The Attack at the Silk Plant Forest

NAVIGATION

Part One: The Crime

‘I’m hurt. I can’t see you.’

By Phoebe Zerwick

JOURNAL REPORTER

WINSTON-SALEM

CHAPTER 1

A terrible beating

Nancy Baxter heard low moans coming from the back of the Silk Plant Forest, back beyond the cash register and a display of artificial Christmas trees. It was five minutes to nine, and she had gone in hoping that there was time before the store closed to buy a garland.

She and another customer followed the moans, walking straight down the aisle, past the plant displays, to the back, where she found a person lying across an overturned ficus tree. There was so much blood on the face and matted in the hair that Baxter couldn’t be sure whether the person crying for help was a woman or a man, even whether she was white or black.

“I’m hurt. Help me, help me,” Jill Marker said, trying to sit up. “I can’t see you. I can’t hear you. I need to get back to the front.”

Baxter, a nurse, knew that she had to do something to control the bleeding and searched the store frantically for a roll of paper towels. The other customer left to call an ambulance; two more came in and helped Baxter keep Marker calm.

“Oh, my God,” Marker told them. “I’m pregnant.”

Baxter did what she could with the towels. It looked to her, she said, as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to the woman’s head. Paramedics took over from Baxter, whose arms were covered in blood up to her elbows.

Marker was still conscious when police arrived, moments after Baxter. “It happened quickly,” Marker told them. She could not describe her attacker.

There was blood all around where Marker had been lying. By the time the police technicians arrived, the crime scene had been disturbed by Baxter and the other customers who helped Marker, and by the ambulance workers. Numerous footprints were outlined on the floor in blood.

Police collected eight blood samples from the crime scene. There was blood on the west aisle of the store, where paramedics had wheeled Marker’s stretcher. Police speculated that those spots dripped from her wounds as she went by. There was another drop of blood on the other side of the store. Police speculated that it had dripped from whatever blunt object the attacker used to beat her as he fled out the front door. Police also found blood on the frame of the front door, from when paramedics wheeled Marker to the ambulance, and on a sheet that was draped at the base of a Christmas tree.

DNA testing later showed that all the blood samples came from Marker. No weapon was ever recovered.

The police fingerprint technician checked the cash register and front counter. He also checked an electrical outlet, a telephone, several pieces of loose paper and a Styrofoam cup, but found no prints.

The police department sent a squad car to TJ’s Deli on Robinhood Road that night to notify Marker’s husband, Aaron, the night manager. A chaplain joined police in the emergency room at Forsyth Medical Center, then Forsyth Memorial Hospital, because the doctors didn’t expect Marker to live.

Just after midnight, Aaron Marker called his in-laws, Edna and Bud Hoisington, in Akron, Ohio.

“What is it? Is it Jill?” Edna Hoisington asked him, startled by the late-night call. She remembers her son-in-law’s reply word for word. “She’s not expected to live. Someone tried to kill her.”

The Hoisingtons drove all night and were at their daughter’s bedside by morning.

“They told us when we got down there they were sure it was someone who knew Jill,” Edna Hoisington said.

The cash register drawer was open and $304 was missing from the tray, though whoever stole the money had neglected to take $400 stashed under the tray. The police said that the crime was too violent to be a simple robbery, a conclusion backed by the basic psychology investigators bring to criminal investigations.

“This is an extremely violent assault,” Greg McCrary, a retired FBI agent and criminal profiler, said in a recent interview. “I think the likelihood is more a victim-targeted crime.”

Marker was 33 and had lived in Winston-Salem for a little more than a year.

She had grown up outside Akron, in Springfield Township. After graduating from Kent State University, she settled in Akron, where she started teaching elementary school. She liked nice things — clothes, jewelry and porcelain figurines — and always had a second job to earn extra spending money. She met Aaron Marker at a restaurant, where she had a summer job waiting tables and he was a cook.

A photo from 1996 of Aaron Marker and his son, Barron (File Photo). You can view the entire photo gallery.

Aaron Marker was nine years younger, but the couple got on well and in 1990, when he was 19 and she was 28, they married and soon moved south. They each found jobs in Peachtree, Ga., with Jill teaching and Aaron working as a chef. In 1994, they moved to Winston-Salem, where Aaron knew the chef at Ryan’s Restaurant, a high-end place on Coliseum Drive. He landed a job there as sous chef helping to run the kitchen.

The couple had marital troubles while they were living in Winston-Salem, including a period of separation, and Aaron Marker moved back to Ohio. When he returned, he got his job at TJ’s. By then, Jill Marker had become disillusioned with teaching school because of the politics and interference from parents. She found jobs at the Today’s Child Learning Center and at the Silk Plant Forest. When the manager at the store offered her a full-time job in the summer of 1995, she was thrilled to have it.

