A Hellish Apartment
Length: • 27 mins
Annotated by Mark Isero
Tabatha Pope thought she’d finally found an affordable place to live. It was the beginning of a nightmare.
Photo: Stevie Remsberg for New York Magazine
Tabatha’s Pope’s story begins in late August 2021, when she heard of an apartment available in a three-story house just outside downtown Houston. Pope, then 32, desperately needed a place to live. For the better part of nine months, she’d been staying at the Great Value Inn, a $35-a-night motel on the city’s West Side, with her boyfriend, Will, then 47.
Pope had never made much money: She’d worked retail and service-industry jobs in the area since finishing high school — at Kohl’s for a few years, iHop for a couple after that. But she’d always been able to afford low-rent places in the suburbs. In 2016, she was priced out of an apartment for the first time in the town of Katy. In 2019, the year after she met Will, the two missed a payment for their place in Rosenberg and were kicked out. They moved in with a friend, a waiter at iHop, who’d stayed with Pope in the past when he himself was hard up. After about a month, the friend stole and sold Pope’s car — a 2007 Toyota Corolla she’d saved for years to buy. When she contacted the police, they instructed her to file a demand letter, allowing ten days for the vehicle’s return, but by the time she did, the car was at the scrap yard being torn apart.
Without it, Pope lost her job — she’d most recently been working as a delivery driver — and she and Will started staying in motels. Life at the Great Value Inn was particularly grim. Their room was cramped, and the neighborhood, Gulfton, was rough: Between January 2021 and April 2022, the police logged an average of 14 crimes there a day. Other guests partied all night. Pope heard of someone being shot in the parking lot and taken away in an ambulance that July. The couple spent their days working construction; Will had contacts on a few local crews, and Pope was able to join when jobs required extra hands. They patched drywall, demolished old kitchens, tore up carpet, and laid flooring for $15 an hour. Though prices for a two-bedroom apartment in Houston had gone up by 29 percent between 2015 and 2021, they could theoretically pay a cut-rate rent. But they couldn’t manage to save enough for a security deposit.
It was an acquaintance who told Pope about the available apartment and connected her to a man named Michael Brown, who, over the phone, offered to show her the house. It was on West Clay Street, at the intersection of the Fourth Ward and Montrose neighborhoods, an area that had gradually gentrified over the past 20 years and was considered fairly safe. The home had a haphazard façade of gray and beige brick on the first and second levels and tan vinyl siding above. Two tall, anemic palm trees and a reaching live oak stood within the narrow, gated front yard, and there were porches on the first and second floors. The backyard, patched with dead grass, was scattered with trash, and a broken hot tub sat uninstalled and uncovered on a stone patio.
Brown’s girlfriend, a woman named Pamela Merritt, then 41, greeted Pope and Will warmly when they arrived, hugging them both. Merritt was around five-foot-11, a good five inches taller than Pope, but the two otherwise looked remarkably similar: Both had naturally brunette hair that had been dyed purple — Merritt’s with additional stripes of pink — and both were dressed in ripped jeans, tank tops, and black combat boots. (Pope’s were Doc Martens; she’d found them in a dumpster.) Brown, who appeared to be in his 40s as well, joined them, and the four gathered in the couple’s living room — a cluttered space, “a little upturned,” as Pope described it. Merritt said they’d recently had a break-in. The house overall, she added, was in a bit of rough shape, but if Pope and Will were willing to spruce it up — clean out the second and third floors, maybe paint some walls — she would give them a discount on rent, from $750 a month down to $600. Best of all, there would be no security deposit.
There were four apartments in the house, she explained: two one-bedrooms downstairs (Merritt and Brown’s in the front and another in the back), a two-bedroom on the second floor, and a loft on the third. The unit for rent was Merritt and Brown’s, and it would come furnished. They’d be leaving for a few weeks, and they planned to move into the second floor when they returned. The idea was that Pope would ready the space for them while they were away. None of the other apartments were currently occupied; Merritt said they were hoping to eventually set the place up as a bed-and-breakfast.
