October 31st; Baytown, Texas. Halloween is a spooky time and in 1985 residents of the greater Houston area had a real-life boogeyman to fear—six weeks earlier eleven-year old Carolyn Hahn had been butchered in nearby Mont Belvieu, stabbed, strangled, her throat slit from ear to ear. A child killer frolicked in the shadows alongside the holiday’s traditional ghosts and goblins. For her final Halloween Mary Stiles dressed as a baby. The pigtailed eleven-year old was last seen alive at approximately 5pm near her home at the Woodhollow apartment complex—carrying a baby bottle as a prop, she was clad in a pair of peach Care Bear pajamas. Mary’s father became alarmed when her brother and sister arrived home later that evening without Mary in tow; he had assumed she was trick-or-treating with her siblings. When she hadn’t returned by 9pm the Baytown Police Department was notified and a search of the area was launched; no trace of Mary could be found. Grief and fear roiled the community as the search for the missing sixth-grader foundered. Finally, ten days after Mary’s disappearance the Baytown Police Department received a letter marked “Urgent-Mary Stiles;” the envelope, bearing a local postmark, contained a Baytown Sun news article detailing the investigation and a hand drawn map which purported to show the location of Mary’s body. The area depicted—a wooded lot behind the Woodhollow Apartments—had been previously searched to no avail. The teen mailing the letter had been caught on videotape, and Detective Gore toted a copy to the local high school straightaway—Assistant Principal Charles Ray Polk identified the subject on the tape as sophomore JOsEph Lee FOrdham, age sixteen. Fordham, a Woodhollow complex resident, was the step-brother of Mary’s best friend. The pieces were falling into place. Investigators immediately began 24-hour surveillance of Fordham and the reconnaissance paid off on the very first day: Fordham was spotted scouting about for witnesses before depositing a black garbage bag in the trash. Detectives retrieved the bag from the dumpster—the contents included a copy of the riddle the police department had received on December 9th and an additional puzzle which had never been sent to the police. The next day while Fordham was in school a search warrant was executed at his family’s apartment—a surfeit of incriminating evidence was found, including newspaper clippings about the Stiles’ killing, several books on mythology, bloodstained clothing and shoes, and a pocketknife which would later be identified as the murder weapon. The Madman’s reign of ungrammatical terror was over. Fordham was arrested that day as he stepped off the school bus. Described as meek and hyper-religious, he was the product of a fractured family—his unemployed beautician mother was on her fourth marriage, and his family unit featured a collection of half- and step-siblings. Shuttled back and forth between his mother’s marital pick-of-the-week and maternal relatives in Georgia, Fordham’s life had not been untouched by tragedy—three years previously his grandfather and uncle had been slain in a family dispute by an irate in-law. (Note: although some recent accounts claim Fordham witnessed the murders of his relatives contemporaneous accounts—including his grandmother’s trial testimony—state Fordham was vacationing in Florida when his uncle and grandfather were slain.) A profusion of physical evidence tied Fordham to Stiles murder—he’d left four palm prints and twenty-three fingerprints on the Madman correspondence, and several practice riddles were found in his room—but detectives were unable to find any evidence linking him to the murder of Carolyn Hahn. Unbelievably, despite the uncanny similarities the two crimes were unconnected; Carolyn’s killer, a family friend, confessed in 1988 and is currently serving a 99-year term in the penitentiary.

KHOU