Edna Hoisington said she didn’t like her daughter working at night. “Don’t worry anything about it, Mom,” her daughter told her. “There’s a big Toys R Us and a Drug Emporium right there.”

In the months after the attack, the Hoisingtons stayed with their son-in-law at the apartment he and Marker shared on Huntingreen Lane. He worked during the day, and they sat by their pregnant daughter’s bedside, waiting for a sign of life.

Two days after the attack, the police department assigned Don Williams, a robbery detective with 14 years’ experience, to the case. He went to see Marker in the intensive-care unit and vowed to find her attacker.

He had been to the Silk Plant Forest before, but barely recognized the slender and attractive Marker, her face swollen and her head wrapped in bandages. “When I seen her laying there, it just tore my heart out,” Williams said recently. “Fire ran through my blood to get this guy.”

When Williams retired four years ago, he took a copy of the case file with him to his home. He keeps the papers in his basement, along with letters and Christmas cards from Marker and her parents. Just last year, Marker asked her parents to send him a figurine of a bear in police uniform. He keeps it on his bedside table. Williams remembers other cases, but this one consumes him like no other, even today.

He appeared on WXII Channel 12 last Christmas in a special about the close friendship that developed between him and the victim. He said he has come to think of Marker as a younger sister and the Hoisingtons as second parents.

“I promised Bud and Edna when I first got the case, I said, ‘I may never get the guy but I’ll work on it until I retire.’”

Soon enough, Williams had a prime suspect.

CHAPTER 2

Early tips to police

Kenneth Lamoureux left Forsyth Medical Center the morning of Dec. 8, 1995, after a week on the locked psychiatric unit, according to police reports.

He was 46, with thinning hair and a bad heart.

His wife, Ellen, had had him committed Nov. 30 on grounds that he was a danger to himself or others. She also had a temporary restraining order against him, issued Nov. 20. The order awarded her sole custody of their 4-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, and ordered Lamoureux to stay away.

She had alleged that her husband tried to kill her and that he had hit their two children. The order prohibited him from contacting her or from setting foot in their home. It also barred him from Forsyth Medical Center, where his wife was a nurse.

Their children attended the Today’s Child center. The staff there knew Kenneth Lamoureux, at least by sight. Sometimes, Ellen Lamoureux brought the children, but most days he dropped them off and picked them up. Staff members there told police that that was how he came to know Jill Marker, who worked there before leaving for the plant store full time. Often, he would hang around for a while after dropping the children off, according to police reports.

One teacher told police that staff members had noticed that Ellen Lamoureux often wore sunglasses indoors and had bruises on her face or a black eye. They said they never asked her about it. Then, in December, she told them that her husband had been beating her. They also knew about the restraining order and that she had had Lamoureux committed to the psychiatric unit.

Jeana Schopfer, Marker’s former supervisor at the child-care center, called police on Dec. 10, the day after the attack at the Silk Plant Forest. According to police records, she remembered that another teacher, Melanie Beth McCollum, had told her that Lamoureux had taken to dropping by the plant store to talk with Marker. Schopfer said she thought that the police should know about the visits and the allegations of domestic violence.

On Dec. 12, two other women called Crime Stoppers to report that they had seen a suspicious-looking, middle-age white man in the store an hour before the attack on Marker. When they entered the store, he came from the rear.

“Look at that guy. He looks creepy,’” one of the women, C. Ann Cloud, told her friend, Stella Goode.

“There was something about him. I just kept looking at him and he just kept on creeping past me,” Cloud said recently.

With those leads, Williams put together a photo lineup with a picture of Lamoureux and five other white men. Separately, Cloud and Goode identified Lamoureux as the man they had seen in the store.

The police had another lead in the case, from a witness who said he had seen a black man leave the shopping center in a burgundy Mustang. They put out a Crime Stoppers report, the only appeal ever made to the public for information in the case. Nevertheless, Williams focused his investigation on Lamoureux.

Today, Lamoureux lives in a comfortable subdivision in Universal City outside of San Antonio, Texas, with his first wife, a retired Air Force colonel whom he refers to as his girlfriend. He said he lives on disability, after having had a heart transplant four years ago. He lost his right leg in the aftermath of the heart surgery.

Lamoureux’s demeanor ran from charming to angry to reflective over a three-hour interview. His language was frequently coarse, and he fidgeted in his wheelchair, rolling it back and forth, and occasionally raising the front wheels off the floor.

“It was hard,” he said, recalling how police initially thought that Marker would not survive. “And here they were accusing me of killing a woman I didn’t even know. It scared … me. I knew I was innocent. I kept telling myself, ‘The law’s on your side,’ but it’s hard to think the law’s on your side when something’s going around and you’re being accused of something you didn’t do.”