When all was agreed to, Brown still had some things to do before they could head out, and Merritt offered to pass the time by styling Pope’s hair. She was taking a cosmetology class, she said, and needed a model for an assignment. If Pope was up for it, she’d install a partial weave and take a photo for her instructor. The suggestion was strange and the familiarity surprising, but Pope was happy to oblige: It seemed like Merritt wanted to bond. Merritt was a bit rough with her hair as she was braiding, but Pope didn’t say anything. She was set on getting the apartment.
There was one moment that evening, however, that in retrospect Pope would see as a warning sign. As Merritt worked away, sewing a blonde weft under the top layers of Pope’s hair, Pope asked Brown an innocuous question — to hand her something nearby. According to Pope, Merritt became suddenly furious: She accused Pope of secretly knowing Brown and of sleeping with him. The two had never once met, and Pope was alarmed, but tried to stay calm. It seemed Merritt couldn’t be reasoned with, so Pope let her rant and exhaust herself for a few moments before gently interjecting that she was mistaken. Merritt regained her composure, and Pope suggested they take a walk.
It was sweltering outside, but the two women circled nearby streets for half an hour. Pope told Merritt that she didn’t need to worry — that she was a good person. Merritt, relaxed and almost serene now, apologized. Some girls couldn’t be trusted, she said.
The next morning, Merritt and Brown returned to the house briefly. Merritt said they’d be coming back periodically while they were away to get their mail and check on Pope’s progress with the cleaning. She didn’t say where they were going, though Pope guessed it couldn’t be far. Offhand, Merritt added that she technically didn’t own the house; the landlord was a man named Colin. He’d lived on the third floor, but he’d up and left a couple months before without explanation.
Before taking off, Merritt brought Pope upstairs to show her the work needed on the second floor. When she started to open the door, however, an intense, rotten stench flooded the hallway, and she seemed to change her mind. She told Pope not to worry about the smell: A refrigerator had stopped working, spoiling some meat, she explained, and the odor had lingered. She closed the door, and the two returned downstairs.
It was a couple weeks before Pope got a look at that apartment. She and Will spent their first days as renters away on a renovation job in Waco. When they got back, the crew Will would be joining didn’t have enough work for her to go along, so she decided to get started on the house. She laced up her work boots, grabbed some contractor’s bags she’d nabbed from a construction site, and headed up to the second floor.
The apartment was in a state of chaos. Trash, clothes, and household items covered the floor — backpacks, old radios, dirty coffee pots. She wasn’t totally surprised. Merritt and Brown clearly lived at the margins, and mess was a part of the deal. But the odor was much worse than she’d remembered. “It just smelled like death,” she said.
She opened all the windows and got to work bagging things up. The stench did not seem to dissipate. After an hour or so, she headed into the kitchen to take a look at whatever it was that remained in the fridge. There, on the tile floor, in the center of the room, were two large plastic storage bins — the kind one might use to store winter coats. And at the bottom of each was a few inches of rusty red liquid. It looked very much like blood. And it reeked.
Next to the containers was a reddish-brown crust — an outline of a rectangle of the same size, as if there’d been a third bin that had been moved. Aside this was a pool — five or six feet long and almost as wide — of what appeared to be the same fetid liquid, congealed. What the fuck, Pope thought.
Carefully, she dragged the bins out to the second-floor porch, their noxious contents sloshing. Then, she kept cleaning: It seemed like the thing to do. Soon, she thought, she would understand the connection between the story of the spoiled meat and the liquid — there was some reasonable way it came together. But none came to her.
She was mopping at the viscid substance on the kitchen floor when she remembered the mention of Colin, the man who Merritt said owned the house. Were the things in this apartment his? Why would he leave without taking them? What the fuck, she thought again. Did I just fuck everything up?
When Will got home from work that night, Pope showed him the bins. He was immediately dismissive. Whatever that was — and it was really unclear what it was, he said — it was not their place to get involved. They couldn’t risk losing the apartment.
