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A Cold Case Frozen in Time

Continued from page 5

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?"

Another theory had emerged soon after the disappearance — that Lorenzo could have been involved, since his DNA wasn't found at the lot. The implication was so hurtful that Misha Chivers wrote the media, asking them to treat her husband as a human being. "He was always either a suspect or he was just a third party or just an employee," she says. But he was so much more. He was the guy she'd fallen in love with when she was just a kid. They were flat broke but always found the two bucks to go dancing at the Indian Center on Friday and Saturday nights — Lorenzo in his braids and Stacy Adams shoes and Misha in her big hair and six-inch stilettos. He was a dad who told his kids he loved them, the child of a single mother with an eighth-grade education who never gave up looking for her son, and died in 2005 with the mystery unsolved.

By the third anniversary of the disappearance, Misha decided she couldn't wait any longer for answers and called Detective Pat Long. "You've given me bits and pieces of information," she remembers telling him. "My son is eighteen now. I need to know." Long agreed to sit down with Misha and Josh. He told them that Paul had been using his business as a front for narcotics and gotten tangled up with the wrong folks, Misha says. Lorenzo was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Long repeated that theory to the news media, saying that Paul, Sarah and Lorenzo were "probably victims of drug violence." Paul "wasn't a major drug lord," he explained, but had a small client base to which he sold marijuana.

His friends and mother don't deny that Paul smoked pot — though never around Sarah. But they don't believe that drugs had anything to do with his disappearance. Paul was not a drug dealer, they say, and he would never have knowingly put Sarah in danger. "He's not the person they made him out to be at all," Rich says. "Yeah, he dabbled in shit, but he was by no means a kingpin."

In 2005, Sharon finally met Howard Morton of Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons (see story, page 16), and he found funding to put up a billboard near the Tuff Movers lot with photos of Paul, Sarah and Lorenzo. As it was unveiled, Westminster announced that it was taking the case over from Thornton. "They inform me that day as we stood out there, did our stuff in front of the cameras, that the case was being transferred from Thornton to Westminster," Morton says. "They said it's been treated as a missing-persons case up until now, and now it's being treated as a homicide and we're giving it to Westminster. Here we are six years later, and they're just now going to take it seriously as a homicide?"

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