Lamoureux denied any role in the crime and any friendship with Marker. He said he met her only once, in November 1995, when he and his children went into the store to look at Christmas decorations and Marker recognized his daughter from the day-care center and gave her a hug.

He said he believes that his ex-wife made false accusations against him and persuaded the teachers at the day-care center and her colleague to turn him in to the police. He disputed her accusations of domestic violence, saying that she hit herself to cause bruises.

He also said that he had an affidavit from the man Ellen Lamoureux was married to before him that she had done the same thing.

Lamoureux failed to produce such an affidavit despite several requests. Nor is there any indication in police records that either of the two people who identified him as having been in the store before the attack knew Lamoureux or his wife. Cloud said recently that she did not know Ellen or Kenneth Lamoureux.

There is nothing in the civil-court records to contradict the allegations of domestic abuse that Ellen Lamoureux made against her husband or to substantiate them. The courts gave her the restraining order based on her allegations.

Four months later, Lamoureux consented to a separation agreement that contained the restrictive terms of the restraining order. The couple later agreed that he would have visitation with his children, but only under supervision by a social worker.

Lamoureux has not seen his children in about five years. To this day, Ellen Lamoureux has fought in court to keep him away from their children.

In 2003, Lamoureux called her home when he was in North Carolina for a funeral in Salisbury. She immediately filed a complaint against him, alleging that he also had driven by her house.

A judge renewed the restraining order against Lamoureux, ordering him to stay away from his ex-wife. In an affidavit denying the continued allegation of domestic violence, Lamoureux said that he will not ask to see his children again until they are adults. An order limiting his contact with his children remains in effect today.

Lamoureux denies any pattern of domestic violence, though he admits to hitting his ex-wife once. He said that he signed the separation agreement on the advice of his attorney.

Detective Don Williams (Photo by David Rolfe).

Ellen Lamoureux declined to be interviewed for this story. Her attorney, Melissa Averett of Chapel Hill, and Ellen Lamoureux’s family also declined to be interviewed.

In the early weeks of the investigation, Williams began to build a case against Lamoureux.

McCollum, the teacher at the child-care center, told Williams that she and Marker were close friends and talked often, even after Marker left to work full time at the plant store. Marker would mention to McCollum that she had seen Lamoureux in the store. He would never buy anything, she told her friend. He would just come in and talk.

“She just thought it was strange that he would keep coming in and not buying stuff,” McCollum told Williams in a taped interview. “She said she was friendly, but she didn’t think she was that friendly for him to keep coming back.”

McCollum also told Williams that she had seen Lamoureux near the plant store the afternoon of Dec. 8. The date wasn’t significant to McCollum, but it was to Williams. By then, he had confirmed that that was the day of Lamoureux’s release from the psychiatric ward.

Ellen Lamoureux called Williams from out of state on Dec. 15. She told him that she and her husband had separated in October, after he beat her on more than one occasion, hitting her with his fist in the face and the back of her head. She went on to say that after a court hearing on Dec. 8, he became enraged with her, and that she believed he had been harassing a respiratory therapist at the hospital, a woman named Wanda Schofield.

In an interview that afternoon, Schofield told police how she came to believe that Lamoureux had been contacting her.

That September someone sent her a card signed “secret admirer.” Then in late October or early November, she told police, someone sent her flowers at work. “Thoughts of you brighten my day,” the card said. “I hope these flowers brighten yours.”

That night, a man who identified himself as Ken called her at home. “I sent you the flowers,” Ken said. “You don’t know me, but I have seen you at the day care. I see you there when you pick up your son.”

The caller told Schofield that he had children in day care and was separated from his wife.

Schofield worked with Ellen Lamoureux in the intensive-care unit. Shortly after the call, the two women were talking about Lamoureux’s marital problems and Schofield’s secret admirer, and they realized they could be talking about the same man. The calls continued at Schofield’s house into December, she said, although the caller would simply hang up after she answered without identifying himself. The last call came Dec. 13. Schofield was frightened, she told the detective, and was heading out of town for a few days.

Schofield declined to be interviewed for this story, but she said in a brief telephone conversation that she believes what she told the police is true.

Lamoureux said recently that he never had any contact with Schofield.

Williams went to Lamoureux’s apartment on Dec. 18, nine days after the attack on Marker, and he agreed to an interview at police headquarters that afternoon. According to Williams’ report, Lamoureux at first denied knowing Marker and denied having ever been to the plant store. Eventually, he told Williams that he had been to the store once, the week before Thanksgiving, with his children.

Lamoureux told Williams that he spent the evening of Dec. 9 putting together a stereo stand he had bought that day. When Williams told him that he had been seen in the plant store that night, Lamoureux said: “I can’t remember. I may have been. I’m not 100 percent sure. I could have been walking by.” He refused to answer further questions.

