At high noon in the Navy Officers’ Club, Fleisher looked down a long table into the faces of the best and brightest federal agents and cops from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington. This was the core group Fleisher had handpicked to start the Vidocq Society, the most accomplished and colorful experts from his various tribes: federal agents, Philadelphia cops, polygraph experts, and Jewish lawmen. On either side of him sat Frank Bender and Richard Walter. Following his luncheon with them, Fleisher had written a letter to twenty-eight law enforcement colleagues around the country and world inviting them to join a private detective club dedicated to “cuisine and crime.” Twenty-six of the twenty-eight replied with a swift and enthusiastic yes.
The air in the room was electric. Never had any of them seen so much detective talent at one table. They were a collective endowment with no obligation to any government or agency. Bender was “really excited.”
Even Walter, ever the skeptic in his crisp blue suit, launched his left eyebrow into a reappraising point as he looked down the table of renowned investigators. The big gun at Customs really did it, he thought.
The charter members of the Vidocq Society had gathered to take their collective measure, determine their purpose, vote on leadership, rules, and bylaws.
Most were men Fleisher knew like brothers. Some, like veteran Customs agent Joe O’Kane, had worked with him for years on major cases.
“Me and Bill [Fleisher] and the other guys have spent the equivalent of two lifetimes together,” said O’Kane. “We live out of suitcases, sleep in cars eating burritos on surveillance, urinate in gas station men’s rooms. 007 it ain’t…” Others had worked with Fleisher with the FBI or the Philadelphia PD, men who’d lassoed murderers and mobsters and stood guard for everyone from the governor of Pennsylvania to the queen of England.
“Fleisher, this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. It’ll never work,” laughed U.S. Treasury Department special agent William Gill, the Treasury ASAC in Philadelphia, surveying the band of tough, independent-minded cops, all of them accustomed to bureaucratic jousting and rivalry and armed to the teeth. “But I love you and if it’s a good lunch, I’m in. I’m one of Fleisher’s disciples.”
Gill was impressed with how Fleisher in the past had brought together all the ASACs who helped run federal law enforcement offices in Philadelphia -FBI, Marshals, Customs, DEA, Treasury, ATF, IRS, Secret Service-for a monthly luncheon. They got to know one another and worked together in new ways. “It was great to be able to call a guy and say, hey, Bob, I need some equipment, or I need some men.”
One of Fleisher’s ASAC lunches was aboard a cabin cruiser sailing on the Delaware, a DEA surveillance boat confiscated from drug smugglers and equipped with all the latest listening devices. “The DEA was showing off, and it worked. It impressed the shit out of everybody.” Gill later borrowed the boat to put away a revenue agent who was taking huge payoffs to ignore corporate audits. The bribes were passed in clandestine meetings on a small boat in the Delaware, and it was easy for the cabin cruiser to listen in. The boat was skippered by DEA agent Steve Churchill, who would become a VSM.
“Bill’s a genius at organization,” Gill said, “at remembering everybody’s name and bringing them together.”
“You got that right,” O’Kane said. “He talks to everybody, every agent, every cop, every snitch, every reporter, every hooker, everybody. He has lunch with everybody. He wanted to talk about this new society over lunch. I said, Bill, I can’t do all the lunches you do, I can’t eat like that. There’s never been a networker like Bill Fleisher.”
The federal agents at the table, Fleisher’s peers, were a flashy group. The bounty hunter, intense U.S. Marshal Dennis Matulewicz, a St. Joseph ’s University graduate, liked to quote Hemingway: “There is nothing like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” Star Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agent Philip Schuyler Deming, chestnut-haired and movie-star handsome, wore the ring of Washington ’s officers, the Society of Cincinnati, handed down by his ancestor Alexander Hamilton. Edgar Adamson had once given his life to Christ in the seminary, but was now based in Washington, D.C., as deputy chief of Interpol.
“Deming was so blue-blooded, if you cut him he bled Main Line,” said Customs agent O’Kane. “But he was a regular guy, not foppish. He wouldn’t tell you his middle name unless you made him.”
Treasury ASAC Gill sat with his former boss, Ben Redmond, reminiscing about the summer day in New York City in 1971 when their agents were scheduled to go undercover and receive a bribe in person from the godfather of the Colombo crime family himself, Joe Colombo Sr. It would have been a spectacular coup. But at Colombo ’s earlier appointment to speak at an Italian rally at Columbus Circle, a gunman shot him three times in the head, putting the godfather in a seven-year coma he never came out of. The infamous phrase of chief rival and suspect Joey Gallo was, “He was vegetabled,” Gill said to laughter.
In comparison, the Customs tribe was a roughhouse gang. O’Kane, son of a Kensington millwright, didn’t know what Customs agents were until half a dozen of them with sticks and guns jumped him when he was removing a repossessed car from Customs bonded storage. The young loan officer hadn’t filled out the proper forms, and Customs agents saw it as a theft. But agents Burke and Murphy liked the way the big Irishman handled himself in the fight. When they realized it was an innocent mistake and moreover the kid was Dutch O’Kane’s son, “they clapped me on the back like I was the greatest guy in the world and told me to apply to Customs.” Like another big Irishman, Frank Dufner, he caught on as a sky marshal. Dufner had been applying to be a letter carrier-his grandfather’s trade for fifty years-when he saw President Richard Nixon on a poster recruiting armed undercover men to stop airplane hijackings. They loved the undercover work, sitting there in coach in a suit with a.38 jammed in their pants, “Just waiting, wanting, wishing something would happen,” O’Kane said. It seldom did, except when Dufner had to tackle a man who was furiously pounding on the pilot’s door. “It turns out he was a gay guy whose lover was pretending to have an affair in the men’s room, and it was the only door he hadn’t checked.”
At Customs, both men trained under the “Forty Thieves,” the hard-boiled inspectors who worked the night docks in Philadelphia with sticks they used to smash smuggled vodka bottles hidden under longshoremen’s coats. “Those guys were two-fisted drinkers and I loved them,” O’Kane said. “I mean they literally stood at the bar with two drinks, and they’d just as soon punch you in the mouth as say hello. They were hardball guys with hearts of gold-Irish mostly, some Italians, a smattering of German types, a few tough Jewish guys.”
Fleisher was one of the tough Jewish guys, one of the polished, college-educated federal agents, even though he happened to have come up the hard way from Philadelphia ’s ethnic neighborhoods. But there was no caste system dividing the men at the table. Common achievement was the leveler. Masculine stoicism and modesty were the code in the room. “Guys don’t talk about things,” said O’Kane. “Gill was a hero on helicopter bombing missions in Vietnam, but I’ve never heard him talk about it. It gets mentioned in passing, and you know what a guy’s got.” They all had a lot.
Renowned attorney Kenneth Freeman, one of the tough Jewish guys, had walked the Philly police beat with him as a young man; Freeman went off to law school and encouraged Fleisher to attend the FBI Academy. Another tough Jewish guy, Customs special agent in charge Dave Warren, Fleisher’s boss, had helped bring him over from the FBI and its endless transfers so Fleisher could settle in Philadelphia.
Farther down the table, and back in time, was Fleisher’s Philadelphia tribe, the men he’d grown up with or served with at the police department. Short, wisecracking medical examiner Halbert Fillinger, who went to homicide scenes in his vintage fire department vehicles, had arrived in his red Thunderbird with the HOM-HAL plates. There was city homicide captain Frank Friel, legendary investigator of four thousand murders. “Frank’s the best man on a murder I’ve ever known,” Fleisher said.
The Philly cop family was as tight as any mob.
Only Fleisher’s cofounders, Walter and Bender, weren’t part of the family. Many of the Philadelphians had worked with Bender, but all knew Walter only as a Midwest forensic psychologist whose brilliance and temperamental nature seemed to match Bender’s. With their booming laughter and preternaturally gleaming eyes-one lit with mania, the other darkly glittering with mockery-the men flanking Fleisher seemed as ethereal as apparitions, shadowy extensions of Fleisher. They were loud, outlandish; they broke the code.
Yet Fleisher seemed to have an unspoken communion with the strange men at his side. “I’ve always had a taste for characters and eccentrics,” he said. A taste that came from his father, who enjoyed the company of gangsters, second-story men, showgirls, and assorted figures on the borderlands of darkness.
Before lunch was served, Fleisher got down to the business of creating the Vidocq Society. He introduced his cofounders, then briefly described the swashbuckling Vidocq, the society’s name-sake, and his many accomplishments.
Special Agent Dufner, once Fleisher’s partner in Customs, chuckled. So that’s where he picked up that trick. One winter day in 1980, they were investigating a major theft of TVs and microwaves from cargo containers when Fleisher found a footprint in the snow. He went to the store to buy plaster of paris and made an impression. “A lot of the guys in the office were laughing-you’ve gone too far, what’s this, Perry Mason?” Dufner said. “But we made about twenty arrests, and one guy gave himself up because we had his Converse sneaker impression. Fleisher was one of those guys who knew everything. I thought, FBI agent, Philly PD, I can learn a lot from this guy.”
Led by Fleisher, the men at the long table quickly hashed out the details of their new fellowship. They quickly chose a commissioner (Fleisher) to lead them, along with a deputy commissioner-an immodest organization model also used by the New York City Police Department, the Hong Kong Police, and the Metropolitan Police Service (Scotland Yard).
They would meet quarterly over a hot lunch at the Officers’ Club to discuss cold murders. Nate Gordon, the esteemed polygraph operator, proposed that membership be restricted to eighty-two men and women in honor of Vidocq’s life span of eighty-two years. (Born in rural Arras, France, July 23, 1775, a baker’s third son, Vidocq died in Paris on May 11, 1857.) The proposal was quickly accepted. Membership would be a “rare privilege” extended to the top forensic specialists in the world, and endure for life. No one could apply; one had to be invited through sponsorship by an existing member, and approved by a vote of a board of directors that included the commissioner and deputy commissioner. A single blackball would sink a candidate. The eighty-two charter Vidocq Society Members would be formally known as VSMs.
Their meetings would exude the elegant, privileged, old-world atmosphere of a Victorian men’s club. Coffee and iced tea would substitute for brandy, cigars were verboten, and talented women and men of all races would be enthusiastically welcomed as members; it was a different time. But they were not shy about making the club exclusive; one had to be a renowned crime-fighter to even be considered. It would be one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.
There was an air of whimsy about the Vidocq Society. Among the many previous dining-and-mystery societies that sprang up, mostly in New York or London, the most famous was the Baker Street Irregulars, founded in 1935. The Irregulars meet for dinner in New York City to discuss Sherlock Holmes in a jovial atmosphere where “it is always 1895.” Notable members included Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, science-fiction writers Isaac Asimov and later Neil Gaiman, and Rex Stout, creator of the Nero Wolfe novels.
Like the Baker Street Irregulars, the purpose of the Vidocq Society would be strictly fraternal, Fleisher said. Working or retired, detectives could catch up with old friends or make new ones and stretch their minds on fascinating unsolved cases. It would be a social club for detectives.
Fleisher was even happy to admit people who were not law enforcement professionals if they brought a unique talent to forensic inquiry.
Walter frowned at that. He wanted no part of amateurs.
In the fall of 1990, as Bender and Walter hurtled over the dark Pacific on a flight from San Francisco to Australia, the artist couldn’t remove his eyes from the stewardess. He’d never taken such a long flight and he was ebullient; his career was soaring. The John List case had propelled him to superstar status as an international forensic artist, hailed for works of genius on the front page of The New York Times. Now he’d been invited to give a week of forensic lectures in Adelaide and Sydney with Walter and FBI agent Robert Ressler. His first appearance before the international forensic community would be alongside two of the most renowned profilers in the world. Things couldn’t be going better.
But it was a long flight, and Bender’s mood rose and fell and finally went into a free fall at 30,000 feet. The truth was, he told Walter, that it was his first long trip away from his wife in their twenty years together, and he was filled with worry. He had called her from all their airport stops, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco, to tell her he loved her.
He was still finding it hard to believe, but his wife had recently informed him their marriage was officially on the rocks. Not with Wife No. 2, as some friends referred to Joan, but with Jan-the original pretty blonde, the rock of his life.
“Jan’s talking to a lawyer about divorce,” he said glumly, staring out over the black ocean.
“As your friend, I’m trying to act surprised,” Walter said tartly.
“I know, I know. I never thought it’d come to this. Jan’s the center of my life. I’ve always had affairs, but I made a mistake. I had the wrong kind of affair.”
“Yes, of course,” Walter said sarcastically. “I see.”
Bender didn’t seem to be listening. “… Jan thinks the celebrity stuff is going to my head. I can’t help it if my work attracts attention.”
In the modern media age, Bender was becoming better known in his time than Michelangelo was in his. People magazine asked him to sculpt the bust of one of the “25 Most Intriguing People” of 1991-Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,300-year-old hunter found in a glacier at 11,000 feet in the Italian Alps with a stone arrow in his back and a knife in his hand, on the losing end of the first known European murder. Ahead of the scientific proof, Bender gave the Iceman short hair because “it just felt right.” The Sonnabend Gallery in New York City made him the featured artist in an exhibit with the work of Andy Warhol called “Monster,” Ronald Jones’s installation about crime. From photographs of a young Jewish girl killed by the Nazis, he sculpted an old woman, imagining that she had survived the death camps. “She had a beautiful singing voice,” he told the Associated Press. “She sang for Mengele. Then he shot her. It was the most moving experience of all the work I’ve done.” Now it wasn’t just Philadelphia newspapers calling; it was Time and Newsweek and Match in Paris, movie producers, Hollywood agents, and celebrities on the phone, in addition to the coroners, city cops, grizzled private eyes, models, photographers, reporters, cranks, quacks, collection agencies, and jealous husbands who had long burned up the wires on South Street.
Jan wrote in her diary that her husband was no longer the young, humble, devil-may-care artist who talked about being a voice for the dead who had no one to speak for them. He was on the phone with journalists and Hollywood and TV people day and night. “He talks about himself all the time,” she wrote.
Things came to a head after they’d been fighting for weeks and months, with long, bitter silences and the tension building. On top of everything else, Jan was tired of being broke and poor. The week that John List was captured, a Time magazine writer had said that Frank Bender was more famous than the president of the United States. Bender’s nearly forty forensic sculptures, which occupied most of his time for more than a decade, had produced spectacular results-but each bust paid only about $1,000, sometimes more, sometimes much less. Sometimes nothing at all. Meanwhile, Frank’s steady money from commercial photography withered. Jan took a job as a perfume tester at Strawbridge amp; Clothier department store, and a second job as a law-firm receptionist. Frank found part-time work repairing nicked and damaged tugboat blades, diving underwater in the polluted Delaware River -with his extraordinary hands, he was brilliant at feeling the flaws in total blackness. They sold their belongings, including Frank’s last motorcycle and his van, to keep going.
The bottom fell out recently, Frank said, when he was lying in bed one morning and Jan started screaming.
“Are you fucking Laura Shaughnessy?” Her shouting echoed through the old meat market, reaching the ears of their daughter Vanessa.
Frank was fed up with Jan’s cold, dismissive attitude. “Yes, I am,” he said nonchalantly. “Now can I go back to sleep?”
“Might I suggest,” Walter said dryly, “that that was the wrong thing to say?”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Walter glared at him.
“I’ve got to restore The Balance,” Bender said quietly and with reverence, as if it were a lost artifact of The Knights Templar. “I violated The Balance.”
Walter raised his eyebrows. “Your idea of balance is Karl Wallenda’s. I don’t know anybody else outside Dubai who lives with so many women.”
The fact was that Joan, Bender’s No. 1 Girlfriend, wasn’t the problem. Jan liked Joan. In return, Joan adored Jan and respected her unassailable status as The Wife.
Jan didn’t even mind the rotating cast of young women-waitresses, artists, art photographers, single women, separated women, and other men’s wives-who served as her husband’s Girlfriends Nos. 2 through 5 depending on Bender’s needs and the oscillations of the moon. And she recognized that the deeper he explored death in his art, the greater his lust for young and nubile life. Jan was the power behind the throne; none of it threatened her.
Bender was accustomed to raised eyebrows about his domestic arrangements, but he cared neither about what others did in their own lives nor what they thought of him. Frank and Jan sought marriage counseling several times over the years for financial and other problems, but Bender’s girlfriends never came up in their sessions. Adultery wasn’t an issue. “It works for me and it works for Jan. She needs her space and I need mine. I don’t want some psychologist telling us how to live our lives. It’s a whole bouillabaisse, a mix of everything that makes us what we are. I’m an artist, but the fact I went to art school is the least important part of me. A gift is a delicate thing and you don’t want to throw it off.”
But Laura Shaughnessy was different. They met through a woman sculptor friend with whom Bender had once shared studio space. He agreed to do promotional photographs for Laura and her handcrafted leather apparel, never expecting a lovely young woman with long, lustrous red hair and a musical laugh who returned his stares with compound interest. “Laura had the hots for me immediately,” Bender said. As he tells it, it wasn’t his idea. But a beautiful young woman throws herself at you, what are you going to do, say no?
She asked him on a date Bender couldn’t refuse-a museum exhibition on Hollywood special effects, including classic Hitchcock horror artifacts that enchanted Bender: the miniature town from The Birds and the dead mother in the rocking chair from Psycho. Soon they were sleeping together, and Bender had a wonderful time. “Who wouldn’t?” Laura took him to a beach house with friends on the Jersey Shore, then to a friend’s cottage in Maine. They laughed over red wine and the taped-over bullet hole in the window of a South Philly restaurant famous for mob hits. He reveled like a Dionysian god at her family estate in New Jersey, the gated compound with mansion, Olympic-size pool with brick bathhouses for men and women, golf course, boat slip on the lake. “She had this fur coat, really nice expensive fur coat, and I made love to her in it in the living room of her parents’ house one day. I love doing it anywhere, over the kitchen table, not just with her. I like spontaneous combustions.”
Bender had a theory that the source of his creativity and happiness was following his heart’s desires. Bender was convinced that once artists lost touch with their uninhibited lust for life, they fell out of step with the dance of the universe. He feared he would lose his ability to hear the dead, his intuitive mastery of forensic art. He had a finely tuned sense of The Balance.
“So let me get this straight,” Walter said. “You can’t be a great artist unless you can sleep with whomever you want.”
“Well, The Balance is important to my work.”
“Right.”
But then Laura did something no other girlfriend of Bender’s had ever done. She became extremely possessive of him. “She wanted me to leave Jan and Joan and drop any other girlfriends. Said she didn’t like Jan and Joan.” Joan didn’t like Laura much at that point, either. Jan was furious; her husband had finally reeled in a woman who-God forbid-wanted Bender all to himself, and she was starting to think, She can have him. Bender was still enchanted with the affair, but his lovely young woman and his new stardom had tilted his world, and he felt like he was flying off into space.
Bender brooded across the Pacific about his imperiled marriage. But at Adelaide, the first stop, he began to feel better. He couldn’t afford the hotel room Walter had booked for him, so the profiler agreed to share a room. It didn’t bother him in the least that the room had no heat. Meanwhile, Walter was coming down with pneumonia, which made him more annoyed than usual with his traveling companion. I’ll never do this again, he thought. He’s a pain in the ass. He thinks it’s clever to be unreliable.
In Sydney, Bender was again bursting with optimism. Even Jan had agreed the trip was a great career opportunity. After the List triumph, he’d been looking for bigger gigs with the feds, Interpol, and Scotland Yard, and now here he was lecturing on criminal personality profiles and crime scene assessment on a program with Ressler, whom he’d been eager to get to know. Bender spoke on the first day of the conference to the prestigious Association of Australasian and Pacific Area Police Medical Officers. He was a big hit and made a great impression on Ressler. Then he told Walter he was headed to Bondi Beach. Walter reminded him it was a four-day forensic conference. But Bender said he couldn’t stand being around “a bunch of fuddy-duddies at a conference” when he could hang out at a famous topless beach.
Bender sat on the sands looking out at the dramatic sweep of the Sydney beach. He was in paradise: The sun was high, the bikinis cut low, and he had three whole days, all expenses paid, to work on his tan. He talked to everyone who went by-about the shark net, the killer riptide, the hermit in the rocky cave, the record number of bikinis. (Bondi Beach holds the Guinness World Record for the largest swimsuit photo shoot, of 1,010 bikini-clad women.) Soon he became known as “that famous American artist” and “the guy who caught John List.” He met a lot of cute women. Things were looking up.
On the third day of the conference, he came back to the hotel to find a message from Philadelphia. “Your wife rang!!!” read the note at the front desk. “At 4:07 P.M… the marshals’ office rang her to let you know they have caught Nauss. He apparently was living in suburbia with a wife and children and they knew nothing about him.”
Jubilant, Bender told Walter the exciting news. “Rich, they caught him in Michigan, just like you said they would. And he was clean-shaven, just like I said.”
“This is good,” Walter said.
Bender said he needed to get back to the United States immediately. Walter said he understood, thinking to himself, It’s a good thing he’s going, because I’m on the verge of killing him.
America ’s Most Wanted had shown the Nauss episode twice in the past two years, and mentioned Nauss a couple more times, as did other TV shows, including The Phil Donahue Show in recent weeks. Marshals had traced down literally hundreds of dead-end tips in California, Montana, Washington State, Texas, Arizona, New Jersey, Delaware, and throughout Pennsylvania. But on November 2, out of the blue, a tipster called and said a man who resembled the Nauss bust on AMW lived in Michigan.
“I told them he was in Michigan years ago,” Walter sniffed.
The tip led marshals to Luna Pier, a small town on Lake Erie an hour south of Detroit, and a man who went by the name Richard Ferrer. Nauss, thirty-eight, had taken the alias from the name of a cell mate back in Graterford. He was living a quiet life in Luna Pier with a new wife and three young sons in a ranch house with three picture windows overlooking Lake Erie.
Marshals had pieced together his trail of deception.
The year after his escape, a gentlemanly, charming, solidly built Nauss, then thirty-two, met and married Toni Ruark, thirty-seven, a single mother and government clerk in Detroit. “Rick” introduced himself as a lonely orphan, divorced, an investor, the owner of fourteen lucrative rental properties, who had “moved to Michigan to try to get his life together.” When he told his life story-orphaned with five siblings after his father died in a car accident-his friends in Luna Pier said they felt so bad for him they didn’t press him for details.
Having grown up in an upper-middle-class home in suburban Philadelphia, it was easy for Nauss to shave his heavy biker’s beard, cut his hair short, and fit right into the middle-class town. “Rick Ferrer” was a devoted husband and father, and loved to take his buddies fishing on his twenty-seven-foot boat. The lonely town of 1,500 had only four police officers, who considered him an upstanding citizen.
“When she met him, she thought she’d died and gone to heaven he was so nice,” Toni’s father said. “I liked him, too.”
Though he had no job in Michigan, Rick cultivated the image of an easygoing, successful tradesman around town. He wore his trademark baseball cap, chinos, and long-sleeve flannel shirts (always long-sleeve, no matter what the weather) as he drove his pickup truck with the toolbox he used for repairs on his properties. Occasionally he took trips out of town and came home with rent money of $2,000 or $3,000. He bought a beachfront camp up in Brimley, Michigan, on Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula, for a vacation home, and started selling off the extra land in lots. Life was good.
