A Cold Case Frozen in Time

According to media reports, Thornton detective Pat Long, who worked the case for six years (he did not return numerous calls for this story), believed that more than one person was responsible and that the killers were familiar with Paul's business and knew he'd be returning to the lot that evening. Long kept waiting for someone to talk. A few people in prison did, but the leads turned into dead ends.

One witness had heard a woman screaming near the lot on the night of February 7, and Jerry says that when he first talked to Teresa the next day, she'd said she'd gone to the lot the night before — and asked him not to tell police.

Teresa Donovan refused to be interviewed for this story, saying that while once she would have bent over backwards to talk, she won't at this point in her life. "Those people are still out there," she says, "and yeah, I know who they are and the police won't listen. I said that on Montel."

There was a time when Teresa talked a lot about the disappearance, on the Montel Williams Show and other programs. On an MSNBC special, she said that police had told her that she failed a lie-detector test and that she was a suspect. "I'd never hurt them," she told the interviewer. "I'd never hurt them. The police have tried to say that I killed them or I had them killed." But she knew who the killers were, because Paul had rented parking spaces at his lot and recently had those cars towed. "They sold Paul drugs, and they were the only people that could have killed him," she said. "I don't know if it was over the cars or anger over Paul trying to get over the coke."

On Montel, Teresa said she believed there was a vendetta against Paul and that the killers didn't care who was with him.

But the owners of the cars weren't the only people who might have had a vendetta. "Paul was a great guy," Jerry says, "but he did have his enemies, people he had fired because they'd get in an argument or something would get broken."

Teresa's brother, Tom Donovan, was one of them. He'd been fired by Paul a few months before, and he had a temper. After the disappearance, Donovan threatened him, Jerry says, yelling "You're next! You're next!" and throwing rocks at the Tuff Movers truck he was driving. Sharon says that Donovan called her and said he was glad Paul was dead, that he and Sarah had been shot in the head and that he was going to shoot her in the head. Donovan later took Sharon and Jerry to court over a debt he claimed Jerry owed him. "He actually looked at Sharon, made his hand look like a gun and motioned like he shot her," recalls Bob Martinez, who went with them to court. (Donovan's sister Bobbi Jo, who also declined to comment for this story, says her brother is not available for comment.)

Paul's cousin Herbert Michael Hymes was another guy with an ax to grind. Hymes and Paul were once partners in Tuff Movers, but in the late '80s, Hymes was sentenced to six years for aggravated robbery. After he got out of prison, he went back to Tuff Movers, but Paul told Rich Lesmeister that he'd caught Hymes taking money from the business and cut him out.

"I quit the business because I was making more money in the stock market," Hymes responds. "I don't know nothing about this case. Kiss my ass."

"He swore that he'd get even with Paul," says Rich, who has his own theory. Police have always assumed that the moving truck seen the night of the disappearance was Paul's. "What if Paul's truck never left the lot?" Rich asks. "It could have been Herb's. Nobody knows for sure. What better way to transport the bodies and his car across town than to drive it in the back of another moving truck?"