Chapter 3 - How Emily supposedly died
Nine days before the funeral, Richard called me at 5:14 in the morning.
“Claire.”
His voice was broken.
“What happened?”
“Emily’s car.”
I sat up.
“What?”
“They found it near Blackwater Bridge.”
The car had gone through a damaged barrier and into deep water below the bridge.
Search crews recovered the vehicle.
Driver’s door partly open.
Emily’s purse inside.
Her phone.
One shoe.
Blood on the driver-side interior consistent with a cut.
No body.
That should have prevented a funeral.
And legally, it did prevent the kind of burial Richard later pretended we were having.
The coffin at the cemetery was supposed to contain what he called “recovered remains.”
He said search crews found partial human remains downstream three days later.
The sheriff’s department had not confirmed identity publicly because testing was pending.
Richard told family the identification was “essentially certain.”
I believed him.
That was my mistake.
The actual remains belonged to someone else.
Investigators already knew that before the funeral.
Which was one reason Ortiz attended.
But Richard did not know she knew.
The funeral director had been told the sealed container inside the coffin held authorized remains transferred through a private mortuary service arranged by Richard.
It did not.
The mortuary paperwork was false.
The funeral home had never opened the sealed inner transport box because the paperwork represented it as already prepared remains requiring no viewing.
Inside that sealed structure, Richard had packed sand.
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The deception was not sophisticated enough to survive scrutiny.
It only needed to survive one funeral.
