Lubbock police detective Tal English drove the unmarked car through the breezy Texas spring morning, with Richard Walter smoking in the passenger seat. They pulled into the parking lot of the Copper Kettle, a popular lunch spot. They were thinking takeout.
One Leisha Hamilton, to go.
The tall, dark-haired waitress saw them across the restaurant and scowled. English said, “Leisha, let’s go outside and avoid a scene.” She nodded and quietly followed them out to the car. They put her in the backseat, and Walter turned around to face her.
“It’s time for a little chat,” he said. He didn’t smile.
Four months after meeting the DA, Walter was frustrated by the case’s lack of progress. In April 1993 he returned to Lubbock, determined to “stop fucking around” and “explain the case to them.” He tried to sell the detectives once more on his idea that Leisha Hamilton was a psychopath and the primary suspect, but it was an old idea and nobody was buying. He muttered under his breath, “Gentlemen, you have no idea what you’re dealing with,” then turned to Detective English: “Young man, take me to the psychopath.” It was time to take the fight to Hamilton.
They all exchanged small talk as Hamilton got in the backseat. The death stare she’d leveled at them in the restaurant was gone. She was smiling, chatty, flipped her dark hair back off her forehead. She’d recovered composure remarkably fast.
Walter could sense the sex in the air, the flirty gestures and smiles she routinely used to entrap young men, the fluffy illusion concealing the hard, calculating mind beneath. He glared at her. With a psychopath, go straight for the kill. Don’t mess around.
“This is not a social visit, Leisha. I wish you would explain something to me. I don’t know anybody else in America who does a murder and then cleans up the crime scene afterward. That is, unless it is done in their own home. And in this case, you’re the only one who had access to that house. And you don’t have an alibi for the murder.”
“But I do have an alibi,” she protested.
“You mean you know when he died? Only the killer knows when he died.”
“I know when I found out he was missing-”
“Scott Dunn is not missing,” Walter sharply interrupted. “I don’t want to hear this charade about him being missing. It offends my sense of propriety. Scott Dunn was murdered. We’ve got that established and you’re a suspect.”
The eyes and voice now went flat as prairie and held there, unshakable. “Then I guess I don’t have an alibi.”
Walter appeared to be lost in contemplation, then stared balefully over his horn-rims.
“Leisha, I’ve noticed you seem to have a great ability to attract men, especially younger men. Now, granted I’m old, I’m ugly, I’m tired. But for the life of me I can’t figure out what they see in you. Can you explain it for me?”
A startled silence filled the car. She smiled awkwardly. “Well, I don’t know.”
“Is it because of all the sexual tricks you’ll perform for them? Because you are a sexual Disneyland?”
“I guess so.” She nodded sharply. “I’ve got to get back to work.” She opened the door, and she was gone.
English sat stunned. “Richard,” he said. “Am I mistaken, or did you just call her a dog?”
Walter grinned conspiratorially. “I thought I did.”
“But why?”
“I wanted to see how she reacted to unexpected situations, to see how quick she was in her thinking and what her game was all about. And it worked. It’s plain that her game is all about power-power and control. She’s a good little psychopath, so information is crucial to her power. I planted seeds of doubt, as well as direct information I wanted her to know, such as she is a suspect. I wanted to create some anxiety and I succeeded.”
Walter lit a Kool. “Leisha thinks she is smart enough to outwit everybody and can play a cat-and-mouse game with the police. What we must do is make her feel insignificant-unimportant. This will drive her crazy and she may well make a mistake.”
The detective nodded.
“But it won’t be easy. It’ll take time and patience. She’s very strong, very powerful. I looked in her eyes and saw she was having fun. It was a game and she was in control. I knew then without a doubt that the bitch killed him.”
Shortly after he returned to Michigan, Walter opened a package from Detective English. Out fell a single piece of white paper on which was drawn “quite intriguing original art.”
It was Hamilton ’s pencil sketch of the murder scene-a crude, childlike drawing that documented the prolonged torture of Scott Dunn.
The drawing showed an empty bedroom with a wooden pallet in one corner to which was chained a stick-figure man, labeled “S.” At the bottom of the drawing was a legend or key depicting handcuffs, a needle, a knife, a gun, and a sketch of a penis and scrotum.
The middle of the drawing showed the “S” man running across the room toward an open door, with the sun shining outside promising freedom. But the “S” figure collapses before the door and dies; a ghost of “S” leaves the body.
