JEFF DORMAN
S
KINSALE Inside 304-year-old Yeocomico Episcopal Church, a place surrounded by snow-laden fields and an ancient graveyard, a standing-room-only crowd of mourners celebrated the life of Sally Jeanette Rumsey last month with ready wit, gentle stories and hymns.
Permeating the service as well was an edgy sense of uncertainty.
How the 49year-old died, in the prime of her life and full of talk of the future, is a mystery. Her disappearance went unreported for two days; the celebrated chef and co-owner of a popular restaurant here lay dead, possibly for as long as four days, before investigators found her partially covered in snow.
She was "within a few hundred yards" of the rural home she shared with her husband, Stephen Andersen, according to authorities, who are looking for evidence of murder in a death they formally describe as "suspicious."
Andersen, equally accomplished in the kitchen, was walking the family dogs when Rumsey disappeared, he told friends in an e-mail. Yet Westmoreland County authorities say Andersen told them he and his wife argued, and when he returned to the house with the dogs, Rumsey was gone.
Left behind and glowing on a computer screen, according to the search warrant, was a pornographic image.
Two days later, Andersen reported her disappearance to the sheriff's office.
"There are so many people still searching for a sense of closure that wasn't there at the service," said Marcia Leddy, whose Jazzercise class Rumsey attended at the Callao Rescue Squad building, sometimes twice a day. "The innuendoes and rumors are flying all over. This is a small community where everyone seems to know one another and everyone is hoping that an answer will come soon."
"She was an independent, strong woman who was a force in our community."
That point came through again and again at the service.
A sister, Holly Johnson, spoke of Rumsey's selfless care in recent months, leaving home for Maryland to provide dawn-to-dusk assistance after Holly's hip-replacement surgery went bad.
Mourners celebrated Rumsey's energy, her cooking skills, her kindness and humor, her heart and strength.
Last to speak at the Feb. 18 service, breaking a minute-long interlude of weighty silence, was Andersen, Rumsey's longtime partner in their acclaimed 13-year restaurant venture, and parent with Sally of a teenage daughter. He is stepfather to a 24-year-old daughter of Rumsey's and father to an adult son of his own from a prior marriage.
He is also the subject of search warrants issued by the Westmoreland sheriff's department in connection with Rumsey's death.
. . .
"RE: Andersen, Stephen," is written above an application for a search "in relation to an offense substantially described as follows: MURDER."
Andersen, 58, rose from his seat and unsteadily made his way to the lectern. His words, muffled and deeply sorrowful, came slowly.
"It is all so very sad," he said. "Thank you all for being here. . . . I loved that girl."
Family friends seated nearby said Andersen looked so forlorn that they were stunned that even those few words escaped his mouth.
The hymn "I'll Fly Away" ended the service and Andersen walked through the chapel's 1,000-pound wicket door toward Ameslee Hall, where food was served and Rumsey's intricate quilting was on display.
Andersen was among the last to leave, spending almost two hours thanking mourners for their concern and care.
Now, the traditional Valentine's Day opening of Andersen and Rumsey's Good Eats Café is long past, the quilting sessions there have ended, Rumsey is absent from her Jazzercise classes, and Andersen is declining interviews with the media.
"It is a mystery," he said in a brief telephone call when asked if he could shed any light on how his wife died. He said he has drawn the attention of investigators because, they told him, "that's what the statistics say" regarding investigations of domestic incidents.
Westmoreland authorities say they are awaiting toxicology results from the state medical examiner's office; they decline to say if there were any signs of trauma to Rumsey's body or if they believe she died where she was found.
And despite the declarations in search warrants, Westmoreland Sheriff's Major John Hoover said Rumsey's death is not formally regarded as a murder but is more properly described as "suspicious."
Andersen is "a person of interest," he added. Not a formal suspect.
. . .
Rumsey and Andersen settled in Virginia's history-laden, wintertime-dreary Northern Neck about 17 years ago, working as manager-chefs at various restaurants. Both were highly regarded and had long associations with upscale restaurants, catering businesses, and private clients in the Washington area and New York.
Rumsey is still remembered for her work in the early 1990s as head chef at the D.C. Central Kitchen, one of the nation's best-known meal providers for the homeless and one of former President George H.W. Bush's "points of light."
"She did wonders in our early efforts to ensure nutritious content in every meal," recalled Robert Egger, the kitchen's founder. Rumsey, he said, was the grit behind pushing production from 400 meals a day to more than 1,500.
Egger said Rumsey left for Virginia, bent on becoming one of the early advocates of locally grown restaurant produce. She and Andersen grew blackberries and herbs on a 38-acre tract at the end of a half-mile long dirt driveway a few miles north of Haynesville, 65 miles from Richmond. The property, with a modest two-story home off unpaved Kings Mill Road, is valued at almost $250,000. The couple called the enclave Hearts Content.
Good Eats Café blossomed inside a former gas station 4 miles from the Andersen-Rumsey home and became a Northern Neck sensation from the day it opened in August 1997.
An early entrant into the locavore fad, Good Eats generated five-star reviews and featured fresh herbs, local seafood, exquisite wines and a big-city gourmet menu. The outgoing, imageand detail-conscious Rumsey cooked and worked the front of the 60-seat restaurant; the kitchen was Andersen's domain.
"The Chesapeake crab soup is the most flavorful I've ever inhaled," wrote well-known Richmond food critic Donald Baker. "The soft shell crabs with lime butter are to die for," an online reviewer wrote a few years ago.
