Dance with the Devil

A Memoir of Murder and Loss

David Bagby

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626819672
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Biografías de ciencias sociales

Immortalized in the acclaimed documentary Dear Zachary, this brutally honest memoir chronicles a system's failure to prevent the murder of a child. In November 2001, the bullet-riddled body of a young doctor named Andrew Bagby was discovered in Keystone State Park outside Latrobe, Pennsylvania. For parents Dave and Kate, the pain was unbearable—but Andrew's murder was only the beginning of the tragedy they endured. The chief suspect for Andrew's murder was his ex-girlfriend Shirley Turner. Obsessive and unstable, Shirley lied to police and fled to Newfoundland before she could be arrested. While fending off extradition efforts by U.S. law enforcement, she announced she was pregnant with Andrew's son, Zachary.

Hoping to gain custody of the child, the Bagbys moved to Newfoundland. They began a drawn-out court battle to protect their grandson from the woman who had almost certainly murdered their son. Then, in August 2003, Shirley killed herself and the one-year-old Zachary by jumping into the Atlantic Ocean. Dance with the Devil is David Bagby'seulogy for a dead son, an elegy for lives cut tragically short, and a castigation of a broken system.

"[An] incendiary cri de coeur."— The New York Times

DANCE WITH THE DEVIL is a eulogy for a dead son, an elegy for lives cut tragically short, and a castigation of a broken system.

CHAPTER 1

Murder

Andrew had been trying for many months to peacefully end his two-year romance with Shirley, but she kept wedging her way back into his life. On Saturday, November 3, 2001, over lunch at the tiny Latrobe, Pennsylvania airport, he finally convinced her that their relationship was over. She boarded her flight and returned to her home in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Twenty-four hours later, on Sunday afternoon, Shirley took her .22 calibre pistol, her cellphone, and some cash, and she headed east on Interstate 80. Early Monday morning, Andrew was getting ready for work when she presented herself at the door of his apartment, located across the street from his workplace, the Latrobe Area Hospital. He allowed her into his apartment and left her there while he walked across the street and reported for work.

At his 7:30 morning report Andrew told his supervisor, Dr. Clark Simpson, the chief resident in family practice medicine, about his early morning surprise visitor: “Guess who showed up on my doorstep this morning.”¹

Clark, who already knew something of Andrew’s troubles in trying to end the relationship, offered the only plausible guess: “Shirley?”

“Yup. That psychotic bitch was on my doorstep!”

“So what did you do?”

“I let her in.”

Clark tried to convey his concern about Shirley’s erratic behaviour: “Andrew, are you sure about this?”

“Oh, yeah. Everything’s fine.”

Andrew finished his morning duties at the main hospital, drove twenty miles north on Route 981, and reported for the afternoon shift at the satellite clinic in Saltsburg, a neighbouring town. In a quick chat late in the afternoon, Clark thought Andrew said that he was planning to meet Shirley after work in a “bar” and send her on her way again. Clark offered to go with him, just to help keep things cool, but Andrew once again assured him that all was well. They agreed that, after Andrew finished sending Shirley home again, he would pick up a six-pack of beer and go to Clark’s apartment for the evening.

A little before 5 p.m. Andrew left the Saltsburg clinic, picked up a six-pack at a convenience store, and went to meet Shirley. Unfortunately, the meeting took place in an isolated park, not in a bar, as Clark had remembered Andrew saying.

From the parking lot of Keystone State Park, just off of Route 981, Andrew used his cellphone to call Shirley’s cellphone.

A witness later reported seeing a lone car in the parking lot at around 5:30 p.m., “dark blue or black.”² The description was consistent with Andrew’s black Toyota Corolla.

Another witness reported walking through the parking lot a few minutes after 6 p.m. and passing two cars parked side-by-side, “a small dark colored car and an unknown color sport utility vehicle.”³ The descriptions of both vehicles were consistent with Andrew’s Corolla and Shirley’s Toyota RAV4.

