Nothing in her experience prepared Gayle Boone for the chamber of horrors her life became in fall 1989.
She was raised in the Christian life, as it’s said of church-going families in these gently rolling hills of rural Missouri, about 80 miles west of St. Louis. Her father, Mel Huenefeld, is a contractor, like his father before him. Locally that means a fellow who throws some two-by-fours into his pickup truck and goes out to build a house with his own hands. Gayle played basketball in high school and won an academic scholarship to the state university.
She dropped out to marry Jim Boone, supporting him while he finished a trade-school course in auto mechanics. They had a daughter, Christy, who is now 9. Gayle Boone became a paramedic with the Montgomery County ambulance service and, with her dad, set up kennels behind her house, raising puppies as a spare-time business.
She and Jim split up, but without much bad feeling on either side. So recalls her divorce attorney, David Dowling, who, in one of the ironies of small-town living, subsequently prosecuted Gayle Boone for murder.
Her case has split this town of 2,000 down the middle. Boone’s family is well-respected here. So, too, is the family of Pat Hollensteiner, whom Boone says she shot in self-defense. The courtroom was packed with both parties’ kin when Boone was sentenced in March 1992, though the proceedings were transferred to a nearby county.
Montgomery County Sheriff John Whyte remains convinced that Boone is a cold-blooded killer. But Gary Hemby, police chief of Montgomery City, is still suspicious about how the case was handled, and believes Boone deserves another day in court.
So, too, do the 670 people who petitioned the judge to that effect, among them Rick Binkholder, then a Missouri Highway Patrol officer, who was pressed into service to drive the ambulance that took the dying Hollensteiner to a hospital. Binkholder took flak from fellow officers for supporting a convicted felon and resigned. He also received two death threats.
“My life was very dull until it all started coming apart,” said Boone, 29, who is imprisoned in the Renz Correctional Center near the state capital of Jefferson City.
Meeting with a reporter for the first time since her trial, she wore the fixed, emotionless expression and carried herself with the stiff bearing of many of those who live behind bars. But she soon relaxed, telling her story as easily as if she were sitting in her hometown cafe, contributing to the daily gossip exchange.
“It all began,” she said, “when I’d return from work to find things had been moved around, like someone wanted me to know he’d been in my house.”
One time in late 1989, she found a scissors and locks of human hair in her sink, as if from a fresh haircut. She and her parents, who live just up the road and who baby-sat for Christy when Boone was on duty, got mysterious phone calls. They saw shadowy figures lurking around their property.
Hearing a noise in her garage one night, Boone went to investigate and felt herself grabbed from behind by someone who put a rope around her throat. She passed out and regained consciousness to find the message “You let her die” scratched into the paint of her truck, as if by someone angry over Boone’s work as a paramedic.
Through 1990, the harassment seemed to focus on Boone’s dogs, dozens of which were poisoned. All of this was reported to Sheriff Whyte, who has jurisdiction over the rural area where Boone lives.
He said he took the matter seriously, to the point of getting off-duty officers to volunteer for two weeks of round-the-clock surveillance of Boone’s property. But the sheriff’s deputies never saw anything, making him suspicious.
“We just couldn’t substantiate some of the things she said were happening,” Whyte said. “We solve a lot of crime around here and I thought: `Why can’t we solve a simple little thing like this?’ “
Frustrated, Whyte asked the advice of detectives at the Kansas City Police Department, who suggested that it could be Munchausen syndrome, a psychiatric condition that leads people to fabricate suffering to get attention, a diagnosis that Whyte believed fit Boone’s case.
Others were equally sure Boone wasn’t faking, among them Melvin “Buddy” Yates, a part-time paramedic who also was a deputy sheriff. He answered the call when Boone reported that a puppy had been hanged in her kennels.
“There’s a term in ambulance work, psychogenic shock, for the state of shock produced by witnessing a horrible sight,” Yates said. “Anybody who saw Gayle’s expression couldn’t have had any doubts about her.”
Finally, Boone’s father had a confrontation with the sheriff, accusing him of not trying to find the stalker. Whyte told Huenefeld and Boone to take their business elsewhere, saying he was turning the matter over to the Highway Patrol. That department did no better in solving the mystery.
An offer of help
Toward the end of 1990, with Boone feeling vulnerable and abandoned by the authorities, Pat Hollensteiner offered to be her protector. A volunteer firefighter, he had previously expressed an interest in her to a mutual friend, but, as he was seven years younger, Boone couldn’t see him as a boyfriend. Now, though, he offered his help, no romantic strings attached, saying he would watch her house when she was at work.
With Hollensteiner on the lookout, the incidents stopped.
“Looking back, I knew he saw himself as a knight in shining armor,” Boone said. “Maybe I did too. I needed help.”