Studying the sketch, Walter thought, Scott suffered worse than I imagined. The gun was clearly used by Leisha and perhaps a confederate to subdue the bigger, stronger Scott with the handcuffs and tie him to the pallet; the needle would have been employed to keep him doped up for forty-eight hours of torture with a knife, fists, and a blunt instrument that delivered the fatal blows to the head. The “companion ghost” next to the fallen “S” figure indicated Scott had died trying to escape, Walter said. “Furthermore, the future, through the door, is clean and unused.”
The drawing of “detached genitalia” indicates Scott suffered “sexual abuse with a dildo, or, more than likely, it was representative of emasculation,” the forensic psychologist wrote in a formal report for the police. Walter believed Scott had been cut in pieces and disposed of in a way that he would never be found.
“Where’d you get it?” he asked Detective English.
“An ex-boyfriend she took up with after Scott by the name of Karl Young. He gave it to me in a coffee shop, looking nervously over his shoulder the whole time. She scared the shit out of him. He thought she’d killed Scott and had Tim Smith clean up.”
“Of course he’s afraid,” Walter said. “This is an extremely powerful woman. She gets what she wants when she wants it, and God forbid if you get in her way.”
The drawing indicated that Hamilton had chained Scott to a pallet right where their bed had once been located. A coroner and blood-spatter expert determined, by the angle of three drops of blood on a far wall, that Scott had died from three lethal blows to the head.
It was Hamilton ’s “pictorial of the murder scene, a keepsake,” Walter said.
“This is a classic,” he added. “It’s her personal pictorial diary of the murder. Rule number one is the murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is, until he or she stops deriving pleasure from it. Scott Dunn is dead, but for Leisha Hamilton, it isn’t over yet. She drew this to memorialize her achievement. She gains fresh pleasure each time she looks at it.”
The drawing confirmed his profile of Hamilton as a power-assertive killer, a woman who was “a user and all about power,” he said. “She has to be the top dog, the alpha dog, the bitch if you will. You don’t break up with or dismiss Leisha Hamilton. She dismisses you. I see lots of anger, rage, domination. ‘You’re going to leave me, are you? Now try and leave me, bitch.’ That sort of thing.”
Torture was a favorite method of power-assertive killers. In this case the pictured implements of torture were all “masculine symbols” employed in the PA’s goal of total physical dominance. Simply shooting Scott wouldn’t provide the necessary pleasures. “Her real payoff was the close-up use of fists and knives and whatever inflicted terrible pain. Her goal was to crush, destroy, extinguish her betrayer.”
Hamilton had made dramatic changes in her life that also were classic post-murder behavior. Few cops understood how killers used murder to stimulate personal growth. It was a very dark self-help movement-“I’m OK, You’re Dead.”
“Murder helps the killer grow, or enjoy the illusion of growth,” Walter said. “It’s the culmination or resolution of a long series of internal issues, and they use it as a springboard to change. That’s why killers often make dramatic post-crime life changes. They find God or new love, move far away, get in shape, and so on.”
Since murdering Scott, Hamilton had dropped Tim Smith, whom Walter believed she had seduced into helping with the crime, and took up with Young, a local restaurant cook, with whom she had a child. Meanwhile, she attended nursing school, while continuing to work as a waitress, and graduated at the top of her class. She was living the American Dream. Leisha Hamilton was going places.
“Her success doesn’t surprise me,” Walter told English. “I always said she was extremely intelligent-psychopathically bright and charming. But the nursing school is really quite rich. If you’re accused of being a murderess, draped in the black robes of torture, how do you ritually cleanse yourself of all suspicion? You enrobe yourself in white and become a healer.”
Walter saw Hamilton as a brilliant and cunning adversary, “a highly skilled psychopath.” She had gotten away with murder for years. She had brazenly killed Scott Dunn, toyed with his father, manipulated lawyers, cops, and the justice system as easily as she had a parade of lovers. She had seduced and bullied a whole circle of men, through raw sexual power and intimidation, to assist her in murder. The waitress had destroyed her betrayer in the very bedroom where he had deceived her-a waitress rising to the role of a vengeful queen.
She was a poor woman’s Clytemnestra, the queen who slew King Agamemnon for his affair with the prophetess Cassandra, striking him in their royal bed with a “threefold hammer blow.”
