The briefing went surprisingly quickly, with everyone summarizing what he or she had been working on: Radar had dug up a list of Caucasian public health workers, social workers, coaches, paramedics, and cops who worked in the West Reagan Street neighborhood. So far no leads. He was still working on getting in touch with an expert on Civil War-era medical instruments to see if we might be able to trace that amputation saw we’d found in the boxcar. It turned out it was harder to find an expert than we’d thought it would be.
Corsica was looking over Griffin’s receipts. Nothing yet to report.
Thompson found out that Movie Flicks Video Store, which was only six blocks from the Griffin house, had a record of Griffin renting both The Fugitive and When Harry Met Sally on Sunday evening. While it wasn’t possible to know if, or when, Griffin and Mallory actually watched the movies, at least, so far, their story was checking out. Thompson was also evaluating U-Haul and moving truck rentals to see if he could find something that might lead us to someone using one to transport ten mattresses.
Lyrie had come up dry yesterday trying to find a neighbor or work associate who’d seen a sedan that they didn’t recognize in the area preceding Vincent’s call home at around seven o’clock. He’d spoken with Adele Westin and she wasn’t able to give a physical description of her abductor.
After the search warrant was issued for Timothy Griffin’s receipts, Ralph had done a background check on Griffin and now distributed his findings. “Nothing striking,” he noted. “You can read it over when we’re done in here.”
Gabriele had spoken with the people at the Salvation Army thrift store and found out the director was out of town at a fundraising dinner and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. However, she was going to continue to follow up on hotels, used-furniture stores, and thrift stores in that part of town to see if we could track down where the offender got the mattresses from, in the hopes that someone at the store would be able to identify him.
Thorne told us he’d looked up the other true crime books Heather Isle had written and one was about Ted and James Oswald. “No address for Ms. Isle that I can find. No photo on the book. I’m working at tracking her down to have a chat. Ask her a few questions about her sources.”
The Oswalds again. They just kept popping up on the periphery of this case.
Looking for a connection between this week’s victims, Ellen reported that she’d spoken with Adele, Colleen, Vincent and, on the phone, with Carl, who was still in custody in Plainfield. The couples had never met, never lived near each other. There were no areas of their lives that appeared to overlap. “I’m going to follow up on that more. There’s got to be something there.”
The CSIU didn’t come up with much either. Based on the temperature of Hendrich’s body and the temperature in the boxcar, they estimated time of death to be between two and four p.m., which didn’t really narrow things down too much for us. No incriminating prints were found in the stolen Ford Taurus, the locks, the fence, the items in the boxcars, or the police tape. Initial tests showed that only two people’s blood was present on the floor of the boxcar, so I was at least thankful there wasn’t evidence of additional crimes. The CSIU did find some DNA inside the plastic bag-apparently our guy put something in there after all. No DNA results yet, though. Two weeks at the earliest.
The guy who was abducting these women and (if he was the same person) who’d killed Hendrich was good. Apart from the DNA in the bag, so far pretty much everything we’d put into play was coming up empty. It was almost like he knew exactly what we would be looking for and how to keep us from finding it.
I summarized the information from Dr. Werjonic that I’d been reading regarding nodes, distance decay, and victimology. “One of the points that Dr. Werjonic kept bringing out really grabbed me,” I told them. “Sometimes the killer chooses the locations for expedience, sometimes the locations choose the crimes.”
“What does that mean?” Thorne asked.
“Well, the killer didn’t choose the bar, the alley, the pier or the hardware store, or that specific graveyard for expedience, or to save time, money, or effort; he was evidently choosing them because of their significance to the lives of Dahmer and Gein. In a sense, the locations chose the crimes, which means that something more important than saving time, money, or effort is guiding our guy’s crime spree.”
“Telling a story?” Corsica said.
“Paying homage?” Ralph suggested.
“Maybe. I don’t know. But it wasn’t just Dahmer’s apartment-it was the alley that was significant in his eventual arrest. It wasn’t Gein’s house, but the same hardware store where Gein shot and killed his final victim-the scene that led the police to his home. So we’re looking at the locations that eventually led to these two guys’ apprehension, not just at their crimes.”
Thorne nodded. “Good.”
“So here’s what I’m thinking. If we could postulate other killers that our guy might want to draw attention to-or pay homage to, or whatever-we could stake out the locations that were significant to their arrest. Try to get one step ahead of this guy.”
Nods around the table.
“But,” Ellen said, “we’d be looking for someone on the same level of depravity as Dahmer or Gein? From Wisconsin? That should be a short list. There can’t be too many other killers from the state with that kind of grisly reputation.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” Radar offered.
I gave assignments to everyone else.
Thompson would delve deeper into the pastiche idea, see what other connections the victims and missing persons in this crime spree-or this set of crime sprees-might have that paralleled Dahmer’s or Gein’s life or their crimes. This included looking into the possibility that Ralph and I had talked about yesterday, that the homicide near Cincinnati might have some sort of connection to Dahmer’s first murder in Bath, Ohio.
Ellen and Ralph would keep pursuing the victimology research.
Corsica announced that she would continue focusing on the receipts and compare Griffin’s catalog subscription list to our suspect list. Also, she’d see if there was anything else Hendrich might have bought from or sold to Griffin to try to establish if someone had been setting him up from the start.
Gabriele and Lyrie would visit the hospital, interview Colleen, and try to find out who else besides Griffin might have known about the cuffs. Earlier interviews with Vincent hadn’t produced any names.
Thorne was going to keep looking for a way to reach Heather Isle and focus on leads related to Hendrich’s homicide.
I decided to examine the Oswald case. Ted and James weren’t cannibals, weren’t as infamous as Dahmer or Gein, but their case was certainly bizarre, and had been highly publicized when they were arrested back in 1994. Certainly, with the cuffs, the Heather Isle book, and the unsuccessful pleas of Dahmer and Ted regarding diminished responsibility for their crimes because of extenuating circumstances, it seemed that the Oswalds were at least tangentially connected to this investigation.
We ended the briefing at 10:54 a.m., with everyone heading off to work on their respective projects. I’d seen the chaplain visiting Colleen at the hospital yesterday and now, on my way to my desk, I asked him how she was. “Okay,” he told me. “I think she’s more concerned about what’s going to happen to her husband than she is about being attacked…in the manner she was.” It was selfless and courageous of her, but I’d gotten a similar feeling when Radar and I visited her room on Monday.
I rolled out my chair and took a seat at my desk.
On the note that Dr. Werjonic had left for me, he’d requested that I call him between 11:00 and 11:05, which seemed quirkily specific, but it just might have been that he liked things to be prompt and precise.
First, I put a call through to Detective Browning, the man whom Ralph and I had spoken with at the Waukesha Sheriff’s Department, to get the Oswald case files delivered here to HQ. I had the sense he wouldn’t be too happy about it, but right now worrying about hurting the guy’s feelings was not at the top of my priority list.
No answer.
I left a message explaining what we needed.
As I was hanging up, I saw the receptionist directing someone toward my desk.
I recognized him immediately from the grad office brochure about the current lecture series.
Dr. Calvin Werjonic.
The visiting professor had decided not to wait for my call but had come to see me in person.