Love gone wrong

Of all the criminal investigations that Independence Detective Keith Rosewaren was involved in during the last 25 years, few compared to the Teresa Stone and David Love investigation.

When Stone was sentenced last week to eight years in prison on charges of conspiracy to commit the murder of her husband, insurance salesman Randy Stone, the sentencing concluded one of – if not the – most complex cases Rosewaren can recall.

“Most of our homicides – the investigation portion of it – goes so quickly,” Rosenwaren said Wednesday, two days after police released thousands of pages of documents related to the Stone case.

“This one was different because it was so drawn out,” he said. “There were many parts to it, especially on the digital records side of it. I had never really been involved with the cell phone records part of an investigation – and that was key.”

He agreed that technological advances in criminology, specifically those dealing with cell phone records and tracings, led to arrests and convictions. Had it been 1985, police would have had great difficulty.

“Had it happened then, I don’t think it would have been solved,” he said, adding that records helped police place suspects in certain locations, specifically Love that day in March 2010.

The facts of the case are well known: Randy Stone was at his insurance office off Noland Road on March 31, 2010, when David Love, his pastor at the New Hope Baptist Church in Independence, came in and shot him in the head, killing him.

Friends and family had speculated that Teresa and Love had been having an affair, and once police determined that was the truth, the investigation flowed from there – though slowly.

“Our belief that she wasn’t being honest started later that night when we interviewed her,” Rosewaren said. “We could tell that what she was saying didn’t make any sense. It just didn’t add up.”

Shortly after an hour’s questioning, a detective asked Stone about a letter that was found in the trash can of the office where her husband was found dead. It was a birthday letter later determined to be written by Love.

“It was at the bottom of your trash can at your office,” the detective said in the transcript.

“Ohhh!” Stone said.

The detective described the torn-up letter to her, with its initials and sentences like “you’re the most beautiful person,” but Teresa said nothing.

Then detectives excused themselves from the room and Teresa, sniffling, whispered, “Oh my gosh … oh great, I forgot about that …”

She told police that she had received the note from a secret admirer, who had left it on her car door. She said she had found it a few days prior and that she had no idea who it had been from.

Jackson County Prosecutor Tammy Dickinson stressed during Teresa’s sentencing hearing that Teresa lied to police countless times during the investigation.

Documents show that Teresa led police and family and friends on a guessing game, often displaying strange and contradictory behavior, which alerted detectives that there was more behind the murder of a simple insurance salesman in Independence.

It wasn’t until late April 2010, following an interview with police, that Teresa began to reveal parts of the story. She accused Love of being the man who shot her husband (an accusation she made to friends and family earlier), and she told police he had come to her home later that night following the murder and told her in her bedroom.

But at the time, she told police that she had been wanting to break off the affair for a long time but was afraid. She told family and friends that she let Love give the eulogy at her husband’s funeral because she was scared not to.

Such claims, many true but others proved to be exaggerated, litter police documents.

Below is a selection taken from police reports and other police and county correspondence:

• After Love was arrested in South Carolina (where he fled after being named a suspect) in November 2010 on murder charges, Teresa was questioned by county prosecutors on Nov. 30, 2010. She admitted to the affair and said she and Love had made plans to marry. She was indicted in May 2011.

“How were both of you going to get married when both of you were already married?” a prosecutor questioned.

“He had – we had discussed about how we could get rid of our spouses,” she said.

Teresa later said that she had given Love access to the garage and to her husband’s gun safe.

“David told me that he could take care of Randy with one shot to the head and that he would use one of Randy’s guns,” she said in court documents.

On March 16, 2010, Teresa said, she had sent a text message to Love saying she wanted her husband dead.

• Randy Stone had life insurance policies, and Teresa didn’t know until a week after he was dead that he had changed the policies so that their children, Michael and Miranda, would get the money. Both policies were worth about $800,000. Teresa told prosecutors that she and David had planned to use the money to start a new life.

• Love had planned to kill his wife, Kim, by breaking her neck and putting her in her car and rolling it down a hill.

• Both Teresa and Love communicated via prepaid TracFone cell phones – one of which Love’s wife found in the garage, showing several messages between the two.

Rosewaren said acquiring cell phone records for the devices proved challenging and time-consuming, but necessary for the investigation.

“We have two ring binders showing the records,” Rosewaren said. “Our department was capable of doing the research we needed to do, but we also enlisted the help from the FBI, who have cell phone experts. They were ready to testify for us, and then Love pleaded guilty.”

• On her way to the insurance office on March 31, Stone said she received a text message from Love. She was going to the office she shared with her husband after she failed to reach him by phone and text.

“What did the text message say?” prosecutors asked.

“It said, ‘Urgent, seriously do not go to the office alone.’ ”

“What do you think he meant by that?”

“That he had killed Randy.”

She told police initially that she thought the text meant that Love and her husband were at the office having an argument.