He did consent to provide a blood sample for testing and to have his house and car searched. Williams looked for correspondence between Lamoureux and Marker, but found none.

Lamoureux said he remembered his contact with Williams in detail. The interrogation began in a friendly manner, but soon turned hostile.

“At one point they were standing up pounding on the table,” he said. “At that point I called my lawyer. I didn’t answer anything. I just got up and left.”

He allowed Williams to search his apartment, and remembers the detective focusing on a heavy-duty flashlight beside his bed. Several years before, Lamoureux had worked as a paramedic, and he said he used the flashlight then to defend himself. He said that Williams picked up the flashlight and called for the technician working with him, thinking he had seen a spot of blood.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Lamoureux said recently. “I’ve beaten the shit out of people with it, and knocked windows out.”

When police searched his car, Williams thought at one point that he had found a spot of blood on the upholstery, awaiting the technician to check it out. Lamoureux recalled the moment gleefully, sharing the punch line of the story. “Oh, that guy was pissed,” Lamoureux said. “‘It’s goddamn ketchup,’” he recalled Williams saying.

Lamoureux also said that police questioned him a second time, though there is no mention of a second interrogation in the police reports. Such an interrogation could have come when Williams arrested Lamoureux at his home in January 1996 for violating his wife’s restraining order.

Lamoureux said that Williams kept him in handcuffs until they were seated in an interrogation room at police headquarters. He said that Williams showed him photographs of Marker’s injuries.

“And there’s this great big laceration. It doesn’t bother me — a paramedic,” Lamoureux said. “I guess he thought I would be shocked by it. This went on for about an hour and then I lawyered up again.”

Lamoureux took issue with other aspects of the police investigation. He said that Williams told him that three women who knew his wife from work were the ones who identified him. According to police reports, two women who did not know Ellen Lamoureux identified him as being in the store before the attack.

Lamoureux also complained about the way the photo lineup was constructed. He said that he was the only middle-age white man pictured in the group of six. The others, he said, included three black men, a white man in his 60s or 70s and a white man in his 20s. The photo lineup preserved in the police reports, however, shows five middle-age white men and one elderly white man, all of whom wore glasses and looked similar to Lamoureux.

View our interactive graphic of the crime scene.

In an affidavit dated Dec. 28, 1995, Williams laid out the evidence against Lamoureux to get a court order for his phone records. The affidavit emphasized the relationship between Marker and Lamoureux, suggesting something more involved than what is described in other police reports.

“Jill Marker is a friend of Ellen Lamoureux, and contacts between Jill Marker and Kenneth Lamoureux are related to the conflicts between Ellen Lamoureux and Kenneth Lamoureux,” Williams wrote.

Williams said recently that without Lamoureux’s cooperation, there wasn’t much more he could do with that part of his investigation. According to Williams’ report, Lamoureux worked part time delivering lost baggage, but Williams did not find out which company Lamoureux worked for. Nor is there any evidence in the police reports that Williams interviewed any of Lamoureux’s relatives in North Carolina, his neighbors, the doctors who treated him on the psychiatric ward, or any other associates who might have been able to help Williams sort out whether Lamoureux could have had a role in Marker’s attack.

Williams had Lamoureux’s photograph posted in the hospital near Marker’s room with instructions to the nurses who cared for her to be on the lookout for him. Williams said he told the nurses to call the police if they saw him.

Over the next two months, Williams kept in touch with Lamoureux. On Jan. 4, Lamoureux came to police headquarters for a lie-detector test but left without taking it because he did not have a note from his doctor required for someone on heart medication.

By February, Williams had received approval from Lamoureux’s doctor. According to police reports, the results of the test were inconclusive. Williams’ report notes that one question showed a “great amount of deception.” That question was: “Did you strike, push or assault a woman inside the Silk Plant Forest?”

After that, the investigation of Lamoureux essentially ended. The state crime lab forwarded his blood to the FBI for DNA analysis. But the blood samples collected at the crime scene turned out to be all Marker’s. There was no DNA to compare to Lamoureux or anyone else.

In April, Williams called Lamoureux and asked him to come to police headquarters for another interview, telling him that because Marker had survived, he was no longer facing a charge of murder.

“I know. I know. I know,” Lamoureux said, according to Williams’ report. Lamoureux promised to call back.

Two days later, Ellen Lamoureux called Williams to tell him that her husband had moved to Charlotte to live with his father. In May, after Marker moved back to Ohio, Williams contacted Akron police officials to let them know that Lamoureux was the suspect in the case. That is the last mention of Lamoureux in any of Williams’ reports.

“I evidently run him out of town,” Williams said.

• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com

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