What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl by Katherine Dykstra

Author:Katherine Dykstra [Dykstra, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Murder, General, Social Science, Women's Studies, Violence in Society
ISBN: 9780393651997
Google: GgIDEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-06-15T00:21:08.022523+00:00

I didn’t know much about what had happened to Lonnie Bell in the intervening years. He made an appearance in the crime blotter of the Gazette in 1979 when he was thirty. According to the item, he’d been charged with public intoxication and criminal trespass. He’d entered a Pizza Hut at lunchtime on a Tuesday with his roommate and threatened an assistant manager with bodily harm. Lonnie and his buddy yelled obscenities at the restaurant’s employees and customers, turned over a couple of tables, and threw a jar of cheese into the parking lot. For this, Lonnie spent the night in jail and was released on cash bond the next day. In 1981, he filed for a marriage license with a once-divorced woman who had been crowned Miss Cedar Rapids in 1965. Other than that, all I knew was that he was sixty-six years old and lived in government-subsidized housing.

Lonnie’s apartment complex lay off a solitary, moderately forested road with few turnoffs and even less traffic on the southwest side of Cedar Rapids. The community had no gate and no security guard. Beyond the entrance, Susan and I found a smattering of two-story buildings, brown-shingled, brick and drab, in a sea of asphalt. I was afraid, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. There was the potential that Lonnie had played a role in Paula’s death and had kept quiet all these years and would go into a fury at our prying. Or possibly he wasn’t involved in her death at all but then there I was holding up to the light an event that was likely a great source of pain for him. But also, and perhaps most certainly, there was the simple fact that he was a man whom I did not know, and I was willingly stepping onto his turf. A move I had been warned against over and over again in varying scenarios throughout my entire life.

Susan had met Lonnie before. On an earlier reporting trip she and my father-in-law showed up at Lonnie’s door with a tape recorder. The audio was scratchy and difficult to decipher, but Lonnie, after initially saying he didn’t want to talk, allowed Susan a few words. In order to ingratiate herself, she told him that she felt he’d been unfairly persecuted. This did seem to open him up. He made a few suggestions as to culprits and motives and then said he had to go.

I parked the car beside Lonnie’s building. When I looked at Susan, I was met with resigned confidence. Despite her size and age—she was in her sixties herself, by which I mean she would not be fighting anyone off—she seemed unfazed by our mission. “Ready?” she asked. I nodded, knowing I needed to give Lonnie a chance to tell his side of the story.

We entered through an air lock in the side of the building and found in front of us a set of carpeted stairs that led both a half flight up and a half flight down.

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