‘We Don’t Have These Type of People Out Here’ : Murderous Affair Shocks Kansas Town

EMPORIA, Kan. — Sandy Bird’s death looked like a traffic accident. While driving down a winding gravel road late at night, she had missed the one-lane bridge and gone over an embankment into the water below.

Kansas Highway Patrol Trooper John Rule had it figured that way when he looked down into the Cottonwood River and saw an overturned white station wagon and the body of the new preacher’s wife beside it.

But after an hour of working the case along the muggy river bottom, he says, “I started to feel hinky about the whole thing.”

One problem was skid marks. There weren’t any. She hadn’t even tried to stop. Then there were the bloodstains on the bridge and on the trees below--far from the water’s edge.

But when the coroner ruled it an accidental death that Sunday in 1983, the trooper didn’t argue. Even he had trouble believing that anyone would kill Sandra Bird, 33, mother of three and wife of the Faith Lutheran Church pastor. Besides, good law officers in Kansas didn’t poke around in the private lives of citizens because of a few unanswered questions.

Sandy Bird’s death was no accident, however. A few months later, a father of four who attended the same church was killed in an apparent robbery that turned out not to be a robbery at all. His wife was Lorna Anderson, secretary to the widowed pastor, Thomas Bird.

For nearly three years, this small Kansas town watched in uneasy fascination as the minister and his secretary were exposed as adulterers and imprisoned for using the insurance money from one murder to make a down payment on a second.

In a town where the cleric’s robe is as revered as the judicial robe, the secret affair and the murderous schemes--discussed in the church, of all places--were scandalous. But the whole thing had a certain magnetism, too. The most scurrilous gossip, the most implausible rumors were slowly becoming real.

Said Trooper Rule: “We don’t have these type of people out here.”

In some ways, however, the case wasn’t unusual at all. At its root were motives as old as the Bible: Love. Money. Ambition.

The trouble had very ordinary beginnings, shortly after Tom and Sandy Bird and their children, ages 2, 3 and 5, left Arkansas and headed for Kansas in 1982.

Their assignment was to form a new congregation for the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, in this settlement of 25,000 people on a gentle ripple of eerily barren beauty known as the Flint Hills.

Faith Lutheran was a “mission parish,” guided at first by an established church, and Bird seemed a good choice for the job. The son of a minister, he held master’s degrees in sacred theology and divinity. Only 32, although his thinning hair made him appear older, he had been an associate pastor in Arkansas for six years.

Within a year, the vigorous new preacher had a brick church with its own day-care center, softball and volleyball teams and membership rolls full of young families.

Sandy Bird, an energetic woman with short brown hair, had a master’s degree in mathematics and had been teaching at Emporia State University, where she was also working on a master’s in computer math.

Three Met at Game

Her husband’s passion was athletics. Whether playing Optimist Club basketball or first base on the church softball team, he was known as a fierce competitor. A distance runner in his college days, he still ran more than five miles each day.

Bird’s interest in sports was shared by Marty Anderson, who ran the laboratory at Newman Hospital. Anderson and his wife, Lorna, met Bird at a softball game and later transferred their church membership to Faith Lutheran.

The Andersons had four daughters, ages 2 to 8, and a marriage on the rocks. Lorna’s affairs were the subject of whispers. To some men, she was the picture of feminine vulnerability, with delicate features and a soft voice, quick to smile and quick to cry.

But she could be tough. Lorna surprised a friend in 1982 by asking if he knew of anyone who would kill her husband. The friend took it as a joke. Lorna also had an attorney prepare divorce papers, but, she says now, her husband talked her out it. She told people that Marty was rough with her and the children.

Lorna decided to take a job in January, 1983, and went to work as part-time secretary to Tom Bird at the church. “I had a real problem, not feeling good about myself,” she says. “Tom was very supportive, very encouraging.”

Trysted in Other Towns

By spring, she said in a recent prison interview with The Times, she and Tom were lovers. They would sneak away to the country or to small nearby towns where they could walk the streets holding hands without fear of discovery.

Bird was unhappy in his marriage too. His wife’s career bothered him. What Bird wanted, he told Lorna, was someone who considered being a pastor’s wife a full-time job.

“He told me that I was not what he needed in a wife, but that he could make me into what he needed,” Lorna says.

