Christa Worthington: Love and death in New England

Christa Worthington (sometime journalist for this newspaper) lived a life of easy charm, flitting between the worlds of fashion, the media and smart New York society. Then, this month, she was murdered - in peculiarly tragic circumstances

The snow lay deep on the driveway of Christa Worthington's home on Sunday morning, disturbed only by deer tracks and by a slash of yellow where it meets the road: the length of brightly coloured tape, quavering in the breeze, told the tale: Police Line, Do Not Cross.

Here, close to the curled northern tip of Cape Cod, winter can be a bleak and lonely season. The tourist throngs, who flock here in the summer months, are long gone, and the doors of the art galleries and restaurants remain locked until the spring. Today was different, though. A dazzling sun illuminated the white-clad landscape. It was a day for snowballs and sledging.

No one is doing much sledging here, on Depot Road in Truro, however. Not since, two weeks ago, a neighbour who was also an ex-lover walked into Christa's small bungalow to return a torch he had borrowed and stumbled upon a scene of violence so awful that Cape Cod is still reeling. Christa, a once-prolific freelance fashion writer from a well-to-do family, lay in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor.

There are no answers yet to the central question of who murdered Ms Worthington, whose words once graced the pages of Vogue, Elle and The New York Times, as well as The Independent. But one thing is certain: speculation surrounding her death has gathered its own momentum, and Americans now know a great deal about her personal life. They have read, in The New York Times and elsewhere, about her ex-lover who found her body, and the handsome fisherman who fathered her two-and-half-year-old child. And about her 72-year-old father's alleged ties to a Boston prostitute and drug addict.

The police here in Truro are trying to say as little as possible. But details do leak out. Nothing remains secret for very long in a town in which, in the off-season especially, most of the folk at least know one another, if they are not actually related by blood. The head of the investigation is Truro Police Chief, John Thomas. He goes by the nickname of "Popcorn" among the locals. We know that Ms Worthington, who was 46, was stabbed in the chest, probably sometime during 5 January, a Saturday. When the ex-lover, Tim Arnold, found her the following day, she had been dead for between 24 and 36 hours. According to the most recent gossip being traded at the soda fountain at Adams Pharmacy in nearby Provincetown, she may have been beaten first with a flagpole from outside her home.

We can also guess at the terror experienced by her little girl, Ava Gloria Sanders Worthington. She was unharmed, physically. In the hours before her mother's body was discovered, she pulled cereal packets from cupboards to find food to eat. And she tried to stir her mother, not understanding that she was dead. We know that she laid a cloth on Christa's face and tried to give her water from a child's sipping cup.

Ava, for now, is in the care of a couple designated by Christa in her will as legal guardians. They live about two hours from Truro, in a town south of Boston. A custody battle has broken out, however. Tony Jackett, the fisherman who claims he was the father of the girl, wants to take her into his family in Provincetown.

There has not been a murder in Truro for over 30 years, so most were astonished when they heard the news about Christa. "They said something about foul play in town, and I thought it was just a kind of joke," remarked Russell Sanderson, a retired Truro police officer. "Round here, someone stealing chickens is about the worst thing that happens. When they said murder, I just said, 'Oh my God'."

Among the many so-called "Wash Ashores" in the area – people who once came just for holidays but then settled in year-round – Ms Worthington was a little different. On the one hand, her family has ties here going back several generations. A road near her home is called Worthington Way. At the same time, she arrived with a cosmopolitan sheen acquired from her fashion-writing days and her Vassar College education that made her seem unusually exotic.

Her career led her from New York to Paris in the mid-Eighties, and then to London – where she first worked for this newspaper, contributing many articles over the years – and back to New York. A painstaking writer who smoked hard at the keyboard, she lived the life of the fashion deities vicariously, hobnobbing with designers and once visiting the home of Yves Saint Laurent. One colleague, who worked with Christa at Elle magazine, said: "She could interview a rock and get it to say something quotable." Another described how: "She would sit and agonise over the smallest piece until five in the morning, when that wasn't really necessary... but the end result was always lovely."