Merritt stopped by the house the following week. It was now late September. Pope believed by then that Merritt and Brown were staying in nearby hotels — it was a way to bring in rent money before the house was ready. She’d decided to probe, cautiously, for information about Colin. “Y’all just don’t know what happened to him?” she asked. “Have you heard anything?” Merritt, in a matter of fact tone, began her reply with an admission: Colin hadn’t abandoned the house. He was actually dead. Pope’s heart jumped. Merritt continued: He’d had some sort of infected wound on his abdomen, from “falling on a spike,” and she and Brown had eventually taken him to the hospital, where he died.
Pope could barely understand what she was saying. The idea of falling on a spike was absurd. What kind of spike? Where? But she didn’t ask any more questions that day, and she didn’t pack up her things. She and Will had already handed over rent for the next month, and they didn’t have money for another place. Even if they’d wanted to go back to the motel, it would have required a deposit they couldn’t have paid. “In my bank account,” Pope said, “I had literally nothing. A few dollars.”
She didn’t believe Merritt’s story about Colin and the spike — she couldn’t — but she didn’t know what to believe instead. It seemed unreal that Merritt or Brown could have murdered a person — never mind gathering his blood in storage bins. But there seemed to be no question something terrible had happened to Colin. And Pope felt some strange kinship with the missing man, a faint pulling connection. “I don’t know if people believe in the supernatural,” she said. “But there was something compelling me to stay.”
In early October, Pope went to Colin’s apartment on the third floor for the first time. She needed some concrete information to guide her: She didn’t think she was going to get anything reliable from Merritt.
The place was similar to the second floor — trashed — but without the rancid smell. She rifled through dresser drawers, filing cabinets, and papers strewn on table tops, looking for any clues as to what could have happened to Colin. First, she found notes from visits to doctors’ offices: Colin’s last name was Kerdachi, she learned, and he was born in 1942. He’d gone to multiple appointments in the past year, and he’d written out lists of questions to ask certain physicians. The idea that he’d died from a horribly neglected wound was even more far-fetched than it had initially seemed. On the hardwood floor, she found a bound family genealogy with photos. Stuffed into the pocket of a sweater was Kerdachi’s driver’s license, his credit card, and a receipt from Home Depot, dated to mid-February 2021: He appeared to have purchased two space heaters during a historic nine-day freeze that swept Texas. Also on the floor was a handwritten missive, dated to that same February: It was a demand for owed rent. Pope took pictures of everything with her phone.
Behind the wall opposite the bed — a metal frame and bare mattress covered in clothes — Pope spotted what seemed to be a door to a crawlspace, a triangular nook fitted under the house’s southern eve. She pressed on the wood and it opened: Inside was another storage bin. At the bottom was the same coppery fluid she’d found on the second floor.
Slow and halting, Pope stood and walked toward the bed. From her crouched position, she thought she’d noticed a dark mark on the underside of the mattress. She pushed aside the clothes. There, on the white ticking, was a deep red stain—stretching across three or four feet. Looking up, she saw that blood was spattered on the nearest wall. She walked into the bathroom: There were drops on the tile floor and on the white of the bathtub.
Pope held herself calm: The proximate danger required she stay cool-headed, aware, and she found some protection in how surreal the scene was, as if it were playing out in a series of pictures some distance from her. She collected the medical records, credit card, license, receipt, and note about rent and walked downstairs. She stored these effects in a clear plastic sheath in a three-ring binder and uploaded the photographs she’d taken to her computer, backing them up on an SD card. Then she called 911 and reported that she’d found blood in the apartment of a missing person.
Standing on the porch outside, waiting, she opened the mailbox for the third-floor unit, affixed to the house near the front door. Inside was a kitchen knife. It appeared to be covered in dried blood. She closed the lid and stepped away.
