On Saturday, February 23, 1957, a cold rain spattered a lonely country road on the northern edge of Philadelphia, falling on a field of brush and vines slowly claiming an old cardboard box behind the tree line. Inside the box lay a small blue-eyed boy of perfect tapered form, naked and laid out with his arms by his side like a forgotten boy-king of Egypt. His sarcophagus was a J. C. Penney box of corrugated cardboard, three feet long and eighteen inches wide, marked FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE. Great and prolonged care had been taken.
The boy had been washed and groomed and wrapped in a coarse Navajo blanket as if ritually prepared for the next life. His hair was roughly chopped, his fingernails trimmed with a loving touch. His life had been extinguished in an ancient ritual designed to harvest his innocence and beauty by inflicting on him the greatest of cruelties. These were the abominable mixing of love and tenderness with betrayal, torture, and terror, culminating in the horror of his murder, which alone provided the climax for the killer or killers.
The ritual was often confused with Satanism but bowed to neither God nor the devil. In the soft landscape of eastern Pennsylvania in the middle of the Eisenhower 1950s, no one had a clue what the signs meant. The boy was scarred with deep cuts and bruises from head to toe.
He was only three feet, four inches tall. But he was too long for the box, and had been curled into the little cardboard coffin to fit. His head peeked out the open end, sightless eyes fixed on the sky. Moles tunneled under the wild grass that sprouted around the boy. Mice and insects rustled nearby in the underbrush, sensing the seeping blood.
He lay only fifteen feet from the road, but remained unseen. The narrow one-lane road was mostly quiet. The field was a last wild green patch surrounded by city, by hospitals and police stations and thousands of suburban homes. But the surrounding fields had changed little since colonial horses thundered and hounds bayed their call over the Fox Chase Inn. Now and again an automobile tunneled on the road south through the mist to Verree Road, past the woods and fields to the Verree house, still standing, once invaded by the British. Then the road fell quiet again.
It was a remote grave, carefully chosen.
It was warm for February but the rain cut with a raw chill. The land was hushed in an attitude of waiting. There had not been much snow for years but the big storms were coming. The oceans were spinning the thirty-year cycle. Climactic changes that would turn the 1960s into the snowiest decade in a century were already in the air.
The boy was decomposing very slowly in the cold. The animals had not gotten to him yet. Clouds fled; sun dried the eyes and little face. Night came and went. Orion the hunter glittered in the south, Jupiter was bright. The field fell dark and quiet, the boy’s lips white as the moon sailing with the winter stars. The sun rose without warmth. There was no movement left in him except gravity drawing his blood downward in his body.
That Saturday, city people whirred north to a city park with a creek Audubon had admired more than a hundred years earlier. A priest turned in to the quiet Good Shepherd Home for “wayward girls,” deep in the field across the street. In the afternoon John Stachowiak was bicycling by to play basketball at a Catholic church gymnasium, when suddenly he left his bike by the tree line and walked into the field.
He was nervous but excited. Stachowiak was eighteen years old, the son of Polish immigrants who spoke little English, and he was a trapper. He kept nineteen muskrat traps in the woods and field; he lived nearby, they were easy to check. But he hadn’t even set them and the season was almost over. He had been afraid for weeks to set the traps since his older brother discovered a body hanging on the limb of a tree in the nearby woods. The pale dangling man haunted his nightmares. So did the memory of his mother and father when the Philadelphia patrolman came to the house to take a report from his brother about the suicide. Refugees from the Soviet police state, they trembled as if it were Stalin’s dreaded NKVD, who’d snatched many of their friends in the night, never to be seen again.
The dense undergrowth stretching back from the tree line by the road was perfect cover for small game. But the teenager was startled and upset. Two of his muskrat traps were set! Who would have fooled with his traps? Combined with the suicide, the lonely field gave him an eerie feeling. He was about to leave when he saw a long rectangular box in a tangle of vines. The field was a dumping ground, and he was curious to see what was in it. He grabbed it on one end and pulled it upright, but it was heavy and he put it down. Walking around it, he looked into the open end for a long moment. He decided not to play basketball that day. Stachowiak rushed home determined not to tell his brother, his parents, or anyone what he had seen near the woods of the hanging man. He didn’t want the police to return and terrify his family.
Two days later, on the afternoon of Monday the 25th, Frank Guthrum, a junior at LaSalle University, was taking the country road home from classes when he pulled over and parked by the tree line. Guthrum was an older student, in his midtwenties, who’d had trouble adjusting to student life. Two weeks earlier, on February 11, he’d braked for a rabbit that ran in front of his car and into the field. On a whim, he followed the rabbit into the underbrush. He lost sight of the rabbit but found two steel traps and decided to set them. Now it was 3:15, still light enough to see what had been caught in the steel jaws.
He was disappointed to find the traps empty. But about fifteen feet from the road, at the intersection of two footpaths, was a curiosity, a long cardboard box snared by the underbrush. Guthrum leaned down and saw the small head, white as porcelain, the limp figure wrapped in a blanket.
A doll. A big doll. He looked again at the bruises on the small head, the chopped blond hair.
Not a doll.
Guthrum hurried home. That evening he told his brother, who was a priest, what he had seen, but he decided not to call the police. He didn’t want to get involved, and the police were already watching him. They’d recently accused him of being a Peeping Tom, pretending to chase rabbits in the woods in order to spy on the “wayward girls” in the Good Shepherd Home across the street. The last thing he wanted was close questioning about the box.
The next morning, Tuesday the 26th, Guthrum was driving to school when he heard on the car radio that police were searching for possible kidnap victim Mary Jane Barker, four years old, missing from Bellmawr, New Jersey. Bellmawr was just across the river from Philadelphia. When he got to school he sought advice from two faculty advisers, then spoke with his brother again. The priest said, “You know what you have to do.” At 10:10 A.M., he called the police.
The Philadelphia Police Department was headquartered in the French Empire stone edifice of City Hall, with the stone relief of Moses the Lawgiver glowering over the judicial entrance. But despite the antiquated rooms the force was among the most modern in the country. Patrolmen drove red 1955 Chevrolet paneled wagons, among the first heavy-duty cruisers designed especially for police.
Sergeant Charles Gargani took Guthrum’s call in the homicide bureau, then ordered a radio message broadcast to all the red cars: “… investigate a cardboard box in the woods of Susquehanna Road, across from the girls’ home. Could be a body inside, or could be a doll…”
Patrolman Sam Weinstein was skeptical and annoyed as he trudged into the muddy field through the cold rain. A stout man with a square head and broad nose, Weinstein was a streetwise rookie cop, thirty years old with a wife and two kids. He’d already made his name in the department as a tough guy, quick to use his fists. Weinstein had seen combat in the Pacific in World War II. His father had been murdered when he was in the womb. His mother died when he was a toddler. He’d been raised in South Philadelphia by an uncle and aunt who were Lutheran but kept his dead mother’s wish to raise him Jewish. Weinstein had a surly attitude nobody liked unless he was on their side.
Ahead he saw patrolman Elmer Palmer, a fellow rookie, and called out a friendly greeting. But Palmer was standing quietly by the lopsided cardboard box, his face broken.
Weinstein looked in the box and was staggered. He’d seen enough suffering and death for three lifetimes, but he’d never seen a murdered child. Few cops had in Philadelphia in the 1950s. Murder happened to adults, at the hand of someone they knew-jealous spouse, ex-partner. The rare body in a field was a gin-smelling hobo, an old drifter.
Two homicide detectives joined the group around the body, in their dark overcoats and fedoras, accompanied by Dr. Joseph Spelman, the city’s chief medical examiner. More detectives and street cops arrived, and a captain sent the uniforms into the field in their shiny wet raincoats, kicking the underbrush for evidence. Seventeen feet from the body, they found a men’s blue Ivy League cap, size 7⅛.
The ambulance pulled up, and Weinstein volunteered to take the boy out of the box. He lifted the small corpse gingerly.
“Bruises, all up and down,” Dr. Spelman said. Bruises and cuts too deep for a child to get falling off a bicycle, he said. Deep bruises around the head looked like thumbprints from an adult trying to steady the child for a haircut. It was a violent beating all right, but the medical examiner said he’d need the autopsy to determine cause of death.
Weinstein held the boy, instinctively trying to shield him from the rain. Suddenly he felt anger surging through him. He looked at Palmer and saw the same fury in his friend’s eyes: Whoever did this should burn in hell.
But Weinstein couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing. None of them could. The detectives were speculating that a mother or father, poor and pushed to the edge, had lost control during a bath and had been surprised trying to give the only burial they could afford. The dead boy somehow represented something beyond their grasp.
Criminals were changing. Everything was changing. Philadelphia had watched Pat Boone sing at President Eisenhower’s inaugural ball the month before, and next month thousands of fans would crowd an Elvis Presley concert in Philadelphia. Everywhere the old order was dying, the new being born. The month before, the actor Humphrey Bogart, an icon of traditional masculinity, had died in Los Angeles the same week the Wham-O company made the first Frisbee for a new and liberated generation. Powerful new currents were upwelling, like an ocean turning over. Freedom and authenticity were the watchwords of the coming Age of Aquarius. Old injustices were being addressed, old boundaries smashed, deep longings unleashed.
Killers were exploring new freedoms, finding deeper and more authentic selves, too.
The patrolman looked into the small blue eyes, the dull orbs reflecting his own, and was overcome by a sadness tempered by thoughts he couldn’t explain. “I saw so much pain and terror there,” he said. The little face seemed to cry out to him. “Why did this happen? Why would someone do this to me?”
His eyes met Palmer’s again with shared emotion: We’ll get the S.O.B., no matter what it takes.
But who was the S.O.B.? What was the answer? Weinstein was a proud man, and it was difficult for him to admit, “I don’t have an answer for that.” He sensed he might never have the answer; it was beyond him. He felt shattered.
The ambulance door slammed shut, and Weinstein looked up at the gray February sky and the rain falling over the field.
The first boy put nickels in the chrome slot and sighed with pleasure as the small glass door opened on a slice of pie. His father turned the crank of the ornate chrome “liquid machine,” and coffee streamed from a dolphin’s head copied from a Pompeian fountain. Dinner with his father at the Horn and Hardart in Philadelphia, America ’s first fast-food restaurant, was a special treat.
The Automat is cool, he thought. It was a dazzling display of modern technology as impressive to him as the transistor radio and his father’s electric watch. A clean, orderly glass palace of meat loaf and macaroni and cheese, the Automat inspired an Irving Berlin theme song, “Let’s Get Another Cup of Coffee.” His dad whistled it during the Great Depression, and now it was the jingle for the TV show Father Knows Best.
William (Billy) Fleisher looked forward to Saturday all week long. Saturday mornings in 1957 he went shopping with his mother. But later in the day he got to be with his father, ride with him in the big 1953 Buick sedan to pick up the early edition of the Sunday papers. His father was Dr. Herbert Fleisher, a Navy dentist who came back from the war and opened dental offices in the Nash Building. His father was brilliant, a tall, dark-haired, handsome man who was a double for the actor Robert Taylor. Billy saw him as Lancelot opposite Ava Gardner as Guinevere in the 1953 movie Knights of the Round Table. Herbert Fleisher was named “ Philadelphia ’s Best-Dressed Man” by the Bulletin. Nearly everybody read the Bulletin, and everybody respected Herbert Fleisher. Billy wanted to be just like him.
His father sat across from him in his suspenders and spats, reading the Sunday Bulletin. Billy had his favorite frizzled beef and creamed spinach. His father was six foot three; Billy was five foot three and had five more inches to go.
“You’re behaving like a bum,” his father said.
Billy cringed as if from a blow, but he loved to listen to his father. His father talked about his important friends at the Celebrity Room. Lawyers. Politicians. Entertainers. Horseplayers. Bookmakers. Craps players. The nightclub was owned by his good friend and patient, the beautiful showgirl Lillian Reis, “Tiger Lil.” Tiger Lil’s boyfriend was famous gangster Ralph “Junior” Staino, ringleader of the famous K amp; A gang, from right here in Kensington and Allegheny in Philadelphia, the classiest burglary outfit in the country. They wore suits and ties on their jewel jobs.
Tiger Lil was accused of masterminding the $478,000 heist of Pottsville coal baron John B. Rich, but was found innocent after the star witnesses against her drowned and died in a car explosion. She had nice teeth, his father said.
“You’re acting like a loser,” his father said.
His mother, Esther, often told him what his father said when she told him she was pregnant, a joke they loved at the club. “You have a son and daughter, what do you want now?” His dad responded, “I’d prefer a German shepherd.”
Billy was a mistake after Ellis and Gloria. Ellis was six foot three, too, tall and handsome and smart like his father. “You take after my grandmother,” his father said. She was four foot eleven.
His father was right. He was a punk. “You’re an embarrassment to me,” his father said. Billy was a poor student, always talking back, always getting into fights. He didn’t do the things the other kids did. He didn’t follow the Phillies, didn’t read school books or watch TV. He hated Leave It to Beaver. His father didn’t take him to temple services. He didn’t have any interests except reading detective magazines.
On Saturday mornings before his mother took him to the market, he played with his cousins Mark and Glenn. “We’d play until we ended up beating each other up, go out and throw firecrackers on someone’s stoop, shoot a match gun at an ant colony, that kind of thing.” His cousins were his only friends. I could eat nickels and shit out quarters all day and nobody would like me, he thought.
The sidewalk was dark as they walked to the Buick. There were shadows in the city even at night, deeper shadows in alleys and the recesses of doors. When Billy was younger, his mother would scare him by saying, “Seymour Levin will get you if you don’t behave!”
Seymour Levin was a fat pimply kid with glasses who used to live in the neighborhood, and everyone was still afraid of him. On January 9, 1949, the sixteen-year-old Levin went with twelve-year-old Ellis Simons to see A Night at the Opera at the movies, then brought his friend home to play with his chemistry set. Ellis took one look at it and said, “I have better test tubes at home.” Seymour was very fond of his chemistry set. They got in a fight and test-tube glass was everywhere. Seymour got a kitchen knife, made Ellis undress, sodomized him, and then stabbed him more than fifty times through the heart and face and back and all over his body. He tied Ellis’s hands and feet with laundry cord and dragged the body through the house and backyard and dumped it behind the garage.
Seymour could get out of jail at any time.
The police said there was not a drop of blood left in Ellis Simons’s body.
Billy’s mother was cool to him, but not uninvolved like his father.
That Saturday, she left him alone in the Penn Fruit Company market. She went down one of the aisles to do the shopping, leaving him standing there. Billy knew horror stories of what happened to kids left alone at markets. The famous one was Steven Damman, whose mother left him with a stick of licorice to watch the baby at a Long Island grocery store; when she came out the stroller and the baby were there, but Steven and his licorice were gone, and never seen again.
Billy wasn’t afraid. He was older than Damman and could take care of himself, and he loved the trip to the market. He’d lose himself savoring the perfumed air of apples, pears, oranges, and potatoes stacked high on the counters; he’d forget where he was. It was “the greatest smell in the world” because it reminded him of his grandfather Sol, Philadelphia ’s largest potato and onion wholesaler. Billy’s grandfather was his best friend, an oasis of love and safety.
Sol’s full name was Solomon Tredwell, but everyone called him “Smiling Jim, the Potato King.” Sol was a gregarious character who had taken the nickname “Smiling Jim” from a handsome Philadelphia mounted policeman who patrolled the city’s parks. He figured the policeman’s popularity would shine like a halo over him and his business. “My grandfather loved the police,” Billy said, “and he loved me. A policeman couldn’t leave his warehouse store without a free five-pound bag of potatoes.”
Now the boy’s eye caught a poster on a wall near the front of the store. It intrigued him; from a distance it looked like a portrait of three heads. He walked toward it and, up close, froze in fear.
A ghostly, shrunken face stared at him with lifeless blue eyes.
It was a pale, bloodless face-the face of a dead boy. On either side of the ghastly face were profile photographs of the child; the side of the head, like the face, was blistered in bruises and cuts. But the emotionless blue eyes held him fast.
He looked at the eyelids, frail and broken as the crushed wings of a butterfly. PHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPARTMENT, INFORMATION WANTED, the poster said. The print underneath said the unknown child had been brutally murdered and found two weeks ago in the woods of Fox Chase. Police were looking for the boy’s name, and his killer. NOTIFY HOMICIDE UNIT, DETECTIVE HEADQUARTERS, CITY HALL, PHILADELPHIA, AT ANY TIME, DAY OR NIGHT, IN PERSON OR TELEPHONE, MUNICIPAL 6-9700.
For an instant the left eye seemed to glow yellow.
Billy had never seen a dead person. He hadn’t heard the prayer to the Blessed Judge of Truth, the rabbi’s wisdom that men were mortals and can’t understand, can only accept God’s will. His father had not prepared him; no one could have prepared him. Death whispers uniquely to each man, but its overture to Billy was beyond the understanding of midtwentieth-century adults, no less a child. In the limpid eye he had seen a glimpse of the darkest evil known to humankind.
The boy lay on a cold metal table in the city morgue. Outside the windowless chamber the night was dark and bitterly cold, but now the boy was bathed in warm bright light. The medical examiner measured him at forty inches long, thirty pounds. He looked so small.
Bill Kelly prepared his inks, rollers, and clean white paper. As the police department’s principal fingerprinter, he was one of death’s numberless attendants. He was trained to stoically touch the cool flesh of the dead, but this boy looked just like the fingerprinter’s four-year-old son. His little feet fit into Kelly’s palm. The fingerprinter bowed his head and quietly asked the Blessed Mother for strength and guidance.
The head of the Philadelphia police identification unit, Kelly was twenty-nine years old, a tall Irishman and devout Roman Catholic with shining blue eyes that reflected compassion rather than mirth. The fingerprinter was a devoutly religious man who believed children were a gift from God. He was a father of two with a third on the way; he and Ruth Ann dreamed of having as many as the Almighty would provide. To feed the extra mouths he was picking up work as a wedding photographer, a joyful interlude between corpses.
On closer inspection, Kelly saw the boy was painfully thin. University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Wilton Krogman, one of the world’s foremost experts on human anatomy, known by the FBI as “the bone detective,” examined him with his young assistant Bill Bass (who would later found the Tennessee “Body Farm” to study decomposing human remains for law enforcement). Krogman calculated the boy had nearly the height of a four-year-old but the weight of a two-year-old. That meant starvation, malnutrition. X-rays of the legs showed scars on the long bones from halted growth. The boy had suffered in ill health for at least a year.
Kelly’s heart clenched as he inked the tiny hands and feet, then pressed the prints onto the clean paper. He believed in God but if He indeed tipped the wing of every sparrow in flight, what was the purpose of this?
Kelly saw other things with a cop’s eyes. The terrible cuts and bruises on the head and all over the body. The skin of one hand and foot withered from water immersion, the “washerwoman’s effect.” The narrow head looked like it had been squeezed, like an overripe melon. These were things Kelly, a civilian on the force, preferred not to contemplate. But he knew in his heart he was in the presence of evil-proof the devil existed as surely as did God.
From his humble prayers the comfort came to him that the boy could be hurt no more in his life. He was in heaven. All Kelly could do was help redeem his soul with a name. A name would cut a powerful trail to the murderer, a killer who would be judged in this life as well as the next. Neither task was his. But never had Kelly’s work seemed so important.
A few miles away that evening, Remington Bristow, the dark-haired, craggy-faced son of an Oregon undertaker, sat at home smoking a Lucky Strike over the broadsheet pages of the Bulletin. The headline leaped out at him: BODY OF BOY FOUND IN BOX IN FOX CHASE. The story seared him with regret. His second daughter, Rita, was a lovely healthy girl, but his first daughter had died twelve years ago from sudden infant death syndrome. Annie Laurie had been three months old. Annie was buried in California, and he had never stopped missing her. Fortunately, he thought, the case would quickly be solved. A heartbroken parent or guardian would come forward as soon as the evening newspapers, TV, and radio reported the corpse had been found. He was scheduled for the midnight-to-eight shift at the medical examiner’s office, where he worked as an investigator.
The boy would be identified by the time he got to work.
But Bristow was surprised when he arrived at the morgue at midnight. Nobody had come forward to claim the boy. He was assigned to cases of the deceased whose surnames began with letters at the end of the alphabet, including U. The boy was his, classified “Unknown.”
It was ancient history, but Chief Inspector John Kelly knew Philadelphia had a bad reputation on big child death cases. The police had bungled the case of the first child kidnapping in America, the most famous crime of its day, the impact of which was still felt. Four-year-old, flaxen-haired Charley Ross vanished from in front of his mansion in July 1874, when two men lured him into a buggy with candy. Christian Ross raced to the police station, but the sergeant told the father not to worry, the two men were enjoying a “drunken frolic.” The kidnappers demanded $20,000 for Charley’s safe return in twenty-three illiterate letters grimly warning of the boy’s annihilation: “… you wil hav two pay us befor you git him from us, and pay us a big cent to…” On police advice, the father didn’t respond to the letters, and “Little Charley” was never seen again. The story was a sensation in the county’s three penny newspapers, and thereafter American parents warned their children, “Never take candy from a stranger.”
Suffering a “bereavement sharper than death,” the Ross family spent the next sixty years and a fortune in vain trying to find the boy.
Now, as the newspapers topped one another with daily headlines trumpeting police defeats-BEATEN CHILD IN BOX STILL UNKNOWN, MISTAKEN FOR DOLL, CLUE TO SLAIN BOY PROVES FALSE-Chief Inspector Kelly was determined to identify the boy and punish his killer, at whatever cost. He launched the largest police investigation of a child’s death in the city’s three centuries.