Sandy Bird was worried about her marriage. She was losing weight and had trouble sleeping. “I’m afraid he doesn’t love me anymore,” she told a friend.

About this time, in June, 1983, Lorna invited a former lover, Darrel Carter, to the church. She and Bird asked Carter to help them kill her husband, Carter would later testify.

Accident Spot Selected

The pastor described a place in the country where there was a bend in the road, a bridge and a long drop to the river. “If a person was drugged or drunk and was coming down that road, they could miss that bridge and go down into the river and it would raise very little suspicion,” Carter said that Bird told him.

Investigators would later notice the similarities between Bird’s plan for Anderson’s murder and his wife’s death a month later.

“I’m not a cold-blooded killer and I’ve never done anything like this in my life,” Carter said.

According to Carter, Bird responded: “I haven’t, either. I’m a man of God and I’m going to kill Marty Anderson.”

By July, Sandy Bird seemed to have come to terms with her domestic problems. “She said her life was right with God and it was up to Tom to get his life right with God,” her mother, Jane Grismer, later recalled.

A few days later, Sandy learned that she was being promoted. She would have extra classes to teach in the fall.

Wife’s Last Evening

To celebrate, she and Tom went to a movie. They returned home at 9:30, and Sandy ran inside to grab a half-empty bottle of pink champagne from the refrigerator for herself and a bottle of whiskey for her husband. She told the baby-sitter that she would be back by 10:30.

Bird later told police that they had a drink at Tom’s church office and then parted--she went to her office at the university and he stayed to work on his sermon.

Police Officer Scott Cronk delivered the bad news to Tom Bird the next morning.

“What was she doing out there? We never go out there,” Bird asked the officer. Then he asked, “Where is it?”

At the scene, seven miles southeast of town, Trooper Rule was baffled.

“I’m programmed to work traffic accidents,” he says. “By the time I realized that this might be more, our best evidence was gone. The body had gone to the morgue; the car had gone to the shop. There was a mountain of evidence down there, if you had been working a homicide.”

The possibility of foul play “was so damn gruesome--so incredible. Hell, I didn’t want to believe it myself,” Rule says.

State Agent Suspicious

In the days that followed, Rule continued to look into the case. Routine tests of Sandy Bird’s blood indicated only a trace of alcohol. A Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent agreed with Rule that the accident “didn’t seem right,” but there wasn’t enough evidence to indicate otherwise.

“We heard rumors--faint rumors--about him having an affair, but no one wanted to tell us anything about that,” said the agent, J. Vernon Humphrey.

Rule talked with Sandy’s friends and co-workers, and he came to know her well. “She was very diligent, very intelligent, and the sort of person who ran at 100 m.p.h., 18 hours a day,” he says.

She was a teacher who talked with students about their personal problems as well as their math problems, and she had this other habit that people mentioned: she never drove without a seat belt.

“I kept thinking, what was she doing out there alone?” Rule said. “It kept me up nights, but I didn’t know what else I could do. I’m not a homicide investigator, I’m just a traffic cop.”

Sandy Bird was buried in Arkansas and her husband presided at the funeral. When Bird returned to Emporia, he and Lorna drove to a rest stop on the Kansas Turnpike to talk.

Murder Story Told

Lorna says that Tom told her he had driven Sandy out to Rocky Ford Bridge. They had walked out onto the bridge and Bird had struck his wife with a tool he had taken from the car. He had tried to push her off the bridge, but she had held onto the railing and he had kicked her until she fell.

He had dragged her body down to the water and then run the car off the road, jumping out before it went over the precipice.

He was wearing jogging shorts under his clothes, so he threw his shoes into the woods and ran--barefoot--eight miles back to the house. He dumped his clothes into trash cans along the way. His feet were still bruised and scarred from the run a week later, Lorna said.

Even before Sandy died, the lay leaders of Faith Lutheran were concerned about the rumors that Bird was having an affair with Lorna Anderson. Lorna offered to quit her job, but Bird said that Lorna’s self-esteem was so low that it would be cruel to let her go.

Others saw signs of a blossoming love affair. While Deana Lee Koch was installing a program in the church computer--purchased as a memorial to Sandy Bird--she noticed that the pastor and his secretary “had pet names. They would say ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie’ to each other.”