Two cops from the Houston Police Department arrived about an hour later: Adam Ancira, who was in charge, and Ian Birch, who stayed quiet. Almost immediately, it was clear to Pope that they weren’t going to take her very seriously: She could feel them looking her up and down, assessing who she was in the scheme of things — taking in her worn-out shoes, the frayed hems of her jeans. As she described the blood-filled bins and red-splashed walls, they responded flatly in single syllables: “Yup,” “Okay.” She’d encountered this type of dismissal before, whenever authorities of any kind saw her poverty in person, but the stakes seemed so much higher now. Prior to checking out the potential crime scene, Ancira asked her if she knew she had an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in court for a traffic violation. She did; she’d been pulled over while driving a friend’s unregistered car. He told her to get that taken care of.
On the third floor, where blood was dashed across the walls and spread in a horror-movie stain on the mattress, neither officer showed much reaction. “We’re going to call homicide and see if it’s worth them coming out,” Ancira said. The two took photos and sent them to the station. Within minutes, Ancira told Pope that no one would be coming to investigate. He was sorry, he said; he wished there was more they could do, but without a body, there was no crime.
The otherworldly calm that had so far carried Pope from task to task throughout the day’s increasingly nightmarish revelations began to loosen. Menacing reality was coming closer. Still, she led the officers back downstairs and to the wall-mounted mailbox; she’d told them about the knife. But when she went to open the lid, it stuck. Ancira said not to worry about it. “I’m telling you there could possibly be a murder weapon in here,” she replied, “and you don’t want to take it?” Ancira repeated his response. There it was: She was going to be left alone in this. They were not going to help her. (The Houston Police declined to comment on this story, citing an ongoing criminal proceeding. A source close to the department later told me that he did not understand why the officers would dismiss this potential evidence or why the homicide unit would refuse to investigate the scene.)
When the two officers left, Pope used a small pry bar to open the mailbox. She removed the knife, put it in a plastic bag, and locked it in a small combination safe she’d hidden in her closet. Shaky now, she gathered a drill and some screws from her work bag and returned to the third floor. She pushed the blood-filled bin deeper into the crawlspace, until it could only be seen with eyes that had adjusted to the dark. She screwed the wooden door shut.
Her mind was churning. She understood now that placing a knife in a mailbox was asking for it to be found. She thought back to the night when she and Will first came to the house, when Merritt was braiding her hair, tearing at it really. After every few tugs, she’d seemed to be reaching into her purse. Pope thought about how similar they looked. Their boyfriends resembled each other, too: both just under six feet tall, with tattoos running down their arms. Had Merritt been collecting her hair? And now her fingerprints were all over a bloody knife.
Photo: Courtesy of Tabatha Pope
Pope found herself beginning to gather up the third-floor trash. What else was she to do? As she dragged a bag from the loft to the hallway, she thought she heard a door close and footsteps. It sounded like it came from her apartment. She hurried down to the first floor: No one was there, but her closet door was open, as was a dresser drawer inside it. A piece of white printer paper was sitting in the open compartment, on top of tousled clothes. A note was written on a corner of the paper, first in blue pen, in a cheerful half-cursive: “Great Job Friend.” The capital F looked to have been practiced in large script higher on the page. Black ink followed: “sorry 4 Killing.” Below and to the left, in what looked like red crayon, in looping letters crossing over the “sorry” and “4,” the author appeared to have added: “XO.”
The window in the bedroom, which Pope kept locked, was unlocked.
Pope’s choice to stay at the house beyond her initial discovery of what appeared to be buckets of bloodstretches the imagination — never mind Merritt changing her story about Kerdachi completely and the ludicrous explanation of the spike, which sounded concocted by a child.
It was wildly dangerous to continue living in such a place in more sense than one. If Pope herself was not in peril — and there was no reason to believe she wasn’t — the house seemed to be, at the very least, the scene of some horrific crime. She was tampering with evidence; she was risking her own future.
Throughout our conversations, Pope insisted that it took some time to really comprehend her situation, and that, when she began to accept just how bad it was, she felt she had no choice but to stay. For a period, I assumed this meant that neither she nor Will had anyone to turn to for help: no family, no friends, no kind acquaintances — that the choice was between sleeping in a house where someone had likely been murdered and sleeping on the street. Pope and Will, after all, didn’t even have a car.