Curious, Walter found his old college copy of Agamemnon by Aeschylus, “The Father of Tragedy,” and thumbed through the ancient Greek classic to the murder scene. It caused him to raise an eyebrow:
She goes down, and the life is bursting out of him-
Great sprays of blood, and the murderous shower
Wounds me, dyes me black and I, I revel
Like the Earth when the spring rains come down,
The blessed gifts of god, and the new green spear,
Splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory!
It was murder as self-improvement seven centuries ago. Clytemnestra, like Leisha, had blossomed “… from that drenching marriage-rite the woods, the spring burst forth in bloom. And I, I cause it all.”
The profiler judged the drawing worth adding to his collection of original murderers’ art, which came in handy as a teaching tool. It included a watercolor by an Australian male nurse-turned-serial killer and a classic portrait of Pogo the Clown by John Wayne Gacy, the Chicago contractor, Democratic ward heeler, and clown-for-hire at children’s parties convicted in 1980 of murdering thirty-three men and boys and burying most of them under the floorboards of his house.
Jim Dunn was devastated by the documentation of his son’s torture and the idea that the perpetrator of torture not only got away with murder but was using it to inspire personal achievement and growth. It gave him the defeated feeling that “Leisha wins in the end.”
“Not at all,” Walter said. “By attempting to reinvent herself and escape her past, she only further identifies herself as the murderer. Leisha is a drama queen, a remarkable woman, in an evil way, for a trailer-trash waitress. But she’s not especially well-educated, and she doesn’t seem to realize that dramas end in tragedy.”
It deeply offended Walter that “a bunch of psychopaths were getting away with murder. They were trying to pass over the ruse on society that Scott Dunn had just disappeared as if he had never existed. There are standards to uphold in civilization. This kind of thing cannot be allowed to stand.” The police weren’t buying his conspiracy theory, but Walter was convinced Mike Roberts, a muscular six-foot-four young man who worked with Scott, knew something about the murder.
Roberts had quit the Lubbock stereo shop shortly after Scott’s disappearance and moved to Tacoma, Washington -classic post-crime behavior. While on business in Seattle, Walter made a side trip. He asked the police to pull Roberts out of his workplace onto the sidewalk, then sent the cop to get some coffee.
“It’s time for us to have a man-to-boy chat,” Walter said, leaning close to the muscular young man. One of Roberts’s shirt buttons had come undone, and Walter observed his heart thumping wildly against his chest.
Roberts jumped back. “I remember you-the Englishman. I’m scared of you. Should I get myself a lawyer?”
Walter noted Roberts was “a fine liar, never losing eye contact,” but the tall man’s jumpy Adam’s apple gave him away as well, slithering up and down “with great rapidity.”
“Young man.” He glared. “If you have not been involved in murder, you needn’t call a lawyer. If you have been involved in murder, however, I daresay a lawyer won’t help. I’ll chew your dick down so far you won’t have enough left to fuck roadkill!”
The mansion in the remote Pennsylvania Appalachians was filled with the gloaming of twilight, except for the lamp in the parlor where the thin man lounged on an eighteenth-century Italian divan, a king Kool perched in two fingers haughtily aloft. “Oh, it’s a wonderful case,” Richard Walter said, as he glanced at a photograph of the doctor who had been shot through the heart by his best friend, a lawyer, some twenty years earlier. “A man desires another man’s wife and simply takes her. It’s quite common. It happens to be the plot of the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as, I might add, Hamlet.”
“I see retirement hasn’t affected your confidence,” snickered state trooper Steve Stoud, a dark-haired, broad-shouldered man in his thirties sitting in a wing chair opposite Walter. Corporal Stoud’s brilliant cold-case work had recently put the murderous doctor behind bars, and earned him membership as one of the young lions of an aging Vidocq Society.
Walter laughed-laughter that dissolved into a hacking cough that left him bent over red-faced like he was expelling a lung. His smoker’s cough was getting worse.
Night fell with the utter darkness of the country and the hush of the surrounding ridge-and-valley Appalachians. The parlor was the largest of twenty-two rooms in the Greek Revival mansion. There were seven bedrooms and seven fireplaces, rumors of ghosts and the Underground Railroad. A grand stairway soared for the needs of society; back stairs shuttled servants from sight. It was Biddle House, a country retreat built in the 1830s by the illustrious Biddles of Philadelphia, including Nicholas Biddle, the disgraced president of the Second Bank of the United States, his bank and his career destroyed by President Andrew Jackson. Walter lived in the house alone.