An urgent Teletype bulletin was sent to police departments in all forty-eight states. The FBI was brought in. The American Medical Association mailed descriptions of the boy’s surgical scars, on the groin area, to all its members asking if they recalled performing the surgery. None did.
The homicide bureau dressed the boy in a suit that once fit a detective’s son and propped him up lifelike for police and media photographs. Detectives traced the bassinet box to the J. C. Penney store in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, and interviewed eleven of the twelve purchasers of that model. They learned the men’s blue Ivy League cap found near the boy had been created by a seamstress in South Philadelphia, and tracked down all the men who’d purchased the cap. The Indian-pattern blanket was traced to one of three textile mills, then the thread was lost. Fingerprinter Kelly was dispatched to as many hospitals as he could drive to looking for a match of newborn footprints on file. Nothing came of it.
After days of little progress, the chief inspector ordered the largest police force ever assembled in the city, including new academy recruits, to comb twelve square miles around the crime scene. Three hundred men brought tons of possible evidence back to the department, including a dead cat wrapped in an old shirt. Three hundred neighborhood doors were knocked on, more than six hundred neighbors interviewed. All 773 white families who had moved into the city that month were questioned, not a scrap of useful information gleaned.
Nothing.
Long Island New York cops drove down to the morgue to see if it was Steven Damman, whose mother, Marilyn, told the story of his 1955 abduction in The Saturday Evening Post. It was too late for Marilyn; her husband divorced her, quit his Air Force career, and fled to Iowa and took up farming. He never forgave his wife for leaving the child alone for ten minutes. Damman was about the same age and weight, also had blond hair and a little scar on his chin. But the Philadelphia boy’s kidneys were a markedly different size, and Damman had a big freckle on his right calf. It wasn’t Steven Damman.
A Marine said it was a lost brother, one of his eighteen siblings; all eighteen proved to be alive and well. Angry ex-wives and ex-husbands swore it was their child, murdered by the dastardly “ex.” Mothers-in-law denounced vile sons-in-law. Hundreds of letters poured in from the seamy underground of the American family; each was checked. (“I know my sister must have had an illegitimate baby, and she’s the kind that would kill it.”)
Nothing.
Detectives got excited studying a photograph of refugees from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, fleeing the Soviet conquest. A boy in the photograph was the mirror image of the dead boy. Hadn’t Krogman deducted likely European ancestry from the narrow face and high forehead? After an exhaustive manhunt, Philadelphia police found the Hungarian refugee child happily playing in a North Carolina backyard.
Detectives thought it had to be the Dudleys. The itinerant carnival couple admitted to starving to death six of their ten children as they followed the Big Top, casually dumping two bodies in Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans, others along a West Virginia highway and in a Lakeland, Florida, mine. Detectives almost felt sorry for them while interviewing the disorganized man and his hapless wife, and had to remind themselves they were human beasts. Yes, they’d passed through Pennsylvania in February 1957. No, the boy in the morgue wasn’t theirs.
Nothing.
The comforting smell of potatoes had disappeared.
Billy was held fast by the unblinking gaze of the dead boy. It was horrid, the ghastly yellowish face like a bruised gourd with hollowed-out eyes. His heart was pounding, his hands clammy with sweat.
The eyes were a well into which he was falling, falling into blackness with no one to catch him.
His mother returned and put a hand on him, broke the spell. She quietly drove him home in the Buick through the gray February afternoon. He did not tell her what he had seen and felt. But something had changed in him. His tongue grew sharper around his parents, and bitterly sarcastic. He found friends, but while other high school cliques formed around sports or drama, his gang “didn’t care about anything but drinking and having sex… I was white-collar Jewish hanging out with tough, blue-collar Italians.” He began drinking and smoking. He stayed small but his fights now were more violent, with bigger kids.
He was one of the smallest kids around, the fastest runner, wiry and nasty and chin-out tough, a wiseass with an answer for everything.
Billy was no longer entertained by kicking over anthills. He got a BB gun, and when he was fifteen, he aimed the gun at the backside of another boy and pulled the trigger. The shot grazed the boy’s butt. The kid squealed like a stuck pig. It was hilarious! Billy roared with laughter.
As he grew older, he grew angrier.
The police came to his house, a five-bedroom split-level, and talked to his father. They were tired of pulling the doctor’s youngest out of scrapes, and now this. How could this happen in such a nice neighborhood, to such a good family?
Billy was still laughing. “It was just a BB gun.” He grinned. “So I shot him in the ass, big deal. I was just trying to graze him.”
The police were not amused. Billy was “ just a kid,” but teenage ruffians were no longer seen in the nostalgic, “boys will be boys” light of earlier generations.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared youth crime, the new scourge of “ juvenile delinquency,” to be a national emergency brought on by family disruptions from the war and a general decline in morals. Parents fretted over traditional values under assault from rock music, materialism, and movies like James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause. A Roper Organization survey showed Americans were more worried about youth crime than open-air atomic testing, school segregation, or political corruption.
Something was wrong, very wrong, with the sons of the new affluent America. William Heirens, from a wealthy suburban Chicago family, had collected guns at thirteen, was accepted to the prestigious University of Chicago, and became a serial killer at seventeen, scrawling in lipstick on the mirror of one of his three victims, “Stop me before I kill again!” Seymour Levin was no longer simply the neighborhood bogeyman. Psychologists said he was an example of the new, especially depraved breed known as “constitutional psychopathic inferiors”; CPIs were human monsters nobody understood, except they shared insatiable resentments and no conscience. This new generation was more violent and depraved than Al Capone’s shooters and the worst criminals of the 1920s and ’30s.
Billy’s struggles in school intensified. He was spending all his time holed up in the basement reading detective comic books. His teachers frowned upon this; it was extremely troubling in a young boy. Detective comic books were thought to be a major cause of juvenile delinquency, a theory made popular by German-American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, a disciple of Freud. His 1954 best seller, Seduction of the Innocent, led to U.S. congressional hearings to censor the comic book industry. Wertham said that comic books filled with sex and violence turned boys into murderers.
But Billy was obsessed with cops and robbers. His favorite book was The Great Detectives, the true-life adventures of the dozen most famous sleuths in history. He admired Scotland Yard detective Robert Fabian, the “Protector of the Innocent”; Treasury agent and Capone nemesis Elmer Lincoln Irey, “The Man Who Couldn’t Be Fooled.” But he was especially fascinated by the flamboyant Eugène François Vidocq of nineteenth-century Paris, “The Magician of Disguise.”
Vidocq was a baker’s son born in 1775 in the south of France, survived the French Revolution as a teenager, just escaped a beheading, and during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte became the lawman hero of Paris, the swashbuckling “father” of modern criminology.
Even more interesting to Billy, Vidocq had been a rowdy, fearless teenager nicknamed le Vautrin, “Wild Boar.” He’d killed a man at thirteen, robbed his parents at fourteen to leave home and eventually join the Army, where he fought constantly. In the Army Vidocq defeated fifteen men in duels, killed two, and deserted after striking an officer. But nothing stopped him. Vidocq was a notorious killer, con man, highwayman, prison-breaker, womanizer, and spy before turning himself into the mirror of all Western detectives. Billy was taken by one of history’s great figures of transformation and redemption.
At seventeen, college was out of the question for Billy. He planned to join the Army, where he could “get in fights all the time and get away with it.” In the future, he saw himself facing two choices: “I’ll either go to jail or become a cop.”
Billy’s favorite TV show was The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor. It starred his father’s look-alike Matt Holbrook as police captain, leading three brave detectives standing for truth and justice in a large, unnamed city. The three detectives spent all of their time tracking murderers, thieves, and other lawbreakers. They were all passionate in their search for truth-a truth they could believe in.
They were all good friends.
The second boy balled his fist, cocked the bicep he had been developing for just this moment, and swung a roundhouse upper-cut that crashed into his father’s skull. That’s how he’d imagined it. He’d pumped iron at age fifteen for just this moment. He was rippling with new muscles and confidence, determined his father would never hit him again without consequence. He was relieved when the old man backed down.
Now we can love each other like a father and son should.
Growing up in the tough Philadelphia river ward, Frank saw a headline in the Bulletin about the child found in a box in Fox Chase, only four or five Philadelphia neighborhoods to the north. He noticed a poster of the dead boy. But he didn’t have the luxury of thinking about anything but his own survival.
At fifteen he was a supremely gifted artist. His teachers whispered enviously about his talent. Strangely though, the city kid was obsessed with Norman Rockwell. Rockwell’s paintings of an idyllic small-town America on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post were Frank’s windows to another world. That world was tangible and close. Frank’s neighborhood was only a few miles up the Delaware River from the landmark Curtis Publishing Company building in Philadelphia, where the Post was published, overlooking Independence Hall. He loved the Rockwell covers: Father in his best suit happily watching Mother serve a Thanksgiving turkey on a white tablecloth to a rosy-cheeked, all-American family; the runaway boy on a diner stool, all his belongings on the end of a stick wrapped in red cloth, seated next to the blue-suited cop; the baseball umps calling the game for rain.
They were happy images, and he preferred them all to the images of his own life: his father going off to work in the factory and coming home smelling of the machines he fixed; his father descending to the basement to hand-sew the big canvas sails for rich men’s yachts. Lying in bed at night listening to the gunshots fly, hearing and feeling one slamming the side of his brick row house. His father drinking too much and hitting him. His father hitting and hitting and hitting him.
He’d dreamed of hitting his dad back all those years. Each hit forced the boy’s anger one level higher until it was ready to explode. He’d lifted weights, carefully planning The Punch that would set things right and release the anger once and for all. He was amazed when his father gave him new respect, and he could concentrate on his gifts, his entrance to that other world.
Frank had extraordinary powers and gifts. He was not a student of English or mathematics. He didn’t have a graceful mind, but a mind full of grace. The hands to draw, paint, and sculpt the beauty around him, the eye to see. He started drawing in art classes when he was five years old and had never stopped. And he seemed to possess a third eye, a talent that even when young he knew not to talk about. Sometimes it seemed he could see past and future. Yet with all his abilities, the boy’s anger persisted.
Not long after he knocked his father out cold, Frank, a high school sophomore, won a gold medal in a citywide student art exhibit at a Gimbels department store. In a dream scenario for a young artist, his work was discovered by Walter Stuempfig, a notable realist painter of the midtwentieth century whose oils were compared to Edward Hopper and the Old Masters. Stuempfig offered Frank $5 for his painting and encouraged him to seek a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the famed school that graduated Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt, where Stuempfig had taught for forty years. But Frank, touchy as a water moccasin, grew angry when he never saw the $5 from Stuempfig. Then some of his exhibited paintings were never returned to him, and in a fury he swore off the academy, an art scholarship, and the art world entirely. “I wanted to do art, but I didn’t want it hanging on someone’s wall.” He escaped into the Navy, where, aboard ship, he discovered he had his father’s mechanical talents but obsessively sketched the men he worked with in the engine room.
Back home two years later, facing poverty, he landed a job as a commercial photographer at George Faraghan’s studio at Nineteenth and Arch. Slim with light hazel eyes and curly blond hair, Frank was an artist with the rugged body of a lightweight boxer, a photographer of models and a model himself. He also had a lust for life and an intuitive grasp of the art of seduction. Women threw themselves at him like confetti.
He modeled for the Philadelphia Inquirer fashion section hanging out the window of his own 1947 Plymouth with girls hanging all over him; in Reader’s Digest he dressed as a horned devil posing as the checkout boy for a Miss America contestant.
“I was like a kid in a candy shop. Plus I’d meet girls in bars and other places. I had sex constantly. I never really tried at it, to be honest. Single women, married women, they picked me up as often as I picked them up; it was all chemistry. I had sex in a lot of cars.”
The blond photographer offered a full service to models: composites, head shots, and zipless sex. One day, bored, he wrote down all his trysts on a pad of paper, recalling all the bodies if not the names. He’d had sex with 165 different women. He was twenty-six years old.
Shortly after making The List, a friend introduced him to Jan Proctor, seventeen years old, a slim, pretty, blond go-go girl who’d run away from home in the suburbs and was living alone in the city. Jan had a child, baby Lisa, but didn’t know who the father was. When she’d left home, she’d stolen all the money in her father’s wallet and left Lisa for her parents to raise.
Now she wanted to stop hustling drinks as a stripper and become a model; she needed a composite. She was smart, sassy, and had grown up in the same neighborhood as Frank, in the riverside row houses of old blue-collar Kensington.
Frank was in love.
It was 1968, the summer of love, and “Jan was wild,” Frank recalls. “She was into everything-sex, drugs, you name it.” Wild enough, he figured, to satisfy his gargantuan sexual appetite.
They married a year later on Halloween as a lark, egged on by a friend. Halloween was the perfect day to consummate their hell-raising lifestyle. After the church wedding, the reception started at the notorious 7A bar in Kensington, birthplace of the city’s legendary K amp; A burglary gang and a block from serial killer Gary Heidnik’s future “House of Horrors.” It ended with the cops chasing the booze-laden wedding party around the tombstones at Laurel Hill Cemetery, where Frank had moved the party out of sentiment. He’d once dug graves for his uncle. To memorialize his marriage, he painted an eerie Gothic scene of the sexton’s cottage at night fronted by snow-dusted tombstones.
Marriage to Jan was a stabilizing influence. They had a child, Vanessa, and bought a dilapidated warehouse that had been a butcher’s shop and meat market in the nineteenth century. Frank never stopped having affairs during this period of domestic bliss, but he had a lot fewer of them. “After I got married, it wasn’t that many women.” As he matured, his conquests evolved from weekly trysts with faceless strangers to several good friends. “Any affairs I had were with girls, women, who believed in me like I believed in them; we supported each other. It wasn’t like a one-night stand. Jan said it was like I was bonding with my good friends, bonding with sex. She always encouraged me to have a girlfriend or two. She always liked to be able to spend some time by herself. She’d want me out of the house for a few days.” Jan insisted only that Frank bring his prospective girlfriends by the house for drinks and her blessing. “Jan would say, ‘I like her, bring her by anytime,’ ” Frank said. “I would never bring a woman into the house that Jan didn’t get along with.”
She didn’t even mind when Frank brought home Joan, a tall, buxom blonde, younger than Jan, as his art assistant. Joan in time also became Frank’s accountant, business manager, Girl Friday-and girl Tuesday night, when she made love like clockwork in the artist’s house. “Jan really likes Joan,” Frank explained. “She’d say, ‘Why don’t you and Joan go down to the shore for a couple of days?’ ” Jan seemed relieved to find such a steady, capable woman to help satisfy her husband’s voracious career and sexual needs. For her part, Joan respected Jan’s role as the queen of the household and Frank’s wife. But she was bitterly jealous of the many lesser girlfriends.
But real life intruded quickly into the newlywed romance. Jan’s parents dropped her daughter Lisa, now six years old, on the Benders’ stoop with all her clothes and medical records and said, “She’s yours. We’re getting a divorce.” Now “the biker momma and go-go girl was the ultimate mother,” Frank said. “She put her heart and soul into raising the kids and taking care of the house.” But with two children to feed on a modest freelance photographer’s income, the family was broke all the time.
Frank began to study at night to recover his art career, taking free evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy, paid for by the Veterans Administration. He studied painting and drawing with the renowned artist Arthur DeCosta, who urged him to do some sculpting to better understand the human form. It would help all his creative work. But Frank struggled with sculpting facial proportions. The academy didn’t offer free night classes in anatomy, and he couldn’t afford to pay for day classes, so he reached out to his friend Bart Zandel, who fingerprinted corpses at the city morgue. Frank offered to shoot a model’s composite for one of Zandel’s favorite strippers if the fingerprinter would give him a tour of the morgue. Zandel agreed.
Frank arrived at the two-story morgue on University Avenue with a sketch pad and calipers in his knapsack. He was excited. He would learn anatomy by studying the human body up close, flesh, bones, and organs revealed, much as his hero Michelangelo once did. Banned by sixteenth-century church authorities from working with dead bodies, Michelangelo procured a key from a friend to the church basement morgue, and spent nights with a candle and a butcher knife studying how the body was assembled.
But as soon as Zandel began leading him through the windowless rooms filled with a cold, sickly sweet air, Frank knew he’d made a terrible mistake.
All around him, bodies on metal tables were grotesquely swollen by disease, shorn by knives and bullets, smashed in automobile accidents, devoured by animals and all the forces of time and decay. He saw a man in the autopsy room who had been hit by a train that cleanly sliced him in two across the thighs. He lifted the white sheet from one gurney and stared openmouthed. In place of a woman’s corpse were three suitcases. The woman, apparently murdered, had been carved up and scattered along the New Jersey Turnpike in the luggage, which held all her remains. There was nothing left of her to put on paper.
In the autopsy room, Frank stared at a torso that was propped high on a block-the breastplate had been removed, the ribs cut. He gawked as an assistant medical examiner plunged his hand deep into the chest cavity and, while feeling around, turned and winked at Frank. The place was surreal.
This is no place for an anatomy lesson, he thought.
But he was fascinated by a body on a gurney in the storage room, toe tag number 5233. It was an unidentified white woman in her fifties, heavyset with dyed hair, a murdered Jane Doe. Her badly decomposed body had been found on October 16, 1977, dumped in a field near Philadelphia International Airport, wearing a herringbone suit, a white blouse, and three bullets in the brain. Frank studied her closely. Her skull was shattered on one side by gunshots; a mass of dried blood and dark blond hair was plastered around the wound. Neither her fingerprints nor missing-person bulletins came up with a match.
It looked like a professional hit. Zandel saw a mass of ruined flesh.
“This is one we’ll never solve,” he said. “Who knows what she looks like?”
But Frank saw something else-a face round and sagged with age, narrow nose, thin lips. He sensed tranquillity about the eyes.
“I know,” he blurted out. “I know what she looks like.”
Dr. Halbert Fillinger, the assistant ME who had winked at Frank, overheard the comment and approached. It was his case, Fillinger said, and he figured they’d never get an identity.
“Did you say you know what this woman looks like?”
“I do,” Frank said. “I see a face in the skull.”
Fillinger stared appraisingly at the blunt young man. “Have you ever done forensic art?”
Frank shook his head. “I don’t even know what the word ‘forensic’ means.”
“Well, you must try.” As they chatted for a few minutes, Fillinger complained that TV shows like the new hit drama Quincy, M.E. starring Jack Klugman as a Los Angeles assistant medical examiner gave a false impression of cases quickly solved and tied up in a Christmas bow. The truth was, many cases went nowhere, often because of lack of identity.
“If you can get me an identity, we may also find her killer. Would you like to help us do that?”
Frank replied that he would.
“We can’t pay you anything.”
“That’s OK.”
Fillinger challenged him to “show me what she looks like.”
“I’ve never completed a sculpture in my life,” Frank said. At the academy they discarded their half-completed clay sculptures at the end of each class. “But I’ll do it.”
“Good. Come back at midnight Friday. I’ll be on the graveyard shift.”
It took Frank eight hours. After measuring the skull and drawing a rough outline of the face on the sketch pad in the morgue, he consulted artist friends and his academy sculpture teacher on techniques. Working nights, he shaped a clay bust over the bones, made a plaster mold of the bust, painted the face, and crowned the head with a dark blond wig. “I saw every feature of her face,” he said. “And how the form of one part of her face flowed into all the other forms.” He brought the head into the morgue that Friday after midnight.
The Philadelphia police had never used a forensic sculpture, but they distributed a photo of Frank’s bust of the murdered Jane Doe to the Philadelphia media, and published it in a missing-person flyer sent widely to East Coast police departments.
Corpse number 5233 remained in the morgue, with no one to mourn or bury her. A New Jersey philanthropist offered her own cemetery plot so the “poor soul” wouldn’t end up in a pauper’s grave. But five months later, a New Jersey detective studying missing-person reports noticed a “remarkable” similarity between the bust of a woman in a Philadelphia Police Department circular and the photo of a woman reported missing by Chicago police.
Anna Mary Duval, sixty-two, had left via Chicago ’s O’Hare Airport on October 15, her family told the police. They didn’t know where she was going, and she never returned. Now authorities quickly confirmed that corpse 5233 found dumped at the Philadelphia airport was indeed the woman who’d boarded the plane in Chicago. Police still were unable to determine what drew her to the City of Brotherly Love, where she knew no one, or who had killed her and why. But Anna Mary Duval had been identified, sad as her story was, thanks to Bender’s artistic vision.
Fillinger was stunned. The police had used sketch artists for years, with little success. Here was a full three-dimensional head sprung from the imagination of a high school-educated kid who didn’t know what “forensics” meant. Bender had been touched by a gift neither he nor anybody else could fully explain.
Frank had his first ID and his first newspaper headlines. Within days, other police departments around the country began asking him to produce busts of unidentified murder victims.
He was a natural. His wife was immensely proud of him, and it was a new income source. But the work was ghoulish, especially with two young daughters in the house. Heads were always popping out of shoeboxes and beer coolers. The worst part was the horrific odor of the cooking craniums, or the thought of them swarming with flesh-stripping beetles. Once, when bugs came flowing out of their old Hotpoint stove, Jan opened it to find the skull of an unknown sailor from the Russian ship Corinthus. Frank figured half an hour would dry it out enough to apply clay. “Frank!” she screamed. “Come take this fucking head out of the oven and go visit your mother.” It was a story they loved to tell.
She didn’t know what “forensics” meant either. Spooked by her husband’s new vocation, Jan went to the library to research forensic art, and was proud to learn that esteemed European sculptors were doing the same thing.
She wrote “Forensics” on a piece of paper and taped it to their refrigerator.