At 8 P.M. Tuesday, Halloween Eve, Rick and Toni and the kids were driving home in the Chevy Suburban, still planning for the trick-or-treaters. Toni had fixed the kids’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes, carved pumpkins for the yard, hung a paper ghost in the window, and strewn tiny lighted pumpkins in a tree by the front door. Until the moment carloads of U.S. Marshals, guns drawn, surrounded the Suburban, she had no idea who her husband was.
The marshals handcuffed the docile, solidly built Nauss in front of his children. Then they handcuffed Toni to keep her under control, though she would not be charged. As Toni stood in shock, a state police sergeant pulled down Nauss’s plaid shirt. And there, extending almost from the shoulder to the elbow, was Nauss’s trademark tattoo, an enormous parrot. The parrot was crucial to confirming his identity. “Some of his tattoos had been altered, but not this one,” said Dennis Matulewicz of the U.S. Marshals’ office in Philadelphia. “He had a special fondness for the parrot.”
The parrot told a tale-of leading Pennsylvania’s most violent motorcycle gang, rape, murder, dismemberment, and prison escape-that none of his new family or friends could believe.
Looking at his wife and children, Nauss said, “Sorry. This is it.”
“He’s a changed man,” Toni Ferrer said as her life unraveled. “At least from what they tell me. He never beat me. He never beat the kids.” There was no Richard Ferrer, no investment properties, no rents to collect. A marshal in Detroit said he was a “classic Jekyll and Hyde,” a charmer who killed one woman and fooled another. Toni thought she’d found happiness only to find out she was a cover. “They just wonder when he’s coming back,” she said of her children. “I just told them the truth.”
Large amounts of cash were found in Nauss’s house, along with a number of false IDs. The marshals believed that Nauss had continued to work with his partner Vorhauer, probably in drug manufacture and distribution. The Detroit region was known for nearly two hundred biker gangs that would have helped the escaped fugitives resettle, they said, and surely it was more than coincidence that Luna Pier was only a hundred and ten miles south of Yale, Michigan, where Vorhauer had been operating a methamphetamine lab on a farm before his recapture four years earlier. Nauss was spotted by several witnesses riding a motorcycle near Vorhauer’s farm when the meth lab was busted.
Clamped in leg irons, Nauss was flown to Philadelphia on a chartered marshals jet. Bender returned immediately to Philadelphia, where marshals supervisor Tom Rappone asked him to take the booking photograph, as he had with Vorhauer, who had refused to look at him.
Nauss was friendly, amiably putting his hand on Bender’s shoulder. “Hey, you did that bust of me, right?”
“Yeah. How does it feel to be immortalized?” Bender felt completely at ease with the charming killer.
“I wish it was under better circumstances,” Nauss laughed, adding, “Didn’t you also play Vorhauer, my partner, on AMW?”
“You saw it?” AMW had asked Bender to play the hit man in a reconstruction of the case.
“Yes, but you’re better-looking than him. He’s ugly, isn’t he?”
They both laughed.
Within two days, Nauss was back in maximum-security Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia, the scene of his dramatic escape, to continue serving his life sentence for the 1977 murder of his girlfriend Elizabeth Ann Landy. A Montgomery County judge gave him a light additional sentence of three and a half to seven years for escape, crediting him with time off for good behavior for his “rehabilitated life” in Michigan. Nauss was separated from his partner, Vorhauer, who was locked up more than a hundred miles away in Huntingdon State Prison in northern Pennsylvania, serving a twenty-to-forty-year term for armed robbery, plus seven years for escape.
Walter’s profile was eerily on the mark.
Nauss had a second car parked in his driveway.
“You got it right, Rich,” Bender said.
It was a Cadillac.
It was the second floor of the Customs House, one of those grand stone Depression-era buildings with a lighthouse motif borrowed from the Colossus of Rhodes. The heavy wood door was ajar, and the ASAC was talking about the goose-down jackets from China that came through Philadelphia International Airport. Murray had tipped them off to the scam-the “goose-down” parkas were stuffed with chicken feathers. They confiscated the contraband, made arrests, and locked up the case. Murray was their best informant.
“So I’m thanking him and he asks me, ‘Bill, how much do you stop, really? Give it to me straight.’ Murray was a good guy so I told him, ‘Eh, two percent. Washington says it’s ten percent, but it’s not close.’ ”
It was June 1991. Out on the river low brown air shrouded the tankers, but above was a clear sky in the east with the feel of the sea in it.
“What’s the moral of the story?” the ASAC said. “Six months later we stop a little gold Buddha statue at the airport. We drill a hole in it and heroin spills out-two million dollars’ worth on the street. We work the case through informants in Asia and trace it back to the shipper-it’s Murray. We arrest Murray.”
Fleisher shrugged. “I guess he liked his odds at two percent.”
The agents laughed. The agents were a proud, veteran crew, working big cases all over the world-Operation Steeltrap in San Francisco targeting Japanese steel industry corruption; Operation Florida on smugglers’ money-laundering. They nailed mobster “Fat Vinnie” Teresa, who’d given up Meyer Lansky and went into federal witness protection, where he smuggled Komodo dragons until O’Kane went undercover as a gay entrepreneur dragon buyer and got sixty hours of tape. They raided a Brooklyn warehouse, busting two Colombians and $60 million in cocaine that came in on a Baltimore freighter hidden in the false sides of emollient barrels. “We used the old tire-kick test,” Fleisher quipped to the press. “We got a dull thud instead of a ping.” It was important, dangerous, all-consuming, thrilling work, and the only way to do it was to think that it made a difference. In other words, not to think about it.
“Eh, what are we doing this for, men?” Fleisher asked, waving his pinkie ring.
The ASAC had become a critic of the war in which he was a four-star general, what President George H. W. Bush called the war on drugs. “I’m tired of sending my men undercover-good men with families, friends of mine-wondering if they’ll come home,” he said. “For what? Prohibition didn’t work, and it got more Customs agents killed than at any time in history.
“I’m honored to be in a long line of distinguished federal officers,” he quipped, “such as George Armstrong Custer. This is my last stand.”
The numbers were absurd. Customs had time to inspect only 3 percent of the three million containers arriving annually in the Philadelphia ports alone, and it took eight inspectors all day to open 1,500 boxes in a single container. With its large port and central location on the East Coast, the world’s largest and deadliest Colombian drug cartel had chosen Philadelphia as the perfect hole to stuff crack cocaine through to feed a hungry America. The port was FedEx for smugglers.
Fleisher’s nine drug smuggling agents were also expected to cover a dozen Pittsburgh port terminals on the Ohio, Monongahela, and Allegheny rivers, the ports of Erie, New Jersey, and Delaware, and the Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, Wilmington, and Atlantic City airports.
He oversaw his empire from a small rectangular office with an old wood desk, credenza, two visitor’s chairs, thin carpeting, white walls-“standard government bureaucrat,” he said. As if to express his unease, the walls were conspicuously bare. Settling into his crowning federal assignment, he’d hung none of the dozens of awards and commendations from a brilliant career. “I’m not into ego art anymore,” he said with a shrug. Only two framed artifacts hung on the wall-a letter of praise from FBI director William Webster, and a portrait of a man with a wide head and brazenly arrogant eyes, wearing a greatcoat and cravat of nineteenth-century Paris.
When he wasn’t high on the adrenaline of leading his men, he took solace in a routine as predictable as the sun. Every day on his way to lunch he took the stairs to appease his wife and doctor, then drove the government Crown Vic the ten blocks to the oyster house he had patronized for fifty years. He ordered the traditional oyster stew with heavy cream, the same dish he had enjoyed with his father and grandfather at the same table, served by the same waitress he had flirted with when they both were young. The ASAC was a very sentimental man.
The job took a toll on Fleisher. He could not tolerate failing; the stakes were too high. One night, at home, he wrote a Declaration of Independence Against Drugs for children in Philadelphia. If there was anyone worth fighting the drug war for, it was innocent children. His men found the powerful ASAC pensive at his desk. His ruminations turned bleak and philosophical. He had taken to discussing the tender hopes of redemption linking Yahweh, Buddha, Muhammad, and Christ. A paperback copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables had replaced his own book on interrogation techniques in his top drawer.
In a sentimental mood, he would open the well-thumbed paperback of Les Misérables and discuss the classic nineteenth-century novel of the French Revolution in light of the ongoing debate on whether law enforcement should be punitive or redemptive.
“This is my favorite scene in all literature,” he would say. It was the famous moment when Jean Valjean, the thief who steals to feed his family, is caught by the gendarme stealing a basket of silver from old Bishop Myriel, who had sheltered the ex-con for the night. Valjean is hauled before the bishop for punishment, but the bishop says there has been a mistake, he gave Valjean the basket of silver as a gift but the ex-con forgot the silver candlesticks, which the bishop now hands over to him. The thief is stunned by the force of forgiveness, and the bishop says, “Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money to become an honest man. Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”
Fleisher could not read the passage without looking up, his eyes wet with tears.
“This is what I want to do with my life. I want to devote my life to what really counts, redeeming the suffering, fighting the battle of good and evil. I want to be a force for good. I want to buy souls.”
No woman was so young, blond, and lovely, no feeling so pure, no night so exciting as Tuesday: Polish vodka, pale Eastern European skin, dazzling white light that cleansed the darkness.
If it was Tuesday, it must be Joan.
It was Tuesday evening in the art studio and home of Frank Bender, the Casanova of the Caliper, the Da Vinci of the Dead, the greatest forensic artist who ever lived.
Bender was laughing with unadulterated, adulterous joy. His laughter rang from beneath the floor in the center of the warehouse, from the underground room, the pit. He was five foot eight, slim and muscular, an ex-boxer with a leprechaun’s grin and light hazel eyes of manic intensity. MOM was tattooed on his arm from his days in the Navy, a scar sliced his lip from a beer-bottle fight, and just above his groin was a butterfly tattoo he had displayed in public, dropping his drawers for a comely barkeep.
Now in his fifties, Bender was making a living doing commissioned sculptures for clients around the world and diving into the Delaware River ’s polluted waters to repair damaged tugboat propellers. In the dark cold waters of the river he was like nobody else, feeling blindly the nicks on the blades with the gift of his hands. In his studio, laying hands on the bones of the murdered dead, he felt his psychic visions and molded clay busts of the decayed and unidentified dead, of fugitive killers. Seven Most Wanted killers were sitting in jail, and many more victims had been avenged, because of Bender’s gift for seeing dead people. His forensic art had provided Bender with fans around the world. He was profiled on 60 Minutes; Esquire named him “Man of the Month.” Cops were awed and spooked by his wizardlike powers. The work occasionally involved opening graves and cutting off the heads of corpses like some Dracula avenger, being chased by gangsters, and checking through airports with a head in a suitcase. Bender needed, he said, to “download the horror.”
He did that best on Tuesdays. Tuesdays were Joan days, and from evening through dawn Wednesday, Bender “downloaded the horror” with her. The pit was sacred space, blindingly white, perfect. They went together naked, hand in hand, down the white wooden stairs, past the white sign painted with black letters, WHITE HIGHWAY CAFÉ. It was white walls, a white bar, and white barstools with a red 1952 model Chevy, a car from his childhood, on a painted highway running down the bar. They sipped Polish vodka, listened to Brubeck, Johnny Rotten, blues, any damn thing. They drank, danced, and made love all night long. He was nearly sixty, and his all-night Bacchanalias gave him more energy than did a good night’s sleep. “It’s how I restore my innocence,” he said. Meanwhile, his wife slept peacefully in their room next to the old meat locker.
Shortly before dawn, he climbed the white stairs into the dim studio gallery. It had been a flawless evening. In the gloom he went to the stove and put water on to boil for coffee. He lifted the lid on the big pot and gave a stir; the head was coming along fine. Joan wrapped her arms around him from behind. Bender lived life ordered purely by his own desires. He didn’t own a watch, and the clocks in the place kept their own separate times. The Norman Rockwell calendar was fifty years behind. Friends had to tell him what day it was. Or he measured time, like Tuesday, by trysts. He floated in a timeless ether of his art, “the mistress I was born to serve,” as one of his role models, Michelangelo Buonarroti, once wrote.
As they sat sipping coffee under the curling Rockwell, the phone rang.
The murky skylights were graying the studio with early light. He could dimly make out the rows of human heads; the women with smudges of red lipstick and rouge and pleading eyes that seemed alive; the wolflike faces and vacant, hollow eyes of sadists, hit men, mass murderers. The mute chorus of the doomed. Visitors were awed, or spooked, by his collection of skulls. It was a sensory overload of darkness. But this was only a museum. They should only see inside his head; that’s where the action was, the active cases, the crowds. The dead appeared in his dreams with their ruined faces, crying for justice, mouthing the names of their killers.
He let the phone ring, running through the possibilities. The hit men who’d vowed to kill him seemed to be placated for now. No husbands were after him at the moment. His father-in-law wasn’t chasing him with a rifle anymore. Things were relatively calm these days. Still, he had a bad feeling. It was nothing he could put a finger on.
His partners had warned him about the physical dangers of murder investigations. Stare into the abyss and it could darken your whole being. Turn away from the pain and suffering, if you were one of those called to it, and you lost your mind. He was the latter. The cops saw it in him. Fleisher said, “We’re all driven to find justice, driven to a fault.” He had been swallowed by it. He was a simple happy-go-lucky sex-loving artist and all-around charming manipulative lothario before he was recruited for something higher. Recruited by fate. He’d never noticed the news racks, the radio, the talk of the abduction and murder of innocents jamming the airwaves of his city, of every metropolis. The numbers meant nothing to him; it was the tortured eyes of the first murder victim that did it, that recruited him, snatched his soul.
The telephone testified to the change. His tape machine, once filled with girlfriends, was crammed with messages from cops, reporters, medical examiners, grieving families seeking help. And here was the rub: The calls wounded him. Injustice made him angry. It pissed him off. But it angered all of them. That’s what kept him going. It angered all of them.
He knew as he listened to the phone ringing under the watchful gaze of the heads that morning that things would never be the same, no matter how many women he bedded. Until the world was a better place, until he did something to knock sense into it, he’d have that bad feeling.
Things were going good. It was just that bad feeling.
He picked up the phone and said, “It’s five in the morning, asshole.”
Richard Walter slept easily in his antique Chinese bed.
He’d retired with a head full of wine. As his head hit the pillow, he said aloud, “And now I enter the arms of Morpheus.” In Greek mythology the three sons of Hypnos all produced dreams. But Phantasos generated tricky, unreal dreams and Phobetor fearsome nightmares.
Morpheus spun the clear-eyed dreams of heroes.
He cherished his solitude.
“I married once, too long ago to recall or discuss. I shan’t make that mistake again. As it happens, I simply loathe cats, dogs, and children. A child should never be present to hear what I have to say.” He had consciously sacrificed the pleasures of life “to be one of the five best in the world.” He believed it was a profound sacrifice, his life a journey marked by loss. “But it is those scars that give us character, that make us who we are.”
He made coffee in the darkness before dawn. The sky was still black when he called Philadelphia.
“Frank? ”
“Richard!” came the manic shout.
“It’s Wednesday morning, remember?”
“Right, Joan and I danced all night. Nineteen sixties rock and Polish vodka. We had an incredible time!”
“Frank, what the fuck are you thinking? Did you sleep at all? Are you alone?”
“Uh, well, no. Joan is leaving soon.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “Christine’s husband is driving her over this morning.”
Walter frowned. “Frank, you’ve had quite enough sex for one twenty-four-hour period. Make a pot of coffee. And try not to let your little head do all the thinking until I get there.”
Bender howled in delight. “Rich, man, you’re just jealous!”
“I think not,” Walter said. He hung up.
The sky was leaden and filled with snow. It’s dark, it’s cold, I’m miserable, the weather is evil, he thought as he swept acorns off the engine block where a squirrel was nesting for the winter. It’s not good. As he drove to the airport and the cabin pleasingly filled with cigarette smoke, he started to feel better. In the cloud of smoke his small blue-white-red gold pin on the lapel of his suit, the badge of les couleurs, rooted in medieval heraldry, was scarcely visible. Each man had a purpose in life, Walter believed; his was to identify, torment, and defeat the most depraved psychopaths on Earth. To be good at it, to be one of the five best in the world, he had rid himself of distractions, had married his profession. Destroying evil gave him the greatest pleasure.
The sky was dreary and the colors of the chivalric code, glory and justice, gods and kings, glittered dully as the old Ford sped down the highway.
On the afternoon of Thursday, September 27, 1990, Joe O’Kane took a bite of chicken almondine and a sip of hot coffee, and looked down at three decaying corpses with their heads plunged into an overflowing tub.
“Nice lunch,” O’Kane said, dabbing the corners of his mustache with a cloth napkin. He gingerly passed the photograph down the banquet table in the Navy Officers’ Club. “I hope this club has a budget for Tums.”
The big federal agent was dressed to kill. He was the picture of a brawny, dandified Irish cop in a custom-tailored, three-piece Italian suit and black alligator cowboy boots. Clipped to a wide, silver-buckled belt was a small Beretta pistol, his “Sunday going-to-church gun.” His big silver beard was neatly trimmed-the final touch that made him Kenny Rogers’s double. With the husky build of a former semi-pro football player and a sweet tenor voice, O’Kane sang at weddings and parties as the country crooner. Special Agent O’Kane was loquacious, brilliant, cocky, a self-described “two-fisted drinker.” He’d signed up for the Vidocq Society for a few laughs. There were enough tears on the job.
O’Kane was in the prime of a major law enforcement career. He’d been a key man on covert operations all over the world. Despite his accomplishments, O’Kane never forgot that he was blue-collar Irish, son of a Kensington millwright, product of a high school education, and proud of it. He was one of Customs’ “Mustangs,” the Army term they borrowed for the Horatio Alger grunts who made it to the top on merit. “None of us waltzed into some fancy job out of college,” he said. The Irishman had a wild, rebellious streak; he’d grown his beard just to piss off a supervisor who insisted he be clean-shaven, and it became a permanent part of him. He followed his own muse. The burly cop was a poetry lover who’d read thousands of novels and had written three thrillers for kicks. “ Chesterfield put it best,” he said. “The Irish are a merry race and surely they are mad, for all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad.”
The last thing he needed was some uptight, buttoned-down agent trying to re-create the FBI over lunch. He wanted to have fun! He was the first man Fleisher approached about joining the society.
“Bill, that sounds great but I’m not a big joiner,” he said. “I don’t join the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police]. I don’t join the Sons of Ireland. These people get carried away with themselves; everybody’s got an agenda. I don’t need any of that in my life. Tell me we’ll have fun. If we can sit around and have lunches and have fun with the guys, I’ll do it. If everybody takes themselves serious as a shoelace, I don’t need that. I’m working twenty-three hours a day on major cases against the scum of the earth. I don’t need that over lunch.”
Fleisher promised a good time. “He said we’d sit in an elegant room over lunch and talk about Billy the Kid, hundred-year-old crimes, we’d bring in experts on Jesse James, even a session on Meriwether Lewis and Clark,” O’Kane later recalled. “I said, ‘OK, I’m in. Sign me up.’ ”
Now, at the Vidocq Society’s second luncheon, the very first case they formally discussed was a triple murder in North Carolina as serious and senseless as In Cold Blood. In fact, the 1972 massacre of the wealthy Durham family in the western Blue Ridge Mountains reminded O’Kane of Truman Capote’s description of the Clutter family slaughter in Garden City, Kansas. It was hardly his idea of a relaxing midday repast.
“What, do they expect me to solve this before dessert? This isn’t fun.”
“No, ’tis not any fun in this kind of case,” Richard Walter sniffed. “Except, of course, for the killer. One can discern from this crime scene that for this kind of personality, it’s the satisfaction of a mission accomplished, a job well done. Oftentimes, the uninitiated fail to grasp how much pleasure is involved for the killer.”
Walter was standing at the head of the banquet table presenting the unsolved case to a couple dozen VSMs. The mass murder had baffled the police for eighteen years, and recently Walter had been hired by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to review the cold case. “It’s a wonderful case,” he said as he passed around crime-scene photos and case documents. “There’s all sorts of drama here.” Fleisher thought it sufficiently cold and fascinating for the Vidocq Society to discuss.
Walter looked down at the case file while gathering his thoughts. “As it happens, the killer was rather obvious,” he said. “This kind of killer always thinks he’s smarter than he really is.”
The Durhams were a quiet, respected, affluent family that, according to police, had no known enemies, Walter said. Bryce Durham, fifty-one, his wife, Virginia, forty-six, and son Bobby Joe, nineteen, had moved from Raleigh two years earlier to Boone (pop. 13,472), the Watauga County seat in the state’s far western mountains, ninety miles northeast of Asheville. Bryce owned a local automobile dealership, Modern Buick-Pontiac. They were conservative, devout Christians.
On the evening of Thursday, February 3, 1972, Bryce left a 5:30 Rotary Club meeting and returned to the dealership to pick up his wife, a secretary at the family business, and son, a student at nearby Appalachian State University, for the ride home. After his last class, Bobby Joe had driven his Buick sedan to the dealership and left it there to join his parents in the GMC Jimmy. A major snowstorm had blown in, and they all climbed into the four-wheel-drive SUV.
Sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 that night, the Durhams reached home, the SUV slowly climbing the icy road to the large brick split-level atop a steep hill. The family settled down for a quiet Thursday evening of dinner and television. Outside, the house was nearly invisible in the blowing snow. It was a night to stay indoors. But the killer knew the local roads and mountains and the Durham house, Walter said, and proceeded through the storm.
That night, Troy Hall, the Durhams’ son-in-law, and his wife were quietly watching TV in a trailer home four miles from the hilltop split-level. At 10:30, the phone rang, and Troy picked it up. On the other end was the barely audible voice of his mother-in-law, he told police. “Help,” she begged, whispering as if afraid of being heard. Intruders were in the house, she said, and they “have got Bobby and Bryce.” Then the phone went dead.
Hall told police he thought the call was a practical joke. He immediately called back, certain his in-laws were all fine, but he got only a busy signal. Growing concerned, he and his wife pulled on their coats and jumped in the car-but the car wouldn’t start, so they asked a neighbor, private detective Cecil Small, to drive them through the storm. It took the three of them twenty minutes to reach the Durham house at the top of the hill. Hall told his wife to stay in the car while he and Small, his handgun drawn, checked out the house. At 10:50, the son-in-law and private eye discovered the bodies and called police.
The crime scene told the story of domestic tranquillity suddenly shattered. The house had been ransacked. In the living room stood three glasses of soda and a half-eaten plate of chicken on the coffee table in front of the sofa, next to Bobby Joe’s solitaire cards. A large patch of blood stained the carpet. Virginia had died from strangulation, the coroner determined. A short piece of nylon cord still encircled her neck. Bryce and Bobby Joe had deep rope burns scarring their necks, a clear attempt to strangle them, but their cause of death was drowning. All their faces were badly bruised. The water was still running, overflowing the tub.
From the beginning, the police were confused. They launched a massive manhunt through the snow-covered mountains of western North Carolina. Within minutes, they found the Durhams’ GMC Jimmy, which the killer had stolen to make his escape. It was abandoned a mile away from the house on a snowy, deserted road known only to locals. The car’s lights were on and the motor was running. On the backseat was a sack of silver plates stolen from the Durham residence.