Payment for Killing

Meanwhile, the plotting continued. The pastor and his secretary got Darrel Carter’s brother, Daniel, to help them. In September, 1983, Lorna gave Danny Carter $5,000 and a schedule of her husband’s daily activities. She says that the money came from Bird, who authorities say had cashed a $5,000 check--part of the life insurance proceeds from his wife’s death--that same day.

Carter passed the money to a co-worker, who sent it to a man in Mississippi who was to arrange the job. But the plot fizzled. The money was never returned.

On Nov. 4, 1983, however, Marty Anderson was killed.

The Andersons were returning from Fort Riley, where they had gone to pick up a camouflage uniform for Marty, who was a captain in the Army reserve.

Lorna’s initial account went this way: She was driving, felt ill and pulled off the roadway. She ran into a field to be sick, and dropped her keys there. After she asked her husband to help her look for the keys, a masked man appeared, demanded Anderson’s wallet and then shot him to death.

In the Emporia Gazette newsroom the next morning, Ray Call, the managing editor, turned to another editor after reading what Lorna had told the police. “If you believe that,” he said, “I’d like to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.”

New Suspicions Surface

Lorna’s story also sounded fishy to authorities in Geary County, where Anderson was killed, and investigators in Lyon County, where Emporia is, were suspicious when Tom Bird surfaced as Lorna’s spokesman.

Humphrey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent, placed a call to his counterpart in Geary County. “Hey, this Tom Bird’s wife died in a mysterious accident here,” he said.

A flurry of legal activity followed. Authorities soon discovered that Marty Anderson’s life had been insured for $300,000. Lorna Anderson was arrested and eventually charged with criminal solicitation in the $5,000 plot. Three months later, Tom Bird was arrested on the same charge.

No one suggested, however, that the murder plots discussed with Darrel or Danny Carter were anything other than plots. No one was charged with murder.

In June, 1984, after weeks of headlines and chatter in Emporia, the show finally came to town. Tom Bird went on trial. Emporians, some carrying their own stadium cushions, stood in line for a spot on the long gallery benches. Women brought cookies and cakes for Bird.

Emotions ran high. Delores Wagoner, a part-time employee of the church, was arrested in the hallway outside court for attacking a prosecution witness. “You better watch what you say, you jealous little wimp!” Wagoner told the woman, authorities said.

The trial boiled down to a question of motive. Was Bird or wasn’t he having an affair with Marty Anderson’s wife, Lorna?

Several Conversations

Phone records showed several conversations a day, and they ran up bills of more than $100 a month while Lorna was staying with her parents in Hutchinson. Witnesses described “an electricity” between the two. Investigators said that Lori Anderson, Lorna’s young daughter, told them that she had seen her mother kiss the pastor on the lips.

Perhaps most damaging were two letters investigators found in the bottom of a drawer in Lorna’s bedroom.

“I love you and I’m confident of the future and that makes the present OK,” one began. It was signed: “Love you always, Tom.”

The other read: “You are so very special . . . I love you so very much and that’s forever. Tom.”

On the stand, Bird denied there had been any romance. He said that the hugs and expressions of love between him and Lorna were “Christian love.” He said that the letters were meant “to shore up her spirits, to tell her she was needed.”

Defense Denied Affair

Bird’s attorney argued that the romantic relationship was all in Lorna’s mind.

Rodney Symmonds, the county attorney, said: “Why would a man who sits there on Sunday morning proclaiming to be a man of God, why would this man become involved in a plot to kill a parishioner’s husband? Love and money are some of the oldest motives that ever existed.”

The jury convicted Bird of plotting to kill Anderson. He was sentenced to prison for a term of 2 1/2 to 7 years.

After the conviction, folks in Emporia returned to thoughts of how Sandy Bird had died. Like her friends and family, reporters at the Emporia Gazette had questions about the finding of accidental death.

Emporia’s appetite for the scandal was growing, too. “It was just a bottomless reservoir of gossip,” says Call, the Gazette’s managing editor. The story raised ethical questions for the Gazette, whose reputation as a thoughtful Middle American newspaper dates from the days of William Allen White, whose family still owns it.

The newspaper published a series of articles about unanswered questions in the Bird case. When local investigators still showed no interest, the Gazette editors met privately with the state attorney general to express their concerns.

Wife’s Body Reexamined

“Lyon County couldn’t get off the mark because it involved a preacher,” an investigator from Geary County says. “It required a stick of dynamite to get them to see the Bird case as a homicide.”

