Posted on Sun, Oct. 12, 2003
Family of missing woman fears the worst
By Louise Taylor
HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER
When someone you love disappears, she can come back to haunt you in the most unexpected ways.
When Mike and Dee Gaines watch their daughter play ball, for example, there's a woman who sits nearby who looks, from behind, just like Mike's sister, Joyce.
They stare.
The woman turns.
Not Joyce.
In their hearts, they know Joyce is probably dead. But no one has found her body, so such sightings rekindle an ever-dwindling hope, then -- as they see the face of the woman at the ball park or the driver of a green Infiniti like Joyce's cruising down Harrodsburg Road -- cruelly extinguish it.
Joyce Crider vanished a year ago at age 32. She was last seen alive about 7:15 p.m. Oct. 27, when she told a friend she was going to see her estranged husband at the hotel where he was living. Since then, her cell phone has been deathly quiet, and there's been no activity in her bank accounts.
It all adds up to the kind of missing-person case that shouts foul play, said Lt. James Curless of the Lexington police department: "If you're Joyce Crider or James Curless, you don't have the assets to flat-out disappear."
In the year since Crider vanished, the police have put her husband, Bill Crider, 39, under investigation, but have not made any arrests. What they have found is that Bill Crider initially lied about when he last saw Joyce. Until April, he had said he last saw her at his workplace on Richmond Avenue the Friday night before the Sunday she vanished. But as police uncovered evidence that didn't jibe with his account, he admitted in a court deposition that he had spent the entire weekend with Joyce in Florence, talking and watching movies at a Best Western.
Joyce Crider's family is indefatigable in its disapproval of Bill Crider and has fought steadfastly in court to preserve Joyce's assets. Her mother, Joan Gaines, got herself appointed Joyce's conservator and is pursuing the divorce action against Bill Crider -- a highly unusual legal course.
"He thought we'd walk away," Joan Gaines said. "He didn't know who he was dealing with."
In addition to Bill Crider's lie about when he last saw his wife, other statements by Crider are suspect, authorities say. Fayette Circuit Judge Sheila Isaac said from the bench that Crider made a "substantial misrepresentation" about his wealth when he had Joyce sign a prenuptial agreement in 1999.
In August, Paul Williams, a veteran Lexington police detective who is investigating Joyce's disappearance, said in court that Bill Crider lied repeatedly during his inquiry.
"I have received numerous specific statements from Mr. Crider in the course of this investigation that have proved to be patently wrong," Williams told Bill Crider's divorce attorney, Michael Judy.
Last week, Bill Crider said he hoped his wife would be found and referred questions about his changing story to Judy, who did not return calls. Crider did say, however, that the police have failed to investigate at least two sightings of Joyce.
"The police just doesn't seem to be interested," Crider said. As for the focus of the investigation being on him, Crider said, "Well, at the same time I'm sure that if there was anything they really suspected, I'm sure they would have done something."
The police still need information to solve Joyce Crider's disappearance -- or evidence to prove her murder, which they think might well have been her fate.
Prone to lawsuits
The Criders met indirectly by way of the Singles Line, a telephone dating service through which Bill Crider met a friend of Joyce, then met Joyce, the Gaineses said.
They married Nov. 20, 1999; they broke up just shy of their two-year anniversary.
The split was almost a year before Joyce vanished, but their divorce dragged out. Two days after she disappeared, Joyce was to give a deposition in the case. She intended to implicate Bill then in insurance fraud, according to sworn police statements attached to a search warrant for Bill Crider's fingerprints and cell phone records.
Bill Crider is involved in four lawsuits: A phen-fen class action in which he claims a heart valve was damaged by the diet drug; a suit against the Holiday Inn-South in Athens, where he says jewelry was stolen; a suit against DaimlerChrysler and Freedom Dodge over a fire in his Dodge Ram truck; and a suit filed with Joyce against Best Buy and plumbing contractors, whom they accuse of causing a fire at Joyce's previous home, a tattered frame house the couple shared on Dayton Avenue, a street off Winchester Road.
The claim against DaimlerChrysler prompted an in-depth investigation by the company's local investigator, Frank Eddy, who said the Kentucky Department of Insurance is now investigating Bill Crider for insurance fraud.
"When I started the investigation into the legitimacy of the claim, it was routine," Eddy said. "But when I started looking at previous claims ... it all started mushrooming."
