THE END OF THE LINE

DEATH MAY NOT BE PROUD BUT IT IS INTERESTING

Yesterday, while talking to my granddaughter, the granddaughter of my first husband, I realized that she didn't know where her grandfather came from and barely knew his full name.  Her mother, now deceased seemed to care very much about that branch of the family and used her maiden name, Miers all of her life.   Now I know I am on some kind of right path to delve through my memories so that there will be a little record of the things I know.  My first husband was adopted when he was a newborn so genetically speaking, I don't know very much about him.His name was Robert Bruce Miers (b.12/21/1941; d. 1986; buried beside his parents Homer and Irene Miers in Greenlawn Memorial Park in Lafayette, Louisiana.) There is no exact date of death in February, 1986 because the circumstances surrounding his death are not clear.  Because I had been divorced from him and had not seen him for five years, before he died, again I know very little.  Gossip, though, is a thing that people in southwest Louisiana thrive on, so I do know some things.

I got this tale from my sister in law who told me that her sister's boss' son found the body.  The boy was about 15 and was visiting someone who lived along Bayou Tortu in St. Martin Parish.  The boy borrowed a pirogue from the people he was visiting, and floating along down the bayou, digging in the water with a long stick, found a chain that he could not get loose, so he hung it over a branch and went on along the bayou exploring and fishing ...and later he came back to dislodge the chain he'd found.  When he finally got it loose, though, a hand floated up with the chain.  The boy was terrified, ran his boat up onshore and sprinted to a nearby farmhouse.  When the sheriff's department came, they loaded up the boy and his boat and took him home to his mother.

St Martinville sheriff's deputies travelled to Alvin Texas to give me and Mike a lie detector test.  They told me at first that I was their prime suspect in a murder.  I knew already about Bob having died because our daughter had called me.  I told them what I knew...that if I was their prime suspect that they didn't have much of anything to go on because I didn't know anything about it.  After Mike and I passed their test, the officers gave me a little more information saying that Bob had a bullet wound behind his left ear and that his body was tied to a cement block with a come-along around his waist and that his arm was thru the hole in the cinderblock.  After making sure I wasn't going to admit to murdering Bob, a Louisiana police woman told me what she thought, that Bob had committed suicide.  She said the reason they thought it was suicide is that before he died, Bob got his affairs in order and that he gave away a lot of his belongings and that those were the actions of someone planning to kill themselves.  I personally thought that was a typical Louisiana police explanation so that the case could be marked closed.   Eva never did consider suicide as the answer and thought always that her father had been murdered.  She said that a life insurance policy that she had seen many times was missing from his file box that had been gone thru by the police.  The police confiscated all Bob's valuables, guns, jewelry, coins and called it 'evidence' and would not give it back to Eva.  Also, something that made Eva think the police were no good was that they picked her up at Bob's 'visitation' and took her back to the St. Martinville Sheriff's office and grilled her, an 18 year old girl, for over ten hours before Tony, who was with her got so mad he made them let her go.  Eva told me that the officer who treated her the worst, not long after Bob's death retired from the department and bought himself a big chunk of land with a fancy house on it so she always thought he stole the insurance policy and collected on it before she had any chance to request a pay off.  I never decided.  Cajuns do thrive on telling tales.

In another tale from my sister in law, a different sister of hers worked in a dentist's office in Lafayette, and it just so happened to be the very same dentist whose records helped to identify the jawbone that was brought in as belonging to Bob Miers.  The body definitely belonged to Bob.

MAYBE IT WAS, MAYBE IT WASN'T

My current husband's brother who at one time worked for the Sheriff's Department in Lafayette called the St. Martinville Sheriff's department for me although I am not sure I wanted him to do that because I wanted more fodder for my Cajun gossip or whether I needed closure.  Either way, there was not much information. The cause of death listed on the death certificate was "bullet wound to the head".  The Sheriff's Department estimated that the death had to have been about a month earlier, and speculated that the bayou did not have much water in it when the death occurred probably the first week in January.  They showed my brother in law pictures of when the body was found, but he said that it was very had to tell anything about the position of the body after they raised it because the waterlogged skin did not hold together well when it reached the air and they had to be very careful not to make any new marks.  They speculated that the death might have been a suicide because they said Bob had wrapped himself with the brick and pulled the come along tight and pulled the trigger on the gun.  All the things found with the body belonged to Bob himself, including the comealong and the rope.  They didn't find any signs of anyone else having been there, but signs could have been erased by the passage of time.  They didn't find the gun either, but from the bullet that was in the wound they identified the gun as a 25 caliber which they speculated probably belonged to Bob.  Many months later my daughter said that they went back and looked at the site again and did find the gun and that it was indeed the gun that had belonged to Bob.  I  don't know if that's true, but I do know whoever killed Bob, himself or someone else, meant for the body to not be found any time soon.  And Eva called me a dozen times during January and February asking me to try to find addresses for anyone where he might have gone to visit.  She told me that he'd told her that he planned to go to Montana, but the people he knew in Montana didn't know anything about it.

My daughter told me that the initial identification of the body was made by Bob's mother Irene (b.12/4/1916; d.5/19/1988) and was based on the clothes taken from the body.  Bob was cremated, and the arrangements for his memorial and burial services were handled by the Delhomme Funeral Home in Lafayette and Eva said they were in the same place where her grandpa Homer's services had been held.  Irene, when I knew her in the early 70's was working as a 'sitter', a home care nurse and her job for quite some time was taking care of one of the Delhomme family's sons who had been in a major car accident, so there is a connection there.  I myself visited the cemetery where Bob and his parents were buried only once...when Homer died in 1967. While I was standing at the gravesite, Bob told me a story about another grave just above Homer's that was the final resting place of Homer's old bookkeeper from back when Homer owned M&M Rig Builders in the 50's in Lafayette.  Bob said the bookkeeper (I forgot the name that was on the grave) had embezzled money from the company and had absconded to South America and apparently only came home after he was dead.  Bob said that Homer was very likely unhappy with the fact that his grave was next to that of the bookkeeper he hated.  Like I said, tales are of major importance in Louisiana and I have heard some stories, me