In the eastern foothills of the Cascade Range, 150 miles from Seattle, is a view of a town nestled between two rivers and the high walls of the mountains like the dawn of the world. Down in the valley along the wide river are apple orchards and vineyards soaked in an arid, sunny climate like the Bordeaux region of France; Main Street is lined with shops. New to the town’s 6,882 families was a bumper crop of Granny Smiths, until a large man came walking down the hill calmly carrying a screaming child drenched in blood.
It was autumn, with the smell of wood-smoke and ripening apples in the air and all the lawns on Eleventh Street neat and tended by the sidewalk where the boy struggled and cried against the man’s shirt trying to escape. The boy was about ten, but the wide arms held him as effortlessly as a bushel of new fruit. Suddenly the man stopped on the sidewalk, grinned, and with no visible effort crushed the boy to his chest. The child fell silent and limp.
Richard Walter was ten years old and chubby, sitting in the passenger seat of his mother’s car, a 1954 Dodge, as it climbed the hill. His mother, Viola, was driving him home from school when she slowed down and pulled over to the curb where the man and boy stood.
When they got close, the man started to cry.
“Get in!” she commanded him. “I’ll take you to the hospital.”
Sheepishly, the big man obeyed, climbing in the backseat with the bloody child.
Accelerating the car, Viola Walter looked in the rearview mirror and made eye contact with the boy.
“Sonny, tell me the truth. What did he do to you? Did he hurt you?”
The child whimpered.
“Tell me. I won’t let him hurt you.”
“My daddy beat me.” The child was sobbing.
This is interesting, Richard thought. He was turned to the backseat, unsmiling, quietly studying the man and the boy as intently as he would an ant farm. They reached the hospital. While the boy was rushed to the ER, Viola Walter told the county sheriff’s deputy about the man, who had fled.
“Son,” the deputy sheriff said to Richard. “I need you to come with me and help me find him. Let’s go.”
Cool, Richard thought.
Richard raced through the night in the sheriff’s car and helped the deputy identify the man for an arrest. He followed the court case in the newspapers and learned the father had twisted both his son’s arms until they broke, then tried to break the boy’s legs but couldn’t manage it. The man was a sadist; he enjoyed it.
Richard had helped to apprehend his first psychopath.
Really cool, he thought. “It was awful, of course, but quite fascinating.”
Until that moment, he’d felt like an alien set down in the remote valley. He was distant from his father, Irwin, a stern German American who was the service manager for Sugg’s Tire Service for thirty-five years. He had two sisters and a brother who became a truck driver. He was the only one of the four Walter children who disliked sports. Richard was a musical genius, gifted at piano with a voice like an angel. Given a chance to attend the big apple festival, he preferred La Traviata.
It was his mother who taught him that behind the façade of the sleepy all-American town lay a grand opera. Viola Walter was a housewife, a formidable, cunning, uncanny woman. Neighbors called her instead of the police.
One evening after dinner a young woman in town called Viola in a panic. Her husband was sitting in his easy chair with a loaded handgun instead of the evening newspaper in his lap. He wouldn’t give up the gun and was threatening to shoot himself, growing louder and angrier as the night wore on.
“Can you come over?”
Viola Walter stormed into the living room, snatched the loaded gun from the man’s hand and demanded, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? ” For the next half hour she berated him for his selfishness in frightening his wife who loved him so and lectured him on his blindness to the beauty and preciousness of life. The couple, childless at the time, went on to have children and grandchildren who, years later, at the man’s funeral in old age, thanked Viola in their eulogies for making their family possible. It was one of three suicides she was credited with preventing.
Intrigued by crime and criminals, Richard went to study psychology at Michigan State University. A haughty, brilliant student, he set a school record by completing eleven courses in one semester, seven more than the usual load, with a near-perfect 3.8 grade point average because “one must have challenges.” He discovered his gift of seeing into the heart of darkness in his Shakespeare class, where he belittled the professor for suggesting that Hamlet fretted and delayed avenging his father’s murder because he was a conflicted, skeptical modern man. “As it happens, Hamlet is quite psychopathically brilliant, and plays the fool while passively controlling all the action in the play until his final revenge. I would have done it exactly the same way!”
In 1975, after a job as a clinical psychologist at the prestigious Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles fell through, he worked for a time at the Los Angeles County morgue under medical examiner Thomas Noguchi, who had handled the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, John Belushi, Robert F. Kennedy, and Sharon Tate.
To be able to study hundreds of bodies, to immerse himself in the awful ways people die and are killed, he had to remain stoic, in total control of his emotions. One morning, he got a phone call with news-his father had died. He hung up and got dressed, put on his tie, and went to work. He went to a meeting on schedule. During a break from the meeting, out of the blue, a woman asked what his father did for a living. Walter said evenly, “Oh, he died.” She was taken back. “I’m so sorry. When?” He answered calmly, “This morning, about two hours ago.” They all finished the meeting. He went back to his desk in the lab. That night, he looked in the mirror and was shaken by the cold eyes staring back at him. He felt nothing. “That was pretty scary.”
He learned the lesson that his mentors in criminal investigation would later drill into his brain: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Walter began to obsessively collect antiques, grand, beautiful pieces from nineteenth-century France and China, “to remind myself there are beautiful things in the world.”
But he was hooked by the gory world of the morgue. He decided to spurn the more prestigious field of clinical psychology to become a prison psychologist. “There is high snobbery in the psychological world, and prisons are supposed to attract the dullest, the biggest drones, the most stupid,” he said. “That may or may not be true, but I’m going to do what I want, what is most fun for me, what satisfies my needs. Listening to neurotic housewives discuss their cats’ puberty won’t do it for me.”
In May 1978, he took a job in the frozen Upper Peninsula of Michigan as a psychologist at the old prison at Marquette, a Romanesque castle on Lake Superior with five-foot-thick stone walls. The castle housed all the most violent prisoners in Michigan in one place.
Winter had eight hours of daylight and fourteen feet of snow. For recreation, locals sat in a lakefront restaurant eating Cornish meat pies and watching the towering shards of lake ice break up as iron freighters came and went. Walter thought he had never seen such a gloomy, desolate place in his life.
The warden gave him his schedule. Each day he would see six appointments. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles, sadists, and serial killers. Men whose crimes had landed them in prison, and whose crimes in other prisons-stabbing a guard, gouging out a fellow inmate’s eye with a spoon, leading a riot-had landed them in the toughest prison of all.
They’d mostly be psychopaths, far more cunning than Wall Street lawyers. They would try to charm, beguile, or frighten him. They would try to convince him they’d found Jesus; threaten to strangle him, cut out his heart and piss on it, eat his kidneys. They’d tried to shock him: The man who’d stapled his children’s eyelids open, then urinated into them. The repeat child molesters who preyed on hundreds. Plato said that there were only a few ways to do good, but countless ways to do evil. He would hear all of them.
He would take it all in with a cold stare. His job was to judge whether a man was irredeemable, filled with demons that were a danger to him or to others, or whether a man’s better angels could be called forth. He had to judge them correctly every time; lives were at stake. It was a daily contest of wills.
Some would be bright and impressive with good families and high IQs; others were tattoo-inked creatures who gave people the shivers just to look at them.
He’d tell them, “Let’s be clear. The reason you are in prison is your neighbors don’t want you to break into their house and rape the cat.”
His office was a small rectangle with concrete-block walls, an old wooden desk and old steel filing cabinet, a wooden chair for clients. There was a single picture on the wall-a flower. A window that looked out on the iron-ore port, one of the coldest, snowiest, and darkest places in the United States.
“Perfect,” he said.
“What a terrible job,” a friend said. “Did you say you moved from Los Angeles?”
“It’ll be grand,” he said.
It was the ideal laboratory to study evil.
The community room at the First Federal Bank building at Castor and Cottman streets in northeast Philadelphia was crowded with Philadelphia and New Jersey cops, all Jewish cops.
Federal agent William Fleisher, one of the foremost Jewish cops in the Philadelphia region, stood to introduce the evening’s presenters on cold-case murder investigation. It was the monthly meeting of the Shomrim, Hebrew for “guardians,” the national association of Jewish police officers. Jewish cops had to stick together: “Kike” was still a sinister noun in police departments. As president of Shomrim’s Philadelphia chapter, Fleisher fought discrimination against men or women who were passed over for promotions in the tribal culture of police departments only because they belonged to the tribe of Abraham.
Fleisher was the assistant special agent in charge of U.S. Customs in Philadelphia, one of the most powerful federal agents in the Mid-Atlantic, responsible for criminal and drug law enforcement at the ports, airports, coastlines, and inland borders of three states. He commanded an $8 million budget, a hundred personnel, and sixty-five special agents in the Philadelphia field office, plus satellite offices in Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania capital of Harrisburg, Wilmington, Delaware, and field agents in New Jersey. He had the equivalent federal rank of a full-bird colonel.
By that evening in 1984, Fleisher was a legend in the annals of federal officers. After two years in the Army-where hard-nosed first sergeant John Baylin “turned me into a man; it was the best mistake I ever made”-he’d returned home to Philadelphia and earned a sociology degree from Temple University, hoping to impress his father, a Temple alum. His father didn’t seem impressed. After college he fulfilled a dream and was hired as a Philadelphia police officer, one of his hometown’s “finest.” His father still didn’t seem impressed.
After three years as a patrolman and corporal, he joined the FBI as a special agent and made a name for himself as a fearless mob investigator in Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. He became a renowned polygraph examiner and interrogator. Fleisher talked to everyone-pimps, hookers, politicians, door-men-and could wheedle information from anybody. He was a chameleon: friendly uncle, ruthless inquisitor, stout best friend, wise rabbi, comic. Once he went undercover on a Caribbean cruise as a stand-up comedian-and sent the crew to jail with smuggling convictions.
He transferred to Customs as a special agent in Philadelphia because Customs agents had more freedom to choose where they wanted to live, and Fleisher and his wife, pregnant at the time with their first child, wanted to raise their family back home. After a three-year assignment in Washington, D.C., the promotion to the powerful job as Assistant Special Agent in Charge in Philadelphia was a triumphant return to his hometown. He lived across the river in a five-bedroom split-level in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and occasionally did Tuesday-night stand-up at the Holiday Inn. On the surface, life was good.
Yet as he accumulated substantial government power, Fleisher had greatly expanded to meet it. At fifty years old, the once-slim FBI agent had become a corpulent man behind a desk, all five feet and eight and a half inches, and 250 pounds splendidly wrapped in Italian suits under the penumbra of a great Old Testament beard. He carried himself flamboyantly with a gold Montblanc pen in the shirt pocket embroidered WLF, a pinkie ring (like the beloved Jewish men of his childhood), a gourmand’s appetite, and streetwise wit. Fleisher’s weight worried his doctor and his wife. But the big man’s regret was that his large stomach prevented him from carrying his Smith amp; Wesson.38 Chief’s Special next to his groin, cowboy style, as he had as a brash young FBI agent, twenty years and a hundred pounds ago.
He was still holding on to the dreams of youth. The comic book and TV stories of detectives, modern knights-errant, that inspired him as a boy still animated him. He’d joke about it. “I never wanted to be a government bureaucrat. I always wanted to devote my life to the battle of good versus evil.” But he meant it.
His dreams deferred had left him with a deep and unknowable sadness that could erupt to the surface in the field, paralyzing him.
As a baby-faced rookie patrolman in 1968 in tough West Philadelphia -ridiculed on the streets as too small, too soft, too Jewish-he’d answered a radio call of a toddler fallen from a second-story window at Fifty-second and Market streets. He rode with the boy in the back of the patrol wagon to the ER, but the ER doctor was having trouble reviving the boy. Suddenly a cry burst from the baby’s lips, and the doctor smiled and said, “This little guy’s gonna be all right.” The child was fine but Fleisher started crying and couldn’t stop. His partner had to lead him out of the hospital, crying for joy, “But I thought he was going to die!”
Billy wept at the scene of a murdered child, just the same over the arrest of a mob hit man. He wept when the other white officers branded a black colleague a “nigger,” shouting at them that he was a good man. The baby-faced cop insisted he’d read the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and heard the Upanishads were no different-it was clear the battle for justice was in the heart; each soul was precious. “The great religions teach us,” he said through tears, “that the loss of one soul affects us all.”
Whispers started to follow him. Crier. Social worker. Too soft. “I may be a short, fat, Jewish detective,” he later roared at critics, “but I’m the toughest short, fat, Jewish detective you’ve ever seen.”
Now the roomful of Jewish cops buzzed as Fleisher stood. He was one of them. He had a mezuzah in his doorpost protecting his house from the evil of the world with the blinding light of the one God. They loved him. It didn’t matter that Fleisher had hugged the Saudi state police in Riyadh after teaching them the polygraph, saying in tears, “I have read the Koran, and there is nothing between us. We share the same God.” Or that he considered himself a Christian, too. His wife was Catholic, and they’d hung a portrait of Jesus near the mantelpiece next to an idyllic photograph of two swans on a lovely pond. When friends asked him about it, he said, “That’s Michelle’s. I call that ‘Two Swans Getting Ready to Fuck’ ”-whereupon Michelle would cry, “Bill!”
“As for Jesus, yo, what can I tell you?” he added. “He was the first good guy in history.”
That was Fleisher. A character. A mensch. Crazy enough to try to love the world. Other cops said he’d gained a hundred pounds to accommodate his heart, that immense heart filled with longing.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the members of Shomrim, “many of us know Hal Fillinger, the great Philadelphia medical examiner. But it’s a first chance for a lot of us to meet Frank Bender, the brilliant forensic artist who’s making headlines solving murder cases with the Philadelphia Police Department.
“Fillinger discovering Bender one day in the Philadelphia morgue,” he added, “is the forensic equivalent of Lana Turner being discovered in Hollywood at Schwab’s Drugstore.”
Fleisher had shaken hands with Bender for the first time only minutes earlier. He had been impressed by the artist’s buoyant energy. But now as Bender stood and began to narrate the slide show of his forensic work, he was stunned by the artist’s uncanny ability.
He showed the bust of Anna Duval, the first murder victim he helped identify. From the gallery of the dead, the face of Linda Keyes also looked out at the room. Her unidentified skeleton had been found on a hilltop in Slatington, Pennsylvania; Bender’s bust ran in the Allentown Morning Call, and a man who lived 250 miles away in Salisbury, Pennsylvania, recognized his daughter Linda, missing for two years. Another bust led to the solving of a murder on North Leithgow Street in Philadelphia -the street Bender grew up on, just a few blocks from his house.
The case that touched Bender most deeply was a young black woman whose skeleton was found in a wooded area near a high school football field in North Philadelphia after being raped and murdered and dumped a year earlier. The frilly Ship ’n’ Shore-brand blouse found near the bones inspired Bender to sculpt her looking up as if to an imagined future beyond the grim neighborhood. When “the Girl with Hope,” as he called her, was exhibited at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, a niece recognized Rosella Atkinson, who had disappeared, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter, and brought Rosella’s mother, who looked at the plaster face and wept.
VIGIL FOR DAUGHTER ENDS IN MUSEUM, the Philadelphia Inquirer headline read.
After Bender’s speech, Fleisher went up and congratulated him warmly. The two men made enthusiastic plans to meet for lunch. Bender was eager to develop his forensic career through the connections of one of the most powerful federal lawmen in the Mid-Atlantic states. Fleisher was openly awed by the artist with paranormal crime-fighting abilities. “It’s sacrilegious for a veteran investigator to think this way,” he said, “but what he does goes beyond science and rationalism. Frank is the ultimate secret weapon for law enforcement.”
That first lunch led to a weekly ritual. The federal agent from the suburbs and the libertine Center City artist formed an unbreakable bond: Both men used suffering at the hands of their fathers as fuel for a fiery passion for justice. Fleisher was outraged by victims who were raped or murdered by criminals and then by the system; Bender was furious at cops who gave up on cases he was still passionate about, like the young woman whose skeleton was found enclosing the tiny skeleton of her unborn child in an abandoned Bucks County whiskey distillery. He had done a bust and his own investigation and was convinced it was a murder and he could name the killer, but authorities lacked the political will to care. Over sandwiches and coffee, Fleisher and Bender asked themselves a simple question: People were suffering, the bad guys were winning, and somebody had to do something.
Why not them?
The big man, wide and squat, moved powerfully down the cracked and broken city sidewalk, 250 pounds in a hurry. His expansive white shirt was soaked through with sweat, and his jacket flapped, revealing a Walther PPK.380 handgun. The air reeked of garbage and urine; the stench of melting tar trailed his black brogans. He was gasping for breath but moving like a bull that would not be stopped.
It was nearly one hundred degrees at midday, the hottest month in Philadelphia history, and William Fleisher wondered for the hundredth time what brought him obsessively into the bowels of the city, why he left the cool, ordered hallways of the U.S. Custom House for the steaming end of South Street, where chaos ruled.
He passed an old wino, and three homeless men sharing a flattened box in some shade, skeletal dogs feeding in a pile of garbage. Criminals along with the whole human race stagnated in the heat, waiting for dark. He was armed, and remained vigilant. A slasher was stalking poor neighborhoods. Four women, ages twenty-eight to seventy-four, had been stabbed to death and mutilated in a frenzy that recalled Jack the Ripper, their torsos carved open. That summer of 1986, “serial killer” was a new and terrifying term in the United States; Philadelphians in particular spied the dim corners of their old city with fears once unimaginable.
Two miles from his office at the Customs House, the nineteenth-century storefront sagged in the darkness. Once the Victorian butcher shop of a prosperous neighborhood, it now shadowed drug dealers and addicts drifting by in a dank river breeze. Old newspaper, long faded by the sun, covered the storefront windows. The green door appeared abandoned, except for two small signs: PEARLS REQUIRED, and PUT OUT THE CIGARETTE NOW, ASSHOLE. No light or sound came from within; steam quietly rose from the kitchen vent, like breath from a tomb. The city stank from fifteen mountains of garbage uncollected during the garbagemen’s strike. But the stench emanating from the building overpowered all else.
Fleisher knocked on the green door of the dilapidated building at Twenty-third and South.
The door cracked open, and a young blond woman let him in. She was taller and buxom in a white T-shirt that fell to mid-thigh; it was all she was wearing. Fleisher grinned; he was feeling better already. Behind her rose a vast, hidden warehouse studio with a concrete floor and no windows, its bulk concealed from the street. In the high-ceilinged gloom, broken only by light filtering through a row of skylights, were crude wooden shelves lined with sculpted human heads. But next to them was a lovely walnut museum case with a bronze handgun shaped like a penis. The plaque read, THE SEX PISTOL THAT WON THE WEST.
He chuckled. “The sex pistol? At his age, I thought Frank would shoot blanks.”
“He’s been up all night,” she said coolly, leading him through a steel door into the studio. “When he gets going, there’s no stopping him.” The studio was cluttered with nudes of young women, ladders and piles of bricks, erotic Parisian postcards. On the shelves were heads cracked by tire irons; mouths twisted in lipsticked horror; the bald head and psychopathic eyes of a man who had killed his entire family; a Negro slave whose bones had been dug from the grave. It was a gallery of murderers and victims of murder without equal and a somber mood came over him.
An abominable smell floated from the makeshift kitchen in the rear. Frank Bender, shirtless and barefoot on the cement floor, was stirring a huge steel pot. From the pot rack hung ladles, spoons, and a pair of steel handcuffs. A Norman Rockwell calendar looked down on a 1950s aluminum kitchen table.
“Bill!” he cried in the luminous voice of a man high on life. His eyes were unusually bright, like a cloudless sky. More female voices sounded from somewhere in the warehouse.
“What’s cooking? ” Fleisher walked over to the stove. The smell was awful.
“You don’t want to know.” Bender grinned and quickly put the lid on the big pot.
Fleisher recognized the smell. “That’s it. You’re not coming to the potluck.”
Bender didn’t like working with flesh-eating beetles. He boiled his rotting heads: fill water above the head, add half a cup of bleach and a dash of Borax, boil until done.
“I make a mean chicken in this pot,” Bender said. Bender did most of the cooking, and most of it in the same pot. “Jan and Joan hate it when I use it to de-flesh the heads.”
Fleisher rolled his eyes. “Why don’t we go out for lunch.”
The Day by Day Café was noisy and crowded with August light filtering through skyscrapers to find the corner plate-glass windows. Outside, winos and addicts slumbered in a church doorway; at a small table in back, Fleisher bent over a cheeseburger while Bender picked at a salad and ogled Wendy, a twentysomething waitress with pale skin and dark hair. Bender’s eyes gleamed in his balding skull like azure marbles. He was trying to persuade her to sit nude for him. She had dropped by the studio for a glass of wine. But he hadn’t yet convinced her to remove her clothes.
“She moves like sex personified,” he said as he watched her walk away.
“Jesus, Frank, I don’t know how you get away with it.”
“Jan wants me to have a few girlfriends,” he said, his tone completely earnest. “She doesn’t like me hanging around the house all the time. She just likes to meet my girlfriends first. I never get involved with someone Jan doesn’t like. Jan likes Joan. It’s Joan who gets jealous of the other girlfriends.”
Fleisher shook his head. “I can’t keep it all straight.” Fleisher had been married to Michelle for thirty years, and his passions were conventional: Besides nineteenth-century detective stories, they included gourmet dining, travel with Michelle, and spoiling the grandchildren. He teased and joked with Michelle as mercilessly as the day he started courting her; in many ways, he had never stopped courting her.
Bender never stopped loving his wife, either. He spoke of her with great fondness. He’d stopped sleeping around with strangers, he said. All his girlfriends were close, intimate friends.
“Let me get this straight,” Fleisher smirked. “In other words, you’re not sowing wild oats anymore. It’s all about relationships now.”
“Right.”
Fleisher laughed out loud. “Frank, if you were in my family I’d chase you with a rifle like your father-in-law did. But on a murder case, you’re the best.”