Geary County had already asked Dr. William Eckert, a well-known forensic pathologist from Wichita, to study the case. Eckert suggested that the body be exhumed.

After a second autopsy, in the fall of 1984, Eckert concluded that Sandy Bird’s injuries were not the result of a car accident. “In my opinion,” he said, “this represents foul play.”

She had been struck on the head with a blunt object and had died from a blow to the back that probably happened when she fell from the bridge, Eckert said. He found marks on her wrists indicating that someone had grabbed her, and marks on her ankles indicating that someone had held her there while perhaps dragging her.

Details of the second autopsy were not made public for almost a year, but within weeks, a grand jury--only the second in the history of Emporia--began looking into the mysterious death.

In February, 1985, Bird was charged with first-degree murder.

Bird still had his sympathizers in town. Susan Ewert, a Faith Lutheran parishioner, wrote him an “open letter” that was published in the Gazette. In it, she told Bird that she and others “still believe in your innocence.”

Penalty Outlasted Romance

The relationship that had started it all ended abruptly in March, 1985, two years after it began. Telephone records obtained by investigators showed that Bird’s collect calls from the penitentiary to Lorna’s home had ceased.

A few days before Bird’s trial last July, Lorna announced that she had married Randy Eldridge, a “born-again” Christian and friend of her family.

Bird did not speak at his trial, but what he said and did the night his wife died was damaging to his case, jurors said later. Bird had called the police several times that night--before checking with the baby-sitter to see if his wife had come home.

Bird went jogging that evening, but the baby-sitter said that he returned home after midnight wearing dress slacks, a shirt and tie. The church didn’t have a shower and his home was only a mile away, yet he had gone to the trouble of changing clothes. The prosecutor suggested a reason: Bird’s jogging clothes had been covered with dirt and blood.

Bird was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

In August, Lorna admitted plotting with Bird to kill her husband. She was sentenced to prison for a term of 5 1/2 to 18 years.

Story of Conspiracy

Now, Lorna Anderson Eldridge is at the Kansas State Correctional Institution in Lansing, a collection of buildings on a bluff that overlooks Tom Bird’s current home, the Kansas State Penitentiary, a mile or so away. Horses graze on the rolling landscape between.

In the recent interview with The Times, Lorna Eldridge admitted working with Bird to murder her husband the night of Nov. 4, 1983. She says that she has since told investigators that Bird was the “masked robber” who killed her husband, and that the weapon was Marty’s own gun, taken from a cedar chest in her basement months earlier.

She says that she followed Bird’s instructions that night. She arrived at the planned location at 6:15 p.m. She was to pretend she was ill, “but I didn’t have to lie,” she remembers. “I was sick with fear.”

Bird parked up the road and waited for them, she says. He appeared, wearing a ski mask, at the back of the van. He ordered Marty to give up his wallet, then fired.

The original plan, Lorna says, had been for Bird to shoot her in the shoulder to make the robbery attempt appear real, but he had run out of ammunition.

Justification of Killing

She said that Bird justified the decision to kill Marty as “the lesser of two evils,” a doctrine she said he had been studying in order to teach a class in Christian ethics at a local college.

“He said it was less wrong for Marty to be killed than for him to slowly destroy the girls and I,” Lorna says.

Authorities in Geary County, acting on Lorna’s new story, drained a pond in August and found what they think is the murder weapon. County Atty. Steven Opat will say only that the investigation into Anderson’s murder is continuing. “We will leave no stone unturned,” he says.

Bird declined to be interviewed for this article and has not spoken publicly since his first trial. He is appealing his murder conviction.

His motives remain a mystery. Why didn’t he divorce his wife? Investigators say that he probably thought a divorce would hurt his chances for promotion, because he felt that preachers should not be divorced.

Lorna says that she has finally “turned the whole mess over to the Lord. I’m through running.” She adds: “I really messed up, but I’m not a dangerous person. If it had not been me, he (Bird) would have found somebody else.”

No one knows whether Lorna was a follower, as she claims, or a leader.

But one investigator says privately: “My experience with criminals is that even though they’ll tell you the truth about a lot of things, they’ll still lie about some things.

“Maybe it’s just that they don’t like to tell all. They always hold back something.

“That’s the difficulty of this job. “You will probably never know all the answers.”