Episode 156:
She Fell in Love With Her Stepfather,Then Her Mom Vanished..
One night in June 2007, a 65-year-old man named Bob called police in Arkansas. His house had been robbed, he said, and his wife was gone. His voice was oddly calm, and he went on to list what was missing: fourteen firearms, $4,000 in cash, property deeds, his truck, even his recliner. His wife, 70-year-old Polly Devor, came up almost as an afterthought.
At the ranch, officers found six bullet holes, two in the living room window, two in the kitchen window, and two in the gun cabinet, each placed with a neatness that didn't look like a robber firing to frighten anyone. Only the master bedroom had been ransacked. The rest of the house was untouched, and there was no sign of forced entry. Polly's phone and bank accounts had gone silent on June 14, the day before the call. Police concluded that someone she knew had taken her and staged a burglary.
A Robbery That Didn't Add Up
Polly had been married three times. She lost custody of her four children in her first divorce, built a 735-acre ranch with her second husband, and after his death married her ranch foreman, Bob. They had been together twenty years. Two days before she vanished, she had reported that someone had used her credit card to withdraw about $1,500. Bob had an alibi: he had been driving a long-haul truck in another city. Then neighbors mentioned someone he had not: Polly's 47-year-old daughter, Delores Eggert, who had reappeared ten years earlier and lived in a trailer on the ranch, and who often spoke badly of her mother. Delores said she had been at a casino in Oklahoma with her friend Monica and produced a toll receipt. A local gun shop owner then reported that a woman had dropped off fourteen guns. He identified Delores, and she had arrived in Bob's "stolen" truck. By then she was gone. Bob said she had gone to Mexico and suggested police look at his own daughters instead, while his bank records showed him sending Delores money in Mississippi. She came back on her own and was arrested on June 29 for robbery. Then Bob withdrew his theft report, and police had to let her go.
The Friend Who Finally Talked
For two years the case went nowhere, apart from Bob turning up at the station with stories about strangers offering to reveal Polly's whereabouts for money, the details different each time. In April 2009, Monica was arrested for check forgery. Facing prosecution and possible deportation, she told detectives everything. She and Delores had been friends for thirty years, and she supplied Delores with meth. Delores had always blamed her mother for abandoning her. When she moved to the ranch, Polly was overjoyed, gave her money, and tried to make up for lost time, but Delores began stealing her credit card to buy drugs. The theft report on June 12 was Polly's attempt to frighten her into changing. She had not named her daughter, and she told Delores she would drop it if she admitted what she had done. Delores decided to kill her instead, and told Monica she would expose her drug dealing if she refused to help. On June 14, Delores phoned her mother saying she had fallen and was hurt. Polly rushed over. Delores's gun misfired, Polly tried to stop her, and Monica struck Polly with a metal rod. Delores hit her with a tire iron, reloaded, and shot her three times in the chest. They burned the body in the ranch's outdoor incinerator, threw the bones and teeth that remained into a river, buried the ashes in a pit, staged the robbery, and drove to the casino, making sure to keep the toll receipt.
The Stepfather
Monica added one more thing. On the drive to the casino, Delores had called Bob and told him, sounding excited, "It's all finished. You can relax now." For her first eight years at the ranch Delores had called Bob "Dad." For the last two they had been having an affair. One neighbor had seen them kissing in a way no father and daughter would, and another had seen them groping each other. A birthday card from Bob read, "If you were a flame, I could play with fire forever and I would never get tired of it." After Polly disappeared, Delores moved into her mother's bedroom and lived with him as his wife, which is why she came back from Mississippi. She had taken the guns to the shop to protect him, since he had a prior weapons conviction. Police had Monica wear a wire. Delores arrived at the meeting driving her mother's Cadillac, told her nobody knew they had killed Polly, said the river had probably risen by now, and mentioned that she had taken her mother's ring before disposing of the body. Experts who studied the case concluded that the affair had less to do with love than with taking everything her mother had.
Final Thoughts
Monica led police to the pit near the incinerator and to the river, where they recovered Polly's teeth and bone fragments. In August 2010, Delores confessed and, under a plea deal, was sentenced to 30 years. Bob sent her a Valentine's card in prison that read, "If loving you is considered a crime, then I will gladly go to prison." He was not charged with the murder, but in 2011 he was tried for harboring a fugitive and obstructing justice and sentenced to ten years. He died of cancer in prison in 2014. Polly had survived a divorce that cost her her children and the death of a husband, and had welcomed her daughter back after decades apart. She was killed because she hurried to help when that daughter said she was hurt.
Polly reported the stolen card without naming her daughter, hoping the scare would push Delores to quit drugs. Two days later she was dead. When a parent is dealing with an addicted adult child who is stealing from them, do you think an ultimatum like that helps or makes things more dangerous, and what else could she have done?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
