(Ronald Foster, Kiowa County district attorney, refused to discuss the Colorado case or to release photos of Phillips, even though making mug shots available to the media is standard practice in most counties in the state.)
Following Toby's death last spring, some of Cynthia's relatives traveled from Kansas to Texas to support her. While they were there, Mathews's grandmother, Billie Walthrop, tried to meet with them--despite her own suspicions.
"I was trying to do what Toby wanted," she says. "He loved her, he said. So I wanted to make sure and see if I could forgive her. That's what the Lord would want. But I sure would like to know what kind of hold she had over Toby."
Chris Reiling, one of Cynthia's sisters, still lives in Kinsley. She says that while she's heard all the bloody stories coming out of Texas, Colorado and Kansas about her sister, they do not pertain to Cynthia. "It's not my sister," she says. "She's never wanted to hurt anybody. I know her."
Instead, Reiling adds, with all the death that has followed her, it is Cynthia who deserves some compassion. "My sister has had an unfortunate life," she says.
October 1998--Greensburg, Kansas
The town lies 25 miles south of Kinsley, along State Route 183, in the bull's-eye center of Kansas's Kiowa County. It is where Harold and Karen Schinstock have resided nearly all their lives. Their tragic personal history, like that of Cynthia Phillips, shatters the myth of a peaceful, idyllic existence protected from big-city violence by endless fields and wide-open spaces.
Several years ago, one of the Schinstocks' sons was discovered trying to have his wife killed. Although the woman was beaten severely, she survived.
That was the second of the family's misfortunes. In January 1982, another of the Schinstock boys, Anthony, took his own life, drifting into death as his car idled in the family's garage. He was sixteen years old.
The suicide seemed as uncharacteristic as it was tragic. The only reason the family could think of that Anthony would kill himself was that he and his girlfriend had recently split up.
Today Harold says he would prefer not to discuss such ancient and painful history. But even seventeen years later, he suspects there is more to the story, details that will never be told about his son's death. There were tantalizing clues that seemed to promise answers but then always dissolved. Clues like the letter from Anthony's ex-girlfriend, Cynthia Nau, that the Schinstocks had found in their son's room after his death.
"Cynthia had wrote him a letter," Harold recalls. "In the letter, she wanted my son to kill her stepdad. She laid it all out in that letter. We gave it to the sheriff. But nothing ever come of it.