The state police believed it was a robbery. But then why did the robber(s) abandon the silver plates? And why, Walter asked, were two bank-deposit bags, with cash inside, left on a dining room chair in the house? Police had no answers to that. The Watauga County sheriff surmised it was a grudge killing. But he knew of nobody with a mortal grudge against the Durhams.
The pressure to make an arrest was intense. Newspapers all across the mountains printed the horrors. North Carolina governor Bob Scott joined local business leaders in offering a reward for an arrest leading to conviction. United Press International broke the news that in her frantic last phone call to her son-in-law, Mrs. Durham had said, “We have three niggers here.” The next day, the Watauga County sheriff told UPI, “We have some good clues and we hope to have early arrests. And we definitely are investigating blacks.”
No black men were ever charged. A month later, the sheriff rounded up three Asheville men in their twenties who were part of a burglary ring. The trio was charged with first-degree murder in the commission of a robbery, but the three men were quickly released for lack of any evidence putting them at the crime scene.
“I would argue that the system worked,” Walter said, to the extent that “innocent men were not prosecuted.” Nobody was ever brought to trial for the murders.
As Walter concluded, Fleisher stood and opened the floor to questions.
Was robbery a motive for the murders? a federal agent asked.
“No,” Walter said. “On the contrary, it was rather clumsily staged to look like a robbery. But it was a killing all about power and control.”
What about the son-in-law? another VSM asked.
“It’s interesting that all was not well in the marriage,” Walter said. “The Durham family was pressuring their daughter to leave Hall.” The couple eventually divorced after the murders.
“But police never considered him a major suspect,” Walter said.
What about Cecil Small? someone asked. Wasn’t it odd that a neighbor who just happened to be a private eye was the only witness to the crime scene outside of the family?
Walter raised his left eyebrow to a fine point. “I have my doubts about Small,” he said. “There’s reason to question his general credibility. For the last thirty years he’s told anyone who listened that he knows who killed JFK, and it wasn’t Oswald.” Guffaws swept the table.
The story beggared belief, but Small had insisted so loudly that a Hispanic man had assassinated JFK that FBI agents finally interviewed him in 1967, Walter said.
Small said he and his wife were in their pickup truck in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, on their way home to their Georgia trailer from a western trip with their little dog. Suddenly they found themselves riding in JFK’s motorcade. Small saw the first lady stand up and heard his dog bark the instant the president was shot (the dog always barked at gunfire). Then he saw a short Cuban or Mexican man cross in front of his truck, running away holding a rifle with a scope partially hidden in a bag. Minutes later, Small happened to give a pleasant young hitchhiker named Lee Harvey Oswald, whom Small believed couldn’t have done it, a ride to the library from the Texas Book Depository.
According to FBI records, agents decided not to further investigate because Small’s memory of Dallas streets and landmarks wasn’t accurate.
“That’s quite a witness,” a federal agent said. “Maybe he knows where Elvis is living now.”
So who killed the Durham family? a VSM asked.
Walter grimaced. “I have a theory. We’ll see if the state police are savvy enough to go forward with it.”
O’Kane was agitated. “It was a gruesome case,” he recalled, hardly appropriate for a social club. He and the other investigators were fundamentally men of action, not words; if you put an unsolved triple murder, a grave injustice, in front of them they naturally wanted to solve it. O’Kane was convinced Walter knew who the killer was, but there was nothing the vaunted members of the Vidocq Society could do about it unless they conducted their own private investigation.
As they left, Walter was disappointed that there had been so few questions from such an esteemed group of investigators. He attributed it to “natural caution. This is the first time we’ve done this, and they don’t know much about it. The guys were pretty much just following along with what I told them.”
William Gill, the decorated special agent in charge of Treasury agents in three states, sat silently through the presentation, stunned by Walter’s knowledge. After a lifetime in the military and law enforcement, he realized with a start that “homicide investigation is a very specialized field”-one he knew nothing about. “In Treasury, I’m a white-collar guy-mostly bribery, extortion, white-collar crimes. We follow the money, just like the IRS special agents. I don’t do homicides. I don’t do blood splatter.”
Gill dourly reflected on the irony that “Fleisher had gathered together these extremely talented people to examine murders and the majority of them are not homicide investigators.” An irrepressible optimist, the Treasury ASAC was confident that he and the other federal agents would make significant contributions, drawing on their own expertise. He decided the league of extraordinarily diverse talents was, like most things new and unusual, hard to grasp because it was a product of pure inspiration, “the simple genius of Bill Fleisher.”
Gill decided to test that genius at the very next meeting. At his request, the Vidocq Society examined the brutal execution of IRS agent Heidi A. Berg, shot to death six years earlier in suburban Virginia while jogging. Berg was a bright, athletic thirty-year-old woman from the Midwest who was slain in broad daylight. Her murder had never been solved. Virginia-based IRS special agent James Rice, whom Gill had assigned to the case in 1984, came to Philadelphia to present it with his former boss.
“Everyone has a case they can’t let go,” Fleisher said to Gill. “This is yours.”
Gill took the case personally. “A sadder thing I’ve never seen,” he said. Gill was head of the IRS Internal Security Division for the Mid-Atlantic region of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. He was responsible for protecting IRS employees and investigating threats and assaults against them. When Berg’s murder landed on his desk in Philadelphia, he felt his blood pressure spike.
Early on the morning of August 12, 1984, Berg was jogging through a park near her home in suburban Merrifield, Virginia, about ten miles west of Arlington. Berg, a dark-haired young woman wearing athletic shorts and a T-shirt, was a highly disciplined IRS agent and a habitual runner. She was a reserved woman from Wisconsin, a devout Christian, gave anonymously to charity, and dreamed of writing children’s books. She hadn’t an enemy in the world, police thought.
But at 6:30 that morning, just a few minutes into her jog, she was shot six times in the back with a handgun. She ran a few steps before collapsing and died where she fell, on the grass in front of an American Automobile Association building, where her body was discovered by a passing motorist. A single assassin apparently ambushed her, for reasons unknown. “She was executed by an excellent shot who emptied the gun on her,” Gill told the VSMs. “Someone really wanted Heidi Berg dead.”
He assigned Agent Rice and eight other veteran IRS agents in Virginia to the case. Rice became obsessed, spending parts of vacations working on the murder.
The crucial question hadn’t changed in six years: Who wanted to kill Heidi Berg? Police had no idea. The murder made no sense. As Fairfax County prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. put it, “Of all the people who jog in Fairfax County, you wouldn’t find many less likely to be the target of a homicide.” They even suspected a professional assassin may have killed the wrong woman.
Gill didn’t see it that way. “There were thousands of reasons someone would want to kill Heidi Berg,” he said, “each one printed with George Washington’s portrait.”
Heidi Berg was an IRS revenue officer, a difficult, dangerous job, Gill said. She was essentially an unarmed, civilian bill collector for the IRS. “When people really don’t pay their taxes and have had a lot of opportunities, letters, the revenue officers have to go out and knock on doors and do seizures,” Gill said. “Everybody hates the IRS, and if you say ‘bill collector for IRS’ you’re doubly hated. We had a high incidence of threats against revenue officers, and a few assaults.
“Naturally,” Gill said, “we assumed the killing was tied to her work.” In fact, Berg had recently been threatened in her job as a revenue officer based in Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia. The threats had seemed serious enough that she received a transfer to the Washington, D.C., office and a less contentious job as program analyst.
But it was a dead end. “We pretty much exhausted the idea that it was job-related. We were reasonably sure it wasn’t anybody in her case files.” Then they found entries in Berg’s diary about a secret boyfriend, unknown to her friends or family. Her secret boyfriend was an FBI supervisor, a married man. Agents got excited when they learned the bullets that killed Berg were of “the same caliber issued by the FBI at the time,” Gill said. “It looked very promising. We went down that alley aggressively.”
FBI internal security gave the potential suspect a polygraph test, but it was inconclusive. Agents also gave polygraph tests to the man’s wife and his son, who was off at college. “It ruined the guy’s life for a while,” Gill said. “Bad luck for him that she maintained a diary.” The FBI supervisor was eliminated as a suspect. Another dead end.
“It’s a very frustrating case,” Gill said. “We had ten good agents in that office and a lot of money to spend. But we couldn’t get anywhere.”
So who killed Heidi Berg?
Richard Walter cleared his throat to speak, and Gill leaned forward. “Everyone seems to think if she’s pretty and young it was sexually driven,” Walter said. “I don’t see evidence for that. The killing is consistent with the angry taxpayer theory-Heidi is just disposed of, thrown away like trash, a killing all about power, which is what money represents. The gun is all power. But if everyone in her case files has been ruled out, the probability is she is a stranger to the killer. She was there and he had the needs and weapon and did her, a variant form of a drive-by shooting.”
The group fell silent. But why kill her? Bender asked. Walter frowned. “He may have tried to put the make on her and she said no, and he didn’t have the ability or testicles to take her down, so he satisfies himself with the gun. It’s also possible that he’s impotent or whatever else and that’s the most he can do, he feels isolated and he wants to take somebody out, and she’s a good-looking girl.”
The thin man smiled coldly. “We don’t like to imagine these fellows out there. They’re the sharks in the harbor. That’s why it’s a high risk to go running alone, to be isolated at six o’clock in the morning in a park, on a pathway-particularly for an attractive girl.”
Gill’s face lost color. He didn’t doubt Walter, but it seemed a tragic, absurd end to Heidi Berg. The questions from the VSMs had seemed relatively weak. Someone had actually asked Gill if he had checked Berg’s phone records. “Of course,” Gill had shot back. What were they accomplishing?
The next month was even more disappointing to Fleisher. On the morning of Tuesday, July 3, 1984, Donna Friedman, thirty-three years old and eight and a half months pregnant, left her two young children with a babysitter and went to her regular obstetrics appointment. Friedman, a doctor’s wife, was due the second week in August. She received great news from her obstetrician, Dr. Robert S. Auerbach. The baby was a “perfectly formed, healthy baby boy,” Dr. Auerbach said. “She was very happy and doing beautifully. She said that she didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl. She had only wanted it to be healthy. She lived for her other two children so completely.”
Leaving the doctor’s office, Friedman said she had some shopping to do. First Friedman, who was redecorating her suburban Philadelphia home, went to All-in-One Linens to inquire about bedroom curtains. Then it was on to Toys“R”Us to look for a stroller for her brother’s newborn son, a gift for the child’s bris. Unable to find the special stroller, she called her brother at about 1 P.M., and he suggested she go to Cramer’s Juvenile Furniture on Frankford Avenue, which was advertising the stroller. She bought it with a credit card, and asked a clerk to help carry it to the trunk of her car. The store clerk watched her drive away at 3:30 P.M.
When she didn’t return home by 4:15, her husband, hematologist Dr. Alan Friedman, was worried. Donna was always punctual and knew she had to be home to relieve the babysitter for Scott, eight, and Lee, four. The couple also planned to attend a 6 P.M. birthday party for Dr. Friedman’s grandmother at a local restaurant. When his wife didn’t show up for the party, Dr. Friedman called hospitals and the police.
Police began an urgent search for the missing woman. Dr. Friedman spent two days retracing his wife’s steps. At 8:25 P.M., Thursday, police found the family’s 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass parked on Ogontz Avenue, a few blocks from the Cheltenham Square Mall. Blood was seeping out of the trunk. Friedman and her unborn child were both found dead in the trunk. The young mother had been bludgeoned to death with two blows to the skull, then shot twice in the back of the head, “for good measure,” the police said.
Fleisher choked up listening to Philadelphia Police Department detective Frank Diegel describe the case. Fleisher had grown up not far from the Friedmans. At the funeral service for mother and unborn child, people wept and cried out in anguish. The rabbi had told the story of a man who cried over the death of a loved one.
“Why do you weep?” the man’s friend asked. “Your tears will not bring back your loved one.”
“That is why I weep,” the man replied.
A week after the murders, the Philadelphia Daily News offered $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction “of the person or persons responsible for the murder of Donna Friedman and her unborn child.” Family and friends of the Friedmans offered a separate $10,000 reward. Homicide detective Diegel had a primary suspect, but the police investigation foundered. The money was never collected. No one was ever arrested for the crime.
The Vidocq Society discussion was spirited. The society helped focus and reenergize Diegel on his primary suspect, whom VSMs were convinced had killed the pregnant woman. But in the weeks that followed, Fleisher was deeply frustrated. “We know who did it, but it was never pursued by the police. It was stonewalled, and we don’t know why.”
Fleisher said they were taking on a Sisyphean task if they tried to solve cold murders. Police often interviewed the killer within forty-eight hours of a murder, but if they didn’t recognize him, the case dried up fast. Memories faded. Evidence disappeared. Other cases clamored for attention. Once a case officially went cold, the difficult turned nearly impossible. “There are good reasons a case doesn’t get solved in the first place,” Fleisher said. “You have to deal with those.” It took a highly motivated DA and police department, and often a passionately involved family, to blast a case from the ice. On top of all that, the Vidocq Society lacked police power to arrest and subpoena. Their power was brainpower. “We almost always know who did it,” Fleisher said. “But to find a solution, get an arrest and conviction, the stars would have to be aligned.”
Gill, the high-ranking Treasury agent, left the Friedman case with a humbling lesson. While he was busy chasing Mafia kingpins, “A lot of people in this country get away with murder. A lot more than I thought.” A restless mood seemed to grip the VSMs. Was the point of the exclusive club to expose difficult truths and break hearts? It wasn’t at all what Fleisher intended.
Yet to Fleisher’s surprise, the Vidocq Society grew quickly and dramatically, and just as quickly gained a remarkable reputation in and out of law enforcement. By the fifth meeting, on April 18, 1991, the size of the society had more than doubled to sixty-two members. The buzz about the dining and detective club reached the media. A New York Times reporter had asked to attend the fifth ratiocinative luncheon. The Vidocq Society, he later wrote, “may be the only club in which real sleuths try to solve real crimes for recreation.”
The new VSMs were, if anything, even more prominent. The director of Brigade de la Sûreté, the French equivalent of the FBI founded by Vidocq in 1811, signed on, making the trip to Philadelphia from Paris. So did FBI agent Daniel Reilly, an organized crime expert from Long Island. Agent Reilly wanted to relax from his job of tracking “really horrible, no, make that repugnant people.”
New VSM Charles Rogovin, a Temple University law professor and criminologist, knew something about cold cases. He sat on the select congressional committees that investigated the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Yet he was now eager to help the everyday cop “who’s got a tough nut to crack. An old case is very tough to deal with.” The virtue of the Vidocq Society, he believed, was that “if the assigned investigator is working as hard as he can and he runs out of trump, sometimes it takes an outside investigator to say, ‘How about this?’ ”
Rogovin looked around the room proudly at the record turnout for the fifth meeting. “This is not a collection of English club members,” he said. “You’ve got some seasoned people here.”
Cuisine and crime that day would be served at the Dickens Inn, a small colonial tavern, built in 1788, facing the broad cobblestone boulevard of South Second Street. The society had left the Naval Officers’ Club, finding it insufficiently atmospheric for their deliberations, in addition to which some VSMs voiced concern about privacy. The new digs were an intimate English pub named in homage to Charles Dickens, who actually visited Philadelphia. The Times reporter was taken by the irony of the setting, noting “waitresses dressed in eighteenth-century barmaid uniforms brushed past a detective who remarked, ‘She was shot to death on a Sunday.’ ”
Fleisher was excited. The setting matched his vision for the Vidocq Society, and so did the case. He had finally scheduled a classic murder case that detectives could discuss and debate over a leisurely repast. It was the 1930s Butcher of Cleveland, who had committed the ghastliest series of murders in American history. The Butcher tortured, dismembered, decapitated, and drained the blood from more than thirty men and women from the 1920s through the Great Depression and beyond. Seventy years later, the murders, which had stumped hundreds of lawmen including Eliot Ness, remained unsolved.
Ness had been hired as Cleveland ’s safety director in 1935 with a shining reputation. In Chicago in 1931, the dashing young U.S. Treasury agent headed an elite unit of eight federal prohibition G-Men (Government Men) who raided Al Capone’s speakeasies and helped bring down the gangster on tax evasion and liquor charges. Men of unassailable integrity, Ness and his Chicago feds could not be bought-thus they were “The Untouchables.”
By all accounts, he made great strides cleaning up a corrupt city. He attacked gambling and the city’s organized crime operations, going after crooked police and politicians who were in the mob’s pocket. He dropped the crime rate 30 percent to make Cleveland the nation’s safest city. Ahead of his time, he reduced auto deaths by cracking down on speeders and drunk drivers. He even dropped juvenile crime two-thirds by starting citywide Boy Scout troops.
Then he encountered a new type of criminal. This was a supremely clever, Machiavellian type who could not be investigated or bullied like Al Capone by simply raiding a speakeasy. Sadistic serial killers, with IQs notably higher than other killers and the ability to imagine and fulfill the darkest, most complex criminal needs, were an increasing plague of the twentieth century. They didn’t seek money or power or revenge. They tortured and killed strangers in a shadowy nightmare-world created and ruled by their own insatiable desires.
The first who gained infamy in the new century was New York City pedophile and cannibal Albert Fish, “The Brooklyn Vampire.” In January 1936, as Ness took office in Cleveland, the pale, mustached, deranged house painter was electrocuted at Sing Sing for strangling, killing, and eating ten-year-old Grace Budd. Fish had tricked the girl’s parents into thinking he was a kindly old farmer who promised the father a job, but first wanted to take the girl to a birthday party at his sister’s house.
Unknown to Ness, the Fish case would provide rare insight into the mind of this penultimate category of killer. Trickery, the ruse, was essential to the sadist’s excitement, as was the denouement, or “gotcha.” Six years after Budd’s kidnapping and murder, Fish sent a letter to her mother boasting of his crime: “On Sunday, June 3, 1928, I called on you… Brought you pot cheese-strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out… When she saw me all naked she began to cry… she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick-bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.”
As Fish, suspected of five murders, died in the electric chair, the Mad Butcher was already well on his way to being the most prolific serial killer of the twentieth century. He was on a pace to match Dr. H. H. Holmes, who admitted to at least twenty-seven killings and may have murdered dozens more in his gloomy “Castle” of death during the glittering Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Compelled by some of the same insatiable needs as Holmes, the Butcher seemed intent on re-creating a gruesome history, littering Cleveland ’s world’s fair of 1936 with bodies.
The killer operated with strength and stealth, and a horrifying appetite to torture and degrade his victims. In September 1934, the grisly Lady of the Lake surfaced in Lake Erie -the torso of an unidentified woman in her thirties, beheaded and legs cut off at the knees. In September 1935, two nude male bodies-beheaded and castrated-were found in Kingsbury Run, a Depression tent city of hoboes in a gloomy downtown ravine cut by the Cuyahoga River and railroad tracks. The younger victim, Edward Andrassy, twenty-eight, a small-time hoodlum of profligate bisexual appetites, was cleaned and completely drained of blood. Both men were decapitated while alive. The fourth victim was a prostitute, Florence Polillo. One arm and both thighs were found in a bushel basket, wrapped like a ham.
The pattern was clear to police: decapitation, which was extremely difficult and rare in the history of murder, followed by dismemberment and sexual mutilation. The killer had to be a very strong man, the coroner said, and also must be a surgeon, given the skill and exactitude of the beheadings. A cop said it more bluntly: “A maniac with a lust to kill is on the loose.”
The city was frightened. As headlines grew hysterical, the mayor and newspapers demanded the city’s safety director stop the monster. Random beheadings in the shadow of its new skyscrapers were a public relations nightmare for Cleveland in 1936. The city that year drew three million visitors to the Great Lakes Exposition, a heroic attempt, supported by federal money, to boost its sagging fortunes. Architects had designed a gleaming modernist expo city on 135 acres on Lake Erie. Rivaling the Chicago World’s Fair’s White City, it was “a city of ivory, a new Baghdad risen in the desert,” one writer said. Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, the future movie Tarzan, and Esther Williams performed on the Aquacade, a floating stage, while jazz from the Bob Crosby Orchestra floated out over the water. In June of that year, Cleveland also was preparing to take a second bow in the national spotlight, hosting the 1936 Republican National Convention, which would send shy Kansas governor Alf Landon to be crushed by FDR in the fall. Yet Ness, absorbed in fighting municipal corruption, showed little interest in the murders. The safety director was letting a serial killer terrorize the city.
But on June 5, as delegates poured into town for the GOP convention set to start in three days, a head detached from the body of a tattooed man was discovered by the train tracks in Kingsbury Run. In a brazen affront to Ness, the killer hid the body in bushes in full sight of a police station. On the Sunday afternoon in September when star Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller struck out seventeen Philadelphia A’s, more than five thousand people gathered around a sewage pit to watch a diver retrieve the arms and legs of the Butcher’s eighth victim.
The mayor ordered Ness to act. The Cleveland Press demanded: “Unusual means must be taken to bring the detection of one of the most horrible killers in criminal history.”
Ness responded by putting twenty detectives on the case, including undercover hoboes. He sought advice from the experts at Scotland Yard. He expanded the investigation to the largest in city history. Police brought in ten thousand possible suspects for interviews, focusing on physically strong men who were surgeons, medical personnel, male nurses, and animal butchers. Detective Pete Merylo paraded through shantytowns in his long johns under the moonlight to “bait” a killer he was convinced was homosexual. Nothing worked. By 1938, the Butcher of Cleveland had killed and dismembered twelve men and women.
Ness ’s dragnet finally turned up a prime suspect. Dr. Frank E. Sweeney was a surgeon from a prominent family, the first cousin of a local Democratic Party boss. On the surface an impressive, articulate man, Dr. Sweeney was known to be an alcoholic, mentally unstable, and abusive; his wife had left him. Furthermore, he was physically huge, quite capable of all the cutting and moving about of human remains. His frequent disappearances from the hospital where he worked, timed to some of the killings, had aroused suspicion, and Ness himself had been frightened by the big man’s anger when alone with him.
Ness’s instincts were confirmed when another crime-fighting legend, Leonarde Keeler, inventor of the polygraph machine, came in from Chicago and administered several lie detection tests to Sweeney, who failed them all. The surgeon, the polygrapher told Ness, was “a classic psychopath.” Sweeney was following in the footsteps of his father, an alcoholic, violent schizophrenic who was committed to mental hospitals at the end of his life. Keeler said, “You’ve got your man.”
But Ness faced a quandary. He was reportedly convinced that Sweeney was the Butcher of Cleveland. Yet he didn’t believe he’d ever win a conviction of the politically connected Sweeney. Two days later, in what some suspected was a deal Ness cut with the prominent family, Dr. Sweeney voluntarily committed himself, and never saw the outside of a mental hospital or hospital for the rest of his life. The Cleveland killings stopped, but the murderer moved on to other parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, it was too late for Ness. His reputation had already been damaged by allegations of heavy drinking and skirt-chasing that facilitated the breakup of his marriage. His long failure to stop the serial killer’s reign of terror left him especially vulnerable to political enemies and the press. It was the makings of an American tragedy.