From the beginning, though, Boone’s mother, Gerry Huenefeld, didn’t like Hollensteiner. To her, he seemed a braggart, especially as he claimed to be an informant for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and said he’d been present when federal agents raided local drug dealers.
“Pat said that once he’d shot a guy in the head,” Gerry Huenefeld said, “then cleaned up and went to a motel and shot another guy.”
Eventually those stories troubled Boone too. She also began to think that if nothing happened with him present, perhaps it was because he was the culprit. Boone said it also angered her to hear that Hollensteiner was saying they were living together.
But the more she tried to ease him out of her life, she said, the more insistent Hollensteiner became. She said he took her wedding ring from her home and had its stones reset in a new band.
“I’d driven him to his job at the junkyard and was telling him not to come over anymore when he showed me the ring, saying we had to get married,” Boone said. “I was shocked, because he’d never even made a pass.”
On a later occasion, Boone recalled, Hollensteiner said he was giving her until 1992 to marry him. A week before the shooting, Boone said, Hollensteiner phoned her at the ambulance service, saying he was coming by because they had to talk. Frightened, she called Hemby, Montgomery City’s police chief, who rushed over and hid in an ambulance to watch what happened.
“I couldn’t hear what he was saying,” Hemby recalled. “But I heard Gayle say, `Yes, Pat, I am afraid of you.’ “
Hollensteiner started moving toward Boone, making Hemby fear violence was at hand. But before the chief could get out of the ambulance, Hollensteiner broke off the encounter with an obscenity and left.
A fateful appointment
Two days later, as Boone was grocery shopping, she was startled by loud banging sounds. Hollensteiner was pounding on the outside of the supermarket’s windows. In a panic, she borrowed the store manager’s phone and called the police. An officer caught up with Hollensteiner at a nearby coin laundry, warning him to keep his distance from Boone.
Two days later, on April 12, 1991, Boone found a handwritten note in her truck that read: “Tonight 7 p.m.” Given their recent encounters, Boone assumed the message was Hollensteiner’s and took it as a threat. She asked a neighbor to warn her if she saw Hollensteiner coming up the road, but the woman said she and her husband had plans to be out.
Boone also called her brother and sister-in-law, Randy and Kathy Huenefeld, who have a veterinary practice in another town about 180 miles away. They said they were jumping into their car.
“It takes three hours to get there, so I told Gayle to call someone nearby,” Kathy Huenefeld said. “She said she didn’t know who to call. I said she should call her ex-husband, Jim, since Christy, their daughter, could be in danger too.”
Jim Boone was called, he came over with a friend, and Christy was taken to her grandparents for safety. Gayle Boone had also contacted the sheriff’s office and was told a patrol car was being assigned. The details of that arrangement are in dispute.
Gayle Boone said the sheriff’s office suggested the patrol car take up a position nearby but not on her property, where it couldn’t be seen. If Hollensteiner showed up, the officer would follow him to her house and arrest him for trespassing. Sheriff Whyte said the idea of not having the patrol car immediately at hand was Gayle Boone’s.
Either way, the patrol car didn’t play a role in the tragedy that followed. The deputy decided he needed a backup and fetched another officer. The two stopped off for coffee, leaving Boone unprotected.
Jim Boone and his friend stationed themselves behind Gayle Boone’s home with a portable phone and a monitor radio. As a paramedic, Gayle Boone wore a beeper, which she was to press once if Hollensteiner was unarmed, twice if he had a weapon. The monitor would pick up the beeper’s clicks, and Jim Boone would phone the authorities.
Hollensteiner did show up, entering through a garage door and saying he’d come for some personal effects. Gayle Boone said she told him to wait and she would fetch them. But she turned to see that he was following her and had a knife with a long blade.
“Pat was saying, `If you’d accepted me, it wouldn’t have to end this way,”‘ Gayle Boone said.
`Looks like a clean shoot’
Clicking the beeper, she fled down the hall to a bedroom where she had a double-barreled shotgun her father had given her when the mysterious incidents began. Gayle Boone said that when Hollensteiner followed her, she pulled the trigger but the gun misfired. As he kept coming, she fired again. This time the gun went off, wounding him.
Boone said that as he retreated down the hallway, Hollensteiner dropped the knife. He staggered outside, tried getting into his truck and collapsed. The authorities were called, and Hollensteiner was taken to a hospital where he died early the next morning, evidently without telling anyone his version of what happened.
That night, Kevin Bryant, a Missouri conservation agent and former St. Louis police officer, found a message on his telephone answering machine.
“A buddy on the Highway Patrol, knowing I’m a friend of Gayle’s, called to tell me what happened,” Bryant said. “He said, `It looks like a clean shoot.’ “
Locally, that’s police shorthand for self-defense. Indeed, that night the authorities on the scene reassured Boone that her actions seemed justifiable.