When she arrived, she found her husband dead. During sentencing, Dickinson hammered at the fact that Stone had stepped over her husband’s body and called her parents, speaking with them for a moment, hanging up, and then calling 911 about six minutes later.

Teresa told prosecutors and police that she never touched her husband’s body.

• Love arrived at the crime scene later that night, Teresa told prosecutors. Love spoke to her, she said, and told her to get rid of the cell phone, “that it could put him away for life.” She later broke it and flushed it down the toilet at the police department, though she first told police that she flushed it at a public restroom.

Love told her at the scene to tell police that her husband sold the handgun used in the murder three months ago.

During questioning with prosecutors, Teresa told police that Love told her he disposed of the gun about 20 miles away and ran over his TracFone with his car and “spread it around Independence.”

• Teresa told prosecutors that there were some bad feelings between Love and her husband, specifically that Randy on March 17 informed Love that he and his family were leaving the church because of issues.

As a minister of records, Randy said he was concerned with the way Love was handling church finances, specifically using funds to pay personal insurance bills and paying his wife, even though she did little to no work at the church. Randy was also upset that Love allowed his son to be choir director even after getting a DUI and being caught in a homosexual act, according to court documents.

• Teresa told prosecutors that she had been sexually involved with another pastor who lived in Florida. It was single occurrence, she said, and her husband knew nothing about it. She said she and Randy had planned a trip to visit the pastor and his family in April, which didn’t anger Love, but “made him love me more.”

• The day after her husband’s death, Teresa contacted a pastor in West Virginia, who told police he knew Love through church work in the early 1990s.

During a visit in 2002, Randy approached that pastor and told him he found a handwritten letter from his wife to a man named David. In it were described several sexual activities, which Teresa later told her husband that she wrote as a kind of “staging” practice that would help her marriage.

Most significantly, Rosewaren said, both Teresa and Love spoke to the pastor following the murder.

“What was significant to us was that she laid out a time line to (the pastor), almost like she wanted others to know where she was and what she was doing,” Rosewaren said. “Love did the same when they spoke.”

The West Virginia pastor described Love as having “no remorse or praise for Randy” and that Love sounded “cold and calculated” during the conversation. He also said Love said “he had a stack of dirt on (Randy)” should the police call him. Love and the pastor also spoke briefly about New Hope and the fact that $125,000 was still owed on some land, according to documents.

• On April 21, 2010, Teresa agreed to call Love on a police phone during a subsequent interview. At the time, Teresa maintained that Love had killed her husband for unknown reasons.

Talking to Love on the phone, she told him that “she can’t live like this” and that Love “had to do something.” She asked him, “Why did you do this to me? Why did you kill my husband?”

Love’s wife took the phone and asked Teresa if she thought her husband “did something. … You know he did something? Do you think he did something to Randy?”

When the call ended, Love’s wife asked him why she was going to the police.

“She’s not going to pin this thing on me,” he told her.

Detectives were near the Love home, and when Love and his wife left the home and headed down U.S. 24, police stopped them and took Love into custody.

• Later that night, Love was escorted into the investigation unit and detectives arranged to have Teresa pass David as he walked down the hallway.

As they passed each other, Teresa looked at David and stated several times in a tearful voice, “I told them everything.” He stood motionless until a detective urged Teresa toward the elevator.

“Don’t worry,” Love said to her, “I will take care of everything.”

• Once in custody, police amassed computers and other items from Love’s home. Several emails were pulled from his computer, many of which documented his relationship with Teresa.

“You are my beautiful bride,” he emailed her in 2009. “I cannot wait to watch you walk to me knowing that we are officially about to be married publicly. I love your ideas. Keep gathering ideas and dream, baby, dream. It is coming. I love your plants. I think you can collect wedding info and file it as if you are planning for your daughter. You know?”

From Teresa, an email to Love in 2009:

“I would love to have an outside wedding with lots of flowers. Not just a certain kind, just real flowers. Maybe a rose garden or something like that. My dress I am not sure. When I find the perfect dress you will be the first to see it. I am going to start planning it.”

Other files show Love exposing himself.

• Teresa became pregnant with Love’s child about six years ago, according to documents. She led her husband to believe that the child was his. The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.

• Before her husband’s funeral, Teresa discussed matters with a church member and associate of Love’s. She told him that she had found out that Randy had changed the life insurance policy (to benefit the kids), “so if the police are thinking I would do it for the money, they can just drop that case because I’m not getting the money.”

• After the funeral, the church associate said Teresa asked if he and his wife could come over to her house. It was an awkward moment, he told police.

“Whoever did this really inconvenienced my life,” Teresa said and, moments later, leaned over and smelled his neck, telling him he smelled good.

Rosewaren said the cumulative tolls – emotional, financial – that affected the families would last for years. Love is serving a life sentence and Teresa eight years, though her sentence is subject to parole.

“This was one of the saddest cases I’ve seen,” Rosewaren said.