On an icy winter night in 1942, after he fled the scene of a car accident at 4:30 in the morning following a night of drinking and clubbing, Ness was forced to resign his post. His second wife, a young model and art student, left him soon after. The former crime-fighting wunderkind descended through a series of career and business failures in New York and Washington, D.C., to the remote mountain town of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, where he drank heavily with his third wife and continued to tell wild stories in the bars about Al Capone that few believed. An old friend, sportswriter Oscar Fraley, embellished those stories in his highly fictionalized account of Ness’s life, The Untouchables, which made Ness an American legend. But Ness didn’t live to see the book. In May 1957, he walked back to his small-town apartment from the liquor store with another whiskey bottle and died of a heart attack at the kitchen sink, at the age of fifty-four. It was said the Butcher had taken yet another victim.
The subject seemed “graphic” to the Times reporter. Philadelphia boasted “enough bizarre killings… to keep a full house at the morgue and make homicide detectives and medical examiners wish they could get away from it all,” he said, marveling that “when some of them do take a break, they like to sit back and listen to the one about the Cleveland torso murders.”
Adding to the sense of drama in the room, the case would be presented by two renowned investigators from sharply different traditions that were increasingly in conflict. Philadelphia homicide captain Frank Friel was an old-school, shoe-leather detective, rooted in the solid nineteenth-century procedure of building a case from fact-gathering at the crime scene. He would be followed by forensic psychologist Richard Walter, one of a small group of pioneers who read bloodstains and patterns at murder scenes like Rorschach tests. At their best, they seemed to be wizards capable of reading a killer’s thoughts. It was a face-off between natural opponents-two proud, strong-willed figures who were oddly well matched, both tall, lean, and charismatic men who used wit to mask a fierce demeanor.
As lunch dishes were cleared, Friel opened the floor to questions. He challenged the Vidocqeans: Who was the Butcher of Cleveland? Fleisher was delighted. It was just the kind of forensic puzzle he had imagined. Could a college of top investigators surpass Eliot Ness? Could they solve the mystery of “The American Jack the Ripper”?
The question-and-answer period was brisk. Friel and others maintained that Ness correctly focused the investigation on cutting trades such as surgeons and butchers. “The principal characteristic of the assailant was that he decapitated the victims while they were still alive,” Friel said.
Customs agent Frank Dufner saw it as the work of an angry medical student. “Did anyone flunk out of medical school?” he asked.
The fact that the bodies were drained, did anyone consider an undertaker? a police officer asked.
Yes, Friel said, medical students and undertakers had been questioned.
“Seven out of twelve of the heads were not found,” Dufner continued. “Were they kept as trophies?” Friel couldn’t say.
Fleisher had scribbled in a notebook: undertaker, butcher, abattoir. But by the end of the presentation, he was convinced the surgeon, Dr. Sweeney, was the killer. “If Leonarde Keeler says he was the guy, he was the guy. Keeler was one of the inventors of the polygraph, and a master at it.”
While busboys removed the lunch plates, “the fact of the matter is, Eliot Ness did some good things, was a hero to an extent,” Walter said, “but was out of his depth in this case because of his limited knowledge in the 1930s of serial killers.”
Walter leaned in and said, sotto voce, “Of course, the FBI still doesn’t understand much of this, so we shouldn’t be so hard on Ness.” Several VSMs chuckled along with him.
To start, Walter said, Ness was mistaken to narrow the investigation to large, strong men and professionals or tradesmen expert with a knife. “You don’t have to be a butcher to carve someone into little pieces or an undertaker to drain them of blood. The fact of the matter is anyone can do it, and do it competently. You just have to want to.” He smiled coldly, and went on. “In addition the killer doesn’t have to be big or powerful. He can be a small man. All he has to be is clever. He gets them drunk, then he can do anything to them.”
Second, Walter said, Dr. Sweeney, Ness ’s main suspect, “was a lousy choice to be the Butcher, for all the reasons that supposedly implicate him. He’s violent, alcoholic, schizophrenic. That makes him an asshole, but it doesn’t make him a sadist.” It was clear from the corpses that the Butcher of Cleveland was a sadistic serial killer, and Sweeney didn’t fit that profile.
“There’s a big qualitative difference between a guy who is just unpredictably violent, like Sweeney, and a guy who had a system like the Butcher,” Walter went on. “A sadist has a long complicated growth pattern to fulfill his darkest desires. He’s organized, cunning, he plans, has the ability to change direction when things go awry.”
Sweeney is also eliminated by the fact that the killings didn’t stop, Walter said. “The police at the time couldn’t understand it, but more than twenty other killings and dismemberments in eastern Ohio and even western Pennsylvania clearly bear the mark of the Butcher,” Walter said. “I believe the killings stopped only when he died of natural causes, was killed, or committed suicide in 1950.”
Given Ness ’s limited knowledge at the time, the Butcher was basically an unstoppable killing machine, he said. “The Butcher was smarter than Ness, and proved it.” The Butcher gained sexual pleasure by creating dependency, dread, and degradation in his victims. It was the same desire that governed the behavior of modern serial killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. The sadist’s pleasure is almost always sexual, and is insatiable.
Hoboes were an easy target. “The Butcher would lure them off into the woods with offers of booze, food, sex, whatever. That’s the ruse. They go into the woods and they don’t leave-that’s an exciting story for him. It’s not enough for the sadist to bash somebody in, he has to enjoy it, and part of that enjoyment is the ruse. Then he gets them into a situation they can’t get out of, reveals himself as a monster. He creates situations where he can systematically triumph.”
As dessert was served, Walter said, “Yes, he took the heads as trophies, like Bundy did.” In his secret lair, Bundy masturbated over his female victims’ decapitated heads. What the Butcher did with the heads will never be known. But the drained bodies are a profound clue to his perverted sexual pleasures.
When the waiters came around with fresh coffee, Walter urged the Vidocqeans to try to imagine the pleasure the killer experienced when he drained his victims of all their blood in water. “The water heightens the pleasure. Try squeezing a sponge under water at home. When you feel the water gently tickling the hairs on your arms, it’s sensual. That’s the kind of pleasure the Butcher experienced, an intense sexual pleasure.”
Fleisher was beaming. The meeting was a success. He bragged to the Times reporter, “Sherlock Holmes was a great detective. But he was all imagination. We’re the real thing.” The Vidocq Society, he said, was “like a college of detectives. You couldn’t get a more astute group of detectives.” But the question was, would the society be a college that discussed murders as an academic exercise, or would the detectives come down from their ivory tower and try to solve crimes? The Times reporter asked Fleisher, “When are you going to actually solve a murder?”
Fleisher said the Butcher of Cleveland was probably past solving. He was confident after just a handful of meetings that “we will solve ninety percent of these cases that come before us. Everyone in the room knows who did it. But it’s a lot more complicated bringing a cold killer to justice.”
“We haven’t solved one yet,” Fleisher added. “But we’re getting close.”
When he saw his words conveyed around the world to millions of readers in the pages of The New York Times, Fleisher only wished it were true.
“Clearly this is not another show at the local mystery dinner theater,” the Times concluded, “nor a meeting of Sherlock Holmes buffs.”
“He did a grand job of saying who we aren’t,” Walter quipped. “But who the hell are we?”
As the lights dimmed in the Texas ballroom, the faces of the dead appeared, larger than life yet so young and small, to soft music accompanied by a staccato of gasps and sobs from the audience. Each child’s face brought another cry from a banquet table, another candle sizzling in the dark, until the great hall glimmered like a concert-a hushed and otherworldly concert where parents implored fate or God for an encore.
Retired Philadelphia police captain Frank Friel sat in the ballroom of the San Antonio Hilton, chain-smoking and haunted by his thoughts. In his suit pocket was his keynote speech; in his hands was the national convention’s Book of the Dead. At his table were the conventioneers, their faces distorted with grief or anger or flooded with tears, like rain washing over stone. It was Thursday evening, August 11, 1991, and the fourth annual convention of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children (POMC) was a gathering unlike any Friel had ever seen.
As he stood to speak to the hall filled with mothers and fathers, uncles and grandparents, of murdered children and young adults, Friel prayed for guidance. The enormity of the suffering in the room weighed on him; he was struggling to keep down a bottomless grief, to stare into his own soul.
In thirty years on the Philadelphia police force, Friel had thought he knew all there was to know about murder. He’d investigated thousands of them as a cop and homicide captain. He’d been codirector of the Philadelphia Police-FBI Organized Crime Task Force that virtually destroyed the Philadelphia Mafia in the 1980s. He’d fearlessly stood up to the murderous don, Nicodemo Scarfo, who identified Friel as his “chief nemesis.” He’d personally investigated the bombing assassination of Philadelphia godfather Philip “Chicken Man” Testa on the Ides of March 1981, when Testa was blown through his front door as he put the key in the lock at 2117 Porter Street in South Philadelphia. In the nation’s fourth-largest city, Friel was the best of the best. The former city police commissioner and mayor Frank Rizzo once said, “No detective in the history of the Philadelphia Police Department was better than Frank Friel.”
Retired from the Philly PD for two years, he’d taken a job as the public safety director of Bensalem, Bucks County, and worked as a consultant to the FBI and Major League Baseball on organized crime. He toured the country assessing the professional standards of police departments for the National Commission on Accreditation. He taught criminology at Temple, St. Joseph ’s, and LaSalle universities. But the POMC was something new. The group had 100,000 members, with chapters in most states, and provided a full range of services to suffering families. The convention seemed surreal to him. In seminars and hallways, at meals and over drinks, they learned from experts and one another how to endure a murder in the family: inattentive, inept, or corrupt cops and prosecutors; an exploitive press; the court system with its noble constitutional safeguards for the rights of their sons’ or daughters’ killers and none for them or their son or daughter; friends, neighbors, and church folk who shunned them; the sidelong glances that said, This doesn’t happen to good girls and boys; the psychologists who had no true explanation, and thus no true word of solace, for evil.
Friel thought he knew the awful secret of murder in America. The awful secret was that since 1960, when he joined the police department at age eighteen, more than 500,000 Americans had been murdered-approximately ten times the combat deaths in Vietnam, nearly as many American deaths as the Civil War and World War II combined. The combat in Americans’ private lives was the nation’s penultimate war, and the troops were sadly undermanned.
Big city police were overwhelmed by a flood of new murder cases each week. With no time to do the job properly, they focused on easy cases and let difficult ones slide. The typical PD was a tragically inefficient bureaucracy that half the time chained the detective to a desk, pushing needless paper, Friel said. “Disgraceful turf battles for individual glory” consumed cops at all levels and prevented city, state, and federal agents from working together. The result was that “the streets are less safe for our citizens than they should be, and crimes-often very serious crimes-that could be solved are not.” The result was that as many as 30 percent of murders nationwide went unsolved. Put another way, more than 100,000 Americans in a generation had gotten away with murder.
Friel knew all that. Then he saw “The Murder Wall” in the main lobby of the hotel. It was a simple display, with homemade posters and photographs, telling the stories of 120 murder victims. His eyes scanned the faces of the dead: not drug dealers or gang members, or the front-page victims of the Los Angeles Night Stalker or Chicago ’s Killer Clown. A twenty-three-year-old Chicago medical student. A thirty-four-year-old Michigan lawyer. Two young Minnesota girls who went shopping for school and never came home. America ’s slaughtered boys and girls next door.
Friel saw parents quietly approach the wall, heads bowed. They left notes and flowers as if at a war memorial. They seemed broken, invisible men and women whom he’d heard say in the hallways and seminars, “Don’t let the killer take another victim.” It hit Friel then that nobody had put into numbers the larger tragedy of American murder, the uncounted hundreds of thousands of people struggling to find a healing they knew would never come, a rough closure. How they hated that word, “closure,” he noted. They knew it was not possible.
JUST ONE PERSON IS MISSING, James Charles Kaloger’s parents wrote at the wall. BUT OUR WHOLE WORLD SEEMS SO EMPTY!
Friel scarcely remembered his keynote address that night. Returning to Philadelphia, he knew he had seen through a fissure in the surface of American crime to an underground, a place of routine tragedy and suffering that was unimaginable and therefore unimagined.
“This is a tragic situation in our country,” Friel said to Fleisher and the others at a luncheon. “How can we see this level of suffering and do nothing? There are lots of people who need our help.” The mission of the Vidocq Society was finally clear.
Covered with dust from an all-nighter in the studio, Bender sighed deeply and picked up the telephone. Jan was still asleep, and Joan was cleaning up from helping him finish a head. He had greeted the dawn with exhilaration; at moments like these, he felt half his age, which was fifty-two. Then the sexual energy and hectoring presence of twentysomething Laura Shaughnessy buzzed through the line.
Laura was furious that he hadn’t yet left his wife; Bender was trying to tell her without coming right out and saying that it was over between them. She was demanding he leave Jan and Joan and settle down. She was trying to make him monogamous. Bender was starting to call her “Sarge.”
They still dated. He’d still have sex with her. “You don’t want to cut it off completely,” he reasoned. But he was saying things like, “I’m not sure this is working out.” He was letting her down slowly. By autumn 1991, he felt strongly reconnected to Jan and Joan, and Laura was trying his patience.
“Laura was a lovely person. We had great times together. It was a fun affair. But I felt like I was losing my space, my freedom. I just couldn’t deal with that.” After a period of self-examination, he had concluded, “I wasn’t about to leave Jan over her, and I wasn’t about to leave Joan over her. They’re the two women in my life who mean an awful lot to me. It’s times like that when you’re tested that you realize how much you really care for certain people.”
Now he thought ruefully, “The greater the pleasure, the higher the price.” His bill for the two-year affair was coming due.
Laura sounded like she’d been crying.
“Kenny is devastated,” she said. “He went on and on about this girl Zoia, this Russian girl, and now she’s disappeared. It’s his fiancée, he really loves her. I feel terrible for him. He’s a big teddy bear, and he’s falling apart.”
“Whoa!” Bender said. “Slow down and tell me what happened.”
Laura said she’d just gotten a distressing phone call from one of her best friends since high school in New Jersey, a Florida ophthalmologist named Kenny Andronico. Kenny had said his fiancée, Zoia Assur, who was living with her sister in New Jersey before moving down to be with him, had disappeared.
Zoia hadn’t been seen in two weeks. The cops were telling Kenny not to worry, people went missing and showed back up. But they’d been going steady for five years, and Kenny had given her a necklace and they had plans to marry. He knew something was wrong. He was scared that something bad had happened to her. He went to pieces on the phone.
“Frank, Zoia is missing and Kenny wants your help to find her-through your contacts at the Vidocq Society, America ’s Most Wanted, or Unsolved Mysteries or whatever.”
Bender suddenly realized he’d met Kenny Andronico. Laura had introduced them at a New Jersey train station the previous summer. Bender and Laura had just arrived on a train from Philadelphia, heading to her family’s estate for an amorous weekend, and there in the parking lot was this lumbering big guy with a mustache in a casual suit.
Laura was effusive introducing her lover to her old friend, but Kenny didn’t pick up on the emotion, Bender recalled. “He shook my hand, but he barely grunted at me. He was clearly possessive of Laura. I sensed he didn’t like me being with her.”
Bender sighed. He wanted to help Laura. But he had sensed a dark and controlling spirit in Andronico. He was happy to get away from the guy. He also had the unsettling feeling that Laura was trying to manipulate him into getting involved as a ploy to prolong their relationship.
But as he heard her troubled voice pleading for help for her friend Kenny, his doubts washed away. He was touched. He liked the girl and decided to help. He felt he owed it to her, being as he was going to dump her and all.
“Sure, I’ll do anything I can,” Bender said. “Have Kenny call me.” Laura was deeply grateful, and Dr. Andronico didn’t waste any time. He called Bender that evening.
The voice on the line was bold and assertive.
“Hey, Frank, my good buddy,” he said.
Bender stiffened. “I barely know the guy. Now I’m his good buddy?” All six of Bender’s senses went on hyperalert.
“Frank, I need your help,” Andronico pressed on, imploringly. “My fianceé disappeared, and the police have no idea what happened to her, and I’m scared to death. I know from Laura that you’re the best forensic artist in the world, and work with the best detectives. Please help me.”
Bender remained cool. “I’ll do what I can, Kenny. Who would want to kill Zoia?”
“She was living with her sister, but there were serious conflicts in the home.” He explained that Zoia’s brother-in-law, a state police sergeant, was having sex with Zoia-sleeping with his wife’s sister under the same roof. He was afraid the cop might have had something to do with Zoia’s disappearance.
“What’s the story with the cop?” Bender asked. “Has anybody investigated him? Has he taken a polygraph?”
Yes, the policeman took a polygraph, Kenny said, and he passed it.
“OK, I’ll make a deal with you. You take a polygraph and you pass it and I’ll help you.”
“Wait a minute!” Kenny sounded furious. He was practically shouting. “I’m your good friend!”
“Kenny, you’re not my good friend. You’re a friend of Laura’s, but I barely know you. You want me to help you-you have to pass a polygraph.”
Andronico was quiet on the other end of the line.
“I work with two of the best polygraph examiners in the world-Bill Fleisher and Nate Gordon, both in Philadelphia. Both are members of the Vidocq Society, a group of detectives I belong to that looks at cold cases pro bono.”
He gave him Fleisher’s telephone number. “Call Bill and set it up. You’ll have to pay for the polygraph yourself-four or five hundred dollars. I also want you to call my friend Richard Walter. He’s a profiler; he can tell you more about what might have happened to Zoia than anyone I know.” He gave him Walter’s phone number.
Andronico grunted OK.
“Kenny, can you pass a polygraph?”
“I think I can.”
Bender’s anger flared. “You think you can? Jesus Christ, Kenny, if you pass the polygraph I’ll be happy to help you. If you don’t, and Bill tells me you’re a flat-out liar, I’ll hunt you down until the day I die.”
On Thursday, November 28, 1991, Thanksgiving evening, Richard Walter, home for a spell after trips to Hong Kong and Sydney on murder investigations, was dressing to go to a friend’s house for turkey and all the fixings. He was standing at the gilt Victorian hall mirror knotting his red tie on a white collar when the phone rang.
He stared at the bleating instrument thinking if it didn’t stop soon, one of them would have to go. Walter’s hypersensitive hearing was a gift on murder investigations, when he heard suspects whispering far out of normal earshot, and detected suprahuman signs of fear, such as sub-aural breathing increases, during interrogations. But the auditory assaults were getting worse with age. He couldn’t tolerate the sound of someone chewing food on the telephone line. When he detected the wet smacking of gum or the dry crunching of crackers on the other end, he hung up immediately.
His condition was apparently caused by sensory overload, the trademark of a man who absorbed too much information simultaneously. The aging ear sometimes lost the ability to screen noises, his doctor said.
He had been looking forward to crowning a successful year with a bottle of Chardonnay with friends. What execrable human being was delaying his celebration and jackhammering his ear-drums? He picked up the telephone.
“Who?” he exclaimed.
It sounded like a sales call. Walter prepared to hang up. He did not recognize the slippery, unctuous voice. Then he realized it was a stranger asking for a favor, and his ire rose along with his suspicion.
“Dr. who?”
“Frank told me if you want to solve this, and exonerate yourself, call Richard Walter,” the voice insisted. “He said, ‘He’s one of the best profilers in the world. He’ll give you good advice.’ ”
As the voice purred on, it came back to Walter: It was Dr. Kenneth Andronico, the ophthalmologist in Florida whose girlfriend, Zoia Assur, was missing in New Jersey. The police were getting nowhere; the doctor feared foul play and wanted help. Bender had told him to expect a call from “a good friend of one of my girlfriends.” Kenny was a confused and grieving man, Bender said, and needed some guidance.
Frank!
“Do you have a moment to give me some advice?” Andronico pleaded.
Walter scowled into the telephone. He instinctively didn’t like the oleaginous, manipulative voice. He checked his wristwatch: five minutes to seven. He would be late for Thanksgiving dinner.
“Oh, all right,” he said.
As Andronico told his story, from Zoia going missing to his suspicions of her policeman brother-in-law and general police ineptitude, Walter’s scowl deepened. The doctor didn’t sound like a confused and grieving boyfriend. He’d contacted a former FBI agent in Florida for help, and now Bender and Walter and the Vidocq Society. This isn’t making sense, Walter thought. He’s right in the midst of everything, and he’s coming up with all kinds of cockamamie theories.
After a few minutes, Walter cut him off sharply. He joined Bender in insisting that the doctor submit to a polygraph examination with Bill Fleisher, president of the Vidocq Society.
“Young man, you’re looking under all sorts of beds and stirring up a lot of dust. But the fact of the matter is you are the primary suspect because you’re not credible. I won’t be looking forward to the case unless you are checked out.” Walter hung up.
As he drove to Thanksgiving dinner, Walter couldn’t decide who was more confused, the doctor he now suspected of murder or his licentious partner Bender. Bender took the concept of knight-errantry, the wandering warrior, to a different dimension.
Some men are a heartbeat away from the presidency, he thought. Leave it to Frank to be a penis away from a murder.
The big, mustached ophthalmologist Dr. Kenneth Andronico sat in a small windowless room melting like a candle, which was better than his fiancée, Zoia Assur, who had been found in a shallow grave in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. But he wasn’t in great condition, either.
Dr. Andronico’s powerful face, wide in the jaw, wore a slick yellow sheen under the hot lights. He refused to make eye contact; his pupils darted along the rims of his eyes, as if looking to escape his head. But there was no escape. The big man was strapped into the subject’s chair with arm and finger cuffs. Rubber pneumograph tubes bound his chest and abdomen. He couldn’t see an exit. He couldn’t see much around the dominant, five-hundred-pound shadow formed by two very large men, renowned polygraph examiners Fleisher and Gordon. They leaned close with their cool voices and big, manicured hands.
Gordon tossed Andronico a softball question, a standard warm-up.
“How do you think you’ll do on the lie-detection test?”
“This thing, I think I can beat it,” Andronico said.
Gordon smiled to himself. Where do we find these guys? Let the fun begin.
The helicopters, dogs, and search squads had combed every inch of the Pine Barrens since August.
Four months later, the corpse was discovered in a place they’d already looked.
In December 1991, a hunter found Zoia Assur in a shallow grave in the piney woods, one of the largest remaining tracts of East Coast wilderness. Animals and the moist coastal sand had quickly reduced her to little more than a skeleton. Enough remained for the Ocean County medical examiner to determine the cause of death: Zoia had been shot three times in the chest. One of the bullets pierced her heart.
James Churchill, chief investigator for the Ocean County prosecutor’s office, said Assur was taking medicine for depression, and had killed herself near the spot where her sister had fallen to her death in a horse-riding accident seven years earlier. Fleisher and Gordon thought the police inquiry was “a joke.”
So they piled into a car with Joe O’Kane and Frank Bender, a team of four Philadelphia VSMs, and drove seventy-five miles east to the wooded area near Toms River, New Jersey, to see for themselves. Maybe an ex-Customs drug agent, FBI agent, black-belt polygraph examiner, and psychic artist could spot something the cops missed.
“It was unbelievable,” Bender said. Although the body had been removed and the scene cleaned up, they found fragments of Zoia’s clothes, even a piece of fingernail. Fleisher was more surprised by the mile they had to hike into the woods to find the place. And the style and location of the suicide weapon-a heavy, German-made Heckler amp; Koch P7, an eight-shot automatic found in a bag twenty-seven feet from the body.