A troubling admission
Two days later, the sheriff’s office called saying that if she’d give a written statement, the matter could be cleared up. Upon doing so, the officers said they had a few more questions, and after five or six hours of interrogation they booked her on a charge of murder.
During questioning, Boone made a potentially damaging admission. Told that Jim Boone had said she’d asked him to lie for her by saying he’d seen Hollensteiner with the knife, she said, “Yes, I asked Jim to lie.”
She said she made that statement in frustration, to get the officers off her back after hours of relentless questioning. As she recalled, when Jim Boone came into her house after the shooting, she said: “Didn’t you see him come through here with a knife? Please say you saw it.”
Gayle Boone’s supporters note that the tape recorder was turned on and off during her interrogation, which could mask any pressure or coercion preceding her admission. They say the investigation was loaded against her because Hollensteiner was the sheriff’s nephew, the son of Whyte’s brother, who moved to California after Pat was born. The sheriff said he’d had almost no contact with Pat since he was adopted as a baby by Ray and Carol Hollensteiner.
“To keep them from howling foul or conflict of interest,” Whyte said, “I set up an investigative team with one officer each from my own department, the city police, the state police, Kansas City’s department, plus a deputy lent by the sheriff in the next county. Nobody could say this was a conspiracy.”
Those investigators found two people who recalled that on the morning of the shooting, Hollensteiner had said Gayle Boone had phoned and invited him over. That could make it seem as if she’d lured him to her house to murder him. Yet for a while, the authorities must not have thought they could prove that at trial. Yates, the former deputy sheriff who’d always believed Boone was being harassed, was approached by a lawyer working on the prosecution and was asked to carry a proposal to her.
“If she’d plead guilty to manslaughter, they’d ask the judge to let her off with probation,” Yates said. “But she had to get rid of the fancy criminal lawyer her family got from over in Illinois. A local boy had to be hired to do the deal.”
But before Yates could convey the message, the offer was withdrawn. Dowling, the county prosecutor, asked and got the help of the state attorney general’s office. Robert Ahsens III, an assistant attorney general, came to town and, according to Boone’s supporters, let it be known he was confident of getting a conviction.
“The big problem had been you didn’t have a clear-cut motive,” Whyte said. “The homicides I’ve worked on were always over money, women or drugs.”
Ahsens thought of another possibility, said Clyde Kuehn, the lawyer based in Belleville, Ill., who represented Boone. There was a rumor that Boone had had an affair with a married police officer, and a number of deputies and officers were called in for questioning. Finally, one admitted to having been Boone’s lover.
According to Kuehn, the prosecution’s theory was that his client had faked the harassment incidents to attract the attention of the officer who eventually became her lover. When he left her, Boone thought it was because he no longer believed she was the victim of a stalker. So she set Hollensteiner up, planning to kill him and plant a knife to make it look like self-defense. Then she could say to her former boyfriend, “You see, there really was a stalker.”
The people may yet decide
The State of Missouri never had to put that theory to a jury. On the second day of the trial, Boone changed her plea to guilty, in return for the charges being reduced to second-degree murder. She was sentenced to 15 years.
“One juror was crying because she knew the victim,” Kuehn said, recalling why he urged Boone to accept a plea bargain. “We’d gotten a change of venue, but only to a nearby county where the Hollensteiners were well-known.”
Kuehn said the ballistics reports also were a problem, in that they seem to indicate Boone fired on Hollensteiner at longer range than she’d said.
Boone and her supporters think differently. When she belatedly saw the depositions given by crime-lab technicians, Boone thought her attorney had misrepresented the weakness of her case to her and her family.
Accordingly, Boone has hired new attorneys to try to reopen the case, on the grounds that she wasn’t fully informed when she pleaded guilty, an allegation that Kuehn denies. In late February the judge who presided over her trial rejected that argument, but her lawyers are appealing his ruling. So it’s possible a jury will have to decide whether Boone is the innocent victim of a stalker or a calculating murderer.
Each side says it’s confident that 12 of Boone’s peers would see the case its way.
If she had plotted Hollensteiner’s murder, her supporters argue, why didn’t she finish him off? She had more ammunition. She should have feared he would live to give his account of what happened.
If Boone is innocent, her opponents ask, why did she plead guilty? Also, before her trial, Jim Boone got letters from someone pressuring him not to give damaging testimony. One had a fingerprint of Gayle Boone’s, which convinces Whyte that Boone feared for the truth to come out.
“If someone plans a murder,” Gayle Boone asked, “do they call people to come over?”
“Wouldn’t you cover your butt just that way?” Whyte countered. “Get people nearby, but where they can’t see. You’d make it look like we’d had a chance to catch the stalker, but didn’t. So now you had to take care of it.