“Didn’t a doctor just tell you to quit?” Stoud teased.
“Yes.” Walter frowned. “I told him, ‘My dear boy, I am quite obviously aware of the risks and pleasures of smoking, and you see I have made a bargain with which I am quite pleased-I had a choice of being a thin man and enjoying life or being too fat to fit into my coffin. So let nature do what she will, I will have the last word-with sodium pentothal one can lie down to quite pleasant dreams…’ ”
Stoud shook his head. “Jesus, Richard.”
“I explained that I am a Scorpio, one who would rather destroy himself than lose control, and one who thrills to attack.”
As he composed himself and took a sip of Chardonnay, Stoud, big hand around a can of beer, said in a teasing voice, “Richard, speaking of suicide, I’ve found a note…”
“Oh.” The thin man leaned forward expectantly, his left eyebrow arched in a fine point. The two men collected suicide notes. It was a friendly competition.
“A guy in Georgia shot himself in the head, left a note, ‘Some say death is the end of life. Some say life is part of death.’ I say, ‘Let’s put the fun back in funeral!’ ”
Walter’s eyes shone with merriment. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” he enthused. “The best yet. I quite like it.” It illustrated the kind of point the police had such trouble accepting: At the dark edges of human behavior, the cruel and the tortured did not think or feel like the rest of us. Murder could be fun! Suicide could be a joke!
“Consistency,” Walter said, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Walter was instructing Stoud in a course on murder, with particular attention to the most depraved serial killers and other sex murderers. Stoud was a plainclothes detective with the elite Criminal Investigation Assessment Unit (CIAU) of the Pennsylvania State Police, which boasted more criminal profilers than any police agency in the world, including the FBI and NYPD. He roamed 2,500 square rural miles in the northeast corner of the state investigating serial killings and other “behavioral” crimes. The state trooper was near the top of his profession; but the only way for an ambitious young detective to further his education in the criminal mind was to apprentice to a master.
“Richard is one of the few who have ideas about killers that really work for the detective in the field,” said Stoud.
For years he had longed to find a protégé to pass on his knowledge. He was conscious that he was running out of time.
“I’m one who believes when you’re dead, you’re dead. If I am to live on, it will be through my ideas. I believe we have an obligation to pass our knowledge on to the next generation.”
Walter, now in his fifties, had recently retired from the Michigan Department of Corrections, and sold his house in Lansing. With no family but two sisters on the West Coast, he moved east to Montrose, Pennsylvania (pop. 1,596), a small Victorian town forty-six miles north of Scranton coal country at the lonely “Top of the Endless Mountains.”
The remote location had numerous advantages. He was relieved to be on the East Coast, “where my acerbic wit is better appreciated.” It was only 170 miles, a two-hour drive, south to Philadelphia; he would no longer have to get on a plane for the monthly meetings of the Vidocq Society. The Biddle House was “quite grand,” with room for his grand piano and antiques to at last stretch their arms and legs. After a lifetime immersed in cities and murder, he planned to enjoy the leisurely life of a country gentleman. He would go skeet shooting and antiquing, sip wine with long views of the mountains, host “little soirees” for the local cognoscenti and friends from the city.
Steven and Susan Stoud, their children and dogs, lived in a farm-house over the hills, seven miles east of town. The Stouds fussed over him like a lost uncle, fixing his car and computer and sewing his curtains, for Richard Walter was one of those towering intellects who could not “tie his own shoes.” Thus the course in murder could continue over lunch, dinner, and drinks, in the parlor ringed by cigarette smoke, opera music, debate, and ribald laughter.
Walter hung out his shingle as the proprietor of the Omega Crime Assessment Group, offering the rarest expertise in “Munchausen syndrome, sadism, and serial murder.” He would restrict his investigative efforts to “select fascinating cases.” But it was not lifestyle or friendship that originally brought him to the remote hills. It was the scent of an old murder, a tale of lust and betrayal he called “quite worthy of the Greeks,” that drew him six hundred miles east, like an aging bloodhound.