“I get it,” he said sarcastically. “This petite young woman who is weak and sickly fights her way almost a mile through thick brush carrying a gun she’s incapable of firing. It takes twelve and a half pounds of pressure to fire the P7, and she’s not going to be able to turn it around herself and find the force to pull the trigger at that angle.” To test his theory, Fleisher asked Jan Bender, who was about the same size as Zoia, to try to shoot herself in the chest with the same gun, empty, at an indoor shooting range. Wearing a bulletproof vest, she awkwardly pointed the P7 automatic with both hands back at her chest, and pulled the trigger with all her strength for several minutes. She couldn’t do it. When she finally succeeded, the gun was pointing over her shoulder.
Standing on the soft Pine Barrens sand, Fleisher continued his theory. “So now we’re supposed to believe Zoia shoots herself once in the chest, has the strength to shoot herself twice more, once in the heart, then puts the gun in a bag and moves it nearly thirty feet away?”
The big man smiled. “Yeah, this was a suicide, and Gordon is Elvis Presley.”
On the way back to Philadelphia, Fleisher drove them to a New Jersey psychic who claimed to have insights about the case. Standing in her kitchen, the psychic closed her eyes and whispered that the spirit of Zoia Assur was present, yet afraid to talk. Fleisher said tenderly, “It’s OK, Zoia, you can trust us.” He reached out into the air to gently touch her, making a gesture as if he was stroking her reassuringly on the arm or head.
They got no new information from the spirit world that evening.
As the car crossed the dark Jersey flatlands in the moonlight, Bender felt he’d never had more fun with the Vidcoq Society, all of them working together. O’Kane howled in laughter. “Bill, you will never live down the night you petted a ghost.” O’Kane couldn’t believe it. He kept saying it over and over. “He petted a ghost!”
O’Kane’s booming laughter was joined by the artist’s, the polygrapher’s, and that of red-faced Fleisher himself. “Maybe Bill scared her away.”
As Fleisher and Gordon prepared to run the test, Bender strolled into the outer office with Laura Shaughnessy, his girlfriend and Andronico’s old high school buddy. Laura was distraught. She had screamed at Bender in the car: “I should never have brought you in on this!” The relentless Bender and his Vidocq friends were trying to expose her good friend Kenny as a murderer, and Kenny couldn’t have done it, she said. Bender was grinning now. Seeing that Fleisher and Gordon had matters well in hand, he left, saying, “Laura and I are going to go grab some lunch.”
Fleisher laughed. “Leave it to Frank. We’re trying to solve a murder and he runs off for a tryst.”
Fleisher and Gordon turned to the interrogation of the man they suspected in the murder Bender’s affair had brought to their door. Fleisher studied Dr. Andronico with hard eyes. When he looks in a mirror, Fleisher thought, he finds his fiancée’s killer.
Wired to the machine, Andronico was supremely confident. He said he’d flown up to Philadelphia to take the test and rule himself out as a suspect-then maybe the Vidocq Society would help him find his fiancée’s killer.
“He’s agreeing to take the polygraph because he thinks he’s smart enough to fool you and fool the machine,” Walter told Fleisher before the test. Walter had completed his profile of Andronico after studying the crime scene. The shooting and disposal of Assur like rubbish confirmed his analysis of a power-driven killer of psychopathic arrogance.
Andronico had said he didn’t believe Zoia killed herself, either. He suspected Zoia’s brother-in-law, the state police sergeant who was having an affair with her. The P7 handgun found at the scene, which fired the bullets that killed Zoia, was the sergeant’s service gun. But the police had ruled out the state trooper as a suspect, and the Vidocq Society believed he was innocent.
Walter scoffed at the doctor’s story. “He had plenty of motives to kill Zoia. He’s enraged to find out she’s sleeping with a married man, and doubly enraged that it’s her brother-in-law, under her sister’s roof. The doctor is power-driven. You don’t get rid of him. That’s an intolerable insult. He gets rid of you.”
The state police had also ruled out Andronico as a suspect. He was innocent in the eyes of the law. “So what’s he doing here?” Walter asked. “Why fly fifteen hundred miles to pay for a polygraph to prove his innocence to a bunch of private cold-case detectives who may show that he’s guilty? He thinks he is smarter than everyone, that’s why, and it gives him a thrill to beat us. He relives the excitement and sense of control of the murder itself. He’s playing that dangerous ‘catch me if you can’ game.”
Andronico had even agreed to allow his polygraph to be filmed by the Vidocq Society for possible future use and shown on 48 Hours with Dan Rather. The 48 Hours crew was scheduled to film the upcoming Vidocq Society meeting, where the society would investigate whether Assur’s death was suicide or murder and whether the doctor killed her.
Walter believed the doctor killed his fiancée, planted the gun to get rid of both betrayers, gulled the police, staged a murder, frame-up, and cover-up, and now would try to fool the Vidocq Society and CBS News in one nationally televised Machiavellian stroke.
Minutes into the test, Andronico’s cool evaporated. His readings shot for the moon: flushed, rapid breathing, shifty eyes, jittery arms and legs. His big, eggplant-shaped face was sweating like it sat in a steam pot.
Fleisher and Gordon had seldom seen a man so clearly deceptive.
Dr. Andronico had a great memory for how he spent each hour of each day. “But asked to describe his whereabouts on the day his fiancée is missing,” Gordon said, “he suddenly becomes very upset and no longer remembers clearly.”
“When did you last speak with Zoia?”
The night before she died, Saturday night, August 10, Dr. Andronico said, he spoke with his fiancée on the telephone. “He told her he was coming up that Monday morning,” Andronico’s father, Carmen, told the Atlantic City Press. Now Dr. Andronico insisted he never made the trip to New Jersey.
Andronico stuck to his alibi. He was at his father’s beach house in Florida more than a thousand miles from New Jersey on the Sunday Zoia disappeared. It was impossible for him to have committed the murder. His father corroborated his son’s story.
But Fleisher wasn’t convinced. Before the polygraph, he had checked airplane schedules between Florida and Philadelphia and the driving distance to the Jersey shore. He concluded there was plenty of time for Dr. Andronico to do the killing and return to Florida in one day. “That doesn’t mean he did it,” he said. “But it was possible.” Fleisher pushed Dr. Andronico hard on the point, and the charts showed the doctor was being deceptive about his alibi. “Why would a man who was innocent lie about his alibi?” Fleisher asked.
Fleisher and Gordon conducted the polygraph examination three times that afternoon; each time, the doctor failed spectacularly. His answers about the murder and his alibi were overwhelmingly deceptive. The Vidocqeans also tested Dr. Andronico’s father, who also registered as deceptive about his son’s alibi.
“It was classic deception,” Fleisher said. “I wish all charts were this easy to read.”
Andronico was so flustered at one point he said, “I have to get my story straight.”
But he did not confess to the crime.
In the topsy-turvy world of the psychopath, he must have been thrilled, Walter thought.
He was winning.
On May 17, 1992, 48 Hours with Dan Rather aired its episode on the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia, “Murder on the Menu.”
CBS correspondent Richard Schlesinger described the shooting death of twenty-seven-year-old Zoia Assur, a doctor’s fiancée, and asked: “Was it suicide? Or was it murder?”
“The setting is colonial, but the subject is crime,” he said. “Today, the eighty-two members will try to solve one before dessert.”
As the VSMs nibbled on the entrée, members reached a consensus that Zoia’s death was “definitely murder,” but several members said there was no suspect yet, nor a motive. Walter, Bender, and Fleisher made their case for Andronico as the prime suspect, including the doctor’s jittery, deceptive polygraph. Andronico had declined an invitation to the luncheon.
Schlesinger was shocked. “Why would a guy who killed his fiancée walk into a room with eighty-two experts in crime and say investigate this crime when it’s already been ruled a suicide by local police? Why would anybody do that?”
Fleisher shrugged. “This is typical behavior of a psychopathic killer-to inject themselves into an investigation, to maintain some kind of control.”
During dessert, Dan Rather said in a voice-over, “Did this man murder his own fiancée? We’ll confront him with the conclusion of some master detectives, and give him a chance to respond.”
The 48 Hours team flew to Florida, and Schlesinger confronted Andronico in a room of his doctor’s office with the camera rolling. Standing against a wall in a blue suit and yellow tie, Andronico said no one knew or loved Zoia “as much as I did,” and he was suffering the greatest loss.
Schlesinger said that the Vidocq Society investigators believed he was a psychopathic killer; what did he say to that? Andronico calmly stuck to his alibi and said, “I have nothing to worry about.”
“Did you kill her?” Schlesinger said.
Calmly, “No, I did not. No, I did not.”
In February, Fleisher had sent a ninety-page letter to the Ocean County prosecutor summarizing the findings of the Vidocq Society investigation and urging him to reexamine Assur’s death.
“We believe that there are enough inconsistencies regarding her death to cause a reasonable person to pause before declaring it a suicide, and that the case, therefore, should be revisited,” Fleisher wrote in the Vidocq Society Journal.
The prosecutor never answered back.
By January 1993, almost a year after Fleisher’s letter, nobody from the police or prosecutor or medical examiner’s offices had shown any interest in looking at the Vidocq polygraph charts, reviewing the conflicting statements of alibi witnesses, watching the videotapes of Andronico and his father, or “for that matter, even listening to what we have to say,” Fleisher said. The New Jersey case was closed: Assur had committed suicide. Andronico had never been considered a suspect. Therefore, Fleisher said, “The Vidocq Society is placing this case in a closed status.”
He added, “There is much truth to the old saw ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’ ”
In old Philadelphia, where horse-drawn hansoms rattled over cobblestones, stood an old brick tavern open for business on and off for two centuries, with the sign of the loaves and roasts creaking in the wind. The eighteenth-century edifice once commanded the New World harbor as “the most genteel tavern in North America,” John Adams said. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Adams dined and drank their way through the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution there. Now it was an elegant neo-colonial restaurant and tourist watering hole that seemed lost in time. The mass of visitors walked by heading to Independence Hall as if the tavern at Second and Walnut was not visible.
During the great celebrations of independence two centuries ago, full-length portraits of Lafayette and General Washington were painted in the tavern windows, backlit by candlelight. On Thursday morning, April 30, 1992, the windows were marbled by more disturbing images. The corpse of a lovely young woman, blond and petite, filled the projection screen at the north end of the hall. Deborah Lynn Wilson, twenty years old, was lying on her back at the bottom of a stairwell on the campus of Drexel University in Philadelphia. The senior mathematics major, a former model, had been severely beaten and strangled to death.
Seven years later, no one had been arrested for the murder, and Vidocq Society Members had assembled from London, Paris, New York, and Virginia to examine their ninth murder case, the Death of Deborah Wilson.
Philadelphia police sergeant Robert Snyder, a homicide detective in his forties with sandy hair and intense blue eyes, took the podium. The highly respected detective had worked the case for much of seven years; Snyder worked headline cases. But this one stumped him. “You always feel bad about the cases you don’t solve,” he told the society. “Especially the ones involving the young, the innocent, and the aged. This is one of the innocents.”
Walter, putting down his coffee, snapped to attention and looked up. He saw at once why no arrests had been made after seven years, and why police detectives and a private eye hired by the family were still confused. The murder scene contained no signs of the common motivations cops were trained to observe-no obvious clues implicating money or sex. No signs of robbery. Deborah’s body was covered by the down-quilted gray overcoat she had donned that chilly morning of November 30, 1984, the week after Thanksgiving. Her winter gloves were still stuffed in the pockets of the overcoat. Her wristwatch was still on her wrist. Nor was there a recognizable sexual assault. Deborah Wilson died still fully clothed, in jeans and a blue, long-sleeve pullover blouse, except for her feet, which were bare. Only her white Reebok sneakers and socks were missing.
There was no rational reason Deborah Wilson had to die. The police would make no progress until they broke out of investigative routine and accepted the fact that the crime was beyond normal human comprehension and traditional standards of morality-or amorality, in fact.
This was no ordinary murder. It was a gruesome act of depravity. It was a New Age crime, a “Me Generation” murder. It wasn’t one of those pre-1960s killings that cops now saw in a bizarre haze of near-nostalgia: A jealous man shoots his two-timing wife, a law partner gets snuffed for half the firm. Those old-time killers were almost understandable to average folks. The cops always knew where to look: the husband, the law partner, someone the dead man knew well.
But this kind of murder, a lovely, wholesome young woman killed for no reason at all-this was crazy time, cops figured. But it wasn’t crazy; it was sane, methodical, cold, well-planned. Just another middle-class American exploiting the bounty of unprecedented affluence and freedom, steady employment, his own house and car, ample leisure time, a king’s library of depraved instructional media images, a large supply of young, tolerant, fun-seeking acquaintances-all the resources, in other words, that only aristocrats like the Marquis de Sade once possessed to sample and deeply explore their hungers. Just an everyday late-twentieth-century American monster.
De Tocqueville warned of the dumbing-down of America, but he never imagined this. The elite forms of evil had gone mass-market.
Still looking up at the screen, Walter thought to himself, Young man, I know what you’re up to. One ought not to do such things. You can’t hide from me.
As Snyder began to describe the case, Walter sensed an air of excitement in the eighteenth-century hall. He detected a new seriousness, an intense focus from his peers. Fleisher had said the eyes of the world were on them now. Adding to the anticipation, another prominent journalist guest, Lewis Beale, a writer on assignment for the Los Angeles Times, was sitting at Fleisher’s table, scribbling notes. Beale specialized in cop stories. He had interviewed the L.A. cops who advised Hill Street Blues director Barry Levinson about his TV series Homicide and Sidney Lumet, director of Serpico. When he described the Vidocq Society, it sounded like a ’50s film noir band of forensic brothers “who pool their experience and intellect attempting to solve the unsolvable.”
Fleisher, Walter, and Bender were astonished. The Vidocq Society had become the media flavor of the moment. A noted film agent who sold the classic mob pic Goodfellas wanted to represent them. A month earlier, the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer had touted the colorful club as avengers of “unsolvable crimes.” A week after that, the Sunday Miami Herald published the same story under the headline, THIS CLUB’S WHODUNITS ARE REAL. Suddenly there was pressure to solve crimes, not just discuss them. The Sunday New York Times, the previous spring, had captured the society’s fanciful Sherlock Holmes style with its dispatch, FIRST THEY DINE, THEN TALK TURNS TO MURDER.
While opportunities were nice, Walter kept them focused on reality. “Point A: We didn’t start this for recognition. Point B: We haven’t done anything to deserve recognition. Point C: Journalists are romanticizing us, turning us into heroes, to sell newspapers. Point D: They wouldn’t be able to do this unless there was a real need. It doesn’t matter how they portray us. The fact of the matter is crime is out of control in our society. People need our help.”
The publicity had brought requests flooding into the Vidocq Society’s P.O. box in Philadelphia -in letters, packages, court files, pleas for help, songs of woe. A Los Angeles man wanted the society to investigate his father’s murder, which had occured thirty years earlier. A United States congressman needed confidential assistance to solve a friend’s murder.
The desire to help was animating the whole society. Friel’s return from Texas and the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children had lit a fire. Fleisher boasted in the Times that the society was a “college of detectives” without equal in the world. Now they had a chance to prove it.
Friel backed his Texas conversion with more than words. It was Friel who persuaded Sergeant Snyder to present Wilson ’s murder before the group for a “fresh set of eyes.” Friel had worked with Snyder in the homicide division in 1984, when Deborah Wilson was killed, and although he didn’t work the case, he and Snyder talked about it often over the years; the college student’s murder still bothered him.
Friel knew what Snyder was feeling, especially toward the end of his career when he was running out of chances. “Bob Snyder is truly a legend in homicide, the consummate homicide detective,” Friel said. “But there are cases you can’t let go of.”
Walter was impressed as he appraised Snyder at the podium. It was an important step that one of the city’s finest detectives had asked for their help. When mobster Frankie Flowers was killed in the Mafia wars, Snyder was the shoe leather the department sent out to find the killer.
Walter felt bad for the hardworking cops, and also for Deborah. He knew how they stewed in a hard boil of grief and rage, haunted by an unanswerable question: Why? There was no rational reason; closure was impossible.
It’s time to out the bastard, he thought. That much I can do.
As Snyder discussed the crime scene, Walter sipped his black coffee and listened.
On the evening of Friday, November 29, 1984, Deborah was working late on a computer project in Randell Hall, a landmark campus building, the detective said. The ornate stone edifice, built in 1901, was a huge labyrinth of classrooms and offices famously difficult to navigate.
At 11 P.M., Deborah called her parents’ home across the river in New Jersey from a computer lab. She said she had to keep working to finish the assignment due the next morning. Gifted at mathematics, her major, Deborah struggled with other courses, including computer science. But she was a disciplined student who put in the long hours needed to excel. She didn’t have a boyfriend, though young men were interested in her, and didn’t smoke or drink. She had modeled and played clarinet in high school but focused on academics in college. Living at home with her parents and commuting to Drexel, she kept her eyes on the future. “She wanted to be an engineer,” her sister Suzanne Leis had said. “She was determined she could do it.” A photograph of a new Mercedes-Benz sedan hung on her bedroom wall as incentive.
Her parents often fretted about their open, trusting, somewhat naïve young daughter working late in the crime-ridden West Philadelphia neighborhood. But Deborah assured them the engineering building was safe, and when she was done she would get a security escort to her car.
Two and a half hours later, at 1:30 in the morning, Deborah called home again and told her parents she still needed another hour to complete the project, but they shouldn’t worry. Her ex-boyfriend, Kurt Rahner, was there with her in the computer room. He’d wait and walk her to her car.
But Rahner didn’t wait. He left the computer room shortly afterward. On his way home, he asked a campus security guard to make sure Deborah got safely to her car, and the guard passed word to campus guard David Dickson. Dickson patrolled the campus on the midnight-to-8 A.M. shift, and was responsible for the computer room.
A few minutes after 1:30 in the morning, Deborah was alone in the lab, working on the computer, when she was attacked. At 1:38 in the morning, computer records show, she made her “last transaction” on the computer. It seemed hurried as if “she was interrupted,” said Drexel computer administrator John J. Gould Jr. “It looked like she stopped in the middle of what she was doing.” Snyder had reconstructed the likely events. Her attacker apparently surprised her and beat her into submission, Snyder said. Then he strangled her to death with an electric extension cord; the cord was discarded near the computer, its grooves matching the marks on Deborah’s neck.
At three in the morning, when her parents hadn’t heard from her, they reassured themselves she was sleeping in the computer room while pulling an all-nighter. In fact, by three in the morning, according to the coroner, she was already dead. In the huge, dark, empty building, her killer carried or dragged her body through the maze of halls and through a door that led to a protected concrete stairwell on the outside of the building. At the bottom of the cold, quiet stairwell on the bitter winter night, he continued to savagely beat her corpse with two bricks, a yard-long piece of lumber, and a strip of metal. The three makeshift weapons were found lying near her body, smeared with her blood.
At nine that morning, two passing students found Wilson ’s body in the stairwell, on a landing eleven steps below street level.
As Snyder spoke, Fleisher passed around additional pictures of Wilson ’s body, a bloodstain found in the computer room and the type of computer she was working on when she died, and the type of sneakers she was wearing. White Reeboks. White socks.
Fleisher joined Snyder at the podium and opened the floor to questions.
“What about the security guard? ” Fleisher himself started it off.
“Dickson was an immediate suspect,” Snyder said. He was the obvious choice. In police interviews, he was shaky about his whereabouts during the course of the evening. But he had an alibi: He told the other guard on duty he’d been talking on the phone with his girlfriend and forgot to escort Wilson to her car. He failed part of a polygraph test, but polygraphs are inadmissible in court. “We never had enough to arrest him,” Snyder said.
The questions came in a torrent.
“Was there a janitor on duty at the time?”
No, Snyder said.
“Were there any arrests for burglary made on campus that night?”
No.
“Have you tried DNA testing?” Heads turned to Halbert Fillinger, the veteran Philadelphia medical examiner. “There may be traces of the killer’s skin nuclei on the cord he used to strangle her if he gripped it tightly enough,” he said. “That residue could be tested for the killer’s DNA.”
Puzzled looks went around the room. DNA testing had not been available when Wilson was killed in 1984; nor was it a well-known technology eight years later. “It’s a long shot,” the Los Angeles Times reporter concluded. “But right now Snyder is willing to clutch on to any suggestion. He’s frustrated by his inability to move the case forward.”
After half an hour, Snyder slumped at the podium. The question-and-answer session was winding down, and he’d gotten little more than free lunch, moral support, and a few interesting ideas.
Suddenly Walter, whose habit, like the anchorman of a relay, was to take the baton at the end, spoke up. He frowned and adjusted his owlish black glasses on his aquiline nose.
“If I might offer an opinion,” he began crisply, “the key to the case is the absence of the victim’s shoes and socks.”
Snyder nodded. “We know the missing footwear was significant. We just didn’t know how.”
Walter nodded. “There is no robbery, yet her white Reeboks and white athletic socks are missing. Why?” he asked rhetorically. Not waiting for an answer, he raised more questions:
“The crucial question is, what is the value of the killing? What did he propose to get? Since he didn’t sexually assault her, what value was it? He tells us by the absence of the shoes and socks. He doesn’t want money. She’s still wearing her wristwatch. He doesn’t want a fuck. He wants the shoes. He’s a foot fetishist.”
Murmurs swept the room.
“Do foot fetishists kill for it?” a police officer asked.
“No, not often,” Walter acknowledged. “A foot fetish is a paraphilia, a sexual deviance. Afraid to engage a living and breathing sex partner, the fetishist uses the shoe as a stand-in for anyone his imagination can conjure. He gains a secondary or tertiary level of sexual satisfaction through sniffing and feeling and touching and rubbing the shoe, and maybe masturbating with it on him.”
To titters of amusement, Walter said, “Foot fetishes may be bizarrely amusing, but they can be very powerful and damaging. This is why the Chinese bound their women’s feet into a shape they could slip their dick into, and there was so much resistance to change. The whole culture was bound by the power and fantasy of this fetish.”
Walter quickly sketched his view of the crime. The killer is obsessed with women’s shoes; he collects them, masturbates over them. In all likelihood, he probably can’t even sustain an erection around a real woman. “It’s the representation, not the reality, he craves.” He has noticed Wilson before and her white Reeboks. He’s probably never killed anyone before, but his fantasy is escalating from merely stealing someone’s shoes to confronting the wearer.
Lost in his fantasy, somewhat akin to the Gentleman Rapist, he believes himself irresistible to women. Once he reveals his charms she’s going to say, “Where have you been all my life.” A large, powerful man, he intimidates Wilson when he enters the computer room, finding her alone. “He tries to chat her up for sex, or to go somewhere with him, form some sort of relationship, and she refuses. Possibly he threatens her, things like, she’s a whore being there alone and this or that, he verbally assaults her to scare her. It doesn’t matter to him. Either way it’s just a vehicle to get what he wants. He may tell himself he wants sex, a conquest, but we fool ourselves. Really he knows the bottom line is the shoes and socks.”
