11
a murder in wellesley 111 later, her children would provide her with a more revealing understanding of what was going on inside 56 Cleveland Road when Belinda was not there. “They’d have these family meetings, and a lot of it occurred after I left the house,” she said. “Dirk would ask my kids to leave and go downstairs into the family room and take his kids and have a family meeting in one of the bedrooms and close the door.” Even though Belinda was far from fully grasping the situation, the growing divide between the Greineders and May’s relatives was palpable. “You could feel a little bit of strain, and by the time the actual funeral came around you could feel some sort of division,” she recalled. “There was anger from my family in there, and I think a lot of that anger may have come from the way Dirk and his kids were handling this.” 11 Returning home to Manhattan after May’s funeral on Monday, November 8, Belinda Markel felt something was seriously wrong. The week following May’s murder had been a long blur of one devastating shock after another, but back home, she was able to step back and reflect on the bizarre happenings in Wellesley. Far from convinced that Dirk had killed May, Belinda found herself beginning to doubt her uncle nonetheless. “After the funeral, that’s when I started to allow some of those thoughts to go through,” she said. “This dominated our lives and our conversations as we started to calm down and back away from it. This was an emotional assault, never mind the loss. Going through the tension of being up there in Wellesley and being in the house and out of the house, there were things that we were learning that didn’t sit right. So you sit there and start to review all this, and it took a while for everything to become clear.” Dr. Greineder’s insistence that a second autopsy be performed “really bothered” Belinda. Even more disturbing was the Greineder family’s pact not to cooperate with the police. Her cousins had been subpoenaed to 112 tom farmer and marty foley appear that week before the Norfolk County Grand Jury and Belinda “couldn’t believe it” when she found out that her uncle and his attorney, Marty Murphy, were going to send a lawyer with May’s children. She was even more surprised to learn that Murphy wanted her cousins “prepped” before they testified. “I said to Dirk, ‘I can’t imagine why you would need to do that,’ but he said, ‘Well, they’re not used to doing things like this like you are and they would just be more comfortable.’” Her uncle was overly worried about what his daughter Britt might say before the grand jury, which was already hearing testimony from the first emergency responders who went to Morses Pond on Halloween morning. Belinda said that her uncle told her Britt “was a nervous wreck and he had given her medication. She had taken Xanax in the past, and they were trying to get her back on it,” Belinda said. Anytime Belinda questioned Dr. Greineder about his actions, he always turned it around and railed about how he was the one who was being persecuted by the police. “It was always, ‘Those sons of bitches,’ and ‘They’re coming after me’ and ‘they screwed up my van,’” said Belinda. “He didn’t want to leave the house and he was upset his colleagues had cancelled one of his lecturing trips.” She got the same response from her cousins. “They were really angry that they were being put through this,” Belinda said. “They were very guarded in what they were going to say to the grand jury, which at that time didn’t make any sense to me.” With each passing day and more telephone conversations with her uncle and cousins, Belinda slowly began to doubt her uncle’s innocence. “I knew something wasn’t right,” she said. “Something didn’t make sense, but I wasn’t at the point to say, ‘Wow, Dirk did this.’” Belinda gradually realized he was only telling her what he wanted her to know. She had her husband, Greg, call Marty Foley and then prosecutor Rick Grundy to find out how things were going. “I was looking to see if they were proceeding on this,” she said. “I felt like Dirk was only keeping me updated...
OR
Buy This Book in Print