But I eventually learned that Pope’s parents were each relatively nearby. She had a strained relationship with her father but spoke to him occasionally, and he was two and a half hours from Houston, in Austin, with his wife. Her mother was an hour away, in a town northwest of Katy. Her mother had told her many times that she was always welcome to come back home.
Pope said she stayed at the house on West Clay Street instead of going to her mother’s because she was determined to “make it on her own.” She added that her mother had moved into an RV and space would have been very tight. Pope also felt, she said repeatedly, a deep need to discover the truth. She had always tried to be a good person, and it hadn’t yet worked out for her, but she couldn’t let go of Colin Kerdachi: He had a family and friends; he was a human being. She had to do something to help.
There was something else, too. Will had been using heroin on and off for more than a decade, since his 20s, when he’d been prescribed an opiate painkiller following an injury — he’d hurt his back working on railroads, laying iron track by hand. He’d gotten clean for a short time before he and Pope met but started up again within the first year of their relationship, and his addiction had affected many of their choices. He held the couple’s money — the foreman at the construction job gave Will both their paychecks — and, according to Pope, he spent much of it on drugs. It was clear that she could not have gone home to her mother’s and continued to live with Will. “I couldn’t bring his problems home with me like that,” she said. He was good to her in many ways, and she didn’t want to give up on him. He sang to her, ran her bath, made dinner: When there was money, it was steak and potatoes, when there wasn’t, she said, “he would make something out of nothing for me.”
Pope was also very aware that Will didn’t have anyone else. She didn’t know what would happen to him if they broke up. She told me, “It’s always been easier for me to help other people than to do the things I need to do for myself.”
Merritt and Brown returned to the house in early November and moved into the second-floor unit. Pope’s mind was constantly cycling through thoughts of the blood on the third-floor walls and hidden in the dark of the crawlspace and of Kerdachi’s family, out there somewhere, whom she imagined trying and failing to reach him.
Merritt had seemed erratic in her early interactions with Pope, but after she and Brown returned to the house, she seemed deeply unstable. According to Pope, Merritt superglued the gearshift in Brown’s car — an old Audi sedan — following a shouting argument. Soon after, she introduced Pope to a neighbor passing by as “my daughter” and then continued talking to Pope as if nothing had happened. Pope could often hear her screaming at Brown. Pope would sometimes find him outside after a tumultuous night, in the backyard or on the downstairs porch, where he and Merritt both liked to sit at the edge, their legs hanging over the concrete. He called the outbursts “episodes” but seemed to write them off as insignificant. (Brown was unable to be reached for this story.)
In late November, when the Omicron variant of COVID-19 began to spread, work on the construction crew slowed and Pope was once again in the house on most days. Brown had an occasional gig on a crew of his own, but Merritt was usually at home, and the two women began spending portions of their days together, sitting outside and chatting. Pope started free-ranging conversations and let Merritt talk, hoping enough real information would slip out that she could develop a picture of what had happened to Kerdachi. Merritt told her she was from Midland, Texas, and that she’d been married for some years. Her husband had died in a motorcycle accident, she said; she’d seen the crash. She and Brown had gotten together in 2019 in Dallas; she approached him in his car at a gas station and called him a “handsome devil,” and that was basically that. They’d moved into the house on West Clay about a year before Pope arrived. It was unclear if she had aspirations beyond getting by. She never mentioned cosmetology school again after that first meeting. At one point, she got a job at a bar, which seemed to last a month or so.
In December, Merritt told Pope, rather casually, that the house had gone into foreclosure: She hadn’t been paying the mortgage. Pope was only a little taken aback, and she saw an opportunity. The next day, as coolly as she could, she broached the subject again. “You know, if Colin’s body were to show up somewhere,” she said, “it wouldn’t be a foreclosure because he wouldn’t have knowingly or intentionally not paid the mortgage.” She knew this wasn’t true — she’d looked it up the night before — but it sounded right enough. If Kerdachi was dead, she told Merritt, the house would go into the much slower process of court-supervised probate. It would buy them some time.
