I Had a Doozy of a Father: The Disappearance of Edward F. Fonder III

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

August 16, 2023

Edward F. Fonder III was born on July 13, 1913, and by August 1993 he was eighty years old, living on an eleven acre property in the 3100 block of Winding Road in Springfield Township, Pennsylvania, a rural stretch of Bucks County. He was a retired machinist, married to the same woman for fifty five years before her death, a loss that by every account he was still grieving heavily when his own life took its final unexplained turn. He walked with the help of an antique rosewood cane, the result of hip replacement surgery, and he had recently undergone heart valve surgery as well, leaving him dependent on daily medication that he would, strangely, leave behind entirely when he vanished. He stood five foot nine or five foot ten, a hundred and sixty pounds, with graying brown hair, blue or green eyes, and a full beard at the time he disappeared.

Following his wife's death, Edward's living situation involved his daughter, Mary Jane Fonder, and their relationship by most accounts was a difficult one. Mary would later describe her father to investigators in blunt terms, telling them at one point that she had a doozy of a father, characterizing him as chronically angry. Others close to the family described the relationship between father and daughter as strained and contentious well before anything happened to him, tension layered on top of Edward's ongoing grief over losing his wife of more than five decades.

A Newspaper Left Outside

On the morning of August 25, 1993, Mary fixed her father breakfast around seven o'clock and then went back to bed. According to her own account, she heard Edward get up sometime after that, move through the kitchen, open and close the refrigerator, and then leave the house, a sequence of sounds she assumed meant he was simply stepping outside to retrieve the morning newspaper, an ordinary errand for an ordinary morning. When she woke up later, Edward was gone, and the newspaper was still sitting outside untouched, exactly where it had been delivered. She reported him missing at eleven o'clock that morning.

Investigators brought in bloodhounds to track Edward's scent from the house, and the dogs were only able to follow it as far as the driveway before losing the trail entirely, a detail that struck police as strange in light of Edward's mobility problems and dependence on his cane, since a man in his condition should not have been physically capable of getting far from the property on his own, especially not quickly enough to explain a scent trail vanishing at the edge of his own driveway. He had taken his walking cane with him when he left the house, but he left behind everything else, including the heart medication he needed daily to manage his post surgical condition.

A Wallet in a Mailbox

The investigation initially treated Edward's disappearance as a genuine missing persons case, though suspicion around Mary began building almost immediately given that she was the last person known to have seen or heard him. Roughly eight months after he vanished, in May 1994, Edward's wallet turned up in a mailbox in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a considerable distance from the family property, with its contents still intact but the wallet itself wiped clean of fingerprints, a detail that read to investigators less like an accidental loss and more like a deliberate attempt to plant evidence pointing away from wherever Edward had actually ended up.

In the years that followed, with no body, no arrest, and no resolution, Edward Fonder was legally declared dead in 2000, seven years after he vanished. What investigators later learned only deepened their suspicion of his daughter. Mary reportedly continued collecting close to thirty three thousand dollars in her father's pension payments over the years following his disappearance, all without ever reporting his absence to the federal agencies responsible for those benefits, a pattern of financial behavior that painted a picture of a woman who seemingly already knew her father was never coming back and had no intention of letting his continued absence interfere with the money that kept arriving in his name.

A Second, Very Different Murder

For fifteen years, the case of Edward Fonder's disappearance sat unresolved, a presumed homicide with a clear person of interest but never enough evidence to bring charges. Then, on January 23, 2008, Mary Jane Fonder committed a murder that had nothing directly to do with her father but that would ultimately define the rest of her life and finally bring her name into a national spotlight. Mary was a longtime member of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Springfield Township, and prosecutors would later argue she had become fixated on the church's pastor, developing what witnesses described as an obsessive infatuation with him. She had reportedly left the pastor rambling voicemail messages and had taken to leaving food in his kitchen without his knowledge or permission, behavior concerning enough that the pastor eventually told police about it after the murder took place.

The target of Mary's jealousy was Rhonda Smith, a forty two year old woman who worked in the church office and who, according to prosecutors, had received sympathetic attention and some financial assistance from the pastor and other congregants, attention that Mary apparently interpreted as evidence of a romantic rivalry. On the day of the murder, Mary called the church and learned that Rhonda would be alone in the office. She walked in and shot Rhonda twice in the head. Rhonda was taken to the hospital and later died after being removed from life support.

In a detail that would become almost darkly memorable in coverage of the case, Mary, who often wore a wig, kept a hair salon appointment to have her natural hair washed and styled after committing the murder, leaving her wig behind at the salon, where investigators later recovered it. She was arrested on April 1, 2008, weeks after fishermen discovered a .38 caliber revolver on the shore of nearby Lake Nockamixon. Mary admitted during questioning that she had purchased and registered a .38, and claimed she had thrown it into the lake back in 1994, though she gave police two different and conflicting explanations for why. Forensic testing on the recovered weapon told a different story, showing that it had been placed in the lake far more recently than 1994, directly contradicting her account, and ballistics confirmed the gun registered to her was the same one used to kill Rhonda Smith.

On October 30, 2008, a jury convicted Mary Jane Fonder of first degree murder. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, becoming, by some accounts, the oldest person ever convicted of murder in Bucks County.

A Search That Came Up Empty

Mary's conviction for killing Rhonda Smith renewed interest in her father's long cold disappearance, but for years she and her brother, who inherited ownership of the Winding Road property after her conviction, refused to allow investigators to search it. That changed in 2017, when a neighbor named John Brunner purchased the twelve acre property and, once he took ownership, granted police full access. Brunner did not mince words about why, telling reporters that someone out there was guilty and needed to be held responsible.

In May 2018, investigators used ground penetrating radar, capable of detecting objects up to five feet below the surface, to scan the foundation of Edward's recently demolished house, a search that took roughly thirty minutes and turned up nothing. Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub called the outcome disappointing but framed it as part of a process of elimination rather than a dead end, telling reporters that his office remained disappointed but undaunted and intended to keep going, potentially returning with metal detectors and heavier equipment to examine the property's concrete slab more closely. Investigators noted that given Edward's mobility limitations from his hip replacements, it seemed unlikely he could have wandered far from the property under his own power, reinforcing their long standing belief that he had died somewhere on or very near his own land.

Weeks after that search, on June 4, 2018, Mary Jane Fonder died of cardiac arrest in the prison infirmary at the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, closing off any possibility that she would ever face charges or offer answers about her father's disappearance herself. Bucks County authorities made clear that her death did not end their interest in the case. The District Attorney's Office stated publicly that the search for Edward Fonder's remains would continue, driven by a stated commitment to returning his remains to whatever family he had left for a proper burial and some measure of closure.

More than thirty years after Edward Fonder walked out of his own kitchen expecting, as far as anyone could tell, to simply pick up the morning paper, he has never been found. His daughter, the only person who ever really knew what happened that morning, took whatever knowledge she had to her own grave in a Pennsylvania prison, having spent the last decade of her life imprisoned not for her father's disappearance but for a second, unrelated killing that finally caught up with her.

Anyone with information about Edward F. Fonder III's disappearance is asked to contact the Springfield Township Police Department at 610-346-7600.

Sources