The pain of not knowing
For her family, Joyce's disappearance is an unbearable mystery.
"If you know what you're dealing with, you can put it to rest," said Mike Gaines, her only sibling. "If you don't know what you're dealing with, you can't."
Early this year, a body was found on the banks of the Ohio River. For days, all were certain it was Joyce: The dead woman was short, heavy and wearing Mickey Mouse clothing. That sounded just like Joyce, a Disney fanatic who stood about 5 foot 2 and weighed 232 pounds. But it wasn't.
Then they heard another news report.
"A man found a body by the side of the road," recalled Dee Gaines, Mike's wife. "It had been there for 'a while.' Their 'while' turned out to be two days. Our 'while' is 11 months."
Joyce's mother, Joan Gaines, crumbles to tears as soon as she is faced with a question about how she is enduring the disappearance. She used to talk to her daughter at least five times a day; they would share a meal every day, too. Ask her how she is bearing up, and Joan Gaines' face falls, her eyes fill with tears. "I can't talk about it."
Joyce's new house, on Jason Court, was locked up under court order from November until last week, when lawyers, Bill Crider and the Gaineses went through it to inventory its contents in preparation for a hearing this week on the division of property in the divorce.
"It was pretty awful to go in it," Mike Gaines said. "It was like the last year had not happened. She still had the house decorated for Halloween."
Every day, Joan Gaines makes the journey to check on the house and two of her daughter's dogs, huskies whom she doted on as if they were children, according to the family. (Two more of Joyce's huskies live with Joan Gaines.)
Joan Gaines, 62, takes care of her 86-year-old mother and a sister with Down syndrome, takes care of four dogs that lived with Joyce, and, as Mike Gaines puts it, "still has the audacity to worry about me and my wife!"
Joan Gaines was an unflappable, hard-jawed witness last month during a divorce hearing at which she successfully contested the validity of a prenuptial agreement. Crider claimed in the agreement, signed on the eve of his wedding in November 1999, that he had $450,000 in cash and guns. In court, he stood by that claim, although he said he could not estimate "within $100,000" how much cash he had. He said he kept the money in a lockbox at his father's home in Prestonsburg and inside his tool box where he works, Spare Parts and Equipment in Lexington, a diesel-parts supplier. He testified that he had been saving the money since he was 12.
Joan Gaines said the claim was absurd. "They borrowed money from me all the time," she testified. Even when the couple bought Crider's mother's house in Prestonsburg, Gaines said, she had to cosign because "both of them had bad credit."
'A hole in my heart'
In depositions taken in the divorce case on Dec. 18 and April 9 and in sworn testimony in August, Bill Crider said that his wife controlled the family finances and that he was unaware of her bankruptcy before they married. He said he rarely used his cash savings in the lockbox but had removed about $6,000 in July.
Joyce, he said, stole from him.
"I married my wife because I loved her. I still love her even though things has happened," he said at the April deposition. "After she took this money and stuff, she broke a trust that we had."
That last weekend in Florence, he said, was romantically inclined, a peace-making session in a room with a Jacuzzi.
Joyce was to be deposed in the divorce two days later. The police search warrants say she told her family and a friend that she was going to expose her husband for committing insurance fraud.
Bill Crider had a different view. "She did not want to go to the deposition," he swore under oath. "She wanted to try to work something out over the weekend."
And Joyce, he added, was worried by the time they got back to Lexington on Sunday evening. Reuniting with her estranged husband would anger her mother and the fellow she had been seeing, a guy named "Scott" she had met at Charter Ridge Hospital who was a "traveling ATM mechanic," Crider said.
"I think they had went to the Smokies together, and that he was like chasing after her or something. She said that she would have to get rid of him ... because he was very possessive."
The Gaineses are unaware of any such boyfriend. The last they knew, Joyce just wanted to have a baby -- without a man hanging around her.
"This leaves a hole in my heart because I won't have a niece or nephew now," Mike Gaines said in an e-mail that was written in a moment of acceptance about the finality of his sister's disappearance.
"The biggest hole comes from the everyday events that I took for granted, knowing she would always be there.
"I hope that someone has some small bit of information that will allow the police to find my sister and give us some peace to know her whereabouts.
"I miss you, Joyce. As we all do."
Lots more here
http://z10.invisionfree.com/usedtobedoe/index.php?showtopic=247