Lost in the Desert
Anyone that lived in the Phoenix, Arizona area in the nineties might remember Terri’s Consignment & Design. The commercials were shown constantly on television throughout the Phoenix valley and featured Terri Bowersock and her mother, Loretta Bowersock.
Loretta had run a successful furniture store as a young woman. In 1983, she used her business acumen to help her daughter, Terri, start her own furniture consignment company with a $2,000 loan from Terri’s grandmother. Terri’s Consignment & Design stores featured “gently used” furniture at bargain prices. Within a few years, the stores were well known throughout the Phoenix area and Terri was making a fortune.
Despite growing up with dyslexia, Terri was a master at marketing her business and was awarded the title of Arizona’s top businesswoman. Not long afterward, Avon awarded her their prestigious “Woman of Enterprise” award and she was featured on the Oprah Winfrey show in an episode featuring “unexpected millionaires.”
Although Terri owned the business, Loretta also became wealthy and bought a large house in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe. As a single woman, however, the home was too large for her and she decided to rent out a room in 1986. Loretta placed a classified ad in the local paper reading, “Room for lease in nice home. Executive businesswoman.” The first person to respond was a forty-nine-year-old man named Taw Benderly.
Benderly showed up to her home penniless and with nothing but the shirt on his back. He told fifty-one-year-old Loretta that he had literally just gotten off of a plane at the airport and had his bag stolen. Loretta felt sorry for him and let him stay.
Benderly was tall, charming, and intelligent. He spoke in a way that was impressive, persuasive, and very convincing. He told her he had grown up as an only child, but his parents had died when he was young, leaving his grandmother to raise him. After high-school he went to college and received a master’s degree in business.
It didn’t take long before Loretta had fallen in love with her new roommate. In the following years, Loretta continued to work with her daughter while Benderly tinkered in the garage. He had convinced himself that he could become an inventor and was full of ideas that he claimed would be “the next big thing.” He worked on projects such as a “revolutionary” lawn mower blade, a solar-energy unit, and a shield to keep cars cool in the Arizona heat. Unfortunately, none of his ideas ever seemed to work out.
Loretta combed through garage sales and estate sales. She looked for watches and jewelry that she could refurbish and resell at a profit. Meanwhile, Benderly toyed with his inventions, cooked, and cleaned the house. Although he didn’t bring home any income, from the outside it seemed that the couple were fine that way. In reality, however, it was far from okay.
By the early nineties, Benderly convinced Loretta that she was entitled to a much larger stake in Terri’s furniture business and encouraged her to sue her daughter. The lawsuit took years and drove a wedge between the mother and daughter team. The dispute was eventually resolved, but it had been a very difficult time for Loretta emotionally.
As the years pressed on, Benderly became condescending towards Loretta. He constantly put her down and made her feel inadequate. The abuse crumbled her self-esteem. Her bookshelves were filled with self-help books and video recordings of Oprah and Dr. Phil episodes about how to save a relationship and domestic abuse.
Loretta had confided in her daughter and sisters that her life with Taw Benderly wasn’t ideal. However, as a woman in her sixties, she believed it was too late to leave him and start anew. She and Benderly had promised each other early in their relationship that they would grow old together; she was intent on keeping that promise.
Benderly talked incessantly at family get-togethers about the income potential of his pet projects. Terri was receptive and for years gave him $20,000 to $40,000 per year to help get his inventions off the ground. She had no idea that other friends, neighbors, and relatives were loaning him money too.
* * *
At 6:00 p.m. on December 14, 2004, Taw Benderly walked up to the security desk at the Park Place Mall in Tucson, Arizona, in a frenzy. He told mall security that he had dropped Loretta off at the Dillard’s Department Store at 2:00 p.m. that day. He had planned on picking her up at 4:00 p.m., but had spent the last two hours walking through the mall looking for her. She was nowhere to be found.
That evening, police searched through the Dillard’s store, the mall, and the surrounding neighborhood, but found no sign of Loretta. The police were familiar with Loretta’s name because they had seen her and Terri on their television commercials. Initially, they thought she had possibly been abducted and was being held for ransom.
Benderly explained to detectives that he and Loretta Bowersock, his partner of eighteen years, had planned on coming to Tucson for a five-day vacation and to do some Christmas shopping. He claimed that he and Loretta left Tempe at 10:00 a.m. and drove to Tucson. They checked into the Tucson Residence Inn at 12:30 p.m. before he dropped her off at the mall at 2:00 p.m.
It didn’t take long for police to find holes in his story. The mall security tapes were the first inconsistency. After poring through the security tapes of both Dillard’s and the rest of the store, there was no trace of Benderly looking for Loretta for two hours as he said. Instead, he had parked his maroon mini-van in the parking lot at 6:00 p.m. and walked straight to the security desk. There was also no footage of Loretta in the mall at all that day.
With a warrant, police searched Benderly’s hotel room. Inside they found various valuables: expensive watches, necklaces, and rings. He had also brought several guns and ammunition. He packed eight suitcases for the five-day trip, but only one suitcase contained any of Loretta’s clothes. The rest were his own belongings.
However, what troubled police the most was what they found when they searched his maroon mini-van. In the back of the van was a pickaxe and shovel, both caked with dirt. They also found a box of miscellaneous pieces of rope and a map of the desert area between Phoenix and Tucson. This discovery was more than just a red flag.
Tucson detectives contacted Tempe police for a warrant to search Benderly and Loretta’s home. Inside their garage was another mini-van. In the back of the van police found a purse containing Loretta’s identification, checkbook, and credit cards. In a trash can outside of the house was a paper towel with a small amount of blood on it. It was clear to Tucson police that Loretta never made it to Tucson alive.
