He Buried My Mother By A Blue Motel

It was exactly what she had seen in her dream – the same nightmare she had had three days after her mother went missing in December 2004. There was the sand dune to the right, and another at the foot of the grave.

When Terri Bowersock finally stood at that place 13 months after Loretta Bowersock’s murder, she turned to a friend and said, “I described it to a ‘T.'”

Along with the familiarity came the relief in knowing that the rest of her dream hadn’t been true: If coyotes had actually tried to get at the body buried beneath the sand and rock, they surely left disappointed. Although Terri’s dream had them nipping at her fingertips, the once-beautiful woman who had been double-wrapped in black landscaping tarp and buried 18 inches under the sand and rocks never suffered that indignity.

For the last year or so, Terri had resigned herself to the belief that her mother’s body had been hastily buried, leaving it exposed enough to be devoured, with the bones scattered across a lonely spot on the Arizona desert. So it was comforting to learn how much care had gone into the burial. “There was some love in how she was buried,” Terri says generously, referring to her mother’s killer.

Less comforting, however, was learning how her mother had died – a plastic bag from the produce department of a local grocery store was still over Loretta’s head when the body was found. She had been suffocated.

Like everyone else, Terri heard the news of her mother’s discovery during a live press conference from Florence, which is where the body was originally taken. She’d gotten lost on her way to Florence, and, regrettably, kept the press waiting. So, when officers offered to brief her prior to the press conference, she declined. “No, everyone’s been waiting… let’s just do this.”

If you were watching, and much of Arizona was watching be-cause the announcement came in the midst of the evening newscast, you saw her flinch in pain as an officer announced the cause of death. Terri had always believed the psychics who’d predicted that her mother was hit over the head and died instantly, never knowing what had happened and never feeling any pain. “That really got me,” she admits.

Inside the Florence stationhouse, Terri looked for some reassurance from the officers. “Suffocation. That’s quick, right?”

If ever there were a time to be merciful and lie, this would have been one of those times. But the Florence police officers told the truth – it takes an eternity to enter eternity when you’re being smothered. Four or five minutes, maybe, and all the while, there’s no air; all the while, the victim knows she’s dying; and all the while, she’s looking at her murderer. It’s an agonizing death. It’s a torment that Terri will have to live with for the rest of her life.

It was the kind of murder you’d never expect: Loretta Bowersock, a successful 69-year-old businesswoman, always beautifully dressed, always with impressive diamonds decorating her graceful hands, turns up missing and presumed dead at the hands of her charming live-in boyfriend of 18 years. She was found without shoes, leading police to believe she was most likely killed in the large, beautiful Tempe home she shared with Taw Benderly – the same home that was filled with treasures from yard sales and second-hand stores.

She had the house and the first hints of success before Benderly came into her life nearly two decades earlier. By then, she and her daughter Terri had founded a consignment company that would make them rich and locally famous.

Terri’s Consign & Design Furnishings became the kind of success story that’s devoured by the press – a dyslectic daughter, with the help of her mother and a $2,000 loan from her maternal grandmother, create a business based on “gently used” home furnishings. Oprah noticed the story and featured Terri on her show; Avon noticed and gave her its “Woman of Enterprise Award”; and the state of Arizona noticed and named Terri the state’s top businesswoman. Her smile and bubbly personality were featured on countless television ads over the years, and she became a generous supporter of community causes. And, through it all, Terri always credited her mother for a lifetime of love, support and help.

So, when news came that Terri’s mother was missing on Dec-ember 14, 2004, it felt like a family tragedy to all kinds of people around the Valley. And it had such a vexing mystery to it – she’d just vanished. Almost immediately, police suspected that she’d been buried somewhere in the desert between Phoenix and Tucson.

Benderly tried to pass off a story that he’d dropped Loretta at a Tucson mall to do some Christmas shopping, and that she hadn’t showed up for their prearranged rendezvous, but that story quickly fell apart.

Police traced his movements that day, which began with the withdrawal of $24,000 from the joint checking account he shared with Loretta at a Tempe bank. That took place at 9:20 a.m. He then left town and headed east on I-10 in his red Chrysler minivan.

Police determined that he spent 2 hours and 15 minutes covering the few miles between exits 198 and 200 off I-10: At 11 a.m., he used his credit card to purchase two baseball caps at the Casa Grande outlet mall, which is located at Exit 198. At 12:30 p.m., he made cell phone calls from somewhere off of Exit 199. Then, at 1:15 p.m., he purchased two lunches at Love’s Truck Stop, which is located at Exit 200.

Police were convinced that he had spent those 135 minutes picking and shoveling a shallow grave to stash Loretta’s body. And even though Terri confronted him directly, Benderly insisted that he didn’t know where her mother was. All he knew, he said, was that he and her mother had promised to spend eternity together.
On December 22, without leaving a note to guide Terri to her mother’s grave, without leaving any clues to help end the anguish of everyone left behind, Taw Benderly hung himself in the garage of the house he’d shared with Loretta.

Only later, as she got access to her mother’s house, was Terri exposed to the amazing secrets that lurked inside that seemingly ideal home. Only then did she realize that Taw Benderly had stolen her mother’s identity and racked up tens of thousands of dollars of bills on credit cards issued in her name. Only then did she find he’d embezzled tens of thousands of dollars of Loretta’s money. Only then did she discover that the house was about to be repossessed because Benderly had been stealing the mortgage payments for months.

Terri had long been suspicious of Benderly, and she was convinced that he had talked her mother into a painful lawsuit over the consignment business they’d started – a lawsuit the mother and daughter spent years learning to get over. She knew he was a blow-hard about the “inventions” he was always tinkering with – always promising that he was on the verge of a breakthrough. She knew because he was always begging her for secret loans. But she’d never considered him a physical threat to her mother.