On June 2, 1976, prominent Montrose physician Dr. Stephen Scher and his close friend lawyer Martin Dillon, were skeet shooting on the Dillon family preserve, “Gunsmoke,” when Dillon died from a sixteen-gauge, pump-action shotgun blast. Dr. Scher tearfully explained to the police that his friend accidentally tripped on untied shoelaces and fell while chasing a porcupine, discharging the gun. The doctor could do nothing to save him; Dillon, shot through the heart, died instantly. Dillon was thirty-six years old and left behind his wife, Patricia, a nurse, and two young children. That the mortal shot came from Dr. Scher’s rifle, and the bullet was a hunting round, not the less powerful round used on clay pigeons, raised eyebrows, as did rumors that Dr. Scher had been having a torrid affair with his friend’s wife. But Dr. Scher tearfully denied the rumors and deeply mourned his friend while offering stout moral support to the widow and children. All involved had suffered a tragedy; the coroner ruled the shooting an accident.
Yet two years later, when Dr. Scher married Patricia Dillon and the couple happily moved to New Mexico and later North Carolina, where they raised Martin Dillon’s children and adopted their own, Dillon’s father, Larry, redoubled his claim that his son had been murdered. It took twenty years before the state attorney general’s office charged Dr. Scher with murder, based partly on new facts unearthed by Corporal Stoud. The attorney general hired Walter to testify for the prosecution as an expert on murderer personality types.
“It wasn’t much of a mystery,” Walter said, lighting another menthol Kool. “Beneath his impressive sheen of physician’s respectability, prestige, caring, and what have you, the good doctor was a fucking psychopath. He took what he wanted when he wanted it, and he wanted Patricia Dillon.”
The small Susquehanna County courthouse was crowded with national TV journalists covering the rural county seat’s “Crime of the Century.” Celebrity pathologists Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Michael Baden, a witness in the O. J. Simpson trial, testified for the defense. Walter, frustrated as legal maneuvering prevented him from being called to the stand for the prosecution, then utterly bored with the proceedings, left the courthouse and strolled the same charming but small Victorian main street for two days until he walked into a carpet shop and demanded, “Where can you get a drink in this goddamn town before noon?” Grinning, the rug merchant produced a bottle of bourbon and two glasses from beneath the counter, and the fast friends drank until, as Walter later put it, “I said to myself, ‘Self, this isn’t such a bad town after all.’ ” That afternoon, Walter strolled by the magnificent Biddle House with a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. He decided the asking price of under $200,000 was a “grand bargain” for a retirement abode, and made an offer.
After a four-day trial, on October 22, 1997, Dr. Scher was convicted of the first-degree murder of Martin Dillon. Stoud’s investigation had helped destroy the doctor’s alibi. Scher claimed he was a hundred yards away from Dillon when the shotgun went off, but FBI lab work revealed he stood six to nine feet away-close enough that Scher’s boots were splattered with Dillon’s blood, and a tiny piece of the victim’s flesh was found on Scher’s pant leg. Dillon’s body was exhumed to measure his arms, and it was proven they were too short to have held Scher’s shotgun in a position to create the gaping wound. Confronted with the new evidence, Scher admitted on the stand that he had concocted the “porcupine story.” Yes, he admitted, he’d been having an affair with Patricia Dillon. Now he claimed he and Dillon were struggling with the shotgun during a “conversation that led to an argument” about Patricia when the gun accidentally went off. However, Dillon was wearing earplugs when his body was found, and couldn’t have heard Scher talking to him.
As Dr. Scher was taken to a state prison outside Pittsburgh to serve a life sentence, Richard Walter moved into the grand home at 78 Church Street. Across from the old stone Episcopalian church, Walter would lead Stoud to the lowest region of hell.
Walter’s previous attempts to find a worthy protégé had failed miserably. He’d agreed to train three different young men, including a forensic psychologist who interviewed killers all day long and a homicide detective with twenty-five murder investigations under his belt. He’d warned them, “Someday you’ll have to interview a sixty-five-year-old man who enjoys destroying children by cutting them into little pieces. You can listen to me tell it to you now, but to be with him alone, to confront this reality, can be something else again if you are not highly structured and sound in your knowledge and belief system, if you are not of the right age or understanding to deal with it. Ideas can be very dangerous if you’re not ready for them.”
All three protégés dropped out. They couldn’t take it. The veteran homicide detective said, “I have a wife and a child. I want a sense of normality, a sense of innocence about life. You’re destroying that for me. I just can’t do it.” Walter was deeply disappointed. Reluctantly, he resigned himself to the fact that, unlike FBI agent Robert Ressler and other profiler friends, he would never have a protégé; his lifework would die with him.