At this, Bender leaned forward, lowering his voice confidentially. “Bill, listen, I’m working on this case that’s really worrying me,” said Bender. “The marshals are tracking down a fugitive killer, a legendary hit man, and they asked me to be the ‘eyes’ of the task force. They say I have an ability to see faces none of the others have.”
“Congratulations. It sounds like a fantastic opportunity.”
Bender frowned. “I’m supposed to do sketches and a bust showing ‘age progression’ so they know what they’re looking for. The marshal deputized me and I’m carrying a gun. They were very upfront about the danger.”
Fleisher’s eyes widened.
“I know, I haven’t seen his face up close, but the guy looks just like me. He’s the same size, same age, same body type. He’s also an artist. It’s spooky. I feel like he’s my doppelganger, an evil twin.”
Fleisher scowled. Bender took a sip of coffee. “I’m not afraid of anybody,” he said. “But I saw him once through a telephoto lens and his eyes were so cold. He knows who I am and the threat I represent to him. I can feel it-he wants me dead.
“His name is Hans Vorhauer,” Bender continued. “He’s a German American like me, but killing is in his blood. His father was a Nazi S.S. officer. And he’s a genius-he has the highest IQ tested in the history of the Pennsylvania prison system.”
Fleisher practically lunged out of his chair. “Hans Vorhauer! I can tell you all about Hans Vorhauer. I chased him all over the East Coast in the 1970s for the murder of a federal witness friend.”
Vorhauer was one of the most wanted and dangerous fugitives at large in the United States. Accused by federal agents in a rare interrogation of killing seventeen people as a hired assassin, Vorhauer openly mocked them. “No,” he smirked, with the arrogance of a man who had never been charged with any of them, “it’s thirty-three.” Vorhauer was a brilliant tactician of murder, a master of disguise, black-market gunsmith, drug dealer, armed robber, and the uber-hit man for East Coast gangsters, elusive as a ghost. A self-taught chemist, he operated one of the largest methamphetamine laboratories on the East Coast until he was finally arrested and convicted of meth possession and armed robbery charges in the late 1970s. Vorhauer was sentenced to twenty years in Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia, the state’s largest maximum-security lockup. A model prisoner, he worked his way into the position of head of the prison shop.
On November 17, 1983, Vorhauer staged a spectacular escape from Graterford that the headlines called THE BREAKFRONT BREAK-OUT, escaping in the hollow compartment of an armoire he had made in the shop for sale and delivery outside. Crouched with him in the pine armoire-stained to resemble oak to better explain its great weight as it was wheeled outside to a waiting pickup truck-was convicted killer Robert Thomas Nauss, the sadistic leader of the Warlocks biker gang, who had strangled and carved up his beauty-queen girlfriend. An unknown couple driving the pickup truck drove away with the armoire, and the killers were never seen again. It was believed they had separated, but they were considered highly dangerous, and profilers thought it inevitable that they would kill again. The marshals had no higher priority than getting Vorhauer and Nauss off the streets-and they’d recently had a break in the long-dormant case. An old neighbor of Vorhauer’s thought she saw him in Philadelphia, where his wife lived, but she wasn’t sure; she hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. The marshals weren’t sure, either; the problem was photographs of him were seventeen years out of date, and nobody knew what the fugitive looked like-or was even sure he was in Philadelphia until Bender spotted him on a stakeout. Bender’s job was to produce sketches and a bust showing how Vorhauer looked today, and he was stumped. It was his first federal case, his first case of national importance. His future forensic career-and perhaps his life-depended on it. He was stumped.
“I saw him at a distance, it was way too fuzzy a view,” Bender said glumly. “There’s something I’m missing about him. I need to know more about him, something that will help me capture his look and his personality in my art.”
Fleisher’s big face was flushed. The memory of the hit man had haunted him for over a decade.
“I’d do anything to help you get that bastard. He has the coldest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
Fleisher knocked on the boxer’s door in Queens and stood to the side with the other special agents. The old boxer was saving for his retirement with a part-time job doing Mafia hijackings.
He answered the door in his underwear. His wife was cooking in the kitchen. The feds said they wanted to talk to him about the murder of a federal informant-one of Fleisher’s informants, the dumbest ever, had told the mob he was talking to the FBI.
“Can I put some pants on?” the boxer asked.
“Sure,” the feds said.
“I’ll go with him,” Fleisher said.
In the bedroom the boxer reached for his pants, an arm’s length from a rifle against the wall. Fleisher put his hand over his service.38-worn gunslinger style over the groin, with the attitude I’m small and I’m Jewish, make my day-and said, “I hear on the street you’re trying to whack me. Get the rifle and let’s get this over with, mano a mano.”
The mobster backed down politely: “No, Mr. Fleisher, I’d never do such a thing.”
Fleisher was soft like the Italians were soft-emotional, wild, a little crazy. The Italians and the street people liked him, a reputation that had led his supervisor, Jim Scanlon, to call him into his office one morning in 1971 at the FBI headquarters in Boston.
As he sat down, Scanlon said, “I want you to look into the murder of a B-girl in the Combat Zone.”
Fleisher’s sources included hookers, bouncers, and bar girls. “They all love me there,” he famously bragged to the older agents, leading to the inevitable question, “What do they charge for that? ” Yet in fact the special agent could wheedle information from anybody. He didn’t spend a dime of the thousands of dollars in taxpayer money available to buy off informants. With the sweet smile of a Boy Scout and the street smarts of a bookie, Fleisher got people to open up, then he picked them clean.
“Her name was Vicki Harbin. She was fiftyish, a dancer working at the 222 Club,” Scanlon said. “They found her in her room at the Avery Hotel. She was lying on the floor near the door, stabbed to death.”
Fleisher’s eyes narrowed. “An over-the-hill B-girl, still dancing around a pole, hustling drinks, living the life in the Avery.” He shook his head sadly. The Avery was a narrow, ten-story landmark gone to seed, a respectable turn-of-the-century hotel turned hooker Hilton. In the 1940s and ’50s, Tommy Carr and his orchestra played “Good-bye to Paris ” in the Cameo Bar, and vaudevillians Jackie Gleason and Art Carney and actor Jason Robards camped in the hotel’s modest rooms, cheapest in the theater district. Filled with touring young performers, even then the Avery smelled of sex. The line was, “At two in the morning in the Avery a bell rang, and everyone went back to their own rooms.” By the spring of 1971, the Combat Zone’s dozens of adult bookstores, girlie shows, and massage parlors stretched outside the door. “The Avery had the saggy, tattered quality of a locale in a Raymond Chandler novel,” a journalist wrote.
“A bad john?”
“No, she wasn’t a prostitute. She was a dancer. You know-the body’s gone, but she’s in it for life. They found her lying on two dollars, the tip she always gave the bellhop for bringing her a bucket of ice at the end of the night.”
Fleisher’s brown eyes softened. “Everyone dreams of something.”
“Vicki Harbin was stabbed in the heart. It was a professional hit.”
“It’s terrible, but so what?” Fleisher shot back. “Is it a white-slavery case? Otherwise, it’s a Boston homicide, a police case.”
Scanlon frowned. “Until a black man by the name of Orange Harbin-”
“Orange?”
“The same. Mr. Orange Harbin, Vicki’s husband and by all accounts a fine gentleman, walks into the Boston PD last week and tells the desk sergeant his wife was killed on orders of the Baltimore gangster Bernie Brown.”
Fleisher’s eyebrows went up. “Wild Bernie Brown?”
Scanlon nodded.
“He’s quite a package,” said Fleisher. “Murder. Extortion. The rackets. Wild Bernie is about as mobbed-up as you can get without being Italian. He’s not a made guy, but he’s kicking money upstairs to someone, paying the street tax. I think he might be Jewish.”
“Whatever. Baltimore says Vicki was testifying against Brown before a federal grand jury,” Scanlon said.
Fleisher whistled. “The murder of a federal witness. He thought of a very effective way to shut her up. I guess Bernie’s still not going to choir practice on Sunday. He’s not flossing before he brushes.”
Scanlon was stone-faced. One of Fleisher’s weaknesses was he thought he was funny. It was part of his charm with informants. A bad joke or pun made them even more comfortable than a good one.
“They’re bringing in a lot of witnesses to the grand jury, putting the squeeze on him,” Scanlon said. “Bernie’s the king of the bust-out bars. The bar girl hangs on you all night selling a fantasy, but you never go home with her. She just busts out your wallet for watered-down gin. So the grand jury is after the bust-out bar empire, and Wild Bernie is busy knocking off witnesses.”
“More than one?”
“Talk to Baltimore. Before Harbin, they put a contract out on another witness down there, some guy involved in the bars. They put a bomb under the seat of his car, enough to obliterate him and a Buick. They didn’t want to kill his wife, so they figured this guy works at night, he’d turn the lights on and-boom-he’s in the next zip code. What they didn’t figure on was the wife, who’s a night person, too, sets the alarm, gets up early the next morning, and takes the car in for inspection. The mechanic checks the lights and boom-”
“They killed the mechanic?”
“No, only the blasting cap went off. Moisture might have got in it. It sounded like a cherry bomb, ripped up the seat, burned the guy’s ass, and scared the hell out of him. He was lucky.”
“So Vicki Harbin saw the handwriting on the wall and ran up to Boston and a new life in the Avery Hotel?”
“Right. The question is, what crawled out from under a rock and followed her? It’s the $64,000 question.”
“Nah,” Fleisher said. “It won’t cost that much.” He said he’d work his sources. “I bullshit with them all the time. They like me. Everybody likes me.” He grinned. “I don’t pay for it in the Combat Zone.”
Fleisher drove to the Bradford Hotel on Tremont Street. A Boston landmark built in the 1920s, the redbrick neoclassical hotel that was once “In the Heart of the City.” In the 1940s, big bands played on the rooftop and in Boston ’s largest ballroom. Now the Bradford was a hooker hotel in the heart of a living hell.
Fleisher had learned from FBI agents in Baltimore that Brown had sent his enforcer, Jack Sugarman, up to Boston to find Harbin. Sugarman was a World War II Marine hero from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, who came back from the war and ended up a gangster’s right-hand man. According to informants, Sugarman was the finger man-he went to Boston to find the dancer and point her out to the hit man. The hit man was Hans Vorhauer, whom Fleisher had never heard of. Baltimore said he was the best in the business. When the fax came in from the Baltimore office, Fleisher was chilled by the killer’s eyes in facsimile.
The Bradford was a sad twin sister to the nearby Avery. He figured it was the most likely place Sugarman would have stayed-if indeed the enforcer had come to Boston.
He would never stay in the Avery with the victim, and the Bradford is in the area of the Combat Zone, he thought to himself. A lot of hookers, pimps, and miscreants stay here.
“Hey, Bill, what do you want?” Paul, the hotel manager, a tall, balding man with stooped shoulders, stopped him near the elevators.
“I need to see the records.” Fleisher shook hands with the manager.
“More hookers?”
He nodded, but the manager had already turned around and was briskly leading him downstairs into a gloomy hallway. The hotel manager was a friend.
He’d helped Fleisher make his name working white-slavery cases. The White Slavery Act made transporting women across state lines for prostitution an interstate, or federal, crime. Along with tax violations, it was a favorite federal tool for tripping up gangsters; Lucky Luciano and Al Capone were arrested on white-slavery charges.
On one case, Fleisher had approached Paul with photographs, saying, “Have you seen these two women? I have a lead they’re hookers in town from Minneapolis.” To prevent the cops from zeroing in on them in their home cities, white slaves followed a circuit like a troupe- Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans.
“They’re here right now, come with me!” the manager had cried. He took the elevator to the fifth floor, then walked down the long hallway. Reaching their room, the manager had started banging on the door screaming, “Get out of my hotel, you whores!”
Now Paul led him to a small, dusty room and put three long cardboard banker’s boxes on a table in front of him. The boxes were stuffed with the hotel’s three-by-five registration cards, stacked and bundled with rubber bands. Fleisher riffled through three stacks of the cards for the previous month with great impatience, working rapidly.
Three weeks before the murder there was a chicken-scrawl signature reserving three nights: Jack Sugarman.
Two weeks before the murder, another three nights: Jack Sugarman.
The week of the murder, just one night: Jack Sugarman.
Bingo, he thought. I’ve got Sugarman in town. The first time he comes up from Baltimore to stake Vicki out, see what she’s doing. The second time, he works on her schedule, gets her hours and habits down. The third visit is brief-he points her out to Vorhauer. It would be trickier proving Vorhauer’s whereabouts. Vorhauer was a wanted fugitive and master of disguise; he would never have used his real name.
That evening Fleisher went to the dim, smoky cave of the Caribe Lounge, the best known of the Combat Zone’s nude bars. A young redhead was dancing on a small stage circled with men watching through clouds of cigarette smoke. The redhead would occasionally flash her G-string and pasties-total nudity was banned in Boston -but not with a cop in the room. George Tecci, the owner-manager, stopped him cold near the door.
“What do you want?” Tecci asked, his lip curled in distaste.
Fleisher took out his wallet and showed his badge. “FBI, I’m looking for Cinderella.”
“What about?”
“I want to talk to her about the murder of Vicki Harbin, who danced at 222.” He showed Tecci a portrait photograph of the dancer, a brunette with a round, aging face. As the manager led him downstairs to the dressing rooms, a tall woman in her twenties, at least six feet in heels, blond and buxom, came walking toward them with a leonine grace that took his breath away. She was the sexiest woman Fleisher had ever seen, and when he studied her face, one of the prettiest.
“Cinderella, this fellow wants to talk to you,” Tecci said. She smiled-she had high and delicate cheekbones, and her smile was dazzling. The eyes were big and blue and brittle. Fleisher took the portrait out of his folder.
“I understand you were a friend of Vicki Harbin’s?” Cinderella’s smile disappeared as she led him to her dressing room.
“I don’t know anything.”
They sat in the mirror lights, so close Fleisher breathed her scent, and he gave her his warmest, most sympathetic smile. She was a knockout and she was sweet and she liked him; he could feel it behind the hard eyes. Their legs were almost touching. She had incredible legs. He looked closer in the hazy light and focus returned like a blow to the head-Her Adam’s apple is the size of Johnny Appleseed’s, he thought. Her hands are as big as Sonny Liston’s. A fantasy about a he-she, he thought, could wake you up like twenty-four ounces of cold coffee.
When had she last seen Harbin?
Her eyes were dead. “I don’t know anything.”
Was Harbin afraid of Bernie Brown?
“I don’t know anything.”
Had she seen these two men? He took out the faxed photos of Sugarman and Vorhauer.
“I don’t know anything.” It sounded like a mantra to an empty universe.
Fleisher knew it would be difficult. According to his sources, Cinderella’s husband was Bobby Urbin, a doorman for Bernie Brown. He watched the gangster’s door in Baltimore and “ran a card game for some wise guys in Boston,” Fleisher said. He and Cinderella traveled the circuit together.
“You don’t know anything, but now you know this. Let me show you what they did to your friend Vicki.”
He reached into the folder for the close-up of Harbin with the knife wounds in her heart.
Cinderella let out a small gasp and put a hand over her mouth; the big blue eyes were moist.
“I’m trying to find out who killed Vicki. Here’s my name and number. Call me if you want to help.” She said nothing as he gave her his card and left.
It was time, he thought as he got in his car, to put pressure on Cinderella and her husband.
At ten that night, he drove to the 222 Club. The bouncer-a squat, heavyset man, five foot three inches tall and nearly as wide-stopped him at the door. He wore thick glasses on a pudgy round face, had hair dyed a shade too dark, a cigarette hung on fleshy lips, and had a blackjack in his back pocket. One of his brown eyes wandered in the socket like a satellite to the moon face.
“Cockeyed Benny,” Fleisher said in greeting. They shook hands warmly. “I’m looking into the murder of Vicki Harbin, and I’m looking for these guys.” He held up photos of Sugarman and Vorhauer.
Cockeyed Benny nodded at the picture of Sugarman. “He was here.” Sugarman left the 222 with a hooker, Benny said; he’d watched them walk out. He took her back to the Bradford, and “he paid her with a check that bounced.”
“Do you know Bobby Urbin?”
Cockeyed Benny grunted. “Sure. He’s always in here.” Fleisher had never met Cinderella’s husband and didn’t have a photograph of him. He and Cockeyed Benny worked out a signal that evening. Fleisher would sit at a table with a drink, Benny would stand at the bar; when Bobby Urbin walked by, the bouncer would light a cigarette. Just as Urbin strolled by, Benny lit up, but at that moment some guy at the bar passed out, and a crowd formed. Cockeyed Benny waded into the crowd with Fleisher and tapped Urbin on the shoulder; Fleisher said, “FBI. I want to ask you some questions,” and hustled him out of the 222 and into a car. Fleisher sat in the back pumping Urbin with questions, while the street hustler put his hand inside Fleisher’s thigh.
I’ll let him do it to get the story, he thought, amused. He likes me, too. They all like me. But Urbin refused to talk about the Harbin murder. He had to let him go.
Frustrated, Fleisher went back to FBI headquarters and called Frank Mulvee, the Boston police detective assigned to the case, and told him Urbin had knowledge of the murder and marijuana in his apartment, a tip he had gleaned on the street.
The next morning, the police raided Urbin’s apartment; Urbin and Cinderella were both at home, and Mulvee called the FBI agent. Fleisher went to the apartment and tried to get Urbin to cooperate in the Harbin murder. “You don’t know anything,” Fleisher said. “I don’t believe you, and neither do the police. Why don’t you just take a polygraph?”
“Oh, Bobby, take the test,” Cinderella chimed in. Boston police took him to a private examiner; the polygraphist attached the blood-pressure cuff, the pneumograph tubes across the chest and abdomen, the electric sensor plates on the fingertips. Urbin answered a few questions, then ripped off all the instruments and ran out of the office. They had only one chart on him, but it showed clear deception.
Fleisher’s head was spinning. He had placed Sugarman, the finger man, in town, but nobody had seen the hit man Vorhauer; Vorhauer was a ghost. Brown’s people were scurrying like rats from a ship. The police couldn’t find Urbin. He had failed to get Harbin ’s friends to talk. Finally he got the name of a dancer who knew Vicki intimately-Terri Emanuel, a gorgeous copper-toned young woman, half Filipino, half Cajun American, half man, half woman until recently; now Terri was as pretty as Cinderella. He put her at the top of his interview list.
That night he was at a bar with two friends, deputy agent in charge U.S. Marshal Mike Assad, and his brother Eddie, a Boston cop, when an extremely shapely woman walked by their table. The three bachelors whistled as they watched her go, then sucked in their breath for a moment of silent contemplation.
“You think she’s endowed,” Fleisher said, “you should have seen the knockout I interviewed at the Caribe the other night, Cinderella.”
“Cinderella, pretty name,” Mike said.
“She makes this one look like a schoolteacher, and she’s a guy.”
Mike and Eddie groaned.
“That’s strange,” Eddie said. “We had a job this morning, before dawn, a mysterious death of a woman and she was a he-she, too.”
“What was her name?”
“Terri Emanuel.”
“Jesus Christ!” Fleisher cried. “I’m supposed to interview her.”
After pressing Eddie for details, Fleisher left the table and called Mulvee from a pay phone. He agreed to meet the Boston detective at police headquarters. At two in the morning, the police report gave them the address where Emanuel’s body was found. She lived in an apartment with some guy named Art Nettles.
At three in the morning, they knocked on the door and Nettles cheerfully let them in. Art was a brunette, “half man, half woman, not finished with the operation,” Fleisher said. “She had boobs but didn’t have her winky removed yet.” Terri roomed with Art and slept on the sofa. Now Art sat on the sofa in a bathrobe left open to show off the new breasts and was glad to talk about Terri’s death.
Art and Terri had been frightened at an after-hours club by two very tough-looking Italian guys who wanted to take them home. They were relieved to get away from the men and back to their apartment. In the middle of the night they were awakened by the buzzer, and Art let the caller in. Through the crack in the door she saw the two Italian guys, who pushed their way in. One of them punched Art in the jaw; the other grabbed Terri, who always slept in the nude on the sofa, rolled her in a blanket, and ran out. Art had the presence of mind to yank the fire alarm. As the alarm sounded, the two goons dropped Terri and ran away. Terri and Art went back to sleep, adventure over. In the late morning, a dancer friend from Chicago called and asked Art, “How’s Terri? I had a dream about her and I smelled flowers. Is she all right?” Art went out to the sofa to wake Terri. She was dead. The ME had no idea what killed her.
The ME was a piece of shit, Mulvee said.
“Jesus,” Fleisher said. He had a feeling Bernie Brown was trying to erase all his witnesses. But he had nothing close to proof. He’d hit another wall.
That night, Cinderella called him. She wanted to talk. Yes, she confirmed, Vicki Harbin knew her life was in danger and was afraid; she was looking over her shoulder constantly. The week before she was killed, Harbin had an experience on the stage that terrified her. While dancing, she looked out and saw the big, ugly, scarred face of Jack Sugarman. Sugarman, who won the Navy Cross in World War II for killing 132 Japanese soldiers in one night on Guadalcanal, and whose face had been since rearranged by a baseball bat, was sitting in the pit watching her with a leering smile on his face. Seated next to Sugarman was Bernie Brown’s ace hit man, Hans Vorhauer. She knew them both. Vorhauer was expressionless. His wolf eyes stared through her as if she wasn’t there.
Scanlon thought Fleisher was “really shaking up the bushes,” but he didn’t feel he had a case until Cinderella cooperated.
Then, that summer of 1971, the FBI transferred Fleisher to Detroit; he was off the case.
