How Mary Stiles’ Killer Got Caught After the 11-Year-Old's Halloween Murder

It was Halloween 1985. 

In the spirit of the season, 11-year-old Mary Stiles pulled her hair up in pigtails and donned a pair of pink Care Bear pajamas in anticipation of an exciting night of trick-or-treating with her family. 

But first, the Horace Mann Junior High School student and her siblings were explicitly told to wait for their dad to get home from work before going door to door in their Baytown, Tex., neighborhood.  

Mary’s brother and sister claimed they last saw her around 5 p.m., that evening, on property at the Woodhollow Apartments where they lived. 

They never saw her again.  

Hours passed with no sign of Mary, and police launched an unsuccessful manhunt for the girl later that night. 

Crude Acts podcast host Jennifer Schaffer was 9 years old when Mary was murdered. Her dad, Paul Schaffer, was one of the Baytown police detectives on the case. 

“I was very aware of what was going on. Kids were talking about it on the playground,” she recalls to A&E Crime + Investigation. “We didn't live too far from Mary’s apartment complex at the time. [Afterward], we didn’t go on bike rides like we did before, we didn't play outside as much.” 

She adds, “It definitely shook the whole town.” 

On November 9, 1985, Mary’s killer boldly began a game of cat-and-mouse with cops when the first letter marked “Urgent—Mary Stiles” arrived at the Baytown police station. 

In the envelope, the mailer—later dubbed “The Riddler”— placed a local newspaper clipping about Mary’s disappearance and a hand-drawn map leading to the sixth grader’s remains 150 yards behind the Woodhollow Apartments, along with instructions to give her a dignified burial.  

“Find her and give her a decent burial,” the letter read. 

An autopsy revealed she had been stabbed four times in the neck and strangled leading up to her death. One of her socks was shoved down her throat.  

Police were perplexed as to who would carry out such a brutal murder.  

Then, on December 3, 1985, a second mysterious letter arrived.  

It read, in part, “that the madman will surrender his tool of death—the pain—is more than I can stand. In time the truth will be opened for all to hear.” 

A third letter came the next day, and by the fourth letter, the murderer, who called himself the “Madman,” threatened to kill again if investigators failed to solve his riddle and swiftly publish the answer in The Baytown Sun.  

“The game begins now,” he taunted. “If correct answers are given—the name—will appear, that if incorrect answers are given the price will be a life.” 

The riddle read, “This time has passed from long ago, but a name remains. The name of the weigher (sic) of the heart against the truth of the feather—The Genesis in this name holds the letter that belongs to mine. Twice do I wright (sic) this, when my signature is written, once in the first and once in the last.” 

Initially, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office assumed the answer was Egyptian god of the dead, Anubis, and published it in the paper. But the killer sought a different response. 

“He [the killer] was pretty livid and upset at the Baytown PD,” former Det. Paul Schaffer recalls to Crime + Investigation, describing the case as a “Zodiac-type situation,” in reference to the serial murderer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area and sent taunting letters to local newspapers in the late 1960s.  

Paul went to the library to try to crack the cryptic message. 

“The answer was ‘Osiris,’” he remembers, referring to a similar ancient Egyptian god of the underworld who oversaw The Weighing of the Heart ceremony.  

But the riddles kept coming.  

The FBI stepped in and developed a behavioral profile of the suspect. 

They determined the perpetrator was likely a male juvenile experiencing declining grades, changes in behavior and whose guilt from committing the heinous crime was beginning to consume him. 

Authorities surveilled multiple mailboxes in the area. 

Baytown Police Det. Harry Gore—who, like Mary, also lived at the Woodhollow Apartments—determined the riddles were being mailed from a box inside their complex, after witnessing a suspicious teenage boy on a bike drop off a letter.  

Within that envelope was another riddle, similar to the ones the police department previously received, marked with threats to kill again if the answer to an earlier puzzle was not published in the paper by midnight Christmas.  

"We had an undercover officer on a bicycle follow him back to the apartment where he lived, and we set up surveillance on him,” Paul describes. 

Investigators determined the suspect was a resident of the Woodhollow Apartments and a sophomore at Sterling High School.  

The assistant principal helped identify him as Mary’s neighbor Joseph Lee Fordham, and police continued their surveillance of the 16-year-old. 

After watching the suspect throw a garbage bag in the apartment dumpster, police retrieved the trash. 

Evidence inside the bag further linked Fordham to the mysterious letters and thus, Mary’s slaying.  

“There were draft letters that were discarded and detailed information concerning the victim. Quite a bit was found to show the party was involved,” Paul says, including the teen’s fingerprints on the letters. 

Police also recovered newspaper reports on Mary’s death that the killer had clipped, practice letters to police and books on mythology in Fordham’s locker, as well as bloodied clothing and the knife used in the stabbing. 

“He wanted to be caught. He was playing a game with the PD,” Paul purports. “He had some guilt on his conscience, in my opinion, and he was only 16, so he was pretty immature, as well.” 

The teen was taken into custody without incident as he stepped off the school bus that December. 

“We placed the handcuffs on him and told him he was under arrest for murder,” Paul recalls. “He was very quiet. You could tell it was something that he expected.” 

Jennifer adds, “When they figured out who did it, we were all shocked.”  

Fordham’s younger sister was friends with Mary, and Mary trusted the teen enough to walk alone into the woods with him that fateful night.  

While Fordham never revealed a motive, Paul believes “it was sexual” because “she was found partially nude.”  

At trial, defense psychologist Jerome Nathaniel Sherman wrote in his report that Fordham purported that as he and Mary walked away from their apartment complex toward the woods that Halloween, he heard voices, “weird feelings” overcame him and he stabbed the girl with a pocketknife.  

“He told her he was going to take her to the hospital and then the voices and feelings started up again,” Sherman told the court. “He felt anger and feelings of explosion starting. She started biting him, and he said, 'Stop,' and she did. He states that he felt out of control and went ahead and killed her, not knowing what was going on.” 

Although advanced DNA technology didn’t exist at the time, Paul suspects Mary “probably struggled when he assaulted her, panicked and restrained, and did what she could to try to escape.”  

Then, Fordham killed her. 

At 17, Fordham was tried as an adult for Mary’s slaying. 

While the defense argued that Fordham was insane, citing an unstable childhood and previous suicidal and homicidal diagnoses, the 12-person jury still found him guilty of aggravated murder.  

He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.  

Fordham served eight years and was released on a mandatory supervision release in 1994 due to prison overcrowding, but landed back in prison after moving to Indiana and failing to report to his parole officer.  

Weeks before his parole was scheduled to end in 2014, Fordham went missing.  

U.S. Marshals tracked him down to a hotel in the middle of an apparent attempt to take his own life.  

He suffered non-life-threatening injuries and was taken back into custody after saying his sentence for Mary’s murder “wasn’t long enough,” according to her sister. 

“It’s just a shame that he didn’t get the help he needed,” Jennifer says.  

Fordham’s current whereabouts are unclear. 

“They let him out too soon, and they didn't monitor him enough,” she adds. “More should have been done to understand him.”