Two days later, Pope caught a ride to the grocery store with Merritt and Brown. She didn’t exactly feel safe in the car with them, but she didn’t have her own vehicle, and she needed food. Merritt and Brown sat in the front, whispering; Pope, in the back, strained to hear them. They were saying something about a dead dog back at the house, under a staircase. Pope stayed quiet. The next day, in the late morning, she joined Merritt on the porch and asked directly about what she’d heard: What was this about a dead dog? According to Pope, Merritt didn’t seem at all surprised. She looked up, the light of a dare flickering in her eyes, and asked if Pope wanted to see it.
Merritt stood and led Pope down off the porch and around the house, toward a set of external stairs that connected the second-floor apartment and the backyard’s stone patio. When she reached the staircase, she stopped and looked at Pope. There it was, she said. She pointed to a dark patch of ground under the lowest landing, enclosed by chicken wire. Almost as soon as she spoke, she turned and began walking back toward the front of the house. Pope watched her leave and then looked into the shadow under the stairs. In her weeks of cleaning, she’d already attended to this spot, pulling out litter that had accumulated despite the chicken wire. But now somehow there it was: a human body. First she saw a torso on its side. It was decomposing — vertebrae exposed in places where the flesh had fully rotted away. Covering the head was a piece of rumpled clothing — Pope remembers it as a blue sweater. It was dirty and inside out, as if it had overturned as the body was dragged.
Pope took a series of pictures with her phone, her hands shaking, and hurried back around the house and into her apartment. She locked the door and sat against it holding her phone. She tried to second-guess what she’d seen. She’d found the blood, the knife, and all the rest months ago. But in the intervening time, she’d come to see Merritt and Brown as sympathetic people — if not normal, they were certainly human. They took little drives around the neighborhood together; Merritt stayed up waiting for Brown to get home with food ready for him. When she cooked, usually pasta dishes, she would make extra to feed the neighborhood raccoons. She was deeply troubled — there was no question about it — but she wasn’t evil.
Pope reached for alternative theories. Maybe it really could be a dog under the stairs — maybe she was seeing things — or maybe she’d gotten the entire story wrong. Perhaps Kerdachi himself was the murderer: He could have killed someone and fled. Merritt, whose mind was certainly clouded, might have really believed the body was a dog. But Pope’s thoughts were like water circling the black hole of a drain: She felt sure Merritt and Brown were somehow responsible. She texted photos of the body to two friends. The answer came back immediately: “Call the fucking cops.”
Over the next four or five hours, Pope considered her options. She assumed things would go differently with the police now — there had definitively been a murder — but if they showed up and somehow dragged their feet again, she would be in an extremely dangerous position. She came up with an out: She would call animal control and tell them she needed help with a dead dog. Its officers would arrive and discover a human body, and they would be the ones to call the police. But when she reached the agency, she was told it didn’t deal with remains on private property.
Next, she decided she would try to get Brown to give her the okay to call the cops. He seemed to be under Merritt’s thrall — in love with her and temperamentally overpowered — but he was more in tune with reality, and Pope knew she could reach him. She brought him to the staircase and pointed, as Merritt had. “You can’t tell me that’s not a human,” she said. Brown did not seem alarmed. He shrugged and put up his hands; he didn’t know what to say — it was a dog.
Pope took a breath. Was it perhaps possible, she asked, that Merritt could have killed Kerdachi while she was having one of her episodes. Again, Brown did not seem startled or even distressed. His answer was hesitant but not defensive: He said she wouldn’t hurt a fly — that she wasn’t violent at all.
Pope responded gently that she understood. “But on the off-chance it’s a human,” she said, “we’ll get in trouble if we don’t report it.” They had to call the cops. Brown paused a moment, then agreed. He asked Pope to give them some time to get there stuff and leave.
The two went back to their respective apartments. Pope sat alone for hours, waiting to hear Brown and Merritt leave. Around 7 p.m., Will got home from work, and she brought him to the backyard to see the body. His face went white. There was no denying it this time.
