Ep. 22 - Death of a Teacher

Cemeteries tell stories. If you are willing to listen, a life can be revealed. Charles Memorial Gardens on Point Lookout Road in Leonardtown holds a large tombstone featuring the etching of a church with a trefoil above the door. That trefoil is a representation of the Trinity, so the church must be Christian. This is one of those headstones shared by a married couple. The story it tells is one of deaths that have come to soon: she died at thirty-three, he died at forty-nine. The symbols above their names indicate that he was a Mason and she was the female counterpart, an Eastern Star. In front of the large headstone is a smaller marker still waiting for its occupant. The man found love again and just three years before he would die, he was married again. A search for an obituary reveals he had succumbed to a long illness and left behind two children and several step-children. But the part of his story that this episode focuses on is not about what happened to him, but what happened to his first wife and why today, there are rumors that a high school harbors her ghost. 

Chopticon High school was established in 1965 to serve the St. Mary's County Public Schools in Maryland and is located in the city of Morganza. The school has gained itself a reputation for excellence in marching band and their band is known as "The Showband of Southern Maryland." It was a music teacher that would find the murdered body of Beverley Jo Heater, whom everyone called "Peachie." She was a well-liked teacher and her murder would affect the students of Chopticon High School for years, as well as the residents of St. Mary's County.

Most people have that one teacher that they remember their whole lives. The one who perhaps gave them some extra attention to get through a tough subject or a rough patch in life. Or this was a teacher of a favorite subject. Beverley Jo Heater was that teacher for some students. Principal Dwight Chakales said of her, "She was a very pleasant person. She got along well with people, spent a lot of time in the community. It sounds trite now but she was the kind of person parents would want their son or daughter to spend time with." Students said that she was always checking up on them and making sure they were okay. Beverley genuinely was interested in the lives of her students. 

Beverley Jo Riffle was born on July 18, 1951 in West Virginia to Benjamin Jack Riffle. And that's really all I could find on her early life. That's what makes the information on headstones so important. I know that at some point she decided to become a teacher and married Samuel Heater with whom she had two boys, Samuel and Brian. Based on cemetery records, Brian himself passed away in 2018 at the age of thirty-seven. Beverley had worked at Chopticon High School for thirteen years and was a business teacher and had been in charge of the student bookstore and youth employment program. On August 3, 1984, she was in her classroom preparing for the upcoming school year by working on the curriculum and schedules. There were other teachers doing the same and there was an 18-year-old summer custodian named Lester Broome cleaning the halls.

At some point around lunch time, Beverley was attacked in her second-floor classroom and dragged twenty feet to a girls' restroom where she was found dead by the music teacher, three hours later. The investigation found that she had been stabbed in the neck from behind in the classroom and then was dragged to the restroom where she was raped and stabbed again. A blood trail lead to this conclusion. A search of the school turned up the murder weapon above a ceiling tile in the first-floor boys' restroom, along with blood-splattered pants. It was an eight-inch kitchen knife. The police immediately looked to Lester Broome as their suspect.

Broome had been a former student at Chopticon and that although Broome had not taken any classes with Beverley, two probably knew each other. Broome was arrested at a juvenile halfway house named Loretta House and he was charged with first-degree murder and first-degree rape on August 6th and held without bond. He initially plead not guilty by reason of insanity. State laws prevented anyone from obtaining information as to why Broome was at the halfway house, but he was working at the school under a federal jobs program.

Two weeks after the murder, Broome was indicted by a St. Mary's County grand jury on charges of rape and murder. This was a nine-count indictment  and the Assistant State's Attorney F. Michael Harris was considering asking for the death penalty. On June 7, 1985 Lester Broome changed his plea and plead guilty first-degree murder. Judge Jacob S. Levin set sentencing for July 9 and St. Mary's assistant state's attorney Walter Dorsey said the maximum penalty Broome could receive would be consecutive life sentences for the murder and sex offense charges plus 18 months for the petty theft charge. As to what the sentence ultimately was, I couldn't find any information, but I did locate Broome as still being incarcerated at the Western Correctional Institution of Maryland. He is fifty-seven years old.