Bender looked up from his coffee. “Man, that’s frustrating. Wow, I would have loved to have met Cinderella. Did you ever get Vorhauer?”
Fleisher scowled. “No. We trailed him all over Boston. He was in a lot of bars, but nothing we could nail down. Then in Detroit I got a call from an agent I’d been working with in Baltimore. He says, ‘Guess what? We got Vorhauer.’ ”
The FBI had received a tip that Vorhauer, a Most Wanted fugitive, was hiding out in Sugarman’s house in suburban Baltimore. Half a dozen FBI agents and police offers went to the house, heavily armed. Sugarman answered the door and let them in. A middle-aged man with red hair was sitting at the kitchen table, an arm’s length from a brown leather briefcase. None of the agents recognized him; they demanded identification. The man’s driver’s license and Social Security number said Joe Smith; his credit cards and club membership said Joe Smith. The last piece of paper in his wallet was a folded-up Western Union receipt documenting money wired to his mother, Barbara Vorhauer, in Hanau, Germany. Vorhauer’s disguise had fooled all of them. Agents arrested the hit man, and brought Sugarman to Boston for questioning. Sugarman flipped immediately to avoid charges of harboring a fugitive.
Bernie Brown paid Vorhauer $5,000 to kill Harbin, Sugarman said. Vorhauer scouted the dancer’s movements and knocked on her door in the evening after a show, the finger man said. She must have thought it was the bellhop with her bucket of ice; Vorhauer pushed his way in. He told Sugarman he stabbed Harbin three times in the heart.
The agents were lucky to arrest the hit man before he reached his brown briefcase. A.22-caliber silencer fired out of the side; there was a ring trigger on the handle. Vorhauer had taken Sugarman into a Baltimore grocery store, said, “Watch this,” and walked down the aisle shooting up the cereal boxes-pfff, pfff, pfff-with the briefcase and walked out calm as a banker on lunch hour. Nobody heard a thing. Vorhauer was a genius, Sugarman said, who created black-market weapons unequaled in the world.
“Vorhauer is a beast,” Bender said. He glanced over his shoulder as if he expected the hit man to be standing there. “That’s what I thought. He’s brilliant and he’s a psychopath. This will really help the bust.” He shifted uneasily in his seat.
Fleisher shook his head sadly. “We never did get him. Murder charges were never filed against Vorhauer. There wasn’t enough corroboration, and they let him go. We all have cases we wish we could go back in time and fix. That’s one of mine.”
They were quiet for a moment, and Fleisher said, “One more thing. It’s strange, but we followed Vorhauer for months, and this is the oddest thing about him. He liked to hang out in gay and transvestite bars.”
Bender’s face lit up.
“He wasn’t gay,” Fleisher said. “He recruited disaffected homosexuals as enforcers. Some of them enjoyed hurting heterosexuals.”
Bender grinned like he wasn’t listening; his eyes were suddenly somewhere else. It was like making eye contact with the Milky Way.
“Earth to Frank.”
Wendy had sailed back into the room.
The ASAC grinned and shook his head once in a swift jerking motion, like he was shrugging off a fly. He often wondered what it felt like to be Frank Bender. Was it like being a bloodhound obsessed with sex and death; did ideas come like radio signals to the teeth?
Wendy came with the check, and Bender chatted her up, his voice as smooth and warm as grade-A honey, all anxiety gone. The ASAC finished his coffee and laughed.
“Frank, you’re a hit man yourself.”
Bender smiled to himself. His mind was wandering in familiar territory. He was thinking about brunettes-brunettes and blondes.
The studio was very still. Far off he heard a sound like the sea breaking, but it was only the ceaseless pounding of cars on the expressway. Above in the dimness, filthy skylights held the dawn. Vorhauer’s face snarled from the shadows, hideous in the slanting red light of the morning star. The face was half-formed, twisted, and grotesque, as if the lump of clay experienced the pain of being pinioned on the steel armature. It reminded Bender of Michelangelo’s slave trapped in rock, mightily struggling to emerge. He looked down at his coffee and back at the face.
“Aw, hell,” he cursed. He slapped the side of the clay and felt like throwing it. What was missing?
Bender had made fifteen drawings of Vorhauer in addition to the half-done sculpture. He had obsessively researched the hit man, as he did all his subjects. He’d studied police files, the newspaper, the morgue, the thirteen-year-old photo. He’d annoyed the marshals with endless questions. The official view was one-dimensional-the hit man was as elusive and as pure a distillation of evil as they had ever pursued, end of story. It wasn’t enough to mold into the three dimensions of life. Somehow, he’d failed to capture the essence of the master of disguise.
Bender had confronted Vorhauer himself on a stakeout and come away shaken in a way secondhand sources couldn’t convey. Vorhauer was “cold as ice, cold, cold, cold,” he said. “I could feel clearly from his eyes that he wanted me dead.” Still Bender searched for a missing ingredient, a clue to Vorhauer’s soul, if he had one. The marshals couldn’t catch what they couldn’t see. Maybe he needed to think like a hit man. He was sipping the cold coffee in front of the head, trying to see the world through the eyes of a cold-blooded assassin, when the doorbell rang.
A heavyset man of medium height, unkempt gray hair falling over a round face, sized up Bender with a cocksure grin. It was Paul Schneider, a Delaware County detective deputized as a U.S. Marshal. Schneider was one of the best detectives Bender had ever worked with-tough, smart, relentless. “If these TV series wanted a real investigator, it wouldn’t be the good-looking people they always have,” Bender said. “It would be a guy with a gut like Paul Schneider.” Schneider wasn’t just any deputy; he was in charge of the marshals’ Vorhauer task force.
Schneider’s grin flickered in the gloom. “I saw him, plain as day. I saw Vorhauer.”
“You’re kidding!” Bender’s face flushed; his eyes flared with excitement. After nine months of futilely chasing the phantom assassin, they finally had a break.
Schneider gave a short jerk of his head. “He was on Wellington Street an hour ago, a block from the wife’s house. He was getting into a car with another man.”
Bender’s eyes went inward, a dreamy look, as if the machine inside were suddenly unplugged. Thousands of cops and informants and the nation’s top bounty hunters were on alert in the hunt for Vorhauer. But no one had seen him except Bender. Bender saw him the first time as he stood on a crowded sidewalk outside a pharmacy. Vorhauer wore a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a cigarette on thin lips. Somehow he intuited Bender’s presence raising a camera in a parked car a block away. Vorhauer glared into the telephoto lens for an instant; the hard, mocking face cracked into a smirk and vanished. The film barely registered him, a fuzzy image impossible to sketch, a residue of light and shadow. It felt like ghost hunting, or waiting for a saint’s statue to weep blood.
Bender’s second sighting was truly frightening. He and Schneider posed as garbagemen to collect Barbara Vorhauer’s trash on Wellington Street. Vorhauer was believed to be hiding out with his wife, a Philadelphia nurse. Bender was extremely cautious; Vorhauer would shoot anybody who threatened him. Dressed in the uniform of a municipal worker, he sat in the passenger seat of the city garbage truck with a loaded shotgun under the floor mat as Schneider steered behind the house. Bender kept his head down so he wouldn’t arouse suspicion as he threw the garbage bags into the compacter. Quickly he pulled a camera from his coveralls and snapped pictures of the back of the house, zooming in on each of the windows in turn. As he focused on a darkened second-story window, he broke out in a cold sweat. The blinds were bent as if someone was peering down at them. Suddenly he felt utterly naked, completely exposed, flushed with terror. His heart accelerated as he waited for the rifle explosion and the darkness at the end of the world. The moment passed. But later when he thought about it his guts seized anew when he realized he had lived, he remained alive, on a killer’s whim.
Or maybe it was just a suspicious nurse peering out her back window. Vorhauer seemed as real as death, as unreal as a ghost.
Bender snapped back to the world around him and picked up his pastels. He walked to his easel and said, “Let’s get this down in detail so the task force knows exactly what he looks like. I want to nail the guy.”
Schneider nodded, and stood behind Bender at the sketch board. The artist’s hand moved rapidly across the white sketch paper, creating a narrow street and a car almost as rapidly as Schneider described the scene. “We were doing surveillance of the wife, waiting for her to come out of the house,” the deputy said. “I saw him on the street getting into a parked car on the right side of the street-”
“What’d he look like?” Bender’s pulse raced. He felt they were finally zeroing in on their quarry.
“He looked nasty,” Schneider said.
Bender nodded impatiently. “I could just see the side of the driver’s face, his ear, as I drove by them,” the marshal continued. “I had an angle on Vorhauer sitting in the passenger seat. Hard, lean, pockmarked face, reddish-brown hair. He was wearing a baseball cap.”
“What color?”
“Blue.”
The sketch quickly filled in to match Schneider’s description.
Bender turned and looked at Schneider. “Did he know you were around?”
“No way, partner.” The deputy’s eyes narrowed, as if he had been insulted. “We’ve done this once or twice.”
Bender lowered his heavy brow until his light blue eyes reduced to slivers of ice. His voice was measured and cool, as if some internal fan had slowed everything down. Bender knew Vorhauer was reputed to have the highest IQ of anybody in the history of the Pennsylvania penal system.
“He’s extremely street smart. A guy like Vorhauer can sense when he’s being watched-that’s good enough for him.”
Schneider shrugged. “Not a chance.”
“What did you do? ” asked Bender, his face flushing with adrenaline.
Schneider grimaced. “Nothing.”
“What do you mean ‘nothing’?” The artist’s head turned the color of a ripening plum.
“We couldn’t do anything,” Schneider said, eyes downcast. “He’d think nothing of shooting at me. We’ve got to pick our time and place.”
Bender’s arm sagged over the easel. Schneider and the others always described Vorhauer in terms of awe. “This is a very formidable individual,” Schneider kept saying. “Very formidable.” Schneider couldn’t get over the fact that after the genius hit man and finish carpenter engineered his prison escape, he attended college to study chemistry and constructed an autonomous meth lab that allowed him to manufacture the drug without being in the lab to risk arrest or potential explosions. Even the cops were afraid of Vorhauer, who was extremely violent and had shot his way out of stakeouts in the past.
“Cheer up. We can’t lose with the Visual Detective on our side,” said Schneider, referring to the nickname he had hung on Bender.
Bender grinned good-naturedly, but his eyes were again far away. He was hearing the voice he trusted most, “something from inside of myself.” Others called it intuition, but to Bender the voice spoke with utter certainty, and gave him evidence that couldn’t be stored in a police locker, or confined to court documents. The voice supplied now three fresh insights he decided were absolute fact, and worth a trip, late that night after Schneider left, back to the drawing board. First, Vorhauer knew he had been seen up close by a U.S. Marshal. Second, as a defensive maneuver the master of disguise would dramatically change his looks again.
Third, he would become a blond.
“A blond?” Tom Rappone, the head of the U.S. Marshals Service in Philadelphia, looked quizzically at Bender when he handed him the final sketch of Vorhauer that afternoon. It was a black-and-white sketch; there was no time to blend pastel colors, Bender explained. Still, the charcoal shading indicated light blond hair.
“This is what Vorhauer looks like,” Bender said defensively. “If you catch him within two weeks, he’s going to be bleached blond.”
“Blond.” Rappone flashed a humorless smile beneath dark, probing eyes. The deputies were constantly amused by Bender’s off-the-wall ideas and visions, but this was a topper. A mob hit man disguised as the Breck girl.
“He’s Aryan and proud of his Germanic heritage,” Bender said. “The skin coloring is right,” he insisted. “He’s also an artist, very creative.”
Rappone waited as if there must be more. Bender’s face reddened. He didn’t get timid when his psychic visions were questioned; he got mad, and sometimes he got even.
“I learned from Fleisher that when he was with the FBI in Boston they tailed Vorhauer to a lot of gay and transsexual bars,” he said. “Vorhauer wasn’t gay, he was recruiting enforcers. But he looks way too straight. Going blond would allow him to pass in tranny bars. Tom, I’m telling you, he’s going to bleach his hair.”
Rappone shrugged and made copies of the blond hit man for his agents. When Schneider saw the sketch, he sported a wide grin. “We believe in you, Frank, but an assistant DA says this is a joke, and a lot of the guys think you’re nuts.”
Bender smiled with his sheepish look that swayed moral women of all ages.
Bender was still struggling to perfect the Vorhauer bust a week later when the phone rang in the vast warehouse studio. It was Rappone, with the news that the task force’s long surveillance of Barbara Vorhauer had borne fruit. She had led the marshals right to her husband.
“You’re kidding me! What happened? ” The artist’s voice, childlike in its enthusiasms, rang across the line.
A night-shift nurse at Osteopathic Hospital, Barbara had gotten off work early in the morning as usual. But instead of taking her routine route home, she’d raced along a twisting, helter-skelter path designed to shake surveillance. Trained by Hans, Barbara had proven remarkably adept at avoiding the marshals for months.
But this time they kept pace with hairpin turns and U-turns, up blind alleys, and into the parking lot of the Penrose Diner. Barbara got out of her car and entered the diner. When she came out, she left her car in the parking lot and walked across the street to the Quality Inn, a twelve-story cylindrical edifice. Hans Vorhauer had picked the round hotel with views in all directions for a tryst with his wife.
Rappone posted a nondescript surveillance van in the hotel parking lot intending to wait out Vorhauer. The day wore on, and inside the van, four heavily armed U.S. Marshals kept a relentless eye on the hotel entrance, unable to leave the van even to use the bathroom. Any unusual movement would spook Vorhauer into fleeing. The surveillance continued all night long. By morning, Rappone had called for backup.
At 10 A.M., Vorhauer and his wife walked out of the hotel and were immediately surrounded by U.S. Marshals. The hit man raised his hands in surrender. He was wearing a light jacket, a hat, and sunglasses, and when he removed the hat his hairstyle was dramatically different: It was cut short and bleached blond.
“Good work, Visual Detective. I don’t know how you do it,” said a still-stunned Schneider, who had dropped by the studio to congratulate his artist partner. “A lot of people owe you an apology.”
“Good work yourself,” Bender said. “You’re the best detective I’ve ever worked with.”
“Want to go get a beer?”
“Nah, I’ve got to paint this head.”
Schneider looked at the bust of a dead man with a familiar face. “The Man in the Cornfield,” Bender called the unidentified white male in his twenties whose corpse had been found by a farmer plowing his fields in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Over the weeks they had worked together on the Vorhauer case, Schneider had watched him transform the skull of the Man in the Cornfield into a clay mold and finally a plaster cast. The white plaster bust had a heroic profile, a handsome long-haired young man with a strong jaw and a noble nose. The Man in the Cornfield looked like Theseus about to face the Minotaur. “Now that you’ve found Vorhauer”-Bender nodded toward the head-“maybe you can find out who this guy is.”
Schneider smirked. “You know nothing about him, right?”
“Nope, nothing.”
Lines of discontent etched the sides of the detective’s mouth. “Yeah, right. Tens of thousands of missing people in this country, and you want me to pull him out of a hat. I’m no magician. You think you are?”
The artist’s eyes glittered. “No, it’s a team effort.”
On his way home from Bender’s Philadelphia studio, Schneider stopped at the Upper Darby Police Department to get his mail. He hadn’t been to the station in weeks. When he wasn’t on loan to the U.S. Marshals Service, Schneider worked as a township detective, and because of his years investigating the Warlocks-and Vorhauer’s fellow escapee Nauss-Schneider was chosen as a key member of the Vorhauer and Nauss fugitive task forces. He was known in the department as an expert on biker gangs. As soon as he walked in the door, an officer hailed him to look at a photograph in a missing-person flyer. The officer said he’d just learned from an informant that the missing person in the flyer was a man named Edward Meyers, who had been killed by a biker gang and buried in the Pennsylvania hills.
“This is the guy. Do you know him?”
Schneider’s face opened in surprise. Staring out at him from the photograph was the Man in the Cornfield. “No, I don’t know him, but I saw him not fifteen minutes ago in Frank Bender’s studio.”
Oblivious to his colleague’s smirks and wisecracks, Schneider returned to the studio, and he and Bender held the flyer photograph alongside the bust. The Man in the Cornfield was a double for Edward Meyers. Police would match Meyers’s dental records to the skull and confirm it.
“We’re on a roll, Visual Detective,” Schneider said. He had been a step behind Nauss for many frustrating years during the biker’s reign of terror on his home turf. He saw this as his big chance. “Now we’ve got to find Nauss.”
“Piece of cake, partner.” Bender beamed in pride, his silver incisor winking in his own skull.
Bender and Schneider were secretly excited about their chances of finally nabbing Vorhauer’s partner, the convicted killer Robert Thomas Nauss. Their enthusiasm was not dampened by the fact that the cunning Nauss had been on the lam for years after the prison break without once being seen by law enforcement, or that there was no reliable new information about his whereabouts or appearance. Nothing.
Success was all but assured, though it wasn’t something they could discuss with most cops. It had been foretold by a psychic.
The psychic was Penny Wright, a nearly blind woman who had helped Schneider on several cases. The marshal had taken Bender to meet her several weeks earlier, and she had predicted that they would capture their next fugitive in a building with a large column. After the Vorhauer arrest at the Quality Inn, Schneider and Bender realized the hotel’s unusual architecture was itself a large column. With new significance, they recalled Wright’s other prediction that after the column arrest the next fugitive they would catch would be a man with a bad stomach. Schneider was fired with excitement. “Nauss was shot in the stomach by a fellow Warlock gang member when he was younger,” he said. “I bet his stomach is giving him trouble.”
Bender agreed. Schneider looked at his Visual Detective partner with a widening sense of possibilities. He’d been chasing fugitives for a decade, to country safe houses and urban hideaways, against impossible odds. But now it seemed that even the Most Wanted criminals were merely hiding in folds and twists in time, their movements apparent to the strangely light-colored eyes of Frank Bender.
“Mr. Nauss,” Schneider said, “must be the Man with the Bad Stomach.”
Bender grinned.
“No doubt.”
After midnight, Bender took Joan to the white underground room. They danced and drank vodka in clear glasses. Outside the wind wailed over the dark shuttered row houses and dying river. They watched David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Bender was reminded of Lynch’s dark but lovely Philadelphia vision and felt it “downloading” into him. “ Philadelphia [is]… fantastically beautiful,” the filmmaker wrote. “Factories, smoke, railroads, diners, the strangest characters, the darkest night… so much fear and crime that just for a moment there was an opening to another world… I just have to think of Philadelphia now, and… I hear the wind, and I’m off into the darkness somewhere.” It was a blast of energy, but nothing helped.
In the middle of the night Joan returned home to her husband and two children in New Jersey. Bender crawled into bed with Jan for a brief, tortured rest. The sun rose pale and fractured by the dirt-streaked skylights. It was July, the steaming summer of 1987, and nothing could possibly help. His muse was gone.
“The Harmony of Form” was the name he gave his muse. Harmony was the blissful grace that allowed him to feel the inevitable shape of a dead man’s mouth based on the eyes and nose. He entered a trancelike state of creation that others mistook for God-like arrogance. In fact, in these moments Bender felt the lowest humility and love for the implicit order of things. “There’s a harmony flowing through everything: art, music, shape. Sometimes you can just feel the way things are and ought to be,” he said. Sometimes not. And then he was like a junkie standing before the last clinic cut from the budget.
Without his muse, the half-formed head of the sadistic killer Robert Thomas Nauss was a stubborn scornful lump of undead clay, a brown-mud Beelzebub. The reborn killer, of Bender’s own creation, seemed to be hiding from his true form, mocking him in a battle of wills. He felt like he lived with the spirit of his subjects, and Nauss was proving even trickier and nastier than Vorhauer. He was staring at the Warlock’s merciless clay eyes when the telephone scattered the cats in the shadows of the warehouse.
“Frank Bender.” His voice was clear and strong, an inverse of the chaos around him. The man on the phone introduced himself as Bob Leschorn, chief inspector of the U.S. Marshals Service at headquarters in McLean, Virginia. He sounded smooth and businesslike, with that commanding charm that’s a half size too small to cover the blunt impatience of power.
“I’ve heard about your work on Vorhauer and Nauss, Frank. We need your help on a very important and sensitive case. I’m calling to see if you’ll consider doing it.”
“Sure, great! I’ll do anything I can to help.” Bender’s breath came a little faster. His commercial photography was inconsistent and money was tight; he needed the work badly. Jan would be thrilled with another federal case-this time from the very top of the pyramid.
“Good. But let’s take it one step at a time. We can’t talk about this on the phone. We have to be very covert about this. It’s an extremely dangerous fugitive, Ten Most Wanted. My assistants will bring you to me. Meanwhile, Frank, I don’t want you to mention this to anyone. Not to friends in the police department, the FBI, even marshals not working on the case.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
“We don’t want anyone to know, not even your wife.”
Jan wasn’t interested in the details of his work, and Bender was uncomfortable sharing case information with anyone, even with Joan. He’d just have to be careful to cover or hide the new bust when anyone visited the studio.
“OK,” he replied.
Three mornings later, marshals Tom Conti and Steve Quinn picked him up in a dark sedan with tinted windows. As they hurtled south on I-95, the deputies said they were driving him to the Philadelphia airport, and the chief inspector was flying up from Virginia to meet him. The only flight information the chief supplied was “afternoon.” As the marshals scurried around the airport trying to find his flight, Bender sensed the chief was testing him and his men, as well as taking security precautions. They waited two hours for the flight to arrive.