Good Eats was a training ground for young people, a place of solace and a fund-raising venue. For disoriented "come-heres" and for locals tired of a too-familiar landscape, Good Eats was a welcomed respite.
. . .
Rumsey's death jolted the community into a new reality.
The sheriff's department has doled out details in provocative dollops of information in sworn affidavits submitted by officers to obtain search warrants.
Three days after providing fingerprint and saliva samples to authorities, Andersen, on Feb. 25, submitted a copy of his wife's death certificate and her will, created nine years ago, to Westmoreland Circuit Court.
He lists himself as the executor and only heir to her estate, valued at no more than $15,000. Rumsey and Andersen jointly owned their home and the restaurant.
The death certificate lists the date of Rumsey's death as Feb. 9, its cause as "pending."
Rumsey, though, may have been dead for days by Feb. 9, when she was found at 5 p.m. after a two-day air and land search of the King's Mill Road property.
Partially buried in a snow drift, Rumsey had been reported missing two days earlier, a Sunday, by her husband in a call to police, according to search warrants.
Anderson also said he had not seen his wife since the evening of Friday, Feb. 5, according to police, and he said he made efforts to locate her on the property and nearby roads but was turned back by a storm that set in and covered the Neck with as much as a foot of snow.
An empty container of Ambien, a prescription sleep aid, was found near her.
Police also recovered from the property a .32 caliber handgun, multiple hard drives and two thumb drives, a bag of clothing, a bottle of wine and a corkscrew, a prescription bottle and an Advil bottle.
On the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 5, according to the warrants and interviews with authorities, Rumsey and Andersen argued over something authorities would not reveal. Andersen left the house to walk the dogs and when he returned about 90 minutes later found that his wife was gone; he also discovered she had found a pornographic Web site he had been looking at and that she left the image showing on the computer screen.
Rumsey had returned a day earlier from a 17-day bicycle trip she'd taken in Vietnam, from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi.
Rumsey and Andersen were known for their world travels during the three-month period each winter the restaurant closed. Sometimes they traveled separately. Andersen picked up Rumsey at Washington Dulles International Airport, according friends of the couple.
About 3 p.m. the day of the argument, a powerful snowstorm began covering Northern Virginia and much of the Northern Neck, where snow levels reached about a foot, with drifts even deeper.
"An investigation of the Andersen and Rumsey residence revealed that Rumsey left their residence without a coat, phone, purse, keys or motor vehicle. Rumsey had no contact with her friends or children prior to her departure," a search warrant states. Her car was found at the end of the drive, placed there earlier in the day because of the imminent storm, police said.
The warrants also say investigators are interested in locating any evidence on computers and other electronic devices that "may relate to [the] actual or online identities of Stephen Andersen and Sally Rumsey, alcohol, medications, dosages, the inter and extra marital relationship of Andersen and Rumsey, and pornography."
Andersen conveyed a far simpler scenario to friends of the Feb. 5 events. It came in a broadly disseminated e-mail dated Feb. 8, Monday night, three days after Rumsey disappeared and the day after Andersen made the missing-person report.
"Sometimes life throws big curves," it began after an apology for the nature of the message.
"I am writing to ask if anyone of you have seen or heard from Sally since about 4:30 p.m. last Friday evening," read the e-mail that went to some 1,400 people, mostly clients of the restaurant.
Andersen said the couple had been getting ready for the storm "until I left at 4:30 to take the dogs for a walk in our woods. When I came back into our house at 6 p.m., she was not here.
"It has now been 3 days since we have seen or heard from her and we are getting desperate."
Westmoreland authorities, meanwhile, have asked for state police assistance in the investigation. They also have corrected information in one of the search warrants. Rumsey was not found within 50 yards of the house, as originally stated, but in a wooded area "within a few hundred yards" of the house.
. . .
On Wednesday, Feb. 10, the day after Rumsey's body was found, Donna Lloyd-Kolkin received a call from Andersen.
"He said, 'Sally committed suicide,'" Lloyd-Kolkin recalled.
The news came as a shock. Lloyd-Kolkin had traveled with Rumsey on the bicycle trip through Vietnam and had become good friends with her.
"Sally was excited about the future and had had a wonderful time," said Lloyd-Kolkin, a consultant in the public-health field who lives in the Washington area.
They shared meals together and spent time shopping. Rumsey was eager to find her husband a guitar strap that was special; she also took a picture of a grim public restroom showing the way, in Vietnamese, to the men's and women's room. "She was going to put that on the wall of the restaurant," Lloyd-Kolkin said.
Leddy, the Jazzercise leader, recalled that Rumsey spoke about changing her name to Andersen, letting go of the professional identity she maintained for decades.
"Every time they were together, it was good times and laughter. There was no hint of a problem," said Jeff Dorman, a friend who helped update the Good Eats Web site.
Westmoreland investigators say they have no idea when their investigation into Rumsey's death will end.
"We have put our faith in the system to determine what happened," said Holly Johnson, Rumsey's sister, from her home in Maryland.
Good Eats Café remains closed. Its operating permit expired Feb. 28, according to the county health department.
A call to the restaurant now produces an outdated recorded message about reservations and the restaurant's last day of business for the season, Nov. 23.
The recorded voice is that of Sally Rumsey.
Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or bmckelway@timesdispatch.com .
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