Forensic analysis later disclosed the sequence of wounds to Andrew’s body. The first two slugs, in quick succession, entered the left side of his chest and his left cheek. The second slug exited behind his left ear. He spun halfway around and fell on his face in the gravel, shoulders hunched forward. Shirley carefully aimed the next two shots at his rectum. Then she stepped forward, bent slightly, and placed a final round in the back of his head—an execution shot close enough to singe the hair. The gun was empty, so she kicked him in the head.

She returned to her car and headed back to Iowa. The relationship was definitely over.

The same witness who reported seeing side-by-side cars on Monday evening was up well before dawn Tuesday morning, walking through the trees near the parking lot. He saw “the small dark colored car parked in the same location as the night before but the SUV was gone.”⁴ He shined a flashlight at the car, noticed nothing unusual, and kept walking.

Just before 6:00 a.m. a man searching for aluminum cans in the park dumpster found Andrew’s corpse, covered in a thin layer of frost, face down on the blood-soaked gravel.

---

1. Clark Simpson, interviewed by Chris O’Neill-Yates in “Warning Signs,” The National, CBC TV, on November 5, 2003.

2. Pennsylvania State Police Homicide Investigation Action Report of witness interview at 22:25 on 2001/11/06.

3. Pennsylvania State Police Homicide Investigation Action Report of witness interview at 13:00 on 2001/11/09.

4. Ibid.

CHAPTER 2

Background

According to Andrew, Shirley called herself a welfare brat and declared that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, to which he replied, “My dad’s not a Bill Gates, so it couldn’t be silver…bronze, maybe.” That seemed to be a good figurative summary of their differing backgrounds.

Andrew

I met Kate in October of 1967, a few months before my discharge from the navy in Long Beach, California. I had always assumed that marriage would be somewhere in my future, but not so soon, because my first priority as a civilian was to earn a degree in engineering and establish a career. Besides, I hardly knew any women. They still scared me.

Kate had firmly decided against marriage long before immigrating to California from England. Her plan was to circle the globe, working as a nurse for two years in America and two in Australia and then settle into spinsterhood as a district midwife somewhere in Devon, a beautiful county in southwest England.

After a blind date at Disneyland, we couldn’t keep away from each other. In the next two weeks we went out together twelve more times. Though our union was inevitable, it took me four more months to recognize that fact and propose marriage. She accepted and three weeks later a judge declared us an official couple. Several birth control methods served to forestall little baby distractions while I earned an engineering degree, but as I neared graduation, we dropped the precautions and enthusiastically set about making a baby: great fun, but not reproductive. After a year, we worried that we may not be able to conceive a child of our own, and Kate started taking a fertility drug. It worked. A year later, in the spring of 1973, Kate was finally pregnant.

I discovered that one of life’s sweetest pleasures was the feeling of pressing my close-shaven cheek onto my pregnant wife’s smooth, soft tummy where I could listen to the gurgles and thumps that go on in there. As my son grew, I could sometimes hear the baby’s heartbeat, and could certainly feel him squirm and kick. There was a primordial connection between that new Baby life in there and pleasure zones in Daddy’s brain out here.

After a tough labour ending in a Caesarean section, Kate and our beautiful baby boy were brought out into the hallway. Kate and I hugged and kissed and cried tears of joy. We named him Andrew David Bagby and took him home to live and grow with us.

The next twenty-two years were only remarkable for their lack of significant problems. Kate’s and my careers progressed very nicely; hers as an OB/GYN nurse practitioner and mine as a computer engineer. Andrew performed his job—growing up—to near perfection. He was a bright and eager baby and toddler, a good student from kindergarten through college, and an Eagle Scout, both figuratively and literally. He was a good kid.