“What I do is too eccentric for a healthy, normal person,” he told himself.
He discouraged the young people who approached him at parties or forensic conferences, as CSI became an international TV hit, looking for advice on how to become a “profiler.” “Young man,” he’d say, “while I understand your enthusiasm, you seem quite too normal. You look like a fine fellow who’d like to marry, have children, have a happy life, not devote yourself to something that can destroy your marriage and, ultimately, your soul. This is not for the faint of heart. There are few of us who are cut out for it.”
Few cops wanted to explore the netherworld of the criminal mind, or could do so with the scientific training of a psychologist. On the other hand, few psychologists had or wished to have experience at crime scenes. Since Freud, leading psychologists had focused on everyday behavior and its disorders with a single-minded determination not to make old-fashioned moral judgments. Murder, evil, they left to the burly, often uneducated police officer or constable.
Walter was astonished, while lecturing to prominent European psychologists on the personality subtypes of murderers, that “none of them had any idea what I was talking about. They could look at John Wayne Gacy and see schizophrenia, but they had no training in sadism. There is no psychology of evil.” Walter was a man without a country.
Then, in 1995, he was listening to Ann Rule, the bestselling true-crime author, lecture on psychopaths at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention in Seattle. Walter was a distinguished fellow and frequent lecturer at the conference with FBI agent Bob Ressler and others. Now he scowled in disgust. There was absolutely nothing a popular writer like Rule could teach him about psychopaths, even if she had been friends with Ted Bundy, the basis of her book The Killer Beside Me.
“Are you believing this bullshit?” Walter asked the large man sitting next to him.
“I’m good friends with Ann Rule,” the big man barked, eyeing the wan, bespectacled figure beside him. “Who the hell are you?”
Thus began one of the most important friendships in the modern history of criminology.
The big man was Robert Keppel, renowned chief criminal investigator for the Washington state attorney general’s office, nationally known for his decades-long pursuit of Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer. A criminology Ph.D. and ex-Seattle cop, the formidable Keppel was known for a brilliant analytical mind, relentless bulldog attitude, and pioneering use of computers in criminal investigations.
Keppel quickly realized his remarkable bond with Walter. The Washington state detective and the Michigan psychologist had spent their careers like a right hand and a left hand that each didn’t know what the other was doing, until now. While Keppel had spent two decades as a homicide detective arresting killers and investigating fifty serial murder cases, more than any living cop, Walter had interviewed thousands of incarcerated killers, descending deeper into the criminal mind than any scholar. Both men were mavericks and outspoken critics of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, the acknowledged leader of the science of criminal profiling. On their own, they had developed almost precisely the same theories-revolutionary ideas that would transform modern murder investigation.
“There’s only one problem with what the FBI is doing,” said Keppel, who like Walter had been a friend or rival of the leading FBI agents for years. “It’s a lot of bunk.” Star special agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler had traveled the country in the 1980s interviewing an incarcerated murderers’ row of thirty-six famous serial killers and assassins to try to determine what made them tick. The list included Bundy, Charles Manson, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, Edward Kemper, and last, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Lynette Frome, respectively assassins of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and attempted assassin of President Gerald Ford. Douglas and Ressler’s resulting book, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, coauthored with a psychologist, became the bible of the new criminal profiling, dividing sexual murderers into two broad personality categories based on the crime scene, organized or disorganized.
Unfortunately, Keppel said, “they made it up. There’s no data at all. It wasn’t created out of a data set or known empirical study, it’s just there. As a result, FBI agents swoop into town, sit with the local cops, and begin their Kentucky windage estimate of what the offender was like. ‘We know he’s young and thin and a clothes-horse so I think he’s attractive to women’-and so on. The agents are in a room talking, never at the murder scene, not a one of ’em. As my detective friend Frank Salerno says, you know they never smelled the blood.”
Walter agreed, but was slightly more diplomatic. He saw the FBI as flawed and hidebound by bureaucracy, but deserving of credit for originating the systematic psychological study of killers. “I may disagree with the FBI or whatever, but we’re all on the same Roman road, trying to understand murder, evil, for the betterment of mankind.”