Wilson, like many victims in this situation, tells him no, timidly or forcefully, maybe she tells him to go to hell. It doesn’t much matter. The response is fury-the fury that sparks attack, murder, and postmortem attack. “Intellectually he knows she’s not going to cooperate, but on the level of fantasy when she tells him to fuck off or whatever he has an explosive reaction to the indignity. He’s had a power loss, not the power gain he dreamed of, and he goes ballistic. This is the energy that fuels the crime.”
The killer assaults her in the computer room, beating her face and head with his fists and possibly weapons, causing her mortal agony and terror. “She’s screaming, pleading, and he has to shut her up so he strangles her.” He drags her corpse to the bottom of the stairwell, now his dark, private lair. “This is very sexual,” the forensic psychologist said, giving voice to his earlier thoughts. “In Freudian terms, it’s the vagina and you’re going down into it. It’s a sensuality independent of the fuck. He doesn’t want the fuck, he wants the shoes. He’ll sniff them up at home. The stairwell is a foreplay kind of entrée; it helps set the sexual context later. He took what he wanted for that. He didn’t want her tingly parts. He continues to beat her out of the anger of rejection of his fantasy, but really he wants the shoes. Basically, he needs to neutralize her so he can harvest from her what he wants. He does it and leaves.”
Leaving with the shoes and socks, the killer is flooded with a powerful feeling of success. The power-reassurance killer, seeking reassurance of his power, had repaired the assault to his pride and dignity and won. “He already got what he wanted, the shoes, so he triumphs.”
Walter turned and looked at Sergeant Snyder. “That murder scene also indicates a bit of a power-assertive guy who likes to dominate and control. A guy who lifts weights, exhibits macho power and strength with guns, hobbies such as karate.”
Walter realized the fellowship of detectives was having an impact on him he hadn’t expected. He thought the federal agents who lacked murder investigation experience were “quite brilliant in the questions they ask to keep me on beam.” He told the Los Angeles Times reporter, “Our value isn’t that we’re a bunch of fucking geniuses. It’s that we can call on each other.” As usual, Walter’s remarks required editing for the newspaper. They weren’t “super-geniuses,” he said, but they worked as a team.
Snyder was pleased with the session. “The profile fits my guy to a T,” he said. His guy was Dickson.
Walter smiled. “Check Dickson’s Army records, go back and interview his girlfriends, ex-wives, see if there were any problems with shoes.”
Fleisher was sitting at his desk in the Customs House, watching sailboats dodge oil tankers on the river. It was a lovely May morning, women were out in spring finery, and the boiled brown water in the blue paper cup emblazoned with the Parthenon almost tasted like coffee. The mood in the office was light, as it was when the ASAC interspersed fighting the war on drugs with practicing his standup:
Why do Jewish men die before their wives? They want to.
I’m making a Jewish porn movie. It’s 10 percent sex, 90 percent guilt.
Someone stole my wife’s credit card, but I don’t want him found. He’s spending less than she was.
“Bill,” his secretary called, “we got another one who saw you on 48 Hours. Says he’s been looking all over the city trying to find the guy who looks like Raymond Burr.”
Fleisher chuckled. “I’m not that fat yet. Maybe by autumn.”
The soft Texas accent on the phone belonged to Jim Dunn, CEO of a marketing company in Bucks County.
“Mr. Fleisher, my son Scott disappeared in Texas. He was murdered, and I’ve been investigating myself for a year, trying to help the police, getting nowhere. When I saw 48 Hours, we were in New Mexico following a lead at the end of our rope and I said to my wife, the Vidocq Society is back home, in Philadelphia. I thought I’d see if it was at all possible for me to talk to these experts on homicide.”
Fleisher was impressed with Jim Dunn. He sounded like a gentleman, highly intelligent, and a brokenhearted father.
“I went to the City Tavern three times asking about the Vidocq Society and the bearded fellow who looked like Raymond Burr. Finally a bartender said, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s a boss in charge over at Customs.’ ”
Fleisher’s voice turned serious. “Jim, tell me what happened to your son.”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Scott and I were very close; we talked on the phone every Sunday. I hadn’t heard from him one Sunday last May when a woman I’d never heard of called me at home very late and asked me if I was Scott Dunn’s father. She said she was Scott’s girlfriend, his live-in girlfriend, and she was worried because he was missing. Their bedroom had been emptied out-no mattress, none of Scott’s clothes, nothing.”
“That’s certainly suspicious.”
“There was blood all over the bedroom, Scott’s blood. I won’t give up until I find out what happened to my son. I was calling to see if the Vidocq Society might help me.”
“I understand. It’s a murder, obviously. What do the police think?”
“It’s the Lubbock PD, and it started out as a missing persons case, but now they’re investigating it as a murder. But they haven’t arrested anybody, and the district attorney said we don’t have a case because there’s no body, no weapon. In Texas you can’t have a murder without a body. I’ve been on the DA’s case for a year.”
“So the case is only a year old,” Fleisher mused aloud, “and there’s no body.” He paused to take a breath. This was never easy. “I’m sorry to say this, Mr. Dunn, but this doesn’t sound like a Vidocq Society case.” He sensed the vacuum of quiet disappointment on the line.
“Number one, this case is just too fresh for us. Cases have to be cold for at least two years. You just haven’t given the police enough time to do their job. If we come in they’ll be saying, ‘Whoaah, what are you doing on our case?’ We provide advice and counsel to police departments when they ask for it. We don’t steal anybody’s thunder. We don’t harpoon cases.”
“I understand,” Dunn said evenly.
“Number two, you don’t even have a body. Technically, it’s still a missing person case. We see those all the time. Some people just disappear, they want to drop out. He could come back. He could be a suicide. We just don’t know.”
“My son didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”
“OK, you’re probably right. But number three, even if it’s a murder it’s almost impossible to get a murder conviction without a body. It’s one of the classic standards of homicide investigation in our legal system. You need the corpus delicti. And it doesn’t help that you’ve pissed off the district attorney, ultimately the only man who can seek justice for your son.
“I’m sorry to say we can’t help.”
Dunn didn’t pause: “Mr. Fleisher, could I just meet with you? Maybe someone in the organization might have some ideas how we could proceed, just some advice. We live right here in the area and I will meet you anywhere.”
“OK, then, why don’t you send me some materials and I’ll look them over.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” Dunn said firmly. “I’m going back to Texas next week to keep looking for my son, and I want my materials with me-it’s all I have left of Scott.” There was a long silence, and then he said, “Mr. Fleisher, I believe you are the only chance I have.”
Something clicked in that moment for Fleisher. “I knew then that Jim Dunn was a good man. He’d do anything to find his son.” Fleisher knew all about the difficult bonds of fathers and sons, the longings that survived death.
His father had taught him to keep his mind and heart open, to always be willing to listen to a good man. He often thought about how his father had learned that lesson himself, when Temple University wouldn’t let him in to take his final exam required to graduate from dental school during the Great Depression. He’d passed all the graduate school classes, but he was too poor to make his last tuition payment or even pay for his diploma. As the exam was being given, he went to see the university president, Charles E. Beury. Beury’s secretary said the president was going to a meeting and couldn’t see him. Herbert Fleisher said, “Tell him it’s a matter of life and death.” The president invited him in. Beury, a tall Princeton grad, class of 1903, looked at his watch and said, “You have five minutes, son. What’s the problem?”
Fleisher’s father began, with tears in his eyes, telling the president about his financial problems and that they would not let him take his dental final.
A half hour later, Beury looked at his watch and said, “You have five minutes left.”
When the time was up, the president took out a piece of paper and wrote a note to the dean of the dental school to let Herbert Fleisher take the test. But when he got there the test was over. The dental dean instead made him take an oral final exam, which was very tough. “My father passed and became an excellent dentist.” Years later Beury was quoted in the newspaper saying, “A university should teach not only the rudiments of education, but it should set standards whereby young men and women may learn to recognize a good man when they see one.”
Jim Dunn was a good man. I’m going to try to find a way to help him, Fleisher thought.
Fleisher spoke rapidly with the no-nonsense tone he used when he wasn’t cracking jokes.
“OK, Jim. We get hundreds of requests, and most people we can’t help. But we’ll try to give you some advice and guidance. I’ll call Frank Friel, who is the police chief in Bensalem, near you in Bucks County, and we’ll both meet with you at his office.” Dunn said he would come with his wife, Barbara. The meeting was set for eight the next morning.
Dunn was speechless. “Mr. Fleisher, I don’t know what to say.” “Frank was a legendary police captain with the city of Philadelphia,” Fleisher continued. “He’s a Vidocq Society Member and one of the most astute men I know on homicide cases. I don’t know if we’ll be able to help beyond this. But if anyone can give you guidance, it’s Frank.”
The night flight from London landed in Philadelphia in the rain. The thin man in coach was not pleased. “It’s ugly, I’m exhausted, I’m miserable, it’s not good,” Walter mumbled. “And I’m out of my last goddamn cigarette.” He was disgusted by the sallow faces in the gloomy concourse, and got in the taxi thinking, I’ve got to get away from stupid people. The other passengers gave the gaunt, stiff-backed gentleman with the shining aluminum attaché a wide berth. This pleased him. “It reduces the time I must spend with the dull and ignorant.” The last thing he needed was someone to start asking him who killed JonBenet Ramsey, or who Jack the Ripper really was.
Walter was physically spent. On the road he lived on cigarettes, Chardonnay, cheeseburgers, and sedatives for long flights. Sleeping little, he often fell ill during trips, and depended on the kindness of strangers-pathologists in London to prescribe medicine, a boy in Istanbul to follow the frail American around with a chair, kindly folks everywhere to help him find his way. He was always getting lost. To restore his self, he told the cabbie, he needed to find the essentials: cigarettes, diet soda, laxatives, and a drink.
“The cigarettes must be Kool Menthol Kings. The diet soda must be red. The laxative must work.” Then he’d collapse in his hotel bed.
The trip to Scotland Yard had nearly done him in. He had been woozy with lack of sleep when he lectured to three hundred of the brightest minds in the Home Office on murder. Walter had consulted with London ’s Metropolitan Police, also known as Scotland Yard, for years on major cases. He would later help them catch the serial killer of homosexuals who terrorized London, explaining that the slayer threw his victims out high windows because this variety of killer was enchanted by nasty sarcastic puns, in this case “Fairies can’t fly!”
At Scotland Yard, “they consider me a guru-the guru of all perversity,” he said with humor and no small pride-meaning sadism, Munchausen syndrome, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and the other “isms” he seemed to grasp as if he’d created them. But the Brits were damned tired of hearing how smart the Americans were on the most difficult murder cases.
Looking out across the sea of faces, he saw the narrowed eyes of “the enemies of my ideas”-the Old Guard, old men trapped in the orthodox nineteenth-century procedural method of murder investigation. Walter was a heretic. The depth of the psychology of the murdering mind, its artistic, symbolic expressions in the positioning of the body just so, the hidden meaning of the knife in the chest (six inches long, the average penis length; look for a perp, like most sex criminals filling the prisons in seething rage, who couldn’t get it up). They were horrified by him. He was peddling “a cross between New Age folderol and witchcraft.” His challenge was to convince them his work was empirical, “not just bad gas from a good meal.”
He started by trying to amuse them with his “tale of woe.” After working a full day at the prison in Lansing, Michigan, he’d driven to Detroit, flown all night to London without sleeping a wink. He’d landed and “fumbled around like I do, getting lost in the airport and train system,” losing more time. He’d arrived at the Philadelphia office at 11:30 A.M., eager to rest for the speech the next day. “Oh, no,” they said. “The speech is today. It’s right now!” He was standing before them now nearly cataleptic with fatigue, and hoped for their forbearance.
It was true, but they were not amused. “They didn’t seem to care I hadn’t slept in thirty hours.” Instead, sensing his weakness, they attacked. Even one of his friends set him up, put him on the spot.
Now he had his Philadelphia cab driver stop at an all-night drugstore. Walter found the essentials and put them on the counter. The young clerk asked for ID to buy the cigarettes. He glared at her in disbelief.
“Madam, you’re carding me! I’m sixty goddamn years old! Look at this face!” Sweeping out the door, he muttered, “I’ll go somewhere where they require an IQ above seventy.”
Later in his Center City hotel room, overlooking Broad Street, he calmed down with a cigarette. His temper had come from addiction. “My exercise is inhaling,” he’d joke, or, “My exercise is coughing after smoking.” He was not proud of it, it was simply a fact. “During nicotine withdrawal, I become like a hawk eyeing a mouse. I simply cannot tolerate human frailty.”
He did not apologize for it. It was the cost of being R. Walter, bane to psychopaths on four continents. “With psychopaths I am far more predatory and in control, using a surgeon’s knife, in the superior position rather than being vulnerable to the biological charms of addiction,” he said. “And I am always in the superior position.”
Walter had many friends and more than a few enemies. Some forensic scientists refused to sit next to him at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention because he verbally destroyed presenters every year. Friends described him as a shining blade, too sharp for everyday use. Walter saw life, as Teddy Roosevelt once did, as a test of manhood. “One of the final tests as a man matures,” he said, “is to identify those things one loves enough to protect.” He’d risk his life to protect or avenge man, woman, or child. Like Roland and Siegfried in the old and forgotten stories, he would go alone into the cave in the dark with the sword when it counted. A week after Walter’s trip to Scotland Yard, FBI agent Robert Ressler had signed a copy of his new book, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI, “To Richard Walter, My good friend and fellow monster slayer.”
The red light was blinking on the telephone in his hotel room. A goddamn red light, he thought. Who the hell wants me now? He was planning to go to the bar. He wanted to hear only five words the rest of the night: “What will it be, sir?”
Reluctantly he picked up the phone. There were two messages. The first was from Bill Fleisher welcoming him to Philadelphia -and asking a favor.
“Richard, would you call Jim Dunn? He’s a bereaved father from Bucks County whose son disappeared a year ago in west Texas, a murder; the cops haven’t a clue. The case has got your name on it. Jim’s a good guy, and I felt sorry for him. Maybe you can find a way to help him when you’re in town.” Scowling, Walter wrote down the number.
The second message was from Dr. Richard Shepherd, forensic pathologist at Guy’s Hospital, London, internationally known consultant to Scotland Yard, the queen’s coroner. Shepherd, a good friend, had introduced Walter to the Scotland Yard audience. Shepherd was tall, commanding, a wicked wit, a pilot (bored with an AAFS convention in Chicago, he rented a small plane and flew over Lake Michigan), and a pathologist of “unsurpassed brilliance.” Walter hoped he was calling to apologize. By the end of his speech Walter felt he’d done passably well, parried with the critics, held his own. Then Shepherd pulled the doozy.
With a twinkle in his eye, Shepherd flashed a photograph of a murder scene on the screen. Lying on his back in the middle of a tidy, middle-class parlor was the corpse of a man who appeared to be in his sixties, prosperous, with short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He was wearing a wool shirt and casual, around-the-house gabardine trousers.
At first glance it looked like a heart attack or a stroke. But on closer inspection it was evident the trousers were unzipped at the fly. The man’s penis had been cut off. There was very little blood, considering. There was no knife or other weapon in the picture-and no penis. The penis was missing.
Walter had never seen the photo before. He didn’t know the case.
“Let’s see what the profiler can really do when he’s got nothing to go on but the crime scene,” Shepherd said. “Richard, the question is, what happened here? What does the photograph tell you? Who killed this man? And why?”
Walter’s eyes gleamed with the challenge.
Walter quickly sized up the victim by his age and condition and asked himself: How many circumstances can you think of where somebody’s going to lose their dick?
Then: This dick was punished for doing something. What did it do?
Walter ran through the possibilities.
He was murdered by a jilted lover or a vengeful husband. But the body said otherwise. “If it were a jilted lover, I would expect to see additional trauma on the body, hitting in the face and head, the sating of that anger. This was just cold and calculated, in and out.”
He was murdered by a jilted homosexual lover. The missing penis put him in mind of a homosexual murder in California in which the jilted queen murdered his lover, “who had a big dick, and he chopped it off, put it in the freezer, and was suspected of continuing to use it.” But if it were gay lovers you’d also see the highly emotional hitting and striking to try to achieve catharsis through all that anger and pain. The killer in this case made it clear the penis wasn’t important to him. He just wanted to deprive the guy of his penis. He may have thrown it in the sewer or whatever. It had no intrinsic value. He wasn’t a pervert putting it in the freezer and sucking on it as a lollypop.
He was murdered by a random sex killer acting out dark fantasies on a stranger. But if it were a sex killer, I would see more ritualistic things done to the body, such as excessive deep stabbings, leaving the body in a contorted, symbolic pose, the taking of souvenir body parts.
Having ruled out sadism and fantasy as motives, Walter was left with power or anger. The anger-driven killer over-killed from fury and inevitably covered the victim’s eyes, or threw him in a closet, as a final, “Take that, bitch!” This victim’s eyes were staring straight up, uncovered. The body was lying just as it had fallen, and was otherwise unmarked. One must always study the absence of evidence as well as the presence, and in this case the absence is important. There was no sign of over-killing from profound anger.
The killer had one purpose only. He did what he had to do and got out. There’s anger, but it’s no longer hot-it’s cold, controlled, organized.
The cold, efficient nature of the crime was the essence of it. The power-driven killer reacts to the sense of being wronged from a challenge to power rather than anger. Now the cold efficiency of the crime made sense.
It’s a power crush for the perp.
Walter sensed the crowd waiting. Given what we have here and what we don’t have, what are the remaining possibilities of an errant dick?
He was killed for making an unwanted homosexual advance on another man. But if the guy tried to suck his dick or feel him up or whatever else, he would have coldcocked him and knocked him in ninety-three different directions. The parlor would be a mess. Nothing in the parlor seems disturbed.
So what trouble is left for a dick to get into, particularly a man in his sixties? The probability is, you can pretty well surmise if he made sexual advances to an adult you’d have a very different reaction, so therefore what about a child? The answer is the victim had abused a child.
Self, quickly now, did the victim abuse a girl or a boy?
If it were a girl the father would have seen it as a deflowering and felt it as a father, but as a man he would have felt he failed to protect his child. In that case I suspect the father might not have cut off his dick, but may have just stabbed him violently, perhaps cut out his heart. It would have been a more hostile action, with more anger, more emotion. My intuitive answer is the father identified with the son and was able to symbolize it, incorporate it, see it as part of himself, see the harm of it as the deviant exploitation of manliness. The commonality of manliness with his son allowed him to narrow his anger to a very cold, focused thing-to send the guy to his grave without a dick like a piece of shit.
A couple of minutes had passed when Walter spoke aloud: “I believe the victim was a pedophile rapist who was murdered by the father in vengeance for the crime he committed against his son. In a nasty little work of symbolism, the father cut off the pedophile’s dick. He bled to death.”
Shepherd slowly grinned and said, “That’s right.” The murder victim had forced a twelve-year-old boy to have oral sex, he explained. The killer was the boy’s father, who had avenged his son. In the audience, jaws went slack. The American was precisely right.
Now, in his hotel room, Walter allowed himself to reflect on the victory. I earned my respect.
He looked at the clock, after ten, not too late. With a groan, he picked up the phone number Fleisher had given him and dialed. My sense of duty is inviolable. It’s damn annoying at times.
Duty also told him now to let it ring five times, no more. On the third ring, Jim Dunn picked up.
Walter introduced himself. “I’m a psychologist, Mr. Dunn, whose basic expertise lies in profiling serial killers. From the little Bill Fleisher has told me, I suspect my skills might be of some use to you.”
The man on the other end of the telephone sounded stunned, then guarded-as if he hadn’t grasped the fact that his son had been murdered in cold blood.
At eight o’clock in the morning, Richard Walter and Jim Dunn sat in Walter’s room on the seventh floor of the Hershey Hotel, enveloped in brown gloom and cigarette smoke. Broad Street lay below in the bright spring sunshine of May 1992, but Walter had pulled the drapes to screen the bothersome light and noise. The profiler sat erect in a Queen Anne chair, a picture of stillness with his eyes closed. Dunn, a tall, silver-haired man with a craggy face and nervous blue eyes, faced him in a matching Queen Anne. On the table between them, Dunn had piled the notebooks, tapes, and newspaper clippings that chronicled his son’s murder. There was a pot of room service coffee, two cups, and an ashtray with a Kool sending a lazy plume to the gathering cloud on the ceiling.
Walter opened his eyes and arched his brow. “It sounds like you’re hurting, Jim,” he said. “How may I help you? Tell me what you have. Tell me about the case.”
Walter had spotted Dunn in the lobby at twenty paces. The deduction was instantaneous. The man’s elegant suit, shiny wing-tips, and silver hair bespoke the mature, prosperous gentleman of the telephone call the night before. The craggy, Scots-Irish face was open and bright-eyed in a manner unusual in the Eastern cities, more likely in a self-made man of southern mountains or western prairie. The suit and tie were too elegant by half, clearly the best suit and tie the man owned-the armor of a man girded for battle and feeling overwhelmed. Yet it was the eyes that neatly summed up the rest of the fellow and indicated it could be none other than Jim Dunn. “I have seen often in the parents of murdered children the eyes of a medical dog sniffing for cancer patients,” Walter said. “He had expectant and engaging eyes that held the lightly masked sadness of loss. There is an ethereal sadness that underpins such a man,” he said. “A sadness of the universal concept, not just feeling sad but a condition in which loneliness, mystery, and all the major universals seep into the bones. They often smile and whatever else but they rarely if ever belly laugh.” He’d seen parents destroyed by that burden. Walter took special note that the man’s briefcase (overstuffed, overburdened, like the man himself) was brown rather than black. The more pliant color was a hopeful sign, suggesting emotional vulnerability and capability of wisdom and growth (rather than unyielding rigidity). Flexibility would be the most important trait of all if it was genuine, the undoing of the whole affair if it disguised weakness.
Walter had suggested they “go up to the room for a cup of coffee, a smoke, and a little chitchat.” As Walter studied Dunn’s gaunt face and hollow eyes in the yellow lamplight, he recalled his misgivings of the night before. A man weakened by grief and self-pity could not bring his son’s murderer to account. Walter smiled to himself as Henry VI came back to him: “Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind, And makes it fearful and degenerate; Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep.”
A man’s grief could not be denied but it must be “set apart. The pain had to come out first.” Walter tented his fingers beneath his gaunt face. As Dunn spoke, Walter’s small blue eyes varied from steely interest to the softness of utmost patience. The angel of vengeance took many forms; in such a conference, it began with Walter as the ferryman poling parents of murdered children through blood tides of woe.
Dunn had been working late on that Sunday evening in his Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home office when the phone rang. He thought, It must be Scott. The Sunday calls from his twenty-four-year-old son, who had moved to Lubbock, Texas, to make a new life for himself, were a father’s joy. Dunn had urged the move; Lubbock was his beloved childhood home, a friendlier, more wholesome place than the East Coast, a place for Scott to start over. Scott had struggled in school in the East. He tried the U.S. Air Force, then tried community college in Texas and dropped out, but after that things started to come together for him. He had a good job, a job he loved and excelled at. Scott had always shown a mechanical gift. Even as a boy he could take apart anything and put it back together. Now in Lubbock, he got a job in an electronics store installing stereos-and became a star at it. He was a West Texas stereo cowboy. The region had rodeo-style competitions in which the “cowboys” vied for prizes, money, and prestige for the fastest installations and highest quality sound. Scott dominated the competitions. He’d found a way to maintain sound quality at unheard-of volumes by stacking ice on the system. His trophies filled the store. An athletic six foot two, 195 pounds with blond good looks, “The Iceman” also starred in the store’s TV commercials. Women came into the shop to meet him. He’d loaded his own car-an ’87 Camaro he called “Yellow Thunder”-with the finest stereo equipment, and took it booming down the prairie highways. He’d recently told his father he was bringing home for Thanksgiving a young woman named Jessica, a bright, lovely Mississippi State University student-his soon-to-be fiancée.