Leschorn was in his fifties, tall and graying, a spit-and-polish lawman in an expensive suit and tie. He took them into an airport restaurant and chose a table in a back corner. After the waitress disappeared with their order, he leaned toward Bender and lowered his voice to describe the case while the deputies kept a watchful eye on the door. Leschorn said they were looking for Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, the underboss of the Colombo crime family in New York City. Persico, fifty-seven, had been groomed to be the godfather of one of the five major American crime families, along with his even more notorious brother, Carmine “The Snake” Persico. The Persico brothers had come up through the ranks as feared enforcers for the Colombo family. The titular heirs to the late, legendary godfather Joseph Colombo, the Persico boys had trouble staying out of jail. Allie Boy had served sixteen years for murder in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York -allegedly taking the rap for his brother. After his conviction in 1980 for extortion and loan sharking, he jumped a $250,000 bail and went into hiding rather than face twenty more years in jail. He’d been on the lam for seven years.
The high-profile Persico had been so elusive a fugitive the FBI decided to wash its hands of the case and had recently pushed it over to the marshals. After spending a fortune on a worldwide manhunt following a trail of fake identifications and aliases, the bureau didn’t even know if the mafioso was still alive. “The last seven years basically we have been getting anonymous tips,” a federal spokesman said. “They were taking us all over the world-tips that he was in Honolulu, Japan, Miami, South America. They were numerous but they never panned out.”
Leschorn emphasized the need for secrecy and speed. Even among the marshals, Persico had attained the status of He Who Must Not Be Named. Deputies could refer to him only by a code name.
“This is a top priority for the service,” he said. “We’re putting a lot of resources into this.”
Bender smiled to himself. He knew the marshals liked to show up the FBI on big cases to affirm their reputation as the world’s best bounty hunters. They saw themselves as the true hard-nosed federal lawmen, little known compared to their more glamorous, pretentious federal brethren.
Leschorn pushed two small prison photographs of Persico across the table to Bender. The three-by-five head shots showed the mobster in profile and also looking straight out of the photograph. They were nearly twelve years old. Like for Vorhauer and Nauss, current photographic evidence was nonexistent.
“What happened to his face?” Bender asked. The whole left side of his face below the eye looked like he’d slept on a pillow of pebbles and nails, leaving permanent scars. Trailing the swath of scars, part of his lower lip was dark blue.
“He got in a fight in Sing Sing and someone threw acid in his face,” Leschorn said.
Whether he’d had plastic surgery since then nobody knew.
“This isn’t much,” Bender said.
“Are you willing to do it?” Leschorn wanted a finished bust in ten days.
Bender would need the same unlikely combination of art, science, and divination known as “age progression” that had nabbed Vorhauer and was stymieing him with Nauss.
“Absolutely.” He grinned, with the shiny, drunken look he had when reality exceeded his need for stimulation. He wasn’t happy unless the impossible odds against him held a tiny chance he could be a hero. “I need to find out everything I can about him.”
The feds knew little. In the twelve-year-old photos, Persico was a lean, forty-five-year-old man who fancied himself a playboy, dark-haired and olive-complected with a dark mustache. He was a heavy smoker and drinker, and preferred Scotch. He was married, but had many other women.
His longtime girlfriend was Mary Bari, a stunning five-foot-two brunette he met when she was fifteen and he was pushing forty. In the glamorous heyday of the New York mob, he showered her with diamonds, furs, trips to Vegas, nights on the town in the white Rolls-Royce with pistol-packing bodyguard. In 1984, while away from her in hiding, he arranged for her to work as a cocktail waitress at the wiseguys’ Wimpy Boys Social Club in Brooklyn so she could make a little money and hang out with the family.
She arrived at the club for the interview dressed like a gang-land knockout in pearls, tank top, high heels, and a snakeskin belt, and was warmly embraced by longtime pal Greg Scarpa Jr., son of the capo. Scarpa held her tight as his father, Greg “The Grim Reaper” Scarpa Sr., came up for a kiss. Instead he pulled a gun and put three bullets in her head. They dumped Mary on the street two blocks away. She had been rumored to be talking to the FBI about Persico’s hideout.
“Jesus,” Bender said later when he heard the story. “This guy makes Vorhauer look like a gentleman.”
The marshals believed Persico was alive and living in Florida or Connecticut, popular mob hideouts.
As Bender worked on the bust, the marshals shuttled him between Philadelphia and New York, the base of the Persico operation, on a plane with the tightest security. Deputies prevented security or even the pilot from inspecting the fiberglass box seat-belted next to Bender. Bender finished in ten days, depicting the aging mafioso with a shrunken face beneath dyed dark hair and mustache. An ex-mobster in the witness protection program who’d seen Persico in recent years previewed the bust for the marshals. The head looked good.
Four months later, around five o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, November 9, 1987, a marshal spoke to the landlady at a garden apartment building in West Hartford, Connecticut. It was one of 150 addresses they had to run down-150 Connecticut men, culled from a database of thousands, whose driver’s license listed a similar height, weight, and birth date to Persico’s, and whose surname ended in a vowel. A caravan of seven more marshals parked on the street, loaded with firepower.
The marshal showed the landlady the twelve-year-old photographs of Persico. She shook her head. “I don’t know who that is.” He showed her the recent photograph of Bender’s bust. “Oh, that guy lives right upstairs. John Longo. He just called me to come up and look at his stove. He’s making sauce and the stove went out. He’s not too happy about it.”
The marshal smiled. “Don’t worry, we’ll fix his stove.” The phalanx of federal agents approached the door. Persico was known to be armed and extremely dangerous, and traveled with armed bodyguards. But now he answered the door himself. The underboss was alone, fretting over his spaghetti sauce.
The deputy flashed his badge. The aging mafioso’s withered, scarred face darkened. But he gave up without a struggle. Deputies found $7,300 in cash in the apartment, which was rented by a woman not his wife. The underboss was receiving money from the mob in New York and preparing to help lead the Colombo family out of a dark hour.
Allie Boy had eluded marshals for seven years by living a drab existence. After being nearly caught at a California track, he sentenced himself to padding around his Connecticut apartment in slippers, cooking, watching TV soaps, and reading newspapers. The flashy underboss would have been “taken down a lot earlier” if he’d continued to indulge his weaknesses for the horses, straight whiskey, and “lots of broads,” a New York marshal said. Instead, said the marshal, “From what we’ve pieced together, he lived moderately and read a lot of newspapers. It does sound like jail.”
The year before, his brother had been sentenced to a hundred years in prison on racketeering charges in a massive federal case that put away eight men who ruled the American Mafia through “The Commission.” Thanks to Bender, Allie Boy would soon join them behind bars.
The sculptor was feted with international publicity. The deputies marveled that Persico’s thin face, dyed dark hair, and mustache were the living image of the bust. “This case drove us crazy,” the top Brooklyn marshal, Michael Pizzi, told United Press International. “But the bust turned out to be accurate.” Said another marshal spokesman, “We hit pay dirt.”
PERSICO RAN OUT OF THYME, quipped the New York Daily News.
Bill Fleisher’s beard expanded around the oval of his mouth.
“Allie Boy Persico? I can tell you all about Allie Boy Persico!” Bender had been prohibited from discussing the case with his friend until it was wrapped up, but now, three weeks later, he was celebrating at his regular luncheon with Fleisher. Bender was in a jovial mood. Once again he’d predicted the unpredictable path of time across a killer’s face. The head he dubbed “Scarface” had been one of his most satisfying cases.
Fleisher wagged his big head. He felt that he and Bender were connected by whatever invisible strings the universe was pulling. “When I was with the FBI, I was assigned to the Colombo family squad in New York, and we were always chasing Allie Boy. We went to his farm in upstate New York and arrested him on an Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives charge-he had an illegal rifle. It was early morning, and he smelled terrible. I don’t think he brushed his teeth. And he looked like he hadn’t slept. I interviewed him in the New York State Police barracks near his farm. He was a typical wiseguy of that era from Brooklyn, kind of gruff but charming. I can’t say he wasn’t a gentleman, except he’d kill you if you looked at him the wrong way.”
Bender laughed. The luncheon marked a major triumph of his new life in forensic art.
Fleisher raised an iced-tea toast. “I don’t know how you do it, Frank. You’re a major asset to law enforcement in this country. Allie Boy was a big fish. I remember he had a bad stomach. Lots of ulcers.”
“Allie Boy?” Bender leaned forward abruptly.
“Yeah.”
Bender’s mouth unhinged. His light hazel eyes got a shade lighter. He recalled one of the few things the marshals told him about Persico-the underboss had stomach problems. Allie Boy could eat only certain foods.
“My God, Penny Wright was on the money.”
Bender told Fleisher about the psychic whom Paul Schneider took him to and her prediction that the next fugitive the marshals caught after Vorhauer would have stomach troubles. Schneider had prayed it would be Nauss, whom he believed had stomach troubles from an old.22 wound in the gut.
“It’s Allie Boy,” Bender said with a far-off look, turning the words over like golden coins of prophecy. “Allie Boy Persico is the man with the bad stomach.”
Now they’d have to catch Nauss without unseen help.
Before he escaped from prison in a pine armoire like Odysseus breaching the walls of Troy in a wooden horse, Robert Thomas Nauss had more in common with the monsters of antiquity than its heroes. He was a lean young man with a bearded face like a portrait of Jesus and soft brown eyes that blazed like a biker from hell. Men in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, quaked when Bobby Nauss strode into a bar with his Warlock gang members, bristling with black leather, chains, and threat. His soulless eyes were the last mortal sight of several pretty young women who vanished into the Tinicum marshes, police believed. Nauss was convicted of one murder and suspected of two others, in addition to his convictions for rape, robbery, and drug trafficking.
On the evening of December 11, 1971, the Warlock leader went on a date with his petite blond girlfriend, Elizabeth Landy, a twenty-one-year-old Philadelphia beauty queen. At the home of a fellow biker, they got into an argument and he tried to choke her, but Elizabeth hid in a locked bathroom. Later they made up and went to bed-where he bludgeoned her to death with a baseball bat. He strung her corpse up in a garage to show off to his biker buddies, and boasted, “She won’t bother me anymore.” Nauss cut off her hands and feet and covered her with lime to hasten decomposition and buried her in a shallow grave near the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Nauss was the first man in Pennsylvania history convicted of first-degree murder without a body. Landy has never been found. Nauss, too, had disappeared since his escape from Graterford with Vorhauer three years before.
Bender stood back and looked at his bust of Nauss, or what he thought time and trouble had done to Nauss’s boyish face. It was less than a month after Vorhauer’s arrest, and the U.S. Marshals were waiting for Bender’s age-progression bust to jump-start another investigation, to reveal their quarry. Equally important, his wife, Jan, was expecting him to perform a second miracle to keep alive his string of big federal cases and its promise of bigger money. He had almost nothing to go on, less even than he had known about Vorhauer. At least there had been recent sightings of Vorhauer in the Philadelphia area, raw material for his sketches. There had been no sightings or leads in the Nauss case. The last photographs of Nauss were nearly a decade old, his 1977 intake pictures from the prison. In those photos Nauss was five foot nine, a lean, muscular, 190 pounds, bearded. His powerful arms were tattooed with a blue parrot, a skull and dagger, a swastika, and the legend “Born to Lose.”
Bender studied the prison photograph of the menacing biker, then looked back at the bust. The bust depicted a conservative, thirty-five-year-old man in a button-down shirt collar. The new Nauss was clean-shaven, with short, neat, dark hair trimmed over the ears. The killer resembled a young Clark Kent. No matter how hard he tried to depict the biker as a burly thug in middle age, his fingers sculpted an all-American suburban family man.
Bender nervously ran his teeth over his lower lip. His muse was directing him; the harmony in nature and proportion that just felt right when he achieved it. But he could hear the marshals guffawing once more.
The mob hit man was a blond, and now the killer biker was Mr. Main Street, clean-cut Rotarian, straight as a banker’s son-in-law?
He saw their faces twisted with skepticism. Where we gonna arrest him, at the chamber of commerce breakfast? The country club?
Bender’s gut told him he was right once again. As a rule, he didn’t doubt himself any more than the moon questioned its pale light or the river its banks. He was the natural. He was the artist who saw dead people. Still, he possessed the humility of a perfectionist, the pride of a craftsman. He liked to check and recheck his assumptions. He was always eager to learn more.
After ten in the morning, he left the clean-cut killer’s head and walked back to his living area to clean up and put on a fresh shirt. He’d been up half the night, stripped to the waist like a rough tattooed John the Baptist with his hands on the head of a sadistic killer, mixing water and clay in a purification rite for a murdered girl. He needed some air. The city was filled with beautiful women and opportunity, he thought.
He combed his thinning blond hair in the mirror by the Fertility Godhead he had sculpted. Before noon, he threw on his coat and walked out into a bright fall morning, trailing his compact shadow along the broken sidewalk.
Eighteen blocks later, he went through a wide door into a great Egyptian-style lobby with sand-colored columns on all four sides supporting a balcony, and a chandelier that had dazzled presidents since Calvin Coolidge. The old Benjamin Franklin Hotel, affectionately dubbed “The Ben,” as it stooped over the years like a favorite tattered old uncle, had been the scene of a few crimes since 1925. But it had never seen anything like the hundreds of private eyes, blood-spatter experts, medical examiners, and even a few hypnotists who crowded the hotel that morning. The prestigious American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention was in town.
As Bender crossed the lobby, he hardly had time to recall his simmering resentment of the AAFS-he could speak before them but not join without a college degree-when a sturdy woman with strong hands flashed a friendly smile and a broad Oklahoma hello. Big, round horn-rimmed glasses magnified soft eyes that Hollywood would have picked to serve homemade pie. The look was deceiving. Betty Pat Gatliff was the grande dame of forensic artists. She’d helped pioneer the profession worldwide. She’d done a facial reconstruction of King Tut published in Life magazine. Working with her forensic teammate, legendary anthropologist Clyde Snow, she’d rebuilt the skulls of seven of the unidentified victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
Bender and Gatliff had met through the “Bone Detective” Wilton Krogman, who had worked with Eliot Ness and mentored the leading figures in what was once called “Skeletal ID.” Many years after his work on the Boy in the Box case, Krogman had introduced Bender to the facial skin thickness charts that had been developed since the nineteenth century. He had inscribed his classic book, The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine, to Frank Bender, “A fellow seeker in the vineyard of the forensic sciences.”
The bone cobblers exchanged a friendly hug, then went off to sit in the coffee shop alone, de rigueur for their grisly exclusive club.
Bender described the Nauss case and turned his palms up. “Betty, I need help,” he said. “I don’t have enough information about the subject.” Gatliff was talking about the challenge of rebuilding a Florida murder victim’s skull, missing the entire maxilla, for goodness sakes, when a tall, gaunt man in a blue suit appeared at the table and exclaimed, through a wisp of menthol smoke, “Betty!”
“Richard!” Gatliff said warmly. She gestured to her fellow artist. “Frank Bender, let me introduce you to my good friend Richard Walter. Richard is a forensic psychologist and criminal profiler.”
Bender gawked at the thin man’s long, withered face. He had the formal manners of a Victorian gentleman, but his small blue eyes glittered with irony. He hadn’t seen such a strange man since he caught The Fall of the House of Usher on cable.
Walter’s cold eyes appraised the small, muscular artist with his tight black T-shirt and cocksure grin-a face like James Dean on laughing gas. The forensic psychologist pushed his large round black spectacles down on his nose and said sardonically, “Oh, my dear boy, I see we’re overdressed.”
Bender howled with laughter. A guy who put himself out there like that, he thought, had to be a genius to back it up. Bender’s laughter came from deep in his gut, a bold, infectious sound.
“Why don’t you join us? ” the artist said with his natural eagerness, as effusive as a twelve-year-old boy. “We’re talking about cases.”
Walter smirked and further lowered the black spectacles on his aquiline nose. “I hope your talent exceeds your couture,” he said.
Bender laughed again even louder, ringing notes of pure joy. Gatliff grinned. Heads turned in the coffee shop.
Walter flushed to the flinty edge of his chin. It was terrible, he thought, the unwanted attention that TV crime shows had drawn to classic forensic science. He wanted to talk to Betty, not this straggler, clearly not a member of the academy. “Typical R. Walter, I became covertly hostile and sarcastic,” he recalled. “But Frank stuck like glue. I couldn’t get rid of the guy, and he laughed at my jokes. How can you hate anybody who laughs at your jokes?”
“What are you working on, Rich?” Walter bristled as he sat down. No one called him Rich.
“A few of us have been asked to do a profile of Jack the Ripper on the one hundredth anniversary of the murders, using modern profiling techniques,” Walter said. He lit a cigarette, shook the match out with two fingers, and leaned back to take a smoke.
“We’ll be presenting at the Home Office in London,” he said, going on, raising an eyebrow with good humor. “I had never looked at the case before, but it’s really quite obvious who the Ripper was. They got it right in the beginning but didn’t know why.”
Bender ogled the thin man. He had never met anyone like him. Lowering his head in his earnest fashion, Bender described his struggles doing the Nauss bust for the U.S. Marshals.
“I don’t know enough about the killer to be sure,” he said.
“Tell me about the murder,” Walter said.
Nauss, Bender said, had rejected his middle-class childhood to become a leader of the violent Warlock motorcycle gang. He described Nauss’s murder of Landy in detail.
“The problem is I don’t know enough about him to depict how he looks. The photographs are a decade old, and I don’t know his personality or habits. Is he married or single? Still slim or spreading with middle age? How does he eat? Does he exercise?”
Walter raised his eyebrow, signaling his interest. “I can tell you a bit about him. I’ve seen hundreds of cases like this, many involving bikers. He’s tremendously macho, aggressive, with an exaggerated sense of importance. He’s very concerned about image. He dispatched the body brutally, like tossing away trash, and simply for reasons of power, not sex or fantasy or Satanism or any other such nonsense. He’s just tired of her and wants to move on.”
Bender’s eyes gleamed like go lights. “Rich, maybe you and I could work on this case together.”
Walter frowned at Bender and leaned back, eyeballing him as if from a safe distance. He took a draw on his Kool and let the silence develop.
Bender leaned forward into the vacuum, speaking faster and with great enthusiasm.
“Rich, why don’t you come talk to the marshals tonight? I can set it up.”
“I’m afraid not, dear boy. It’s well known I won’t have my libations at the hotel bar interrupted.”
Bender laughed again. Walter took a long draw on a cigarette and turned inward. Bender is a very intense character, very intense, bright but off the wall, he thought. What the hell is he all about? Oh, well, I’ll never see him again.
At six the next morning, Walter shot out of a deep sleep in his hotel room. The telephone was ringing.
“Hi, Rich!” Bender sounded like he’d had five cups of coffee.
Oh, God, Walter thought. What have I gotten myself into now? He sat on the edge of the bed and reached for a Kool.
“The marshals want to meet with you today!”
Walter went to breakfast at the Downhome Diner with Bender and Tom Rappone, head of the U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force in Philadelphia, to discuss the Nauss case. Bender played a trick on the somber psychologist. “You’ve got to try scrapple, Rich. It’s a classic Pennsylvania delicacy. You’ll love it.”
“What is it?”
“Meat.” The artist grinned.
Walter looked down at the odiferous brown extrusion of last-chance pork parts, snarled, and pushed his plate a foot away as Bender exploded in schoolyard laughter. Walter quietly took in black coffee and a cigarette, turning a hard flat gaze on the boisterous clown who seemed to be forcing his way into his life. “I was not pleased.”
At four that afternoon, the thin man sat in a conference room at the marshals’ office at Sixth and Market streets with Bender. With them at the table were Rappone and two other deputies.
“Listen up,” Rappone said.
Walter looked down at a yellow pad filled with scribbled notes, and cleared his throat.
“I’ve conducted a brief crime assessment of the Nauss murder,” he said. “Nauss was a closet case in the motorcycle gang in that he was very high up, but he also wanted to be in the mob, a promotion as it were. He had a middle-class background, and he’s going to be a little brighter than your average semi-organized PA killer and he’s going to be clever. He’s going to clean himself up a little bit, be not as scruffy; he’ll have more options available to him.”
Walter looked down at his pad. “Frank Bender is right. He’ll be clean-cut and living in the suburbs. He’ll be married to a compliant woman who has no idea about his past, and present a wholesome image to the community.”
Bender beamed like the father of a newborn son. “I agree with Rich. I think Nauss will be clean-shaven, short-haired, and living in suburbia,” he said. “He’s come from a good family and I think he’ll go back to what he’s known.”
The marshals exchanged doubtful looks across the table. One deputy pointed out that their few leads were consistent with a biker lifestyle. The marshals had set up a cabin in the Poconos for several weeks following a tip that the biker was hiding out in the Pennsylvania mountains. They followed another tip to a Western state, and set up surveillance across from a motorcycle parts distributor, with no luck.
Dennis Matulewicz, one of the lead agents, frowned. “I don’t know about this. A biker is a biker is a biker.”
Walter cleared his throat. “Not only is Frank right that Nauss is hiding in the suburbs, I have some idea what suburbs.”
Rappone leaned forward, his voice nearly caught in his throat. “How do you know that?”
Walter that morning had called the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson, with 5,600 inmates, the world’s largest penal institution. The massive 1934-era prison complex, known as “Jacktown,” was one of the most notorious and feared of American prisons. Riots in the 1950s and 1970s had killed a guard and injured dozens of guards and inmates. Walter had recently started working there as a prison psychologist, counseling and evaluating the most depraved criminals in the state.
He had spoken on the telephone that morning with an inmate who had been a member of Nauss’s Pennsylvania motorcycle gang.
A heavy silence came over the table.
“Those guys never talk,” a deputy said.
Walter nodded. “Quite true. It is a fact that a gang member, a criminal biker, is a very rigid, power-based personality. As such he is extremely loyal and pathological in how he counts on the group. He has rigid standards and principles.” Walter paused and raised his eyebrow for dramatic effect. “But one can use that rigidity against him.” The marshals fell silent, waiting.
