1833
The Meacham family came to the area in 1833.
about 0:08:59The story
Bloomingdale is a village of about 22,000 people in DuPage County, Illinois, some thirty miles west of Chicago. James begins with the town's history. The Meacham family arrived in 1833 and the settlement was first known as Meacham's Grove, after Silas, Lyman and Harvey Meacham, who pitched their tents in March with snow still on the ground. The Meachams lent a valuable rifle to the native people, who returned it on the day promised, and the two groups learned to trust one another. The first permanent building went up in 1849, a Baptist church that still stands as a museum. Bloomingdale was originally in Cook County and was annexed to DuPage County in 1839. In 1923 the village split and the northern part became Roselle. The population rose from 338 in 1950 to 12,659 in 1980, and by the time of the episode it stood at 22,254.
He was five foot three, served in the Marines and played a little semi-professional football. He married and had four daughters, then abandoned the family. He built up a record for car theft, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and disorderly conduct. In Massachusetts he lived with a woman named Helen Hansen for about a year. In July 1966 she was found dead in her apartment after roughly four days; her six-month-old daughter was alive in a crib beside the decomposing body.
Lopes moved to Bloomingdale, Illinois, and took the name Jasper Brown. He worked as a school janitor, as a labourer at the Medina Country Club and at nights in a local tavern. In 1969 he met Phyllis, a divorced 43-year-old waitress, at a restaurant in Bensonville. They married quickly and settled in Bloomingdale, but the marriage was poor from the start. In late June 1970 Phyllis disappeared. Lopes told different people different stories: that she was in the tub, that she had gone shopping, that she had left him. In late July the restaurant where they both worked called the police, saying Phyllis had stopped coming in and her husband's explanations kept changing.
Around the same time Lopes began seeing Shirley Johnston, whom he had met golfing. He was far more serious about the relationship than she was. On 31 July 1970 they argued on the phone, with him pressing her to move in and her saying she was only dating. He went to her home, broke in and waited for her. When she came back he choked her, then stabbed her several times in the neck, leaving the knife in the wound, and dragged her to the basement. About an hour later Shirley regained consciousness in a pool of her own blood, with full memory of the attack, and called the police. She survived.
Five days later Lopes's car was found in Illinois with a newspaper clipping about the attack on the front seat, which told him his victim was alive. A manhunt followed, and police also wanted to question him about Phyllis. On 19 December 1970 a backhoe digging a septic tank in Winfield township unearthed Phyllis's decomposed body in an 18-inch grave. She had been strangled. The body was identified partly by the cast on her broken arm.
Lopes had fled to Pinellas County, Florida, using the name George Spezio, the name of his former country club boss, and carrying a stolen book of Spezio's cheques. He worked for a veterinarian.
He had no answer to Shirley, who was alive and could identify him. The prosecutor Joseph Lauria called him a strange little bird.
On New Year's Eve 1979 he proposed marriage vows over the phone, with Jesus as witness.
He went to Grand Island, Nebraska, married Joan officially and struggled for two years before the couple moved to Washington state. Over about three years he became the pastor, with a preacher's licence, and Joan became the Sunday school director. He earned $18,000 a year, umpired local baseball and was widely liked.
In December 1991 a reporter for the Tri-City Herald, Wanda Briggs, began a feature about the pastor with the dramatic past. He also told her, unprompted, that he had killed a woman in Brockton, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. She checked his story with Illinois corrections officials, who recognised the name and told her he was a fugitive.
The congregation was stunned. Members raised his bail, and most believed Satan was responsible for his unmasking; one told the press it had to be a mistake. He said he had lied because he was afraid of being rejected. Thirty-eight people stayed to pray with him. A few days later, pressed by other ministers and the reporter, he admitted killing Helen Hansen, though his account was vague and false in its details. When a pastor asked his age he said 61; he was 56, and the ministers concluded he could not stop lying.
He returned to West Richland but his congregation melted away, and he and Joan left for Nebraska and then Missouri.
A 2013 report described him as a model prisoner in the healthcare unit, working as a janitor and volunteering in the hospice programme, but the board refused him, citing the risk to the victim who had survived. The letter was never read.