But the flat, cold voice on the line was someone he’d never heard of.
Her name was Leisha Hamilton.
“Are you Scott Dunn’s father?” she asked.
She was Scott’s live-in girlfriend, she said. She’d found Dunn’s name on a telephone bill. Scott had been missing for four days and she was concerned.
Dunn was confused. “The only girl Scott ever told me about was Jessica.”
Scott had moved out completely, Hamilton said. He’d taken all his clothes and just left. Even the bed they shared was gone. The only thing he’d left behind was his car, still parked at the office. When Dunn heard that he felt a chill. “I knew then something was really wrong,” Dunn said. “Scott would never go anywhere without his car. It was his baby.”
Hamilton called again, and Dunn recorded her call. Now Walter asked to hear the tape. “She sounds so cold,” Dunn said, as the atonal voice filled the room. “I’ve never heard anything like it.” Walter raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
The police regarded Scott’s disappearance as a missing person case, but when his son hadn’t returned two weeks later, Dunn flew to Lubbock to push the investigation. Walter listened to Dunn describe his torment when he realized his son had been murdered.
Police ran a luminol test in Scott and Leisha’s emptied bedroom to detect any blood that might have been cleaned off the whitewashed walls. Luminol detects traces of blood as diluted as one part per million. When sprayed on the walls in darkness, even blood that had been cleaned up would interact with the chemical and glow with a blue luminescence for thirty seconds.
The walls glowed as if they had been painted blue. Huge waves and spikes of blood splashed halfway up the wall. There were blood splatters on the door, blood splatters almost to the ceiling. The room was a chamber of horrors. A blood bath had occurred there. DNA tests showed it was Scott’s blood.
Jim’s voice broke as he showed Walter the luminol test photos. Scott had died in that room, Jim was now convinced.
Police, too, were convinced they had a murder on their hands. But if Scott had been killed, they couldn’t find his body.
They’d combed the prairie with cadaver dogs and helicopters, turned over half the city dump, even brought in psychics, to no avail. “In Texas, the state can’t bring murder charges without a weapon, body, or body part,” the DA told Dunn. “You don’t have a case.”
With no body, police flailed trying to find suspects. They’d interviewed everyone Scott knew, including his colleagues at the car-stereo installation shop, but nobody stood out. Leisha was being very cooperative with the police. She didn’t know why Scott had up and gone, although she speculated that he may have run off with another woman-women adored Scott. She had no idea how her bedroom had become soaked with Scott’s blood.
The police thought she wasn’t being completely forthcoming, but they figured she was scared and they hoped to coax her into greater trust. They didn’t want to frighten her into not cooperating. There was no way the helpful, petite, twenty-eight-year-old woman committed murder.
Dizzy with grief, Dunn had pressed every power from the FBI in Washington to the governor of Texas, George Bush, to take an interest in the case, to no avail. He stalked the West Texas prairie looking for the body himself, and spent hours talking to psychics in Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Dunn went to Texas and took Hamilton out to dinner to form an alliance with her in his cause. After that, Leisha kept calling, but her phone calls grew darker. One day she’d say she loved Scott and was doing all she could to find him; in warm tones, she expressed deep sympathy for Jim. The next day, she’d sound vague and distant, hinting that she might know where Scott’s body was, but Jim would never find him. Growing suspicious of Hamilton and frustrated by the police, Dunn did his own sleuthing. He traveled to New Mexico to investigate reports that Leisha had once been jailed for passing bad checks. But he was always eager to hear from her. Of everyone in the West Texas world where Dunn had sent his son, she seemed to know Scott best. Since she was the closest to Scott, Hamilton said, she thought it was only fair that she get his car. She kept pressing Dunn to give her the keys.
The thin man sitting in the Queen Anne chair had said nothing for almost three hours.
Dunn’s voice cracked. “Well, Mr. Walter, what do you think I should do? Is there a case here?”
Walter stubbed out his cigarette and stared hard at Dunn.
“Jim, aren’t you tired of being the grieving father?”
Dunn’s mouth fell open. “I… I thought that was what I was supposed to be.”
Walter shook his head. His jaw was clenched.
“No! You’re supposed to be goddamn mad! That bitch murdered your son! Let’s go get her!”
Dunn sat stunned as the profiler stared at him, awaiting a response.
Slowly, Dunn’s gaunt face creased in a big, toothy smile.
“I’m in,” he said.
But Walter still had concerns about Dunn’s emotional frailty, and he addressed them immediately.
“First we must encapsulate the difference between your emotional issues and the things we need to do with solving the case,” he said. “As for your love or anger or hatred or whatever else, you must express these things in terms of your son, but not let it bleed over into the case because it dilutes it and you start to misplace emotion into the structural issues and you don’t know where you’re at. I certainly don’t have a problem chatting with you about internal things, things that are important, but we need to do business on a different plane. We need a cold, businesslike approach.”
Dunn quietly nodded his understanding.
Second, he told Dunn, there would be no more phone calls to or from Leisha Hamilton.
“Jim, don’t you see what she’s doing to you?” Walter’s voice was filled with urgency. “Leisha is running a number on you! She’s trying to make you her next victim. She not only killed your son, she’s bragging about it, and killing you, too.”
Dunn’s eyes widened.
“She’s pulling your strings like a marionette,” Walter went on. “One minute she’s telling you she loved Scott, too, and the next she’s squeezing you about the car. And you, the devoted father, are too close to see the pattern. You don’t know how to deal with her because you don’t know what she is. What she is is a psychopath, and a good one at that,” he said. “And this is the biggest scheme she has ever played out. She is trying to shape you. She knew you would want to know where your son was, so she is laying the framework in hopes of deflecting your suspicion away from her.”
As Dunn sat quietly, in a well of contemplation, Walter shot him a look.
“Don’t you hate her-even a little bit?”
Dunn’s face flared in rage. The emotion exploded from him. “Hell, yes! I hate everything about her! But I keep thinking that as long as I can keep her talking, I may learn something about what happened to Scott. Maybe she’ll slip up.”
Walter took off his glasses and gave Dunn a stony stare that caused the father to lower his gaze.
“She murdered your son,” he said, his nose tipped in disdain as if she were not worthy of contempt. “You don’t need to cut her any slack. She’s not some sweet, innocent thing. We’re going to make sure she comes to justice. It’s all right to hate her. She’s a vicious killer and none of her bullshit is going to change that.”
Dunn reached for the newspaper clippings, as if he were eager to get to work.
“No,” Walter said sharply, waving his cigarette in the air. “I don’t need to see all these other bits and pieces right now. This is what happened: Leisha Hamilton is a psychopath. Your son was caught up in a web of sexual domination and manipulation by a very cold, powerful, controlling woman. She did him in.”
Walter stood and walked to the balcony window and looked out between the curtains. Traffic was crawling up Broad Street under a hazy yellow sun.
“She’s calling you and continuing to call you to shape you and control you, so what we want to do is take the power away from her and regain it ourselves. She’s manipulating you to gain information because information is power and to a psychopath it’s everything. The moral of the story is, limit your sympathy and chats with Leisha Hamilton because she’s playing you like a violin and you can’t afford it, nor can the case.”
Dunn blinked and swallowed. “I didn’t know what else to do-”
Walter cut him off. “Not a problem, Jim. You’re a grieving father. It’s not an issue of laying blame, it’s an issue of trying to blunt her aggression. We need the control instead of giving it to her. And we are just signaling by our meeting that we are taking control.”
Dunn nodded.
Walter saw a new color in Dunn’s face, heard emotional depth in his voice. He still seems downtrodden, Walter thought. He needs to feel empowered. Walter feared police had been hard on Dunn about his son’s lifestyle, which included dropping out of high school and minor drug possession. Dunn seemed to be struggling with shame.
“Jim, I know you’ve told me Scott had some issues, and had not yet lived the life you had dreamed for him,” Walter said.
Dunn nodded gravely.
Walter waved his cigarette impatiently, as if Dunn wasn’t getting the point.
“Look, Jim, Scott was in his early twenties, and sometimes kids do foolish things and get involved in issues that are high-risk. And sometimes those errors in judgment result in dastardly deeds. It would appear that Scott’s worst crime, so to speak, was judging the wrong person, and sleeping with the wrong person, and forming an alliance with the wrong person.”
“I know my son wasn’t perfect, but I was proud of his progress,” Dunn said in defense of his son.
“That’s exactly my point, Jim. Many times what young people will do if they feel they have failed their own class or standards is they will regress back to a lower class or group because the pressure for performance isn’t as great,” the profiler continued. “Then across time those who have any substance in them at all will repair themselves, pull themselves back up to the expected standard, and join their own class. I know that sounds elitist but that’s just the way it is.”
“I was excited for Scott because he was really turning things around,” said Dunn.
Walter nodded. “He’s staying away from drugs, doing well on his job. And while he’s screwing his brains out with Leisha Hamilton, as twentysomethings are wont to do, he’s found a better thing, the real thing, in Jessica. He’s working his way back to legitimate society. Then of course Leisha finds out she was going to be dumped and you don’t dump Leisha Hamilton, she dumps you. He had the bad fortune of forming an alliance with a violent psychopath. He’s not the first. They don’t call it ‘psychopathic charm’ for nothing.”
Dunn sighed.
“Jim, we’re not just solving a murder. Scott was cut short of his ability to rehabilitate himself and be honorable and productive. What we’re doing-part of the ethic of being a father-is to take up that challenge for him and make a strike for decency.”
“What do we do next?” Dunn’s eyes were fastened on the thin man.
“The Lubbock Police Department must call me and request my help. The Vidocq Society does not become involved in a case unless it is invited in with full cooperation by the police department. Until that happens, all we’ve done is have a conversation.”
“I’ll call them right away. They’ll understand,” Dunn said passionately. “They’ll have to.”
“Then it’s up to the police to call me,” Walter said, “or we have wasted our time. And another thing.”
Dunn appeared dazed. He was feeling relieved, emboldened, optimistic, and overwhelmed all at once.
The thin man’s face sharpened in the sallow light of the room.
“The Vidocq Society will help you as best we can. As for myself, I’m not going to let that bitch get away with murder.”
The week before Christmas a little blond girl, dead for thirty years, materialized on a screen in the City Tavern. The tiny figure, bruised and beaten, ashen face drained of life, shimmered in the midday sunlight in the front of the room. Fleisher started trembling. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.
That morning in the Strawbridge amp; Clothier department store, he’d seen Ebenezer Scrooge quaver before the Ghost of Christmas Past in the store’s annual portrayal of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. But the slain little girl before him now, nine-year-old Carol Ann Dougherty, was not a figment of anyone’s imagination, and Fleisher was not trembling in fear. He was shaking in fury.
Dougherty’s murder was one of the saddest and most disturbing images of his childhood. Carol Ann had been found raped and murdered in St. Mark’s Church in Bristol, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb not far from Fleisher’s house, in October 1962. A fifth-grader at the parish school, she had been killed in an era when police and the public were not fully aware of the perverse sexual needs of many priests, or the long practice in the Roman Catholic Church of allowing pedophile priests, cloaked wolves, to prey on victims, simply transferring them from flock to vulnerable flock. Carol’s killer had never been brought to justice.
Now on the morning of December 17, 1992, as the Vidocq Society began its examination of the Choir Loft Murder, Fleisher converted his anger into a desire to fix the past. Thirty years, one month, and twenty-five days after the murder, Bristol police chief Frank Peranteau and detective Randy Moore stood before the society to present the case. Peranteau had said, “We need all the help we can get.” A series of articles in the Bucks County Courier Times by reporter J. D. Mullane had recently reawakened interest in the county’s coldest case. The county district attorney had impaneled a grand jury to investigate it. Chief Peranteau had inherited the case from Chief Vincent Faragalli, retired now for thirteen years, who had obsessed over it. Faragalli kept Carol’s picture in his wallet.
The case was always “ just out of reach,” investigators said.
Now the screen in the Long Room showed Dougherty lying on her back in the choir loft the day she was raped and murdered. It was one of those cases where the waiters and waitresses looked away as they carried silver cloches in and out of the Murder Room.
Light from a stained-glass window revealed her blond hair mussed and untied. The red plastic barrette that had held it in a ponytail was lying nearby on the landing. One of her feet was bare. The shoe was tossed to the side; the sock was stuffed in her mouth, gagging her. Carol’s small right arm was wrenched behind her back. Her left hand was straight out, clutching three dark hairs, a man’s pubic hairs, which she had grabbed during her fatal struggle. She had been forcibly raped; semen was found at the scene. The grooves on her neck, from the rope that strangled her to death, appeared to match the pattern of a cincture, the long, ropelike cord tied around the waist of a priest’s alb, the full-length Roman tunic. To Roman Catholics, the cincture was a symbol of the priest’s chastity and purity.
One of the few surviving original investigators had told the Courier Times that it broke his heart. “I really took that case to heart because I had a daughter the same age, nine years old. You saw that little girl laying in that choir loft, and you just wanted to cry.”
Fleisher felt a chill displace his holiday cheer. As he walked the city garlanded in holiday lights that morning, Fleisher had allowed himself a moment of pride in the Vidocq Society. Vidocq agents were working for justice wherever need took them. Richard Walter was in West Texas that morning, consulting with police on the Dunn case. Fleisher smiled, imagining their sardonic dark knight flashing his rapier wit at the suspected killers of Scott Dunn, the police-whomever got in his way. U.S. Customs special agent Joe O’Kane, the Vidocq case manager, was fielding heaps of letters signed by grieving and aggrieved men and women across America. Word was out that a band of pro bono detectives in the City of Brotherly Love was standing for truth in cold murders beyond the grasp of police.
But now he noted that a quiet pall had fallen over his fellow Vidocqeans. “Everyone was deeply disturbed,” he recalled. Though Fleisher knew that one of the most notorious murders of his childhood was on the menu, he had not expected to be so deeply affected. Looking around at his seasoned investigators, he was confident they could help.
On Monday, October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy went on national TV to announce that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missile sites in Cuba, ninety miles from Florida. That afternoon after school, Carol rode her bicycle to the library to take back a book and meet two girlfriends. Police never learned why she stopped at the old stone church on the riverfront, but the nuns often said that if you were passing the church you should stop and say your prayers. Witnesses saw Carol enter the church at 4 P.M.
At five o’clock, when she didn’t return home for dinner, her parents went looking for her. Frank Dougherty, a newspaper printer, found his daughter’s bicycle on the steps of St. Mark’s, and went into the church looking for her. When he found his daughter’s body in the choir loft he ran out into the twilight screaming for help. As word spread, a thousand people gathered behind rope barricades outside the church, a fixture in the community since the nineteenth century. As the night went on and police and the coroner came and went through the arched entrance, they shouted and wept, stood numb and whispered, “A girl killed in a church!” and did not move, as if they would stand there until the world was made right again. After seven hours, Chief Vincent Faragalli told them to go home. “As of right now, we are without any leads.”
Faragalli learned that the parish housekeeper had seen someone kneeling in a pew a few minutes before Carol entered the church. He was eager to learn the identity of this “mystery witness,” but his attempts to extensively interview church staff were quashed by Monsignor Paul Baird, the leading cleric at St. Mark’s, who refused to let police interview the reverends Joseph Sabadish or Michael Carroll.
But police had already interviewed Father Sabadish once before. Monsignor Baird withdrew cooperation, and now they began to focus the investigation on Sabadish. Sabadish had been extremely nervous and evasive during the interview. He gave an alibi that police easily discredited. The priest said he had been a few blocks from the church on West Circle, making his rounds on the annual parish visitation, during the time of the murder. But the surviving investigator interviewed by reporter Mullane said that Sabadish had lied.
“He left a note at one of the houses that showed he was on West Circle a couple of hours before the murder,” the investigator said.
In 1962, a clerk at a Bristol shoe store told the police that Sabadish came into the shop shortly before 4:30 that afternoon-when Carol was apparently already dead-acting strangely. Nervous and distracted, he asked the clerk for the time, and also asked a bizarre question in a shoe store, “Do you sell underwear?” The clerk noted that Sabadish was wearing a wristwatch and knew the time. Police believed Sabadish was trying to create an alibi for himself. And they became increasingly suspicious of the priest’s possible sexual perversions when they obtained receipts for purchases he had made at an upscale ladies’ lingerie shop.
They were still looking at other possible suspects. But the night before Halloween, a week into the investigation, Chief Faragalli received disturbing information that made Sabadish the primary suspect. A married woman in nearby Fairless Hills told police that Sabadish had threatened to rape her three or four weeks before Dougherty’s murder. She knew Sabadish from years earlier when she lived at a home for unwed mothers where he was the chaplain. Now on the telephone he had made sexual advances, including a threat that he wanted to rape her. Sabadish said she needn’t worry about becoming pregnant because he was “sterile.”
Furious, the woman’s husband called Sabadish and confronted him, while taping the phone call. Sabadish admitted making the obscene telephone calls and sexual threats. He apologized and promised not to do it again. Chief Faragalli had obtained the tape.
When Sabadish was making his rounds on parish visitation, the chief and a detective picked him up in an unmarked car and took him to the Bucks County Courthouse in Doylestown, where a county detective gave him a lie detector test. The priest passed the polygraph.
After that, police turned to other suspects they considered equally compelling. A town drunk admitted he killed Carol. Later, it was discovered that the man was mentally ill, and furthermore a Bristol cop had coerced his confession. A local convicted child molester rose to the top of the list, but he proved he was in another state at the time of the murder.
At the Vidocq luncheon, the police said that Frank Dougherty could not forget how the church had shunned him and his wife after Carol’s murder. Father Sabadish refused to make eye contact with him. Neither Sabadish, Reverend Carroll, nor Monsignor Baird called on the family to comfort them. When Dougherty asked Sabadish in the church confessional, “Father, am I wrong in assuming a priest could have killed my daughter?” the priest stood up and left the confessional.
Police never questioned Sabadish again. “We had no concrete evidence to tie Sabadish to the murder, except that he was very evasive during the interrogation,” said the surviving investigator.
Shortly after the polygraph, Sabadish was quietly transferred from St. Mark’s with no explanation to parishioners. He returned months later, again without explanation from the monsignor. Five years later, he was transferred to St. William Parish in Philadelphia. Then followed more than a dozen transfers in eighteen years within the archdiocese in eastern Pennsylvania. In recent weeks, Mullane, the reporter, had tracked down Father Sabadish, now in his seventies and still employed by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia as a chaplain at a Montgomery County Catholic hospital. Mullane asked the aging priest if he killed Carol Ann Dougherty. Sabadish vehemently denied it, calling it “an absolute, positive lie.” He denied that he had made obscene phone calls to a Fairless Hills woman, saying, “That’s news to me,” and called police detectives “crazy.” After the newspaper stories were published he called Mullane, furious, and called him “anti-Catholic.”
Now the Bristol police were seriously considering other suspects as they reopened the investigation. The Vidocq Society urged police to test the semen, pubic hairs, and a badly smudged fingerprint left on Carol’s plastic hair band, presumably the killer’s.
After the luncheon, Fleisher left the City Tavern determined to solve the case. “It was the priest,” Fleisher said. “We all knew it was the priest.”
Within days, the Vidocq Society had formed a task force to bring the killer of Carol Ann Dougherty to justice.
The light in the room was storm cloud gray, and ice glistened on the sidewalks below the municipal building. A bitter north wind beat the windows of the detective division of the Lubbock Police Department. The man from Philadelphia had not enjoyed his week on the high plains of West Texas. He had sat in the police car grimly staring at cotton fields rolling under black judgment-day skies. Goose hunting country, they said. It’s a fucking wasteland is what it is, he thought. You can see a pimple on a cat’s ass. He detested the bone-chilling cold but was warmed by a Lubbock Avalanche-Journal story open on the desk:
SUPER SLEUTH CALLED TO SHED LIGHT ON BIZARRE DISAPPEARANCE.
It was the front-page story that touted his arrival, followed by a second front-page story in the Avalanche-Journal that had made him something of the talk of the town.
INVESTIGATOR EXPECTS TO CRACK DUNN CASE.
Walter had confidently declared that Lubbock police would soon solve the case of Dunn’s disappearance. After spending one day studying the case, interviewing suspects, and talking to police, Walter promised that the “nasty and clever” killers’ eighteen months of gloating would soon come to an end. His analysis of the murder indicated that the killers were “smart” but made “mistakes.” They unknowingly revealed their patterns to him, leaving “trails, bits and pieces” that would be their undoing.
“Success will be based on two things,” he said. “A) The case merits success, and B) I don’t like losing a case. I have a bulldog mentality, and what I want to hear are handcuffs, and I want to do it right… If I were the suspect, I wouldn’t feel comfortable. I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”
Now at eight o’clock that morning in December 1992, Walter sat down with a police corporal, sergeant, and detective to discuss the Dunn case. The thin man looked fresh and energized in his blue suit, his blue eyes shining above the French tricolor pin on his lapel. Tal English, the tall, twenty-seven-year-old detective, had an aw-shucks manner that matched his sandy hair and cowboy boots; he and Walter had bonded working the case for months over the telephone. The older man had croaked, “Young man, we’re going to go into the jaws of hell and bring this case back out.” Corporal George White, distinguished-looking with gray in his dark hair, and Sergeant Randy McGuire, large and bald, sat stoically appraising the profiler. They all got along in an atmosphere of mutual respect, but the two veteran cops had not seen eye to eye with the “super sleuth” from the Vidocq Society in their previous meeting.
After the cops’ courteous Texas welcome, which Walter always appreciated, he got right to his point: They should immediately take the case to District Attorney Travis Ware and press for murder charges. Walter wanted the charges filed against Leisha Hamilton and her neighbor and lover Tim Smith, fiercely jealous of Scott, whom he believed was an accomplice.
Corporal White and Sergeant McGuire took a long look at the man from Philadelphia. The case had been a top priority for a year. Jim Dunn was a hometown boy, a hall-of-fame alumnus of local Texas Tech; his best friend was still his old college roommate W. R. Collier, president of the largest locally owned bank in Lubbock. There was great public interest in the gruesome disappearance of a prodigal son in a cloud of sex, blood, and duct tape, and the police had invested thousands of man-hours. Murders were relatively rare in the Texas city of 186,000 people, but they were reading about this one over coffee from Plainview to Dallas to Jacksonville, Florida. The police wanted nothing more than to solve it. They liked Walter, and he them-“they were all great guys”-but they just couldn’t see how a petite, charming twenty-eight-year-old woman had orchestrated a vast conspiracy of lies and cold-blooded murder.
Walter tried to convince them.
