One Debt From Murder

One Debt From Murder In Arizona, a mother and daughter who are also the best of friends, have built up an awesome and successful business together. The mother’s name is Loretta Bowersock and her daughter is Terri. The business, called “Terri’s Design and Consign Furnishings” specializes in lightly used furniture and home décor. The two have killed it – in a good way – and the business becomes a multimillion-dollar chain with 17 stores in Arizona and six other states. The mother and daughter duo become famous locally for their wealth and their commercials. They are popular and well-loved in the community. They are the poster for the American dream as far as building wealth and business is concerned. They were so good at what they did that Oprah featured Terri on her show for her business skills and Avon gave her its “Woman of Enterprise Award.” Loretta, now in her senior years, isn’t satisfied, though. She’s lonely and doesn’t want to spend her golden years alone. The business was pretty much her only social life and it just wasn’t completely fulfilling. Loretta’s daughter, Terri, gets an idea to help her mom. Loretta has a large home with extra rooms and Terri thinks maybe she needs a roommate to keep her company. And wouldn’t it be the icing on the cake if that roommate ends up becoming a life partner? The pair put an ad out for a room for rent and begin interviewing interested parties. Two weeks after the ad runs, a handsome, charming guy shows up at the front door of Loretta’s home. He tells her he saw the ad and would very much love the opportunity to rent it. Loretta is immediately taken with this man’s good looks and flirty manner. His name is Taw Benderly. He tells her he has just returned to the states from a trip to the UK. He’s had something awful happen though – he had lost his wallet during the trip and had absolutely no IDs, cards or even cash. Even though Loretta is smitten with Taw, she’s cautious. She’s not dumb and knows it’s not a good idea to rent the place out to a stranger with no ID or money. So, she tells him that she’ll talk it over with her daughter and she’ll get back to him. A few days after Loretta met Taw, Terri hosts a dinner for her mom and Taw to vet him. He tells the ladies that he’s a successful inventor and entrepreneur. He’s well-traveled, sharing stories from all around the world and tells them about his myriad of degrees he got while at school along with… Donald Trump. He’s so charming and clever, it’s easy for why Terri is so taken with Taw. Taw tells them about his newest invention that is pulling in investments from business investors everywhere. This big invention that will change the world for all time is a…. lawn mower blade. He claims it will overhaul the mowing industry and he’s so convincing, Loretta and Terri are drawn into his plans. A few days later, despite not having money to pay his first month’s rent, Taw moves into Loretta’s home. Fortunately for Loretta, Taw is really handy and fixes things, he’s helpful and Loretta loves having him around. It doesn’t take long for romance to blossom and the two become an item. Loretta is very engaged in the business world of Arizona and has great connections with the wealthy which ends up being very helpful for the inventor, Taw, who needs investor funds. He networks his way into her circle of friends and associates. Taw is so knowledgeable, charming and inspiring, Loretta’s friends are quick to fall under his spell and invest in his inventions. They want to support Loretta of course, but they also really believe in Taw. However, 6 months later, Loretta’s friends and associates are wondering why they haven’t seen any returns in their investment. Loretta gets concerned as well since he still hasn’t contributed at all to living with her financially. She gets worried enough that she asks a friend at the police department to look into Taw’s background. Taw had claimed to have several college degrees from Penn University where he had attended with Donald Trump, but none of that was true. Besides that, there wasn’t anything awful. He wasn’t a record-holding criminal, but his lies are a red flag. Loretta is confused and hurt. She really liked Taw and he wouldn’t have needed the fake stories for her to accept him. She decides to confront Taw with the evidence of his deception. Taw admits to lying but says it’s not his fault. He had a terrible childhood filled with abuse and pain. His story of trauma pulls all of Loretta’s heartstrings and she buys into his excuses. Probably partly because she’s falling for the man and loves his company. Loretta’s friends begin pressuring her about their investments, which makes for an uncomfortable situation. They talk with Taw and he’s great at reassuring them that things are in the works and they’ll start to see their returns soon. It works, for a while, but when the same excuses go on and nothing begins happening, Loretta’s friendships start dissolving. Taw has Loretta and Terri convinced he is a business mastermind. He is a master of selling himself anyway and though his lies have been discovered, he still claims he does have lot of business expertise. Since he