“I made the point that Nauss had shot somebody,” Walter said. “OK, fine, a real man can shoot someone. But he had shot and killed them in front of their child. It’s not macho to kill people in front of their children. It’s not a good thing; he’d broken a rule. And I used that to break apart the biker’s loyalties. Nauss was not living up to biker standards, Nauss was a bad guy, he’d done bad things, he’d not lived by the code a man must live by. I undermined Nauss’s masculinity to get the guy to talk.”
Walter smiled coldly. “I will sometimes sleep with the devil to get what I want. As it happens, Nauss is living somewhere in Michigan.”
Walter picked up several photographs of Nauss. He noted that the biker always wore a shirt that was patterned on one side and not the other. “It’s part of the personality type. He’s a black and white guy; there are no grays. I’ll tell you that when you find him in Michigan, Nauss will be driving a black Cadillac.”
Rappone’s brow crinkled in puzzlement. “How do you know that?”
“Ah,” Walter said. “Fair enough. We know he liked Cadillacs in the past. Cadillacs are prestige cars and he is a power guy who wants prestige and is cleaning up. Particularly rigid types like dark cars. Given his killer instincts it’d be either white or black, and he’d go for black. It’s declarative, pureness and evil at the same time.”
The faces around the table fell open with something like awe.
Bender’s grin grew wider. The marshals planned to present his finished bust of Nauss to America ’s Most Wanted, the Fox TV show. Bender could see that a man like Walter could be of great use in the future.
“It’s not wizardry,” Walter said later as they left the federal building. “It’s all a matter of probabilities. I’ve been around the block a few times.”
“Rich,” Bender said, “you can read criminals’ minds the way I read women.”
Walter’s face darkened around a scowl as Bender’s laugh rang down the gray canyon of Market Street.
In February 1988, America ’s Most Wanted broadcast Bender’s bust of Nauss. The sculpted face of the biker appeared dark-haired and clean-cut. Dozens of calls came in to the show’s tip line with sightings of Nauss from the East to the Midwest, but none amounted to anything.
Assuming he was still alive, the escaped prisoner and convicted killer remained at large.
Richard Walter was sitting in his small, classical white house in Lansing, Michigan, sipping wine and listening to opera in the civilizing presence of his antiques. The scowling, life-size samurai warrior, sword raised to attack, was a particular favorite. He was recalling his chat that day with a serial killer when the telephone rang, and he frowned.
Walter had been promoted to the largest walled prison in the world, the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson, from the desolate castle prison on Lake Superior. The high-tech prison gave him remarkable power over the inmates. He could turn off their hot showers by a remote switch, or put them on a diet of “Prison Loaf ”-all their meals blended and baked into a hard, tasteless brick. “You will learn to control yourself or I will control you,” he told them. Control gave him satisfaction, victory over chaos, and thus he found the voice on the telephone disconcerting. It blasted through the line, as loud and excited as a television car pitchman.
“Rich!”
He rolled his eyes. No one else called him that. Although Walter liked the forensic artist, he didn’t enjoy being “shaped” by anyone. Furthermore, he didn’t feel the need for human contact at that moment. He would dispatch of Bender quickly.
“Rich, a producer at America ’s Most Wanted called me, and they want me to do a facial age progression of John List-the most wanted mass murderer in America.”
“That’s wonderful, Frank. I hope it works out for you.”
“He’s the bank vice president who killed his whole family in New Jersey. He’s been on the lam for eighteen years!”
“Yes.”
“He’s committed the most notorious crime in New Jersey since the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in 1922.”
“It was 1932, Frank.”
“Right.”
Walter said nothing, creating a vacuum in the conversation. It was like a drawbridge pulling up.
Bender waded into the moat. “Rich, I thought maybe you’d want to help me. You could do the profile. I told AMW about you and they’re all for it.”
Walter said nothing. He looked around the room. His music, books, the classical lines of the library-for years these had been his constant companions. Home alone with a bottle of wine, he gazed fondly at his antiques and felt the powerful presence of the men and women who had lived with them; he imagined these spirits as friends and family. He was quite happy living alone. “In point of fact,” he said, “I care not a whit for the general run of humanity.”
Although he was compulsively charming and social, and regaled perfect strangers in bars with true-life Gothic horrors like a slumming Poe, there were few people in the world he could really talk to, even in law enforcement. He had married his profession, driven to be “one of the five best in the world,” and accepted the sacrifices. He was obsessed with things that decent people were happiest not knowing about. His was a dark vision, the same one that made Machiavelli and Dostoevsky embittered men and geniuses for the ages.
Now Bender was pushing him toward a partner’s intimacy of the kind one saw in cop buddy movies and read about in storybooks. Instinctively he shrank from Bender’s salesman’s affect. “I quite like Frank,” he said to himself. But bamboozling excitement was something normal people didn’t use unless they were selling something shiny and hollow. In his long experience with the criminal and the craven, it was the tool of a seducer and user.
“Rich, why don’t you come to Philadelphia? It’s spring, the weather’s nicer here. AMW will put you up in a bed-and-breakfast near my studio.”
“We’ll see what happens,” Walter said stiffly.
“I really want to catch this guy. The FBI hasn’t had a clue for decades, and now they’re using computer-drawn facial reconstructions. They don’t believe in what I’m doing-the old human way, the real artist way, looking for the unique human characteristics. I want to know what List was thinking when he killed his family, what he’s like now. I want to get into his head.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
“This will really show up the FBI when we nail him together.”
Walter laughed. “Now you’re talking.”
The darkness of the studio surrounded the halo of light on the makeshift kitchen table.
On the table was a stack of newspaper clippings as yellow and wrinkled as the gaunt face studying them through owlish black glasses. The New York Times, The Star-Ledger, Philadelphia Inquirer, and most every newspaper and TV station in America had broadcast the horror story as chilling as a Stephen King serial.
On November 9, 1971, John Emil List, a former bank vice president and Sunday school teacher in prosperous Westfield, New Jersey, had killed his wife, three young children, and elderly mother. The fastidious killer had left the lights blazing in his great house, Breezy Knoll, along with a polite note apologizing to his mother-in-law, a thoughtful list of sales prospects for his boss at the insurance company, another note instructing his pastor to remove him from the congregation rolls. Fretting over the noise of his car, he’d steered the old Impala and its coughing muffler into a quiet predawn November rain and disappeared.
Walter lit a Kool and leaned back with his right hand bringing the cigarette to his lips. His left hand crossed over to grip his right bicep and he took a draw and lowered his head to think. He had been reading for an hour. As soon as Walter arrived in Philadelphia on an early flight from Lansing, Michigan, Bender had attempted a hearty hug or slap on the back, but Walter had successfully pushed him off with a firm handshake.
Walter had Spartan needs on a case. An ashtray was essential, and black coffee. Bender offered to make coffee, but Walter snarled, “Not from that stove, my dear boy.” Bender got him takeout, handed him the file of newspaper stories, and went off gallivanting.
It took a few minutes before the psychologist recovered from the decrepit atmosphere of the art studio. It seemed to him that Bender fancied himself a male version of Circe, a sorcerer who turned his visitors into supplicant females and shrunken heads.
Now Walter blocked out the background noise and odors and concentrated on the five murders. He envisioned each in its turn, until the monstrosity was reduced in his mind to cold-blooded calculation. Eighteen years before, List had made his move. Walter saw the slaughter as theatrically staged, an intricately planned performance designed to hide List’s true motive in plain sight and cover his tracks. Now it was Walter’s turn-his chance to unmask the deceit and expose the fugitive’s hiding place. It was just the two of them in a deadly chess game, a battle of mind and will with no boundaries of time or space.
Killers always make mistakes. What mistakes had List made?
The cops always miss something. What had the FBI and the police missed?
Walter had been moonlighting as a consulting detective on the most challenging and depraved murder cases in the world for more than a decade. It was what he did in his “spare hours” while working full-time for the Michigan Department of Corrections.
Early on that November morning, John List stood at his office window on the first floor of Breezy Knoll and watched the milk truck drive away. As usual Herbert Arbast, the milkman, had entered the unlocked back door to the nineteen-room, three-story Victorian and entered the butler’s pantry where Helen taped her handwritten order on the refrigerator: six quarts of milk, butter, and eggs, twice a week. That morning instead was posted a curt note from John instructing the milkman to stop deliveries “until further notice.” The family was going on vacation, the neat, careful handwriting explained. List and his wife, Helen; Patty, the oldest, blond and leggy like her mother and a budding actress; the two young boys, Fred and John Jr.; and John’s eighty-five-year-old mother, Alma, would be gone “for a while.”
At forty-six years of age, John List stood a gangly six foot one, gaunt-faced and straight-backed, with receding dark hair and a long, bony jaw. An accountant, former bank vice president, and Sunday school teacher in the Lutheran Church, he was an exceptionally bright and meticulous man. On his desk lay two beautifully kept handguns, gleaming with oil-a small,.22-caliber automatic Colt that had belonged to his father, and a classic Steyr 1912 automatic John had brought back from World War II. The Steyr was a World War I gun that had been retooled by the Nazis to carry a special nine-millimeter cartridge. Each pistol was loaded with eight rounds.
As the milkman left, empty bottles rattling in his carrier, List stood listening for the routine noises of morning. He heard Helen’s soft footsteps coming downstairs to the kitchen. With the gentle sounds of the flame firing under the kettle as it jangled onto the stove, he waited a few minutes, then picked up the Steyr. His wife was sitting at the breakfast table over toast and coffee, her morning wake-up ritual. She wore a bathrobe and red satin teddy, and looked out the window. She was dreaming her thoughts into the bleak gray sky, and heard nothing until she sensed a shadow two feet behind her and half-turned to look. She never saw her husband or the bullet he fired into the left side of her head from eighteen inches away. The shot knocked Helen to the linoleum floor, a bite of toast jammed into the back of her throat. Walter noted that List fired several aimless shots at the wall, one pinging a radiator, but the children were at school and heard nothing. If any noises escaped the foot-thick walls of Breezy Knoll, they were carried away on the cold November breeze. What police had called for decades the perfectly planned murders had begun to move like clockwork. As his wife lay dying on the kitchen floor, List headed up the back stairs.
His mother’s cozy apartment, where he read the Bible with her most evenings, was on the third floor. Alma, tall and gray-haired, was standing in the small kitchen holding a plate with butter, waiting for the toast to pop, as he opened the door without knocking. “What was that noise downstairs?” she asked. Without a word, List raised the Steyr and shot his mother above the left eye from point-blank range. She died as she hit the tile floor. Walter noted, with one eyebrow arching above the old newspaper account, what List had done next. He shoved her body into a narrow hall space with a force that shattered her knees, and threw a carpet runner on top of her. He covered his dead mother’s face with a dish towel.
Heading back downstairs, he dragged his wife’s body through the center hall to the ballroom, and laid her facedown on a sleeping bag under the Tiffany dome skylight. He placed two other open sleeping bags perpendicular to Helen’s, whose body formed the top of a T, and covered Helen’s body with a bath towel. He covered his wife’s head with a dish towel.
Next he went upstairs to his wife’s bedroom, smeared his bloody hands all over the sheets until he vomited, then showered and shaved. Wearing a fresh suit and necktie, his hair combed and fingernails cleaned, he walked crisply downstairs as if to start an ordinary business day. There was much to do.
He called the office of State Mutual Life, where he sold insurance, and left a message on the machine canceling his ten o’clock appointment. He said he was taking the family to North Carolina to be with his wife’s mother, who was seriously ill. Then he wrote school notes for his children-Patricia, sixteen, at the high school; and John Jr. and Frederick, fifteen and thirteen, at the junior high-explaining their absence for several days because of the emergency family trip. He went outside to rake leaves while waiting for the kids to come home from school. It was cloudy and nearly freezing, a record low for November 9, and a neighbor woman was surprised to see List in his dark overcoat and tie meticulously raking the yard. After working up a sweat, he fixed himself a sandwich and ate lunch at the table where he had killed his wife over breakfast.
Walter noted the steady, implacable routine. Mr. List was being productive and efficient. He was having a good day.
Shortly after noon, List picked up his daughter, Patty, at school. She was sick and had asked to come home, and didn’t feel well enough to work her after-school job at the insurance office. As she gathered her books in the backseat, he walked quickly into the house before her, and was hiding behind the door when she entered the kitchen. List shot her in the head from behind. Dragging her body through the house, he made a forty-foot track of blood parallel to his wife’s blood, and laid her on one of the open sleeping bags. He covered his daughter’s face with a rag.
At one o’clock, List, cleaned up and, wearing fresh business attire, went into town to do errands. He put a thirty-day stop on the mail. At Suburban Trust bank, he cashed out more than $2,000 in U.S. savings bonds, the last of his mother’s savings. She died unaware he’d already gone through all of the $200,000 her husband had left her. He mailed a special delivery letter to himself at Hillside Avenue with a key wrapped in a folded blank sheet of paper.
At approximately three o’clock, young Fred, his thirteen-year-old son, called from the insurance office where he, too, had an after-school job, wondering, “What happened to Patty?” He wanted to come home. List picked him up at the insurance office, drove home, and hurried into the house to retrieve the gun he’d left behind the kitchen door. He shot Fred in the back of the head before he got his coat off. His father pulled the boy’s small body onto the sleeping bag beside Patty. He covered Freddie’s face with a small rag.
At four o’clock, John Jr., his husky fifteen-year-old, came home early from soccer practice, and sprang away from his father hiding behind the door with a gun. He grabbed his father’s hand as bullets blasted a kitchen cabinet, a dining room window frame, the ceiling. As List stalked his son through the house, a pistol in each hand, bullets caught the boy in the back, behind the neck, in the head, and he fell, breaking his jaw. Walter knew that a fifteen-year-old male had a narcissistic selfishness, a will to survive, unmatched at any other age, and John Jr. wouldn’t quit. He crawled desperately away from his father in the parlor. List stood over him and pumped eight bullets into his oldest son. A ninth into the eye and a tenth through the heart were required before the boy would lie still.
List moved his wife’s arm to rest on Freddie’s shoulder, and as the fading light of late afternoon filtered through the stained-glass dome in a thousand colors, he knelt by his family and prayed for their souls. “Almighty, everlasting, and most merciful God, Thou who dost summon and take us out of this sinful and corrupt world to Thyself through death that we may not perish by continual sinning, but pass through death to life eternal, help us, we beseech Thee…”
Walter studied the grainy newspaper photo of the ballroom crypt. “The accountant in him lined up the children by age,” he said to himself.
It was a busy evening for List, making phone calls and methodically checking off items on his planner.
At seven o’clock, he phoned his Lutheran pastor and good friend Eugene Rehwinkel, apologizing because he would be unable to teach Sunday school class for at least a week. He explained to the director of the high school drama club that unfortunately Patty would have to miss rehearsals for a while, and so would be unable to continue as understudy in A Streetcar Named Desire. On stationery from a failed business enterprise, John E. List, Career Builder, he wrote to Eva Morris, his ailing mother-in-law whom the family was supposedly visiting in North Carolina:
Mrs. Morris,
By now you no doubt know what has happened to Helen and the children. I’m very sorry that it had to happen. But because of a number of reasons, I couldn’t see any other solution.
I just couldn’t support them anymore and I didn’t want them to go into poverty. Also, at this time I know that they were all Christians. I couldn’t be sure of that in the future as the children grow up.
Pastor Rehwinkel may add a few more thoughts.
With my sincere sympathy,
John E. List
Walter scowled at the faded words in the newspaper column. List wrote similar letters to his sister-in-law and to his mother’s sister. By now you know what has happened to Mother and the rest of the family… Please accept my sincere condolences. John. List spent the rest of the evening explaining his logic for killing his family in a blizzard of letters to family and his pastor, but he had outlined his reasons for the murders in the first note to his mother-in-law. He had lost his job at the bank and, consumed by failure, spent his days at the library when he said he was looking for work. Despite his recent efforts as an insurance salesman, the family was in dire straits. The fear of going bankrupt, moving, and putting the children on welfare weighed heavily on him. But his greater burden was the fear his children would go to hell. Helen refused to attend church, and the children were growing cynical about God. Patty’s passion for acting indicated an immoral existence incompatible with a good Christian life. “So that is the sum of it,” he wrote to his pastor. “If any one of these had been the condition we might have pulled through, but this was just too much. At least I’m certain that all have gone to heaven now. If things had gone on, who knows if that would be the case.
“I know that what I have done is wrong… but you are the one person that I know that, while not condoning this, will at least partially understand why I felt that I had to do this.”
It was important to kill his mother, too, he added as an afterthought. “Knowing that she is also a Christian, I felt it best that she be relieved of the troubles of this world that would have hit her… to save Mother untold anguish over that result I felt it best that she be relieved from this vale of tears… Originally I had planned this for Nov. 1-All Saints Day. But travel arrangements were delayed. I thought it would be an appropriate day for them to get to heaven.”
List added one more thing for his pastor. “It may seem cowardly to have always shot from behind, but I didn’t want any of them to know even at the last second that I had to do this to them. John got hurt more because he seemed to struggle longer… Please remember me in your prayers. I will need them whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it. I’m only concerned with making my peace with God and of this I am assured because of Christ dying even for me. P.S. Mother is in the hallway in the attic-3rd floor. She was too heavy to move. John.”
He wrote to Burton Goldstein at State Mutual Life thanking him for his support, and listing the four “best prospects for a quick sale… maybe Paul Greenberg can follow up on some.” All the letters, the two guns, an envelope with the unused bullet, went into the filing cabinet into locked drawers labeled TO PASTOR REHWINKEL, BURTON GOLDSTEIN AND ADMINISTRATORS and GUNS amp; AMMO. He taped a note to the top of his desk:
To the Finder:
1. Please contact the proper authorities.
2. The key to this desk is in an envelope addressed to myself.
3. The keys to the files are in the desk.
Walter reviewed List’s extensive documentation of the reasons that led to the massacre. It was an extraordinary record to be left by a killer. And it’s all bullshit, he thought to himself.
Walter felt he knew the killer better than the murderer knew himself. That evening List quickly grew tired. He’d had a long day. He made a light dinner and once again ate at the table where he’d murdered his wife that morning, then washed the dishes and put them in the drainboard. He slept in the billiard room in the basement, beneath his murdered family. Though there was no information on it, Walter wagered that he’d slept very soundly. He said that for List, “It had been a wonderful day.”
In the morning List packed his suitcase with two days’ worth of clothes and a briefcase with an assortment of motor club maps, and tidied the house as if preparing for vacation. He turned the thermostat down to fifty degrees and put three supermarket bags stuffed with bloodied papers and cloths neatly by the back door. He switched the lights on in every room except for one, the ballroom crypt. Finally he turned the radio to the only station he had allowed the children to listen to. Classical music, good for the soul, filled the house as he drove away.
Ten days after the murders, a policeman writing parking tickets at JFK airport found List’s old Impala, but the abandoned car raised no red flags. List had planned the murders so meticulously that nobody realized something was wrong at Breezy Knoll until police discovered the five bodies on December 7, almost a month later. The headlines trumpeted THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY. Overnight, List entered the upper echelons of twentieth-century mass killers that the media tracked like a home run contest.
Walter took a sip of cold black coffee and rubbed his eyes to focus. The newspapers described a massive, international manhunt for List that became an embarrassment to law enforcement.
No wonder they couldn’t find him, Walter thought. They didn’t know what they were looking for.
The FBI spent more than $1 million pursuing reported sightings of List across all fifty states, Europe, and South America. New Jersey police and prosecutors interviewed dozens of potential witnesses. The police catalogued more than 150 pieces of evidence. But the investigation went nowhere. Detectives resorted to black humor to overcome the shame. Vacationing police sent postcards to the department from Florida, Barbados, and elsewhere: Wish you were here. Your good pal, John Emil List. Having a ball. Nice to finally have a vacation without the kids! John E. List. The trail had long gone cold. The last significant evidence was the car discovered at the airport eighteen years before. In the police evidence room, mold grew on the dried blood on the victims’ clothes, and the garments were discarded.
Walter looked up from the yellowed newspapers, his concentration broken. He heard Bender’s voice and the voices of two women. It had only been an hour, but it felt like days had passed since he’d immersed himself in the case.
“How’s it going?” Bender appeared at the kitchen table.
“Quite well.”
The sculptor’s eyes gleamed. “What else do you need?”
There was a lot of digging Walter could do. He could talk to the police and FBI investigators who spent years on the case. He could study the police file, read the mountain of interviews, look over the hundreds of photographs and pieces of evidence, review the psychological evaluations of List. He could reinterview potential witnesses, praying their memories hadn’t evaporated.
Walter met Bender’s eyes and said he needed nothing else. The yellowing newspaper accounts were sufficient. The grainy old newspaper photographs of the murder scene were particularly helpful. He didn’t wish to read anything or talk to anybody. The killer had directly communicated to Walter all he needed to know.
“The profile is done,” he said. “He thinks he’s the smartest man in the world, and he pulled off the perfect crime, he’s fooled everyone,” Walter said. “But in point of fact he’s not difficult to read.”
List’s extraordinary confessions, thousands of words of admitted guilt, were elaborate, carefully constructed deceptions, he said. “List spouts ink like a squid, to obscure himself from his pursuers.” But unknowingly, he had left indelible documentation of the truth in a special language.
List had written out his motive and his fate in blood and bullets in the stone-walled rooms of Breezy Knoll.
Sunlight and traffic noise flooded the dim studio, startling the gallery of grinning, frontal-nude blondes and somber heads of the dead. “Rich, let’s go for a long walk! It’s a beautiful day.” Bender stood in the open door, a hazy dark shape within the blinding halo of light.