Walter had studied the history of murder back to the Greeks, but the modern road of criminal profiling began in November 1888, when Scotland Yard surgeon Thomas Bond attempted the first psychological profile of a killer after performing the autopsy of Mary Kelly, the fifth victim of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper, he wrote, would be physically strong, quiet, and harmless in appearance, possibly middle-aged, and neatly attired, probably wearing a cloak to hide the bloody effects of his attacks.
Both Walter and Keppel were aware of how little progress had been made in a century of trying to peer into the minds of killers. There were few highlights. In a 1943 profile of Adolf Hitler commissioned by American intelligence, New York psychiatrist Walter Langer correctly predicted that if the Third Reich collapsed the Führer would likely commit suicide. In 1957, the psychiatrist James Brussel, “The Sherlock Holmes of the Couch,” successfully profiled the Mad Bomber who had terrorized New York City in the 1940s and ’50s, injuring fifteen people with thirty-three bombs planted everywhere from phone booths to libraries, including Penn Station, the New York Public Library, and Radio City Music Hall. The Mad Bomber eluded cops for sixteen years until Brussel, after studying the bomber’s many crimes and letters, successfully predicted down to the last detail that the killer would be a middle-aged, Catholic, Slavic ex-Commonwealth Edison employee living in Connecticut, who furthermore would be, as George P. Metesky was when arrested at his sisters’ house, wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned. In the 1970s, Brussel helped the FBI create its Behavioral Sciences Unit, which developed the first “profiles” of suspects.
By the time Pennsylvania State Trooper Stoud attended a Vidocq Society luncheon in Philadelphia in 1995, as a guest of a senior state trooper who was a VSM, he had investigated more than a dozen murders and read everything he could get his hands on about murder and murder investigation, including all of Douglas’s and Ressler’s books, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Yet he was deeply frustrated. In his thirties, he wanted to advance his career.
Walter had given a talk at the Vidocq luncheon about his murder subtypes. He discussed his method of solving the most notorious murder in modern Australian history-the brutal slaying of beauty queen and nurse Anita Cobby. Stoud was dazzled. He was desperate to become a profiler, but after reading all the books, there wasn’t any more to learn.
Mindful that “you had to find a profiler to show you the road so you can walk it yourself,” he approached Walter after the luncheon and asked if he could study with him, and was swiftly rejected. Late that night, he called Walter at home in Michigan, repeating his request to “be a learner.” Walter snapped at him, “I said no, did you hear me? I’m not interested. You’re too normal, a family and all the rest. I’ve tried this before, and it’s never successful. It would be a waste of my time and yours.” Half an hour later, Stoud called back and said, “I was just hung up on, but I won’t take no for an answer.” Walter cursed him out; Stoud said, “I’m going to keep calling.” He called the next night, and the next. Gradually, the younger man and the older developed a dialogue. They discussed murder cases in the news, murder cases they were working, the nature of evil. Walter allowed himself to wonder if Stoud had the brains, the guts, the character, and moral fiber, to be his protégé. “You must learn to think horizontally as well as vertically,” he said, “which very few of us in the world can do.” Walter nurtured hopes the younger man could follow him, could stand witness to and stand against the worst evil human beings did to one another.
Walter drove over the icy hills in his aging Ford Crown Victoria to the Green Gables tavern. The car had 120,000 miles on it, and was always breaking down. Walter was always getting lost. Stoud pointed out he needed new shocks and brakes, and he snorted in reply, “You know I don’t care about those things.” The state trooper marveled at how little he knew about ordinary life-cars, computers, the World Series-for a genius. I guess he’s saving it all for sadism, necrophilia, and Munchausen syndrome, Stoud thought.
Walter said that after a lifetime immersed in ghastly murders, he had decided to reinvent himself as a country gentleman. What was left of him, that is, after years of forays into the abyss and back again-little but the broad egg-shaped pate of his forehead, the consumptive cough, the withered frame hardened or wasted by unknown disciplines and battles with darkness. He wanted to pursue the good life.
Stoud smirked. “How many cars have you owned?”
“Seven.”
“All black Crown Vics, like police cars?”
“Yes.”
“And you ran them all into the ground.”
“Yes.”
“How many suits do you own?”
“One.”
“Color?”
“Blue.”
“And you wear it into the ground.”
“Yes. Then I get another one. One does.”
Stoud grinned. “If you’re a country gentleman, I’m Earl Grey. You’re a cop.”
Walter laughed. “’Tis true.”