always seems to have money, though they don’t see it, they believe him. Terri herself struggled through school because of her severe dyslexia. Taw has heard about a college for the dyslexic that helps overcome the condition for those that attend. He tells Terri that for her business to get to the level she wants it at, she needs to go to this program to overcome her own dyslexia. He’s so caring and genuine and the family really believes he has their best interest in mind. He assures Terri that he and Loretta have the business covered and in good hands until she returns from the program. Terri heads off to school and Taw begins taking over more and more of their furnishings business. He was all about the philosophy that you need to spend money to make money and boy, did he. He took out several loans in their name and loaded up the shop with merchandise, saying the more inventory they had, the more they’d sell. He seems eager to make money as fast as possible. Terri gets back, ready to tackle the business with a brand new enthusiasm. However, when she starts checking the books, she finds they’ve lost about $10k just since she’s been gone which was like a month or two. Terri is furious with Taw and she shows her mom the books and wonders where the money went. It wasn’t just re-invested in the business, it was gone. Loretta was sure there was an explanation. Sales did seem to be going well and he’d been really reinvigorating the business. But, this is when Terri starts seeing Taw in a slightly less favorable light and tells her mom that she wants the business to go back just her and Loretta again with Taw out of the picture business-wise. A few days after this, Loretta comes to Terri’s office and was unlike she’s ever been with Terri before. She was cold and unloving. She told Terri that one of them needs to buy the other out of the business. Terri is shocked and hurt, never imagining running the stores without her mother. But, she tells her mom, fine, I’ll buy you out. This is what I want to do with my life and I can’t imagine starting over. Taw tells the duo that he’s had a lot of experience with corporate buyouts and he’d be happy to take over the paperwork for it so they didn’t have to involve lawyers and it would save them all a lot of money. They agree and it’s decided that Terri would pay Loretta $140k over a year’s time. This is exactly the point when Terri and Loretta drift apart and stop telling eachother everything. Terri does well with the business on her own though, she builds it up more and two years later, everything is done and paid for with her mom. One day, her mom shows up at her house looking like a character out of Dynasty. Instead of embracing Terri like she would have in the past, her mom slaps papers in her hand and tells her she’s been served. She and Taw were suing Terri for the business. She said the buyout agreement was done incorrectly and that she was legally still part owner and that Terri would have to buy her out again if she wanted her out of the picture. Disgusted and stunned with her mother’s unusual behavior, she realizes that Taw has manipulated her mom into walking away from her relationship with her daughter. The old Loretta would have never been so cold and calculating. Terri begins making payments to buy her mother out a 2nd time. I’m not sure why she didn’t consult a lawyer at this point, but she hoped that maybe this time, they would just stay out of her life for good. Terri refuses to speak to her mom for an entire year. But eventually, on mother’s day, Terri sends her mom flowers and the two connect on the phone. Loretta invites Terri over for dinner to see if they can mend their relationship. When Terri arrives, the whole feeling of the house has changed. It’s obviously no longer Loretta’s house. Taw is clearly in charge. Dinner doesn’t go well, Taw is rude and controlling and Terri decides not to put up with his bullshit. She stands up and walks out of the house. Loretta runs after her and apologizes, asking what she can do to make things better. Terri says, well, drop the lawsuit against me. Loretta does and Terri stops making payments, but the damage is already done and their relationship is irreparable. Years pass and Loretta falls farther and farther into Taw’s controlling clutches. Then, in December of 2004, everything changes. BREAK Terri gets a frantic phone call from Taw saying that her mother, Loretta is missing. He tells her that he and Loretta had taken a trip to Tucson and he had dropped her off at a mall where she had wanted to shop for a couple of hours but that now he can’t find her. She tells him to go back and ask the mall staff to help him look for her and he agrees. A couple of hours later, he calls her again explaining that no one can find her and that he’s called the police. Terri feels like something is really wrong and she starts driving that direction herself. When talking with police, Taw doesn’t seem too worried and he’s pretty calm. He explains that he had dropped Loretta off at the North entrance of a department store at about 2pm and they had plans to meet up at the same area at 4pm. He said he had waited about 20 minutes in the