With good reason, police didn’t believe Benderly’s story and brought him in for questioning. During the interview he was combative and showed more concern for the accusations against him than finding Loretta:
“You need to respect that the fact that I’m trying to give you information in as clear a form as I can. I was not prepared to have to account minute for minute for my time.”
Tucson detectives were convinced that Benderly had killed Loretta and most likely buried her in the desert somewhere between Tempe and Tucson. Benderly eventually refused to speak further with police and, without a body, they were unable to charge him for anything. They were forced to release him.
Investigators began backtracking Benderly’s movements of the day Loretta went missing. He claimed they left Tempe at 10:00 a.m. that day and checked into the hotel at 12:30. At 2:00 p.m., he dropped her off at the mall. Hotel records at the Residence Inn, however, showed the check-in at 2:48 p.m. – and the hotel staff said Benderly checked-in alone. There was no record of Loretta in the hotel.
Benderly’s credit card and cell phone records also told a different story of the day. He had used a credit card to purchase two baseball caps at 11:00 a.m. at an outlet mall in Casa Grande, just south of Phoenix. At 12:30 p.m. he returned a cell phone call to his dentist. The call used a cell phone tower near exit 199, also near Casa Grande. Finally, at 1:15 p.m., he purchased two sandwiches at the Love’s truck stop just a mile further down the interstate.
The time between 11:00 a.m. and 1:15 p.m. remained unaccounted for. Police believed that after he left the outlet mall, he buried Loretta in the desert somewhere nearby before continuing down to Tucson.
* * *
Terri Bowersock was distraught at the disappearance of her mother and confronted Benderly personally. Despite the inconsistencies, he insisted he had nothing to do with Loretta’s disappearance.
Terri didn’t know what to think. Having had close contact with the Phoenix area television stations and newspapers, she turned to them for help. The story of Loretta’s disappearance became front-page news. The media attention incited friends and strangers to help her search the area between Phoenix and Tucson. Although Benderly’s call had bounced off of a particular cell phone tower, the area covered by that tower was an enormous area of desert; finding a body in that large of an area was highly unlikely.
The story also attracted psychics who claimed they could help. Terri was a believer in the supernatural and hired eight different psychics for advice. The psychics provided her with tips that were mostly available to anyone that read the newspapers. One particular psychic, however, convinced Terri that she could talk to the dead. The clairvoyant told her she needed to check on the whereabouts of Taw Benderly.
Tucson police were building their case against Benderly and were close to having enough evidence to arrest him. They had gone through his and Loretta’s financial records and found that he had taken out several large loans using her name. He had also embezzled money from her company and hadn’t been making the mortgage payments. Together, they were tens of thousands of dollars in debt and Loretta’s beautiful Tempe home was just days away from foreclosure. Phone records showed she had made seventeen calls to the bank the day before she disappeared.
Terri hadn’t spoken to Benderly in the past few days and went to check on him. After there was no answer at his door and he wasn’t answering phone calls, she called the police.
On December 22, just eight days after Loretta went missing, Tempe police entered Benderly’s home to find him dead. He had hanged himself using an extension cord tied to rafters in the garage. Benderly had left a suicide note, but it said nothing of Loretta’s whereabouts or how she died. It only said,
“Loretta and I vowed over the years that we would spend eternity together, and so we shall.”
Though Loretta and Terri had been told by Benderly that his parents were dead and he was raised by his grandmother, Terri soon found out this story was a lie. Benderly not only had a brother, but his mother and father were still alive. He also had an ex-wife and two children that he hadn’t spoken to in over eighteen years. His story of having a master’s degree in business was a lie too. In fact, when he showed up at Loretta’s doorstep eighteen years earlier, he had only recently been released from prison for theft.
* * *
It appeared that any hopes of finding Loretta’s body had vanished with the death of Taw Benderly. The only remaining clues came from psychics with vague descriptions like; “look for something red in the dirt,” “she’s in the desert,” or “she’s buried next to something blue.” But Terri still put her faith in the psychics, even inviting one to help her hike through the desert looking for her mother.
Six months after she went missing, police called off the official search for Loretta Bowersock. Nonetheless, Terri continued to spend her weekends hiking through the desert south of Phoenix.
* * *
Just over a year after she went missing, two hikers kicked at a rock in the desert and uncovered part of a human skull. When police dug just eighteen inches below the surface, they unearthed a complete female skeleton wrapped in plastic bags. One bag covered her head, another was shoved down her throat.
Dental records proved that the body was that of Loretta Bowersock. A forensic examination determined that she most likely died of asphyxiation by placing a bag over her head. The body was buried without shoes, leading police to believe that she had died at their home in Tempe.
* * *
Terri Bowersock found solace in the discovery of her mother’s body and that she could give her a proper burial. Rather than the police work involved, she credited the clairvoyant with finding her mother’s remains. Today, the same psychic can be found on social media websites spouting dozens of unsubstantiated and easily debunked conspiracy theories.
The economic downturn wasn’t kind to Terri Bowersock and her consignment stores. Three years after her mother’s body was found, her multi-million dollar empire came crumbling down. The Better Business Bureau received 188 complaints in a matter of thirty-six months. Google and Yelp were filled with negative reviews of her businesses from people who put their furniture on consignment and never saw a dime in return.
The business she started with a $2,000 loan – which had grown to seventeen stores, employed 300 people, and made $36 million a year – eventually filed for bankruptcy protection. Terri Bowersock also filed for personal bankruptcy.
