UNDETECTED
NEARLY EVERY WEEK M.J. Jennings went shopping at the Dallas Galleria with her mother, Leah Corken, an 83-year-old widow who had moved to Texas to live near her daughter.
On their last visit, Corken, who had tiny feet and hands, needed a new pair of slides, so they stopped at her favorite shoe store, the only one with a decent selection in size 5. Later, they caught a matinee at an upscale theater. “We always got a pepperoni pizza and split it,” Jennings said of their weekly ritual. “She always got her own popcorn from the popcorn stand and put on just the kind of butter she wanted.” They leaned back in reclining seats, munched popcorn, sipped wine, and laughed out loud at a comedy that featured Meryl Streep singing hilariously off-key. That afternoon, the only sad note came when Corken expressed distress over the unexpected deaths of two friends at Tradition-Prestonwood Senior Living, the luxury complex where she’d moved in 2010.
The next day, August 19, 2016, Jennings found her mother’s body facedown on the floor of her fourth-floor apartment. Her mother’s diamond-studded 18-karat gold wedding band was gone. Jennings called the police, but the patrolmen who arrived seemed uninterested in the missing ring or the passing of another elderly resident at the upscale complex.
Two months later, Dallas detectives investigated the theft of the 18-karat gold wedding ring of Norma French, who had also died at Tradition-Prestonwood. But the Dallas Police Department closed the case without identifying the culprit or recognizing a pattern in the robberies and deaths. French’s daughter, Ellen French House, asked her siblings to take pictures of their mother’s body. She couldn’t stop staring at the photos of her mother, lying facedown on the scarlet carpet in a pool of blood. To her, her mother’s ring finger looked red and swollen, as if someone had “pried the ring off of her finger,” she recalled. “There were a lot of red flags.”
By 2017, a total of nine residents had been found