He was not, however, a perfect kid. For several years in early grade school, his classmates found that he could be easily goaded into violent reaction with the slightest of insults. Kate and I must have sat Andrew down on a monthly basis to deliver some variation on the non-violence speech: “Andrew, somebody’s words don’t hurt you. Let them say anything they like; it won’t hurt you. But the one who hits first is always wrong. The first rule, the last rule, and all the rules in between: don’t touch anybody without their permission!” He eventually accepted the wisdom of this advice, cooled his temper, and developed many good strong friendships throughout his school years. He matured into an easygoing personality who could fit in with any crowd and aspired to become a doctor.

After graduating with a degree in biological sciences from the University of California at Irvine, Andrew failed to get into medical school. Choking down the disappointment, he got a job and repeated the application process—this time he applied to about sixty schools. He also became engaged to a lovely young lady named Heather Arnold, but left the wedding date unspecified because he didn’t know when, where, or even if, he would be going away to school.

In the spring of 1996, persistence paid off and Andrew was accepted into the class of 2000 Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada: MUN MED, for short. I confess that I had to check an atlas to locate that easternmost city in North America. In late summer, Andrew and Heather drove the four thousand miles from California to Newfoundland, where his medical studies progressed very well; he passed the first year of medical school.

Cohabitation fared less well. When they came home on break in the summer of 1997, Andrew and Heather announced that the engagement was off. A common story: two good people who couldn’t live together in peace and harmony. But there was no animosity in their parting; in fact, Kate and I had Andrew’s blessing to continue our love and support of Heather. When he returned to St. John’s, Heather moved in with us and became something of a surrogate daughter. She got a job and struggled to get her head on straight and identify her life’s work. Two years later, in July 1999, Heather had settled on a career in medicine and entered her first year of training at MUN MED. By that time Andrew, in his last year of training, was often seen in the company of a family practice resident named Shirley Turner.

Shirley

Shirley Jane Turner was born on January 28, 1961, in Wichita, Kansas, to an American father and a Newfoundland mother. Her parents separated when she was about seven years old, and she went with her mother to live in the tiny seaside village of Daniel’s Harbour on the west coast of the island of Newfoundland. At the age of sixteen she enrolled in Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, a satellite of MUN located in Corner Brook, on the west coast of Newfoundland. She was, according to fellow student Rene Pollett, “by far one of the most intelligent and funny people I’d ever met…She would get 98s and 100s on chemistry exams…All in our circle of friends were amazed by her academic abilities.”¹

Pollett, who grew up in a “comfortable middle-class home” in Corner Brook, became fast friends with Shirley, whose childhood was spent in “desperate poverty in rural Newfoundland.” Near the end of their college friendship, talking of future plans, Shirley considered a career in nursing. Pollett set her friend straight: “Forget that. With your marks, you should be a doctor.”

In 1981, less than a year away from an undergraduate degree in chemistry, Shirley’s medical ambitions were temporarily sidetracked by marriage. Even without a degree, Shirley had enough backgro...

Table of contents

• Dance with the Devil
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Prologue
• 1. Murder
• 2. Background
• 3. Notification
• 4. TLC
• 5. Investigation
• 6. Escape
• 7. Limbo
• 8. Two Fronts
• 9. The Enemy
• 10. Nits
• 11. Move
• 12. Happy Birthday
• 13. Access
• 14. Zachary
• 15. Extradition Hearing
• 16. More Nits
• 17. Another Hour
• 18. ATP Ruling
• 19. Cooperation
• 20. Jail
• 21. Ice Mode
• 22. Bail Application
• 23. Bail Hearing
• 24. Détente
• 25. War
• 26. Emotional Octopus
• 27. Surrender
• 28. Counselling
• 29. Birthday Parties
• 30. The Stretch
• 31. Notification
• 32. Next
• 33. Motive
• 34. Useful Limbo
• 35. The Law of Bail
• 36. Proposal
• 37. Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Appendix A. Murder Prevention and Response
• Appendix B. Justifications for Criminal Punishment
• Appendic C. Dangerousness
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