American writer, a fashion journalist whose body was found on 1/06/2002, dead in her home dressed in her nightgown with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, by her side, attempting to nurse. Someone had kicked in the door of her gray-shingled secluded home, likely someone she knew.
Christa had an unorthodox approach to life. A Vassar graduate, she spent years in London and Paris where she served as European bureau chief for fashion magazines. She wrote for W, Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Times. Five years before, she wrote of her decision to bear and raise a child by herself. Around 1995, she put her high fashion wardrobe into mothballs along with her world-traveled passport and moved into the small town of Truro to be a full-time mom.
Christa wrote with humor and poignancy about her search for a sperm donor. She chose Tony Jackett, a local shell-fish constable who is married with four kids. He had told his family about a year ago of his brief affair with Christa and after her death, he sued for custody of Ava. His wife and family embraced Ava with total warmth. They had already become fond of Christa and Eva who had been guests in their home. Tony is a big, handsome man with black curly hair.
However, Christa was also friends of Amyra and Clifford Chase, who contested the guardianship of Ava. They claimed that Christa had admired the way that they were raising their kids and had asked them, about three months ago, to become Ava’s guardians.
Christa had a boyfriend in Truro, Tim Arnold, an author and illustrator who had lived with Christa and Ava for about four months after they met in 1999. They found that “they drove each other crazy” when under the same roof but remained friends. It was he who discovered her body when he visited the home that Sunday. Her two sometime lovers became the prime subjects of investigation in the mysterious murder; Arnold, 45, who is recovering from brain surgery and Jackett, 51, a respected local citizen.
Christa had found single motherhood to be more difficult than she expected and she had been seeking child support payments from Jackett. This was not financially feasible for him in the range of his budget. Four days before her death, she had called him, anxiously worried about the lapse of her health insurance and Jackett assured her he would cover Ava by claiming her as his own child. As his parentage had not yet been legally confirmed, he could not claim Ava.
A suspect in her murder was arrested on April 14, 2004 in Hyannis, MA and charged with her murder. Christopher McCowen, Oklahoma-born, age 33 at the time of his arrest, was her garbage collector who had previously given a DNA sample but the crime labs said that they were so backed up that they could not provide results earlier.
Link to Wikipedia biography