The Heater family filed a 9 million dollar lawsuit charging the county superintendent, the board of education, and representatives of the area's Private Industry Council with civil-rights violations resulting from their gross negligence, hiring and lack of proper supervision of Lester Broome. The suit was filed August 5, 1985 in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. The Private Industry Council was made up of local business representatives. Their job was to oversee the distribution of local aid under the terms of the federal Job Training Partnership Act. Although Samuel only survived his wife Beverley by fifteen years, he did manage to go on with their six-year-old and three-year-old sons and found love again with a woman named Debra.

Stories of hauntings going on at Chopticon High School started almost immediately after the murder. Staff and students claimed to hear the clicking of high heels in the second-floor hallway when no one was in the hallway. And this is the most common occurrence. One source claims she and her friends were standing in one of the hallways of Chopticon High School when they heard phantom footsteps…footsteps sounding like high heels clicking down the hall and walking right next to where they were standing. Needless to say, they were spooked and fled the hallway immediately. Feelings of impending doom and an air of uneasiness are quite often felt by students and even teachers that go to Chopticon High School to this day. The bathroom where her body was left has unexplained things happen at times as well.

A member of 3 Notch Paranormal Investigations wrote, "When I went to Chopticon High School, I spent the night the smaller auditorium during a cheerleading fundraiser night. The girls and I were terrified, to stay at the school, even though the stories of hauntings weren’t quite so popular back then…the school still carried an air of 'something isn’t right here' and tended to creep most of us out to the point where we didn’t want to leave the auditorium without a large group of girls present. I never heard footsteps or experienced blatant paranormal activity, except the feeling of something being around us…a feeling that I never quite shook."

Dawnielle wrote in 2020, "I attended Chopticon High school and had several classes on the particular hallway of her classroom and the bathroom where she was found. The hallway itself had a strange ora and the bathroom was very eerie. It was cold and unsettling, to the point during or traveling to my typing and record keeping class I stopped using it, I would walk the distance to use another bathroom. My seat in typing class was in the front near the door, and I can tell you many times I looked up and out into the hallway because I could hear heels clicking down the hall, to look up and see no one. I did not even know the story of Mrs. Heater until years after I graduated. I generally do not subscribe to the idea of ghost or the paranormal, but the feeling of that particular part of the school was very real."

A woman named Brandy wrote in 2020, "I owned her old house. And it too was haunted. Dark shadows. Dogs barking for no reason as if someone was there. Laundry detergent flying off shelf and busting all over kitchen floor in middle of night. Someone walking up front deck steps but no one there. My young child having screaming fits in its bedroom at night and locking eyes with something in the corner…get her out of the room and she was fine." 

Beverley Heater was one of those teachers that is hard to forget and her death left a memorable imprint on the school. Has she also left her spirit there? Is Beverley still roaming the halls of her former school and home? That is for you to decide! 

Special thanks to Cameron Radtke for suggesting this haunted true crime.

A young person going by the username Kasper's Haunting shared this poem that I stumbled across:

The Ghost Teacher
The school is closed, the children gone,
But the ghost of a teacher lingers on.
As the daylight fades, as the daytime ends,
As the night draws in and the dark descends,
She stands in the class room, as clear as glass,
And calls the names of her absent class.

The school is shut, the children grown,
But the ghost of the teacher all alone,
Puts the date on the board and moves about
(As the night draws in and the stars come out)
Between desks -A glow in the gloom-
And calls for quite in the silent room.

The school is a ruin, the children fled,
But the ghost of the teacher, long time dead,
As the moon comes up and the first owls glide,
Puts on her coat and steps outside.
In the moonlit playground, shadow free,
She stands on duty with a cup of tea.

The school is forgotten -the children forget-
But the ghost of a teacher, lingers yet.
As the night creeps up to the edge of day,
She tidies the Plasticine away;
Counts the scissors -a shimmer of glass-
And says, "Off you go!" to her absent class.

She utters the words that no one hears.
Picks up her bag...
And
Disappears.