.

      As Thomas stood and stared at the guy, she wondered, Was this actually a suicide? She had been taught to think that any scene could be a potential crime scene. Thus far, all indications pointed to suicide, but there was no guarantee. Was there someone else inside the home waiting to ambush her? Was there a spouse or someone else in need of medical assistance?

      “What do I do?” Thomas questioned later. “This is my first call by myself. So, after checking his pulse to make sure he was dead, I backed away and made the appropriate calls to get everyone to the scene.”

      Detectives eventually found out the guy had been in a terrible financial jam and had, indeed, taken his own life. But the day—six or seven hours of which Thomas spent at the crime scene drawing maps, taking notes, going through the man’s house, interviewing people—taught her several important lessons she would carry with her.

      “I learned that you have to be so detailed,” regardless of the situation.

      It didn’t matter that the guy had committed suicide; what mattered was that she shouldn’t assume anything. Dig for facts and truths until all questions were answered. That one death, so seemingly inconsequential years later as Thomas was chosen to work in the investigation arm of the GCSO, told her that the truth was in the details and specifics, not in what a cop might “think” happened.

      In 1995, Thomas began working in the children’s sexual-crimes division of the GCSO. She was perfect for the job. Female, a mother and grandmother, she could talk to kids and get them to reveal secrets, a vital part of investigating crimes against children.

      All of the skills she had learned throughout the years, Thomas found out as she began looking through Thomas Bright’s trailer on May 12, 2003, were about to be put to the test.

      2

      Kew Gardens, New York, in Queens County, a tiny neighborhood a few miles from Jamaica, is known by some as the “Urban Village in the Big City.” Today, the main thoroughfare running through downtown is called Metropolitan Avenue. It is a busy street, in a bustling section of town. In the early 1900s, that same busy street, however, then known as Williamsburg and Jamaica Turnpike, was but a dirt road dotted with massive colonials and large weeping willows. If one were to walk in the shoes of his forefathers during that era, Metropolitan Avenue would have looked like a backwoods street somewhere in South Carolina, with steep driveways and fenced-in yards. Rustic, seeping with nostalgia.

      The apartment complex on Metropolitan Avenue that Dianne Molina moved into with her mother was typical for the region. It wasn’t the Trump Tower, yet it wasn’t skid row, either. Located above a retail carpet store, a second-story unit with access from the street, the apartment had a dining room, two bedrooms, kitchen, and pantry.

      The infrastructure of the region enjoyed a building boom during the late ’60s: multistory tenement buildings and large office complexes went up, while vendors of all kinds dotted the streets. For Dianne, as the world around her changed, it felt like she had been submerged in water while living with her dad and had now been allowed to breathe. Dad was a few miles away. But to Dianne, beginning a new life with Mom, free from the chains of Dad’s abuse, Kew Gardens might as well have been on the other side of the world.

      While children around her lived normal lives—going out on dates, having slumber parties, and just girls being girls—Dianne worked day and night to survive, she later said. She hadn’t been with a boy yet, she said, only because it would have never been allowed, by her mom or dad.

      “I couldn’t even be involved in life,” Dianne recalled, “better yet, boys.”

      What shocked Dianne most, she said, was that the world she believed she was heading into—a somewhat “normal” life with her mom—suddenly turned into something she never thought possible. For the past two years she had been sexually abused by her father, she claimed, anytime he felt like it. Mabel knew about the abuse, but did nothing to stop it, or even discourage it. Moving out with her mom, Dianne had every reason to believe the abuse was over.