Slowly, however, the fashion world and those who occupy it lost all appeal for Christa. A small woman, described by those who knew her as almost luminous, she had had serial tumultuous relationships without settling with any man for long. But as she grew older, she began to yearn to be a mother. The aching she felt sometimes found voice in her writing, as in this eerily worded reflection shared a few years ago with Independent readers: "Someone, a date, I think, once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said no, I wasn't afraid of dying. I was afraid of never having lived. Well, I didn't marry him or anyone else, and I'm still thinking such thoughts, but they are more pressing now that half my life has gone by." Elsewhere, she wrote: "I had hoarded motherhood carefully, like a squirrel does nuts, I planned to retrieve it one day when I was absolutely safe and sound."

When, in 1998, Ms Worthington learnt that her mother had been diagnosed with cancer, she decided it was time to abandon the urban life that had left her soul jaded and to return to her native Massachusetts. She emptied her Manhattan apartment and moved her belongings into the small grey house on Depot Road that had been in the family for decades.

Not long afterwards, she began an affair with a ruggedly handsome man she had met at the boat slip just half a mile from her house. He was Tony Jackett, a longtime fisherman who now serves as the shellfish constable in Truro and Provincetown, enforcing fishing regulations and checking on water quality. She became pregnant. With poignant timing, the baby was born just four days after Christa's mother succumbed to the cancer.

Mr Jackett had by then vanished back to his wife, Susan, with whom he already has six children, and Christa set about raising the child for whom she had yearned. More recently, she became involved with the man who found her body, Tim Arnold, a writer of children's books. The couple broke up last year, but remained close.

Despite these ups and downs, friends thought that Christa had truly found contentment in Truro, staying at home with her little girl, and watching the seasons pass from the small windows of her wood-shingle bungalow. Surely, there was nowhere in the world where she and her daughter could have been more safe and where life could have been more tranquil.

"I watch people come here and lock their cars before going next door to the deli," laughed Judy Bartoswicz, owner of a Truro art gallery that also rents videos. "No one's going to steal your car here!" She admits, however, that the carefree atmosphere of the town is gone now. It may only return when – if – the killer is identified. People want to know, at least, whether it is a local person, someone still among them.

"It's shocking it could happen here, and especially because it didn't happen in summertime, when there is such an influx of people," Ms Bartoswicz went on. "The fact that it happened in winter when it is only us around, that makes it more nerve-racking". Maybe 1,800 people live here in winter; in summer, the population is 10 times that.

What the police have said so far is that they have interviewed both Mr Arnold and Mr Jackett. The latter has also submitted to a paternity test to establish that he is indeed the father of Ava. The little girl, it should not be forgotten, stands to inherit most of the estate held by her mother, which is worth $700,000.

Last week, however, the focus of the frenzied speculation spread beyond the Cape to the gritty town of Quincy, near Boston. It is there that Christa's father, Christopher Worthington, is reported to pay the rent for an apartment for a young woman called Elizabeth Porter.

Christa had, it turns out, grown concerned in recent months about what her father was doing with Ms Porter, a 29-year-old former prostitute and a heroin addict. According to the Boston Globe, she even asked a private detective to investigate. Some say that she was afraid that her father, a former Massachusetts assistant attorney general, was vulnerable to the woman leeching on his wealth – the money Christa expected to inherit for herself and her daughter.

Gossip about Ms Porter is intense, in part because she was recently a witness in the murder trial of a prominent Boston doctor convicted in the stabbing death of his wife. Ms Porter is also alleged to have been passing herself off in Quincy as Christa Worthington's step-sister. Still, no one can say what connection Christopher Worthington's reported liaison could possibly have with his daughter's murder; if there is any connection at all.

At the Adams Pharmacy in Provincetown, theories are bandied back and forth over the long breakfast counter. But all that the Truro police sergeant James Plath will say is: "No comment, no comment, and no comment."

Perhaps, in the end, there is only one person who knows who Christa's killer was, aside from the victim herself: a little girl named Ava, who once had a mummy who gave up her fashionable life in order to bring her up. Whether or not she will ever be able to share this terrible knowledge, only time will tell.