With Will in the house, Pope felt safe enough to go check on Merritt and Brown. She knocked and opened their door. They were in the entryway, holding rollers and cans of white paint: They were painting over blood that Pope had never noticed — on the interior side of the door and on the surrounding walls. Standing in the hallway, she attempted to feign disinterest. “Are y’all ready to go yet?” she asked. “I want to call.” Brown said they would need another 30 minutes. Pope went back downstairs, locked the door.
After a few hours, at around midnight, Merritt and Brown were still in the house, and Pope decided to report the body to the police in person. The downtown station was a 30-minute walk, but she couldn’t risk them hearing her on the phone. Will stayed behind. When Pope arrived at the station, the desk officer told her he couldn’t help; these types of reports had to be made over the phone. She showed him the photographs of the body, but he waved her away, saying again that she had to call it in.
It was now nearly 1 a.m. Pope walked back to the house crying. Whatever well of composure she’d accessed was running out. When she got back, the Audi was still in the driveway. Will had gone to bed so she joined him, but she slept only a few minutes at a time. In the morning, the car was still there. Pope couldn’t wait any longer. She dialed the non-emergency number the desk officer had given her the night before: Busy. She tried again and was placed on hold before she had a chance to say why she was calling. She waited on the line an hour before hanging up and trying again: Another hold.
Around noon, she saw a patrol car drive by. She quietly stepped outside, and, when she knew she was no longer in view of the house, began to run. She caught the cruiser at a corner store a few blocks down. An officer in the driver’s seat rolled down his window. “I think there’s a dead body in my backyard,” Pope said. He scanned her up and down, looking annoyed. “You need to call it in.”
Pope was starting to crack. She was crying on and off and her heart was racing. When she got back to the house, Merritt and Brown were sitting on the front porch. She tried to act casual and asked what they had planned for the day, though that didn’t make sense. One of them must have answered but she wasn’t listening. After a few minutes, Merritt stood and went inside, and Pope kneeled down next to Brown. “I’m going to call the police,” she said. “Right now.”
Merritt and Brown left in just under an hour. They didn’t seem to pack any bags or take much with them. In the early evening, Pope called 911 and was finally allowed to report the dead body. She paced the apartment while she waited for the police to arrive, turned over the details of everything that had happened: She was primed for the cops to doubt her.
At around 9 p.m., she heard Merritt and Brown return. Two hours later, the cops finally showed up. Pope led them to the body and handed over the SD card. Merritt and Brown were taken down to the station. In the early-morning hours, the medical examiner arrived and collected the body, and Pope was put into the back of a cruiser, where she stayed for nearly four hours.
At the station, according to police records, Merritt repeatedly insisted that the body was a dog and told detectives that Kerdachi had “faked his death to commit fraud and is probably alive in Africa.” (Pope would learn later that Kerdachi was from South Africa.)
In the early morning, Merritt and Brown arrived back at the house. The police had opened a murder investigation, but neither had been charged with any crime.
For the next few days, Pope hid out in her apartment. She barricaded her door, pushing a heavy dresser across the jamb, and plotted an emergency escape route through a window. When her toilet stopped working, she was forced to venture upstairs, to the third floor, and saw Merritt and Brown in the hallway for the first time. They didn’t speak, but she took some comfort in how they averted their eyes. She came to believe they were not an imminent threat.
A month after the body was taken away, Pope asked Will to leave the house. Throughout the ordeal, she’d felt alone — abandoned even when he was present — and there was no sign of him getting clean. She knew she could never achieve a stable life if they stayed together.
Pope now had $20 in her bank account. And without her connection to Will and the construction crew, she had very little money coming in. Through a friend, she was able to snag a few hours of handy work at a local apartment complex, but she was most often at home. During the days, the three remaining housemates avoided one another. Merritt never confronted Pope about calling the police. But at night, she said, Merritt began to bang on her door and shout, usually incoherently. Sometimes she screamed that Pope was having sex with Brown. On one occasion, she yelled that Pope had done something terrible to her son: Whether Merritt really had a son, Pope didn’t know.