car, but when she still didn’t show, he went into the mall himself to search for her. Since Loretta is pretty famous in Arizona for the multiple TV commercials she and her daughter had made over the decades, word of her disappearance spread quickly. Loretta was also well known for her wealth, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that she could have been abducted and would be held for ransom. In fact, Taw told them he felt like they had been followed for a bit outside the mall by a couple of suspicious looking men in a van. Also, Loretta is 69 at this point, so she is elderly and could she be suffering from a form of dementia where she wandered off and got lost? Meanwhile, Terri arrives and books a room at the same hotel Taw and Loretta were booked in. She was frantic and was confused as to how Taw could be so calm about the situation. Police find Taw suspicious from the start. They had a gut feeling something was off with his story. They begin looking at the surveillance tapes from the mall and from the hotel. When Taw checked into the hotel earlier in the day, you would expect Loretta to be with him, but she’s not anywhere on the tapes. Maybe that’s not so weird, though. Maybe Taw checked in while she was shopping. So, they move on to the surveillance tapes at the mall. They do see Taw enter the mall like he said he did and he went right up to the customer service desk where he had asked for her to be paged and had called the police to report her missing. However, when they rewound the tapes further to the time Taw claimed he had dropped Loretta off, there is no sign of the couple. They’re not driving up to the North entrance, and Loretta never enters the building at that entrance. Maybe Taw got that wrong? But they check every entrance video and nope, no sign of them at any time either. Now police are extremely suspicious of Taw. Terri, meanwhile, meets Taw at his hotel room where she sees some strange things. Taw has 4 huge suitcases filled with his clothing and possessions. He had told her that he and Loretta had just planned a couple of days for their trip, so why did he need 4 suitcases of shit? Her mom only had one suitcase filled with 4 sets of unmatching clothes, something her fashionable mother never would have packed. While that’s not super weird, the collection of knives, bullets and guns Taw had spread out was. Plus, the counters were covered with her mother’s fancy jewelry; much more than she’d need for just a couple of fancy events. Police bring Taw in for questioning after seeing the videos, seeing if they can catch him in a lie. They were worried enough about Taw’s next actions that they also told Terri she should change to a different hotel, thinking he might try to go after her when they hear about his armament of weapons. When talking to Taw, they quickly punch holes into the timeline he had given police as to when he’d dropped Loretta off and tried to pick her up. They had already gotten word of sightings of him elsewhere when he had claimed to be at the mall searching for her. They believe that he had been out getting rid of Loretta somewhere in the expansive desert surrounding the area. Taw had a lot of time he couldn’t account for. Taw tries to quickly make up excuses, claiming that oh, I think my watch was off. He forgot he had noticed it earlier, but had fixed it, so his times were probably off. Police keep him for hours, trying to get him to confess. They ask him about Loretta’s purse and stuff and he’s like, “well, it’s all with her, she was shopping, after all.” While he’s there, police get permission from Terri to search her mother’s home. There, they find Loretta’s purse filled with her ID and cards, so obviously she wasn’t out shopping, or if she was, she wasn’t planning on actually buying anything. They ask Taw, “well, why is her purse at her house, then?” Taw’s shocked and caught off guard, not expecting they would go check his home. When they check Taw’s car, they find a pickaxe and a shovel caked in dirt. They ask, “so, do you always drive around with a pickaxe and shovel in your trunk?” He explains that sure he does, because of his hobby of collecting geodes in the desert. When they would ask about his financial situation along with Loretta, knowing that she was quite behind on bills, he claimed that their finances had recently gotten better due to some deals he’d made with personal projects. They would ask, “oh yeah? Who are you in business with?” He would never be able to give them a clear answer, saying things like, “oh, I can’t think of his name off the top of my head, but he’s located in Mexico.” Things like that. From cell phone records, they see that Taw was in the desert just hours before Loretta went missing. None of their pressuring makes Taw crack and without a body or a confession, police have to let him go. Investigators pass the case on to the Tempe PD where they will take on the investigation. Instead of returning to his house, Taw checks into a hotel in Tempe, saying that the police are still going through his home and he wasn’t comfortable staying there. He calls Terri and tells her he has something at the hotel front desk for her. On