“This case is like shaking hands with smoke,” he said. “It’s a matter of you can see it, you can smell it and taste it, but it’s difficult to get your hands around it.”
Walter urged them to look at the crime scene, the killing room with blood halfway up the walls and splattered on the ceiling. They all agreed Scott Dunn had no doubt died in that room. The point of departure was that with no body and no weapon there was no case, according to the police. Without that foundation of physical evidence, it wasn’t possible to bring murder charges under Texas law, as the DA never tired of reminding them.
Walter saw it differently. “I say, OK, we don’t have a body. Its absence is a clue. Let’s use that to move forward.”
The problem, as he privately saw it, was that “cops are concrete. They think in structure. The whole investigative process is structural, and wisely so. Traditionally, you work from the inside out on a case. You work from the evidence forward. Here you don’t have a body, you don’t have the primary evidence; that’s it, end of story. So in this case one must work from the outside, the pathology, back to the crime scene.” He smiled to himself at the small irony that it was eccentric Eugène François Vidocq, in nineteenth-century Paris, who first had the gall to reveal broader and deeper patterns to the straight-thinking gendarmes.
“The police are correct in that what we have at the crime scene is vital,” he said to himself. “One must always remain rooted in the facts of the case, but one must think differentially, not just linearly. Unfortunately, there are not many people who are capable of it.”
He took a sip of his coffee, which was already cold. “Sometimes, gentlemen,” he said, “what’s missing is more important than what’s present.” He held up the photograph of the blood-soaked room revealed by the luminol. “What’s here and what’s not here?” he asked. “A minimalist version of the crime is left, but the essence remains.
“Something dire happened in this room,” he continued. “It was a bloodbath, and the careful cleanup speaks to a very careful, elaborate plot. The murder is very purposeful, not recreational.” At the word “recreational” eyebrows rose, and he explained: “A Bundy type who chose a random victim and killed for sadistic pleasure would have left a far messier, more symbolic crime scene. So the killers knew Scott.” He let that sink in a moment.
“As it happens, the carefully organized crime, cleanup, and the brutal destruction and disposal of the body point to a power-assertive, or PA, killer,” he went on. “It’s a recognizable type I’ve dealt with many, many times. The killing is all about power-not the acquisition of power through fantasy but a John Wayne-type power, the macho direct assault-simple, in-your-face, incapacitate, restrain, torture, kill, throw away. ‘I win, you lose’ kind of power.” A cold smile crossed Walter’s face. “The whole thing just reeks of PA at all levels.”
He asked them to examine Scott and Leisha’s relationship. Scott was twenty-four, a ladies’ man, handsome, bright, cocky. He would have seen Leisha as a stimulating challenge. She was an older woman, also very bright, sexy, flippant, and “fun in the sack, without giving much thought to her essential character as a manipulative, Mata Hari figure.
“Leisha had a long litany of situation lovers, husbands, one-night stands, wanted and unwanted children,” he continued. “She had six children without knowing who was the father of several of them.” His voice took on a sarcastic edge. “She told police she only loved the ones conceived in love.” He paused to let that take root.
“Leisha would have seen Scott also as a challenging conquest, and a link to money, his father’s wealth. But like a lot of twenty-four-year-old men, Scott had found someone to take to bed, not home to meet Mom and Dad. Scott was rebuilding his life, and when he found a ‘decent’ girl, the real thing, it was time to dump Leisha Hamilton.”
The day Scott’s would-be fiancée called and Leisha answered the phone sealed his fate. “Nobody dumps Leisha Hamilton. Oh, no.”
Walter’s complexion took on a grave cast. “When we look at Leisha’s history, we recognize that she absolutely cannot stand rejection, that loss of control. She has a series of short-term relationships which are not monogamous because she needs not so much to conquer men as emasculate them. Scott is a relatively strong-willed man himself. He sees this rather malevolent, vixenish woman whom one wouldn’t mind having an affair with, but he wouldn’t want to introduce her to his parents. Now he has Jessica and he’s gathering strength. He doesn’t need Leisha anymore. If anything is going to get you killed, it’s to reject the psychopath and say, ‘I’m better than you are.’ ”
His voice turned dour. “All her behavior points to a psychopath. She’s just a power-hungry witch who chooses men younger than herself and tries to seduce and control through sex and intimidation. She found one that didn’t play, or played for a while, but it was his game not hers, and she simply wasn’t going to tolerate the insult and the challenge to power.”
Walter believed Leisha had ensnared some of Scott’s coworkers, who were caught in her web of intimidation, in a conspiracy to murder him. There was powerful resentment of Scott at his job, “a lot of competitiveness, rivalries, and jealousies with coworkers.” Not only was Scott the star “stereo cowboy” and the handsome face on the shop’s TV commercials, he was cocky and brash. “He rubbed it in, got in their faces about it without realizing the risky game he was playing,” Walter said. Walter speculated that the shop was stealing and reselling its stereos, a common racket. “Scott would have gotten in their faces about that, too. One more thing to trump them with.” The week before he disappeared, Walter reminded them, “He and his boss had a fistfight out behind the shop.”
The police were tracking down Leisha’s numerous ex-boyfriends, but Walter believed the suspect list was short. “Few people had access to Scott.” The sequence of events leading to Scott’s murder began with a party at his boss’s house. Leisha was at the party, but Scott arrived with a tall, gorgeous blonde. Walter believed the blonde performed oral sex on the other men. “When I asked them they all denied it, but a lot of eyes hit the floor,” he said. At the end of the evening, he believed that Scott had trumped them all. “You think you guys are so smart, that was a transvestite! Needless to say, they were not pleased.” The revelation of that indiscretion would have ruined the life of at least one of the men at the shop. “Thus a crime already planned became a crime of improvisation and opportunity,” the profiler said.
Scott became seriously ill with the flu at the party, too sick to stand, Leisha said. Walter saw it differently; the murder conspiracy was already in motion. “I believe he was poisoned, organophosphates, something from under the sink. His extreme sensitivity to light and noise is telling.” Scott slept on the sofa at the party house, and the next afternoon, Leisha showed up and brought him home. A neighbor saw Leisha supporting the weak, stumbling young man as she led him into the apartment. It was the last he was seen by anyone other than Leisha or a coworker. Leisha said she went out to get soup and a thermometer to nurse Scott that night and the next day. When a coworker came by in the morning to pick him up for work he was still too ill. It was the last time anyone saw him alive.
It was a simple enough matter for Leisha to call on neighbor Tim Smith, a young, submissive evangelical Christian, to help with the murder. Smith had flooded her with a series of fawning love letters that included, “If only Scott wasn’t around, we could be together.” Duct tape from a roll in Smith’s apartment was used to patch the blood-soaked carpet that had been cut away and replaced in the killing room.
“This is a classic setup for a PA killer,” he said. “Just classic. A female PA relies on sexual performance and seduction, but if her power base is threatened, she will resort to violence. She’ll typically enlist trickery to disable a stronger male and/or acquire a sympathetic and weak accomplice. Leisha did both. And the PA killer classically needs to brag or flaunt the killing to claim credit, and inserts him- or herself into the investigation to exert control and power and prolong the fantasy of the murder.”
Calling attention to herself was Leisha’s big mistake, Walter said.
“How do we find out about the crime? We find out when Leisha calls Jim Dunn. She’s laying the framework, not only shaping the investigation-she knows ultimately Jim’s going to look for Scott-but she’s also exhibiting her own insatiable greed for power. She’s already done in the son; now she wants to do in the father, too. Then she tried to be coquettish with the detectives, casting herself as the wronged woman, calling them all the time with new information, pretending to be afraid of Tim Smith. She moved in with Smith so she could continue to set up her dupe to take the fall. This need for stimulation is quite insatiable for a psychopath, the ego gratification to prove they’re smarter than anyone, the gotcha.”
In the Avalanche-Journal story on Walter’s arrival in town, Leisha was quoted as saying Smith was a “suspect” in Scott’s disappearance, and had been “fiercely jealous of her relationship with Scott.”
Smith was absent from work the day of the murder, Walter said, and Hamilton can’t account for her activities that day, although her memory is extraordinary for the days around it.
The murder itself was a monstrous affair, Walter said. Scott was incapacitated with poisons, imprisoned and restrained and tortured for two days before his death, Walter believed. “This kind of killer typically uses a gun to restrain or intimidate, but close-up weapons, the kind that caused all this splattering and gives the killer emotional satisfaction, to pummel, cut, utterly destroy the victim until the killer’s fear of vulnerability is sated, and power restored. There would have been a lot of ‘You think you’re leaving me now, bitch, try this.’ What the absence and presence of evidence at the crime scene tells us is Scott intolerably challenged somebody’s power base, and paid with his life.”
After the murder, Walter said, Leisha and Tim had sex together that night in the apartment. “A little thank-you from Leisha,” Walter said. “But only after they had removed the body and cleaned up.” He smiled wickedly. “Even they have standards.”
Detective English shook his head sadly, acknowledging the depth of evil, and sat back with an audible sigh. He was persuaded by Walter’s profile of Leisha Hamilton as a psychopath-he saw why Jim Dunn had termed Walter’s insights “miraculous.” But the young detective didn’t buy the wide conspiracy, and the others weren’t nearly as impressed. All the cops knew Hamilton was withholding information; all of them considered Smith a suspect. “They were Texas polite,” Walter said. “But the whole thing was too ethereal for them.” None of it would matter, anyway, the cops said, to the DA, Travis Ware. As Sergeant McGuire told Dunn, “I have seen Ware cut people right off at the knees when he feels they don’t have a strong case. Believe me, you don’t want to talk to Travis Ware.”
Walter wasn’t listening. He was ready to see the DA. “Let’s do it,” he said. “I don’t like to fuck around.” Reluctantly, the cops led him to the office of the top lawman in Lubbock County, Texas.
The district attorney’s office was large and redolent of masculine power. Travis Ware, six feet tall, dark-haired, and impeccably attired, rose from his high-backed leather chair behind a huge polished wooden desk. In a remarkable display of dominance, he hitched one expensive black leather shoe up on the desk, towering over them with the flamboyance, Walter thought, of a matador. Leisha’s not the only PA in the room, the profiler thought, amused. Let’s see who gets gored.
Walter, Detective English, Sergeant McGuire, Lieutenant Dean Summerlin, and Captain Frank Wiley, head of Crimes Against Persons, sat in five small chairs positioned around the district attorney’s huge wooden desk like pawns around a king. In a glance Walter evaluated Ware-fortyish, reasonably good-looking, expensive gold watch peeking from under the cuff. Ah, narcissism, he thought-a weakness.
For twenty minutes, the DA talked about himself. As if to match Walter’s experience with Scotland Yard, Walter thought, he discussed his education abroad in England and the many brilliant murder prosecutions that “attested to his greatness.” Appealing to the DA’s sense of vanity, the profiler offered, “Yes, there are indeed many connections to England in this room,” and casually mentioned a “quite brilliant friend,” Dr. Richard Shepherd of London, who had helped him with the case.
Ware said brusquely, from his elevated pose: “Well, you’ve asked for this meeting. What do you want?”
Walter snapped back, “We want charges filed against Leisha Hamilton and Tim Smith in the murder of Scott Dunn.”
The DA scoffed. His voice filled with condescension, as if addressing schoolchildren, he said, “You don’t have a murder charge. All you have is a missing person. You don’t even have a body. Without a body you don’t have a murder. Come back to me when you have a body.”
The profiler removed his horn-rims and glared. “If you want a goddamned body, I’ll give you one. It’s right here, in Dr. Shepherd’s report.” His face flushed with color, Walter stood and dropped on the desk a slim blue-bound report titled “Forensic Pathology and Analysis of the Crime Scene in the Murder of Roger Scott Dunn.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s right here,” Walter said. “Dr. Shepherd’s report proves conclusively that Scott Dunn died in that room, and was murdered.”
Walter had asked Detective English to have a forensic pathologist examine the crime scene to determine if enough blood had been spilled to indisputably have caused the death of a six-foot-two, 170-pound man. Dr. Sparks Veasey, the Lubbock County pathologist, had refused the job, saying there wasn’t enough information to reach a conclusion. At Walter’s direction English had mailed a large package with copies of the entire case file, photographs, and bloody carpet samples to Walter’s friend Dr. Richard Shepherd, forensic pathologist at Guy’s Hospital, London, England, internationally known consultant to Scotland Yard. “Dick’s brilliance is unsurpassed,” Walter said. “And he owes me a favor.”
After studying the sprayed blood on the south and east walls, ceiling and doorknob of the bedroom, Dr. Shepherd wrote that the “by far most likely cause” of the blood spatter was “repeated blunt trauma.” Furthermore, “The distribution of the spraying of blood is entirely consistent with the victim lying on the floor while the blows that resulted in this spraying were struck.” Although the amount of blood lost was impossible to calculate, the blood spatter indicated Scott Dunn was forcefully and repeatedly bludgeoned about the head and such blows to the brain were “the prime cause of death in such cases.”
As DNA testing indicated the bloodstains were 958,680 times more likely to originate from the offspring of James Dunn than from anyone else on Earth, Dr. Shepherd concluded that bloodstains in the room:
“(1) have not resulted from a natural disease process; (2) are entirely consistent with the infliction of multiple blows from a blunt instrument or instruments; (3) are entirely consistent with those blows being delivered with a force of sufficient strength to cause death; (4) that a child of James Dunn has suffered severe multiple blunt trauma injuries while in the corner of the south and east aspects of this room, and these injuries resulted in the death of that individual.”
The report was signed: “Richard Thorley Shepherd, B.S.C., M.B., B.S., M.R.C.C. PATH, D.M.J., senior lecturer and honorary consultant in forensic medicine. United Medical Schools of Guy’s and St. Thomas ’s, Guy’s Hospital, London.”
The DA looked up from the report, his chin set in defiance. There still was no body in the case, he said. “I’m not sure what Texas law would say about this.”
“I just happen to have that section of Texas law with me,” Walter said, grinning.
Ware issued a wan smile. “I thought you might.”
Walter opened a statute book and read, interpreting as he went. “In essence, Texas law says we have to have A) a body, B) part of a body, or C) a confession with corroborative evidence. We have B. We have blood; blood is connective tissue; ergo, we have part of a body.”
Ware leaned back in his chair, tenting his fingers. He stared at the profiler.
“All right,” he said. “You’ve got a murder.”
For an instant the thin man’s smile flashed triumphantly, but his voice was soft.
“As it happens, I agree.”
The three men huddled in the smoky light of a Philadelphia pub, discussing their coldest cases.
Bender said he had been asked to do a facial reconstruction of John Wilkes Booth. It could help solve mysteries surrounding President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.
Walter was chosen as the profiler on an eight-person forensic all-star squad, including Los Angeles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, investigating Jack the Ripper on the one hundredth anniversary of the murders. “It was quite easy. The murders show a clear learning curve not understood in 1888, and only Montague Druitt was capable of it.
“The Home Office begged me not to make a fuss about it.” He smiled. “Kill the mystery, and there goes all that tourism.”
“Good work, men. Maybe you two can figure out who killed King Tut,” Fleisher cracked, holding up a Philadelphia Daily News. “Meanwhile, check out the twentieth century.” The June 9, 1993, headline in the tabloid newspaper said: FETISH MURDER? KILLED BY FOOT FETISHIST? DREXEL STUDENT WAS SLAIN IN ’84.
Walter picked up the story: “A twenty-year-old Drexel University student, strangled more than eight years ago, was killed for her white sneakers,” he read.
“No kidding,” Bender deadpanned. “That sounds like an interesting case.”
“Good for them,” Walter said. “Justice is done.”
The day before, Philadelphia police homicide detectives had arrested David Dickson Jr., a thirty-three-year-old U.S. Army sergeant and former Drexel University security guard, at the Army office where he now worked as a recruiter. Police charged him with “murdering Drexel University student Deborah Lynn Wilson in November 1984 because of his fetish for women’s white sneakers.”
Walter raised an eyebrow and read on.
Wilson may have been murdered after she dozed off in front of the computer in Rendell Hall-and caught the guard trying to remove her Reebok sneakers.
“Law enforcement sources” said Dickson was believed to have a “foot fetish” and “gets enjoyment from smelling women’s sneakers and socks.”
“Clever of them,” Fleisher said. Walter smiled.
According to accounts in the Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dickson had been a suspect all along, but police never had enough evidence to arrest him. They decided to take a fresh look at the cold case but weren’t getting far until “investigators learned of his alleged foot fetish and linked it to the fact that Wilson ’s sneakers and socks were missing.” For eight years, investigators thought the missing footwear was important, “but they didn’t know why. Then, in 1993, police said they found a clue in the files of the U.S. Army.”
Dickson had been arrested and court-martialed for the theft of women’s sneakers on an Army base in Korea in 1979. Army Sergeant Gwendolyn Garrett-Jackson, who now lives in Birmingham, Alabama, was prepared to testify that Dickson broke into her quarters on the Korean base and stole her white sneakers, video camera, and other belongings. Based on the Army court-martial, police obtained warrants to search Dickson’s apartment on City Avenue and his storage bin at the Philadelphia Navy base.
In both locations, police seized more than a hundred pairs of women’s white sneakers, all used, and confiscated seventy-seven videotapes of women wearing white sneakers. The tapes were pornographic, including sex scenes of women in white sneakers, and women fondling other women’s feet. There were shots of Dickson’s Florida vacation to Disney World, with the camera trained on his female partner’s feet, and a scene in a fast-food restaurant where the camera was focused on women wearing white sneakers. There was a home-shopping commercial for a cross-country ski machine showing a woman on the machine wearing white sneakers, and a naked store mannequin wearing white Keds.
Dickson’s foot fetish was not a harmless fetish, the prosecution said, but a sexual deviancy that led him to psychopathic behavior. Three years after Wilson ’s murder, police said, Dickson was fired from a maintenance job at the SmithKline Beecham pharmaceutical company after admitting he had written a love letter to a female chemist, asking her to leave him her sneakers. Three other women were prepared to testify they believed Dickson had broken into their apartments to steal their white sneakers.
Dickson’s ex-wife told police Dickson “was obsessed by, and drew sexual satisfaction from, women’s feet, sneakers, and socks… when she came home from work, tired and wearing sweaty sneakers, her husband removed her shoes and rubbed, kissed, and fondled her feet and toes.” She saw him masturbate in their home while watching aerobics tapes of attractive young women exercising in white socks and sneakers. When she found other women’s sneakers in her closets on several occasions, her husband said “he was giving them to Goodwill.”
Police had shattered Dickson’s alibi for the murder. He claimed he’d been talking to his girlfriend on the telephone at the time of the murder and “forgot” to check on Wilson and take her to her car. Yet the woman, now his estranged wife, testified that Dickson phoned her only once that evening, for fifteen minutes between midnight and one in the morning, when Wilson was alive. She also testified that she received a frantic phone call from Dickson saying, “Felicia, you’ve got to help me. You’re my alibi. You’ve got to help me.”
Reached at her home in Woodbury, New Jersey, Dorothy Wilson, Deborah’s mother, said the family felt “very, very thankful… it’s been eight and a half years… We just can’t say enough for the Philadelphia Police Department and district attorney.”
A Drexel spokesman said the university was “gratified” by the “break in the long-standing Deborah Wilson case.” Police credited a grand jury for recommending Dickson’s arrest on murder charges after an eighteen-month investigation. The police homicide special investigations unit and the district attorney’s office investigated the case extensively. Chief of Detectives Richard Zappile said he “feels very sorry for the family of the victim and we are glad that this case has finally been resolved.”
The Daily News said “it was not clear why the old murder case was reopened, although the special homicide investigations unit periodically goes back to take a fresh look at unsolved slayings.” The Wilson family hired a private detective to work on the case, police said.
The Vidocq Society was not mentioned in any of the stories. Nor was the investigative luncheon at the Downtown Club, or any individual VSM.
“Let’s remember we’re consulting detectives,” Walter said, “not crime-solvers. That’s what the police do. We’ve done our job.”
“It’s just like The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” Fleisher said. Walter glowered at him.
Fleisher ignored him. Sherlock Holmes, he said, was accused by the police of stealing credit for solving the theft of an important naval treaty from the Foreign Office.
“His reply is a classic. ‘On the contrary, out of my last fifty-three cases my name has only appeared in four, and the police have had all the credit in forty-nine.’ ”
“That’s us,” Bender said.
“I don’t have any problem with it,” Fleisher said. “We’re territorial and tribal animals. It’s a very, very natural phenomenon. I saw it in the government all the time, squads competing for cases like children with sibling rivalries, agents competing with each other. It’s prize envy.”
“The fact is, we can’t work for the approval of others,” Walter said.
“There’s a better way to say this,” Bender said, raising a shot glass of vodka.
“Virtue is its own reward.” Fleisher had a lopsided grin.
“Stoli is its own reward.” The sculptor threw back the shot and smacked the empty glass on the bar.
Two years later, in December 2005, David Dickson Jr., thirty-five, would be convicted of the second-degree murder of Deborah Lynn Wilson, the twenty-year-old math major at Drexel University, so he could steal and sniff her white Reeboks and socks.
A jailhouse snitch told the court that Dickson had confessed “the whole story” of the murder to him in prison, where Dickson was known as “Dr. Scholl.” Inmate Jay Wolchansky, serving thirty to sixty years for a string of burglaries, said that Dickson told him he had asked Wilson for a date, but the student rejected him. During his late-night rounds on November 30, 1984, Dickson, a martial arts expert, attacked her in a basement classroom by grabbing her hair and hitting her on the head.
As she fell to the ground, Dickson, who once boasted of his ability in ligature strangulation, told Wolchansky that he choked her with one hand. She fell unconscious and he removed her sneakers and socks, smelled the sneakers and rubbed her feet. When she groaned awake, Wilson choked her to death. Then he “had his way” with her feet, rubbing them against his face.
Dickson had said he killed Wilson because she “deserved it, and he had a fetish for white tennis shoes.” He told Wolchansky that he kept the sneakers for about a year “and would masturbate with them from time to time.” A psychiatrist testified that Dickson kept women’s white sneakers in plastic bags to preserve the smell for his fantasies.
Wolchansky, thirty-three, denied he was in line to receive any reduction in his term for his testimony. “It bugs me that people do that [sniff sneakers]. I’m not a violent man… To know how that lady was killed, Miss Wilson, disturbs me. I pray for her every night.”
The testimony perfectly matched Walter’s profile of a power-reassurance killer, a Gentleman Rapist type lost in a dark fantasy world, an illusionist who explodes in rage when his fairy tale shatters. He’s imagining that the victim will fall in love with him at his approach but “he knows goddamn well in reality the chances of that, the chances of him ever even getting a hard-on, are very slim.” Wilson was “ just shoes and socks to him.” When she fought back, it was a power loss. “He took what he wanted and got power reassurance. In his mind, he triumphed.”
Dickson said he was innocent. He told the court he enjoyed sniffing women’s feet but said he never used violence to enjoy his fetish.
Common Pleas judge Juanita Kidd Stout sentenced Dickson to a mandatory life sentence.
Deborah’s parents, Dorothy and Joseph Wilson, said they went to their daughter’s grave and told her the news. “The wound has been closed,” said Dorothy Wilson. “It’s settled. Maybe she can rest now.”