Only later would she learn from her mother’s sisters that Loretta had wanted out of the relationship for a long time. “But my mother’s generation believed in standing by their man – they aren’t women who want to be alone,” Terri says. If only… Terri wonders. If only her mother had followed her instincts and left him. If only her mother hadn’t been afraid of being alone.

The day Benderly hung himself, Terri and her friends spent 12 hours searching the desert for her mother’s body. Police had pinpointed the most likely area, based on the clues they’d pieced together. The search party, however, returned again and again, sometimes accompanied by strangers so touched by news reports, they just had to help.

There were the snowbirds from Michigan and the retired state trooper who showed up out of the blue. Indians from the nearby reservation showed everyone how to systematically search an area, while two guys arrived with their private helicopters. A Florida couple searched during their Arizona vacation, and there was Jeramiah, who left a handwritten note in the desert on the back of a cardboard box: “I’m willing to look under any avenue or cactus yet unturned. I will march thru hell to help.”

“I never went out on the desert alone,” Terri says with gratitude and wonderment. “When they found the body, I asked, ‘What two miles of the desert did I miss?'”

As it turned out, they’d been searching eight miles too far east. And Terri will forever be convinced that if she’d driven those extra eight miles, she’d have realized where the body had to be, because so many psychics had given a crucial clue.

The psychics were drawn to the case early on, some saying they “saw” the murder, some saying they “saw” the grave. “When you don’t have any other answers, it was comforting to hear from them,” Terri says. She followed every clue – except the one that never materialized.

“The psychics kept saying a ‘blue truck,’ or a ‘blue car’ – they al-ways saw something blue where my mother was buried,” she remembers. There never was a blue truck or blue car in the desert where they searched for a year. But eight miles down the road was an abandoned motel. Its roof is blue. And it has an old gas station that’s painted blue. What’s more, there’s a blue water tower behind it, and in the yard is a forsaken blue truck.

Terri’s convinced that her mother’s killer had scoped out this spot long before the day he arrived with a body to bury. “If you pulled into the motel, you had to drive around to the back,” she says. “There’s an old road, and once you’re out there, it’s so secluded that no one could see you. It’s a miracle she was found. I always thought that eventually somebody would be building and find her body, but nobody was ever going to build out there.”

In the end, hikers found the body when they kicked at a rock and exposed a part of Loretta’s skull. That was January 11. The next day, police called Terri at work, cautiously telling her that they’d found a body and it might be her mother.

“I got excited, but I’ve been out so often and come home so de-pressed, I tried to stay calm,” Terri recalls. She’d just gone through a big disappointment on December 13, the one-year anniversary of when police believe Loretta was murdered. A truck driver called to report that a year earlier “he’d seen a red van like Taw’s on the road right where we had been searching,” Terri says. “I thought it was a sign from God.”

But it wasn’t, and she figured this call from the police might turn out to be one more disappointment. By the next day, though, tests proved that the body was Loretta’s.

“It’s a little bit comforting that he didn’t just toss her out,” Terri says. “There was love and hate in that relationship. He buried her to save her and protect her.”

The memorial service was filled with laughter and love and hundreds of pictures to attest to the lovely woman who was Loretta Jean McJilton Bowersock. There was one of Loretta holding baby Terri and another of Loretta and Terri in one of their favorite places – a beach in Hawaii, where Terri and her brother, Scott, intend to spread their mother’s ashes. There’s even a picture of Loretta and Taw on the trip they’d taken to Alaska with Terri in the fall of 2004.

About 100 friends and coworkers came to mark Loretta’s memorial, including many who’d scoured the desert for the body and several of the psychics who’d tried to help. They paged through several photo albums that were put together to show the happy times. And then there was the final album with the sad pictures. The gravesite. The rocks. The blue motel. The mementos found on the searches, including Jeramiah’s cardboard note.

The Reverend Kathryn McDowell looked out over the crowd: “Quite a village has been built around this situation,” she said. And then she glanced over at Terri: “The essence of who Loretta was is alive in Terri.”

“The things I got to learn this year were absolutely phenomenal,” Terri said.

In that year, she founded a new business in honor of her mother. It’s called Still N Style, and it sits next to her consignment store at Elliott and Hardy in Tempe. It’s still under construction, but this is where the memorial was held, amid the particleboard shelves yet to be painted and the drywall yet to be textured.

She plans to make Still N Style a fashion and home décor store that also will serve as a donation center for Doves, a Phoenix home that’s noted for being the nation’s first shelter for elderly victims of domestic violence (see Jana’s View, page 40).

Terri is still shattered by the realization that her mother was a victim of domestic violence. “Domestic violence isn’t just getting hit or beat up,” she says now, with a new understanding of the issue. “Abuse is stealing your identity. Abuse is taking your money. Abuse is turning you away from your daughter.”

Taw Benderly did all of those things to Loretta, who often told her daughter, “I’m too old to start over.”

Terri is convinced there are many women out there just like her mother. Women who are afraid of being alone or ashamed of the abuse they’re silently suffering. She hopes to help them realize that it isn’t too late, and she hopes younger women learn to cherish their own identity and assure their own security.

Time will tell. Meanwhile, Terri spends a lot of time talking to her mother. “I hear her voice all the time,” she says. “When you love someone, you’re always talking to them.” Sometimes, Terri says, her mother answers back.

“I asked her once, ‘Are you with Taw?’ and she answered, ‘Oh no, he’s on another level.'”