I've written about Linda Lester several times, because she is on my mind still, some 31 years later.
Linda was (is!) a woman I worked with at Baltimore County 911. I worked there for almost 19 years, with a group of about 200 people, many of whom came and went, and many of whom were there when I started and were still there when I transferred out.
Linda was an unforgettable woman, with a smile as big and bright as her personality and a heart of gold. She fell in love and had a baby, and that big sweet heart of hers was broken by the man she thought was her person.
When the marriage was over and he became abusive, she moved across the Bay Bridge to Cambridge, for God's sake, commuting to Towson an hour and a half on good nights, just to be away from him and stay safe. She wanted a divorce and the chance to raise her daughter in peace. She told me just that in the lobby of the courthouse one afternoon when I was leaving and she was reporting in.
Came the night of October 11, 1994. Linda worked 3-11 and headed to her ex's house to pick up their daughter from the ex. She never got there, there was a manhunt, her body was found in an embankment off I-70 four days later.
They never arrested her husband, until this past Friday. https://www.wmar2news.com/marylandcoldcases/police-arrest-estranged-husband-in-decades-old-murder-of-911-operator
I'm not here to pass judgement on the man. He had some gray-suited lawyer on the courthouse steps on Friday, confidently proclaiming his innocence. The jury will pass judgement on Linda's husband, and who knows? Any time you have twelve people hearing a case, you run the risk of some of them being set against convicting anyone for anything.
I will tell you this. I cried when we lost Linda, and twenty years after that when we lost our Deanna, and my tears didn't change anything then and they won't now. But I believe in Heaven above, and I believe that Linda looks down from there to see us still loving her, still caring, and I want her to know, we always will.
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