the phone, he sounds out of it and groggy. Terri hurries to the hotel where she picks up a briefcase, he’s left for her. In the briefcase is a power of attorney giving Terri control over all of his assets. Now Terri is freaked out, sure that Taw is getting ready to commit suicide. She runs up to his hotel room and bangs on the door until he answers it. He’s groggy and has clearly taken some drugs of some sort. Terri is sure if she can get him to talk to her, she can get him to confess what he did with her mother. She was willing to say anything and planned to tell him she would help him get away if he would just tell her what happened. But the whole time, Taw denies having anything to do with Loretta’s disappearance. She begs him and suggests that if an accident happened, she won’t blame him. Now, Terri is a very spiritual person who seems to be a bit of a psychic herself and later turns to psychics to help search out where her mother had gone. She said at that point she felt her mother’s soul enter her body and she straightened Taw’s hair just like she always would. They embraced and then kissed, but it wasn’t her, it was her mom kissing Taw goodbye for the last time. Taw moves back into Loretta’s house and carried on with life, but Terri couldn’t move on. She was sure her mother’s body was buried somewhere in the desert nearby. She went out constantly, digging all over she could in the desert and friends would often help her. She never found anything though. In her frustration, Terri decides she’s got to give it another go at getting Taw to talk. She tries to call him repeatedly, but there’s no answer. Beginning to worry, Terri calls the police and tells them she’s worried something may have happened to him. They told her, just wait at home. We’ll go check on him and call you back. Terri waits and waits for the call from the police, but when they still haven’t called back after a couple of hours, she decides to head over herself. When she gets close to her mom’s house, she sees cop cars, police tape and reporters everywhere. When she steps out of her car, a reporter mobs her and asks what she thinks about Taw committing suicide. Terri’s face must have shown the shock she was feeling since reporter then said, “oh no, no one has told you? Taw hung himself with an electrical cord in the garage.” Terri is furious and sad knowing that he’s taken the secret of her mother’s disappearance with him. A few days later, the police have her come to the station for some new information they came across. They tell her that they found a bunch of documentation that shows that her mother’s finances were in dire straits. Loretta was completely bankrupt and her house was being foreclosed upon. In fact, it seems that Loretta hadn’t known her financial situation until right before her disappearance. Loretta would write out her monthly mortgage payments and give the check to Taw. Instead of sending it into the bank, Taw would wash the checks and write them out to himself. Authorities believe Loretta discovered what Taw was doing after she made a call to her mortgage lender and had confronted him. That’s when he likely killed her and dumped her body in the desert. There was a lot more they dug up about him as well. He had told lies about his entire life to her and kept it a secret the entire 18 years they were together. He had claimed to be an orphan but his dad and brother were still alive. He’d also claimed he’d never been married, but he’d been married twice before and had ripped off those women. When the story hit the news after Taw died, Terri got a call from a lady that told her that Taw had been in jail right before he’d responded to Loretta’s ad for a roommate. This woman worked at the jail and was in a relationship with Taw during his time in jail. He had conned her into expunging his record and then disappeared after he left jail. When Terri goes through all her mom’s things, she discovers that Taw had taken her mom for over $1 ½ million in total. She also found writings that her mother had made about regretting bringing Taw into her life. He was abusive and she was caught under his thumb, feeling that at her late age, now bankrupt, she didn’t know how to start over. One day about 2 years after her disappearance, rock hunters find bones out in the desert buried under 18 inches of dirt. Finally, Loretta had been found. She had been suffocated and was found with a plastic bag still wrapped around her skull and down her throat. Terri is relieved that her mother’s body is found and she can finally give her a proper burial. She agonizes about not knowing her mother had endured such financial and verbal abuse. Eventually, she writes a book about her experience called “The other side of the crime” available at shopterris.com. Proceeds from the book go to a nonprofit called the DOVES program which helps older victims of domestic abuse. Sources: Tucson citizen, janabommersbach.com – Jana Bommerbach wrote a book about the case called, “Bones in the desert”, an inquisiter article written by Traci Reyes, monstersandcritics.com, eastvalleytribune, handsome devils s1,e8: Desert Rat, Grave Secrets s1, e4, Her Mother’s Secrets