Then, in January, a man named Nathan Kerdachi and his wife, Angela, arrived at the house carrying concealed 9-mm. handguns. Pope answered the door. Nathan was Colin’s estranged son. He’d been contacted by relatives in South Africa who’d seen the news of an unidentified body discovered at the residence. They hadn’t heard from Colin in months, and they’d asked Nathan to find out what he could.
Merritt and Brown were home, so Pope suggested they take a walk, and she recounted all that had happened. Nathan told me later that she seemed very genuinely concerned about his father’s fate. “She was trying to do the right thing,” he said. Before he and Angela left, Pope gave them a box of Colin’s personal items and the bound family album.
Nathan tried to encourage her to leave. “You need to get yourself out of this situation,” he said. “You need to be careful. If they’ve done it once, what’s going to stop them from doing something like that again?”
But Pope would stay in the house for another year and a half. That February, she moved to the third floor. She threw out the bloody mattress and finished painting the walls—the police had told her she could do what she wanted; it was no longer an active crime scene. She continued to barricade her door every night, though there were no new incidents with Merritt or Brown. She saw them both rarely now; it seemed they had all learned to time exits and entrances to avoid one another. When they did cross paths, they said “hello” — polite, tight-lipped neighbors. In March, the power in the house was cut off — it seemed Merritt hadn’t been paying the utilities — and within a week, Merritt and Brown were gone.
Pope still didn’t have any money — getting another place was impossible — and she still preferred the house to moving in with her mother or crashing with a friend. She prayed she’d be able to stay as long as it took to build up a small savings. But each day was a struggle. She used flashlights at night and in the hallways; she charged her phone most days in a parking garage, sometimes in a pizza parlor; and she cooked over a fire in the backyard. Every few weeks, she called the Houston Police Department and asked for updates on the murder investigation. They told her, always, that they were working on it and to stop calling.
In July, the body found under the staircase was finally identified, through the use of dental records, as Colin Kerdachi. Nathan informed Pope. According to the Harris County forensics department, Kerdachi’s death was a homicide, caused by sharp-force and blunt-force trauma to the head, neck, and torso. Still, no one was charged with his murder.
Eight months later, in March 2023, a sergeant named Ross Watson, the new lead investigator, arrived unannounced at the house and asked to see the storage bin sealed into the third-floor crawlspace: It had never been sampled. That May, Merritt was charged with Kerdachi’s murder, but it took until August for police to find her. (Brown was not charged with a crime.) The state alleged that Merritt had stabbed Kerdachi to death on February 15, 2021, during the deep freeze. Watson had learned that a previous tenant, unknown to Pope, had called the police on February 23, saying that Merritt had admitted to the murder that day. The police, as they would again later, briefly detained Merritt and then released her without any charges. The tenant moved out immediately, and, that summer, Pope took his place.
Photo: Houston Police Department
Merritt was arraigned in late August 2023. As of early January, no trial date has been set. Merritt’s lawyer did not comment for this story. When I spoke to Harris County Assistant District Attorney Andrew Figliuzzi this fall, he emphasized Pope’s role in the case. “Without Tabatha,” he said, “we may not even be here.”
As for Pope, she finally left the house on West Clay Street in September 2023, three weeks after Merritt was arrested — two years after she first found Kerdachi’s blood. She was still flat broke, but she had a plan to stay with an elderly woman in Missouri City, a half-hour southwest of Houston, in exchange for helping her around the house. After a few months, that arrangement collapsed — the woman accused Pope of slacking and damaging her property — and Pope went to stay with friends, back in Houston, sleeping in a van on their property. Soon after her arrival, their house burned down in an electrical fire. But Pope stayed. Last we spoke, she was collecting wooden shipping pallets: She planned to use them to build a tiny house. When she had enough money, she said, she was going to buy a trailer, build the home, and drive it away. She didn’t know where she’d go.