Slain woman’s boyfriend recalls scene ‘with horror’

Chuck Beaudrot didn’t see anything amiss in his girlfriend’s Midtown condo.

No blood.

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Photo courtesy of Chuck Beaudrot

Cancer researcher, Eugenia ‘Jeanne’ Calle, and her boyfriend, Chuck Beaudrot, while on vacation in Australia in September 2007.

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[an error occurred while processing this directive]    • Atlanta and Fulton County news

No broken furniture.

No signs of the attack Tuesday that took the life of the woman he loved, prominent cancer researcher Eugenia “Jeanne” Calle.

Beaudrot, 57, went to Calle’s 20th-floor condo in the Aqua building late Tuesday night because she didn’t show up for a dinner meeting with colleagues. Not finding her there, he talked to staffers at the front desk. He took Calle’s poodle outside to relieve itself. He called her friends about filing a missing person’s report.

It wasn’t until Beaudrot, an Atlanta tax attorney, opened the walk-in kitchen pantry to get food for the poodle that he discovered her body. Police say Calle’s attacker hit her on the head with an unknown object and then put her inside the pantry.

“It was horrible,” Beaudrot said. “It was complete shock. I wasn’t expecting it. I remember it with horror.”

Even then, Beaudrot said, he didn’t know that Calle had met with foul play. Seeing the wound on her head, he initially thought she had fallen, because she was short and often had to climb and stretch to reach high shelves.

It didn’t take long, though, for police to figure out someone had done that to Calle. Atlanta police on Thursday arrested Shamal Thompson, 22, on charges that he killed her while posing as a potential buyer for her condo.

“It’s like being in a nightmare in a bad movie,” said Beaudrot, who had been dating Calle for more than two years. “The whole thing was like being in a bad episode of CSI.”

Beaudrot makes sense of Calle’s death through an analogy told to him by Calle, who retired last month from the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society. Cancer cells grow in everyone’s body, but normally the body can recognize and destroy the cells, she told him. For someone to get cancer, numerous things had to go wrong, she would say.

“That seems what happened here,” Beaudrot said. “So many things could have gone different, but they didn’t.”

What if she hadn’t been walking her poodle and run into Thompson, who police said had wandered over to Aqua after noticing that the building had condos for sale?

Calle’s condo had only been on the market for a couple weeks, Beaudrot said. They were planning to move in together once she sold it.

“Our deal was if we were still living together 10 years from now, we would get married,” Beaudrot said. “It’s the Goldie Hawn thing.”

Beaudrot, who is twice-divorced, got set up with Calle in December 2006 by a mutual business acquaintance. Eight months earlier, she had lost her husband to cancer.

“She had had to bury her husband and I had been through the pains of divorce,” Beaudrot said.

Beaudrot was drawn to her energy. As a scientist, she could be “coldly rational,” but she also had a passion for dinner parties, good conversation and creative outlets like music, theater and photography, Beaudrot said.

She was opinionated and loved politics. Her friendships weren’t casual and superficial, but rather deep and long-lasting, Beaudrot said. She also took care of herself.

“People routinely thought I was dating a 40-year-old woman,” Beaudrot said. “I once told her she was perky. She looked at me and said, ‘Perky?’ “

For the couple’s second anniversary in December, Beaudrot didn’t know what to get her. So the attorney who is a music composer on the side wrote her a song. And he hired a dozen professional singers to sing it to Calle in the lobby of Aqua.

“I told them, ‘If she doesn’t cry, I’m wasting your time and my money,’ ” Beaudrot said. “If you make Jeanne cry, you done good.”

She cried.

“It was a great treat,” he said. “I’m so glad I did that. She was just thrilled.”