“My dear boy, my exercise is inhaling. Do I look like a sophomore on the cross-country team? ” Walter chuckled from his chair, quite pleased with himself. The flexible lines of his mouth tugged downward around the cigarette-like tent stakes.
“C’mon, Rich!”
The thin man rose slowly. “Well, then. I suppose one could.”
They walked down South Street. They were an odd pair, the short, loud, muscular, tattooed man firing questions at the tall, blue-suited, balding gentleman with stiff Victorian airs.
Bender wanted Walter’s insights into List’s character-character that would have helped shape the contours of the killer’s face all these years later.
“I need to know what John List was like,” Bender said. “How would John List stand on this corner? What would be the expression on his face?” As if on command, the tall man in the suit stood rigidly and tipped his long jaw into a double chin, like a game of charades in reverse.
“Here, let me show you which facial muscles stay tight and which lengthen.” The thin man pushed his owlish black glasses back on his nose and appeared sterner than usual.
Bender’s voice rose a pitch. “Rich, what would his face look like? I mean, he’s sixty-four years old now. In his early forties, he had dark hair with a widow’s peak of M-pattern baldness. I see him almost completely bald now, with tufts of gray hair on the side.”
Walter nodded agreement. “Yes. And what little hair he has left will be carefully trimmed, very neat. He is still an accountant and careful about his appearance in a professional way.”
“We know he has a scar behind his ear from mastoid surgery,” Bender said. The artist had interviewed craniofacial surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School to document the aging process in the facial tissue, brow, eyelids, bone. Bender had also spent a few days in Westfield, watching the men of List’s generation on the streets, and in church. He studied the faces, eyes, and mouths, their paunches and how they treated their wives. He had already made a rough clay head of List and sent a photograph of it to Westfield police for comment.
Bender had learned from the Philadelphia surgeons that the mastoid scar, though softened with age, would still show unless List had plastic surgery.
“I figure he wouldn’t be the type to have plastic surgery,” Bender said. “Or the type to go to the gym and work out.”
“Exactly,” Walter said. “He was a meat-and-potatoes man and would remain one. He’s not from the jogging generation. He’s a very rigid personality. It’s the extreme rigidity, at a pathological level, that enables him to kill his family.”
“So he’ll have jowls now, a slackened jaw, and look much older.”
“Quite.”
They sat in a riverfront park crowded with its Saturday morning population of Frisbees, romping and sniffing dogs, young professionals, and homeless men. Walter lit a cigarette. Bender’s eyes wandered to a tall blond woman chasing a black Labrador, and came back into focus.
“Do you think he’s very religious? How will that alter how he looks or behaves?”
Walter frowned. “This has nothing to do with religion. Many terrible things are done in the name of God. It’s just a cover. Behind his Caspar Milquetoast churchgoing façade, he was a pure psychopath all about power. He was fed up with his dominating wife and mother, the little brats who wouldn’t listen to him, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. He wanted a new life and he wanted it on his terms.”
The thin man’s eyes shone with excitement. “This is the typical personality type of a man who destroys his family. It’s a man who chooses a stronger, older woman who criticizes him so he will never have to take responsibility for himself. They can become quite pathological about it.”
“So he’s crazy.”
“Oh, no, not at all. He’s extremely rational. He’s something of a snob, feels quite superior to other people. He lives beyond his means, the world starts to collapse on him. His first move is to plunder his mother’s money, for years. No conscience. He deserves it, after all.”
Bender took a deep breath. “So what pushed him over the edge?”
Walter gave a dark smile. “It’s typical to have a strong matriarchal figure, like his mother, a wife who is aggressive and pushy and also status-seeking. Controlled, structured men who feel they are being pushed too far can seethe. That turns into anger and righteous indignation. He doesn’t face challenges and own up to his failures like a man; all his failures are because of ‘that bitch wife.’ He’s losing power, control, becoming more isolated. The threat increases when his daughter enters puberty. He is able to justify the killings in his own mind. He felt his family was demanding too much.”
The thin man removed an old newspaper story, yellow and creased into a permanent fold, from his suit pocket. “Notice the corpses of his wife, mother, and three children. He covers all their faces with rags or rugs or towels. I’ve seen this many times. The killer can’t let the victim’s eyes reproach him, and he can’t let the victim’s eyes see egress. It’s the final trump card of rage and power. All the drama and the over-killing-he pumps ten bullets into his oldest son, shoots his mother and then breaks her kneecaps-is how he sates the rage that drove him to kill in the first place. When the rage is satiated, he feels an instant wash of relief and triumph.”
“So is there anger in his face? Have anger and guilt worn him down over the years?”
Walter laughed out loud. “Guilt? Are you kidding me? He doesn’t know what the word means. He doesn’t feel anything at all, except for relief and triumph. He was thrilled with what he did! Thus he could coolly sit and call his pastor and his daughter’s drama coach, eat lunch and dinner in the kitchen where he killed his wife over breakfast. The lack of guilt would allow him to disappear and adjust to a new life without any awkwardness. The following day to him was just that, the next day, except it’s a great relief.
“You want to talk about guilt?” Walter continued. “List stalked his victims. It’s very typical with this type. Note his conversation at the dinner table the week before, quizzing his children on how they would like to die.”
Bender nodded.
Walter arched his left eyebrow. “May I be bold and make some predictions? ”
“Sure.”
“List would have settled into a reasonably comfortable life much like the one he left after a period of reinvention,” Walter said. “At first, he would have moved a great distance from the crime to gain a sense of freedom. His first job would probably be a night clerk in a motel-a logical occupation for a bright but underachieving man, good with figures, who wanted a job where he would not be seen and recognized.
“As he grew comfortable, however, List would move up in the accounting profession,” Walter said. “He would rejoin the Lutheran Church, remarry, and eventually move back to within three hundred miles of the murder scene. He would not be able to tolerate the differences of another region that was alien to him. Familiar turf would give him a sense of control. Beneath the veneer of respectability, trouble would still be simmering. He’ll still be living beyond his means. He’ll still have financial problems.”
List would fit in easily in a conventional suburban community, a steady churchgoing man of high intelligence with a serious look, the profiler said. “He’ll be wearing a suit and tie. Given his history and rigidity, I figured the most modern he’d get would be to wear a striped suit. He’d always wear the white shirt and plain tie, probably striped. He’d also wear dark shoes and dark argyle socks. He’ll be wearing thick, black glasses-not wire rims. It will give him an aura of intelligence and authority. He’ll be remarried to a subservient woman who has no clue about his past. He’s just good ol’ John.”
“Rich, this is great.”
“Just so. You’re asking brilliant questions. In the information game, the most important part of the equation is the question, not the answer.”
That evening, Bender put the finishing touches on List. His age-progression bust had a broad, bald pate, deep wrinkles, sunken cheeks, and a stern, unforgiving mouth; the bust included the neck and shoulder line of a dark suit and white oxford collar. He found a pair of old tortoiseshell eyeglasses with a thick rim at an antiques store in the neighborhood, and put them on List.
They looked right.
On Sunday, May 21, 1989, America ’s Most Wanted aired the story of fugitive mass murderer John Emil List. Host John Walsh introduced the segment as New Jersey ’s most famous unsolved murder case. More than twenty million viewers tuned in.
That night in Denver, Colorado, Wanda Flannery thought the bust of John List looked like her former neighbor Bob Clark, who had moved to Virginia. Bob Clark, like John List, was an accountant from Michigan, had a scar behind his right ear from a mastoidectomy, had chronic money problems and trouble holding jobs. Wanda was worried about Delores, Bob’s wife, a shy, pretty woman fifteen years his junior. She was worried her friend’s life might be in danger. She called in a tip, one of more than three hundred that flooded into the show’s hotline from around the country.
Eleven days later, FBI agents followed Flannery’s tip to a ranch house in Midlothian, Virginia, outside Richmond. Delores Clark was vacuuming the living room carpet. Bob wasn’t home, she said. He was at work at the Richmond accounting firm of Maddrea, Joyner, Kirkham amp; Woody. Delores looked at the photo of the bust of mass murderer John List, and reacted with disbelief. Trembling and weeping, she said, “This looks like it could be my husband. But it can’t be my husband. He’s the nicest man in the world.” He was a good husband and neighbor, she said, a member of the Lutheran Church. She went into shock.
Agents arrested Bob Clark at his accounting firm that afternoon. The tall Clark, wearing a bow tie and large glasses, was walking down an aisle with a Xerox, and didn’t resist being led out in handcuffs. He vociferously denied he was John List, but fingerprints confirmed a match. The eighteen-year search for the killer of Alma, Helen, Patty, John Jr., and Freddie List was over.
The next day, Bender and Walter’s brilliant work was national news. The New York Times hailed the dramatic arrest of “one of the nation’s most wanted fugitives” with a front-page story. On page one was also a photograph of the suspect John List and Bender’s eerily matching bust. The List case launched Bender as an internationally known figure in forensics. AMW host Walsh said Bender’s detective work was the most brilliant he’d encountered in his career.
Bender was ecstatic. He called Walter in Michigan to celebrate their triumph.
“Rich, your profile was right on!” As List’s story emerged in court and in the press, the mass murderer’s life read as if Walter had written it. List told of fleeing the crime for the distant haven of Colorado, where he took the name Bob Clark and found a job as a night clerk in a motel. In Denver, he slowly rebuilt his life, finding a job in accounting and marrying Delores, who never questioned his story that his first wife had died of cancer. He rejoined the Lutheran Church in Denver and taught Sunday school. Those who knew “Bob Clark” described him as a friendly, if taciturn, man who always wore a suit and tie, dark shoes and argyle socks, and thick-rimmed glasses. He had recently landed the job in Virginia, so he could be back on the East Coast. His home in Midlothian, Virginia, was 240 miles from his former home in Westfield, New Jersey.
Walter was cautiously pleased with all the attention. “It’s nice but it’s kind of scary,” he told the press. “The issue then becomes ‘How did you do it?’ It’s hard to explain the synergy. It’s both powerful and empowering, but with it come expectations for consistency, so the standard always gets higher.”
On April 12, 1990, about a year after Bender and Walter had helped bring him to justice, List was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder. Though there was no capital punishment in New Jersey at the time, he was sentenced to five consecutive life terms, ensuring he would never make parole. Superior Court judge William Wertheimer said the case reminded society it must defend its bedrock values. “The name of John Emil List will be eternally synonymous with concepts of selfishness, horror, and evil,” he wrote. “He is without remorse and without honor. After eighteen years, five months, and twenty-two days, it is now time for the voices of Helen, Alma, Patricia, Frederick, and John F. List to rise from the grave.” While Bender and Walter were both gratified, Walter said, “Unfortunately he was spared the death sentence he had issued to his family.”
It was a spring of justice and redemption, of joy and celebration for Bender and Walter. They were suddenly an artist-psychologist detective team with few peers, as well as fast friends, bonded brothers, drinking buddies who’d just as soon close down a bar together as open up a cold case. But there came too intimations of a false spring. They fought like brothers, too, and over time, the voice of Bender rose in sharp complaint that Walter was stealing credit for the List case, while Walter, in stunned defense, accused Bender of slandering him and going off the deep end.
Bender and Walter were arguably the most talented detective duo on the planet, it was said in forensic circles-if they could be content with outsmarting psychopaths, redeeming victims, defeating evil, and generally destroying the lives of criminals, rather than each other.
On President’s Day, 1990, the city was dark and icy and the sky spanned the rivers like an arch of gray stone, but the small yellow café was awash in light. Fleisher pushed through the glass door on the corner of Twenty-first and Sansom, rubbing his hands from the cold. The small tables were crowded and noisy, the warm air smelled of soups and coffee. It was a federal holiday, and Bender had invited him to meet his partner Richard Walter, the forensic psychologist. Walter was in town from Michigan to work with Bender on tracking escaped killer Robert Thomas Nauss.
Fleisher was eager to meet the famous Walter and be cheered by Bender’s energy.
The news in the Philadelphia Inquirer over breakfast had disturbed him. Even the small print told of absurd and tragic things happening in the city, with a frequency that numbed the soul. James Wayock, husband, father of four, was selling cable-TV hookups when he was shot and killed by Benjamin Frazier, forty-one, with a stolen.38, for fun. Frazier said he just wanted to kill someone. Linda Garcia, sixteen, was shot in the neck by strangers and killed coming out of a movie theater; her fatal mistake was shouting at the car that had swerved and almost hit her. A fireball of gasoline-soaked rags was thrown into the mausoleum of the Victorian industrialist family of the Champion Blower amp; Forge Company, and a 125-year-old corpse attacked with a hammer. Finding a black candle at the scene, police said the attack had “Satanic overtones.”
The big man saw Bender’s face, beaming like a second sun. Then he saw the tall, balding, sallow-faced gentleman sitting with him, a thin line of darkness in a formal blue suit. Richard Walter. He had the strange and instant impression that the two men belonged to the same firmament, like the sun and the moon. Yet he’d never seen two more mismatched human beings.
Bender had said, “You’ve got to meet my friend Richard Walter, the profiler. He has the coldest eye for evil you’ll ever see.”
The thin man was wan and withered as an English butler, but Fleisher was surprised as his handshake crushed like iron tongs. Walter’s booming tubercular laugh filled the coffee shop. Above his starched Oxford collar, his words flowed as arch and cultivated as Winston Churchill’s; beneath it the blue suit was polyester and stank of a thousand cigarettes.
Wearing his trademark black T-shirt and jeans, Bender sat between the two veteran forensic detectives grinning like a boy who’d happened upon a candy-truck accident or a stack of Playboy in his father’s closet.
He’d picked the Day by Day Café to introduce them. It was loud and bustling with news and gossip that morning-the 76ers were winning in Philadelphia and the Communists were losing everywhere-perfect cover to discuss murder and other gruesome subjects. If lunch was disappointing, he could still advance his seduction of his favorite waitress. It was a win-win.
“Richard is the best profiler I’ve ever worked with,” Bender said eagerly.
Walter winced. “Quite true. There are only five of us in the world who know what we’re doing. Frank doesn’t know any of the others, I’m afraid.”
Fleisher laughed heartily, enjoying himself more than he had in a while. He was especially intrigued to see the wan psychologist and manic artist together for the first time. He had been stunned like every other cop in America by the duo’s prophetic work on the John List case, and now he wasn’t disappointed. He considered Frank a genius, and, he later noted, “It didn’t take long to see that Richard had an unsurpassed knowledge of the criminal mind.” Walter was equally impressed with Fleisher. “The Customs chief was quite affable and extremely bright. He had a remarkable memory for every case he ever worked.”
Wendy came to the table. Bender began to sketch her face on a napkin, demonstrating a technique to her. “A cheeseburger,” Fleisher said. “No fries.” The waitress wrote down his order. Fleisher was grinning. “Atkins is going to save my life.”
Walter ordered a cup of coffee, black.
Bender ordered a teriyaki salad, coffee, and cherry pie.
“You have quite an appetite today,” Fleisher deadpanned.
Bender watched the brunette’s hourglass figure return to the kitchen. “Look at that,” he whispered. Fleisher chuckled.
Walter stared into the gray afternoon as if he’d rather have been watching iron oxidize than Bender’s libido on exhibit.
Before the food came, the three men fell into an easy camaraderie talking murder and mayhem, including the case that connected them. They’d all worked on the U.S. Marshals’ pursuit of the fugitive killers Hans Vorhauer and Robert Thomas Nauss. “It’s because of Bill sharing his investigation with the FBI that I got a breakthrough that helped lead to Vorhauer’s capture,” Bender said. “And Richard helped me with a profile of Nauss. I still think we’ll get him one of these days.”
Bender’s face reddened in sudden anger. “That’s how it should work. But when I went to Washington to see the FBI about the List case, they were practically hostile to me. They wouldn’t give me anything. I think they had a profile of List they wouldn’t share.”
Fleisher and Walter nodded in agreement. “I’ve seen victims victimized by the justice system for thirty years,” Fleisher said sadly. His brown eyes had a faraway look.
“But why is solving a murder so hard?” Bender went on. As an artist relatively new to forensics, he was frustrated by the rigid thinking of most policemen. “They never think out of the box!”
“Police are very procedural,” Walter said, frowning. “It’s the foundation of investigative procedure, to build a case on what’s there. But sometimes what’s not there is even more important.” He smiled wickedly. “For instance”-he chuckled-“if I were sitting here naked, what was missing would become very relevant, as old and ugly as I am!”
Walter well knew the virtues of sharing information. He told them of the infamous Case of the Underwear Killer. He had just finished speaking about murder personality subtypes at a forensic conference in Atlanta when Georgia police approached him for help on the baffling case. Three women’s slips had been found strewn across the bushes of a park. The slips were bloodied and appeared to have been slashed down the middle with a knife. The garments had the letter “J” sewn into them. But there was no body. No sign of a struggle. What did it all mean?
“The police looked at it and said, ‘What happened here?’ ” Walter said mockingly. “Well, what the fuck do you mean what happened here? Anyone with half a brain can see a murder happened here. But often one doesn’t have to have half a brain to be in law enforcement.” Cutting and slicing were evidence of picquerism, Walter told them, the pleasure of causing pain through puncturing or slashing. It was the grave sign of a sadistic serial killer on a learning curve, like Ted Bundy, who evolved into even worse behavior, such as murder for the pleasures of necrophilia or cannibalism.
Fleisher looked up from his cheeseburger. “Thanks for mentioning it.”
“Not at all. The point is that some weeks later I was at a forensic conference in St. Louis listening to Roy Hazelwood, the FBI agent, describe a murder. It was a mysterious case of women’s corpses in Ohio. The torsos had been slashed open, and the slips were missing.”
Walter arched his eyebrow. “As it happens, Roy and I have known each other since Christ wore tennis shoes. After the speech, I said, ‘ Roy, I have a question for you-what does a “J” sewn in slashed women’s underwear mean to you?’ His mouth fell open. It was the first initial of one of the victims, says he.” The two profilers pieced together the case of a serial murderer, a long-distance trucker who was convicted of killing his victims in Ohio and scattering their slips in Georgia.
Wendy came and took plates away, pouring coffee with a free hand. Walter grinned. “So there’s a certain inherent value in sharing information. We can put two and two together, make connections that others don’t see.”
Bender’s voice rose in excitement. “Exactly! Bill and I have always said we ought to form a group of forensic experts who share information and cut through all the red tape and bullshit. We could work around law enforcement, and really get things done.”
Fleisher chuckled. “They already have people doing that, Frank. Their names are Batman and Robin. We can’t skirt around law enforcement like vigilantes. We need their cooperation and information.”
He turned to Walter. “We’ve talked about getting together talking over cases like we’re doing now.”
Walter sniffed in disapproval. “I’m not much of a joiner.”
Fleisher burned to join the battle of good and evil where it counted, in the suffering of individuals crying for help. If their private club of detectives didn’t take on the mantle of crusaders, it could at least be a social club, old cops hashing over cases together in their golden years.
But their dream was missing something. The ASAC wielded tremendous power but sat dreaming with it like an aging king reluctant to rise and draw his sword. The humdrum routine of life enveloped him, sealed with an ineffable sadness he couldn’t identify.
The café emptied, Wendy came with pie and more coffee, the long shadows of skyscrapers striped the street. As night closed in on the café, the figures of homeless men passed like forgotten ghosts. The three talked about the serial killers who stalked Philadelphia, and the unprecedented levels of anxiety and fear they saw in the faces of ordinary Philadelphians. “I’m seeing criminals who are much more vicious, violent, and depraved than in the previous generation,” Walter said. “People who kill for the fun of it.” The enormity of their battle settled over them with the dusk, challenging their easy bravado.
A sharp, excited voice broke the quiet. “What are we going to call our club?” Bender asked. “The Sherlock Holmes Society?”
Fleisher grinned. His irrepressible friend was never down for long. “That’s the right idea, but too obvious. I have a better name in mind. Let’s call it the Vidocq Society.” To puzzled looks, he told them that Eugène François Vidocq of nineteenth-century Paris was the greatest detective who ever lived. “And he’s my hero.”
Fleisher had rediscovered Vidocq as a young man in the FBI Academy while studying the history of criminology. The French-man was legitimately the father of modern criminology. In 1811, Vidocq founded a plainclothes detective unit, composed mostly of ex-cons like himself, which Napoleon Bonaparte signed into law as a state investigative agency, Brigade de la Sûreté, the forerunner of the FBI and Scotland Yard. Vidocq invented criminal record-keeping, ballistics, plaster foot casts, and invisible inks, experimented with fingerprinting, and was a master of disguise. Accused of staging crimes to solve them, he was ousted from Sûreté, and in 1833 founded the first private detective agency, Le Bureau des Renseignements (Office of Information), seventeen years before Allan Pinkerton formed the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago.
But it was Vidocq’s remarkable story of redemption and his belief in the redemption of others that touched Fleisher most deeply. The chief cop of Paris was a great friend of the poor and said he would never arrest a man for stealing bread to feed his family. Vidocq was Hugo’s model for Javert, the relentless detective in Les Misérables, as well as for Valjean, the ex-con who reforms and seeks redemption for his deeds.
Fleisher would write to law enforcement specialists around the world to recruit members to the Vidocq Society.
Bender’s face pinked with excitement. “We really bonded,” he told Fleisher on the way out. “We have a name, we’re going to get this done!”
Walter did not share his comrades’ excitement. As the fevered talk of forming societies and clubs and rooting out evil swirled around him, he grew quiet, and left the table early.
“I’m not much into groups,” he said. “The Vidocq Society, some kind of Sherlock Holmes club? It was simply preposterous. I quite enjoyed Frank and Bill, had a nice time and humored them both. I was trying to be polite, OK. But frankly, I thought the whole idea was foolish.”