Number 1704 Locust Street in Philadelphia was a dreary Victorian brownstone wedged among an imposing white-marble classical music school and the fashionable hotels and shops of Rittenhouse Square. An awkward wrought-iron staircase twisted sideways to a tall, forbidding black door with a tarnished knocker. The second-floor window was clumsily off center, like a misplaced proboscis. It appeared lost, an archaic, slightly seedy gent in a topcoat and homburg. A series of small and vaguely mysterious brass plaques on the brick wall to the left of the door got smaller as they descended, until the last one could be covered by a man’s hand:
THE ACADEMY OF SCIENTIFIC
INVESTIGATIVE TRAINING
KEYSTONE INTELLIGENCE NETWORK
THE VIDOCQ SOCIETY
On the second floor, atop a white-marble nineteenth-century staircase, were the new offices of the Keystone detective agency and its director, William L. Fleisher. Fleisher had retired from his federal career on December 31, 1995, and, true to his reputation as a workaholic, had taken all of two days off before starting his new career. On January 2, 1996, he partnered with VSM Nate Gordon to open the full-service private-eye shop under the slogan “the FBI for the other guy.” On the same floor as the Keystone agency was the Academy of Scientific Investigative Training -their school for teaching the polygraph, with classes everywhere from down the hall to Dubai. The small warren of offices was also the first headquarters for the Vidocq Society, outside of home offices, trunks, and briefcases.
The agency door opened into a big room with a red Persian rug and Oriental prints on the walls. The secretary, Gloria Alvarado, sat next to a Victorian mantelpiece adorned with a bust of Vidocq, and a gray cadaver skull Fleisher’s father had used in dental school in the 1930s. Down the hallway were the offices of Gordon; former Philadelphia police detective Ed Gaughan; and a couple retired FBI agents, all members of the Vidocq Society. Fleisher’s office was a small, pie-shaped space with a leaded casement on a back alley. The shelves and walls were cluttered with awards and bric-a-brac, including a schooner in stormy seas painted by Michelle, a 1940s Psycho-truth-ometer, a picture of his father in Navy blue.
Gloria buzzed-Ron Avery, the Philadelphia Daily News columnist, was in the waiting room.
“Send him in.”
The press loved the commissioner of the Vidocq Society, and Avery was an old friend. Now Fleisher sat back in his swiveling leather chair and listened as Avery said he was writing a book about historic Philadelphia crimes and looking for ideas. His thesis was that in 315 years it was tough to match the City of Brotherly Love for corruption and murder. City of Brotherly Mayhem was his title.
“My specialty.” Fleisher grunted. “You need five books for this. What do you have so far?”
Avery had dug dirt as far back as founder William Penn’s son, William Penn Jr., who was charged with assault during a drunken free-for-all in the early 1700s. The pastor at Christ Church -the church of George and Martha Washington-boasted of bedding the congregation’s prettiest ladies, and fights and duels erupted. There was the nineteenth-century monster H. H. Holmes, America ’s first serial killer. Gary Heidnik, the cannibal minister of the 1980s, and his “House of Horrors,” Ted Bundy’s early years-he was leaving most of them out. It was an embarrassment of riches; there was too much. And there was one more.
“The Boy in the Box,” Avery said.
The moniker sent Fleisher back in time. As Avery described the case, he saw himself as thirteen years old again, standing in front of the poster at the Penn Fruit Company market while his mother shopped. The hollow eyes in the sad pale face of death came back to him, his first brush with death.
The case, Avery said, had never been solved. The homicide bureau had taken a collection and paid for a monument, the only monument in Potter’s Field, where the unnamed boy lay with rapists, murderers, body parts, and the indigent and forgotten. The detectives had the stone inscribed “God Bless This Unknown Boy.” Remington Bristow, the medical examiner’s investigator who had been assigned the case in 1957, had continued to investigate it in his retirement, keeping it in the news with his annual visits to the boy’s grave. Bristow had died three years earlier, and with him a lot of the public interest in the case.
After Avery left, the resurrected image of the poster lingered in Fleisher’s mind. As a boy he’d dreamed of solving the terrible crime, becoming a hero of the city. As an adult, he’d known many of the cops who became the boy’s tireless champions.
He went home to Michelle and the kids and dinner, but it stayed with him. It bothered him that for four decades someone had got away with the coldest murder he’d ever known. It bothered him that nobody had come forward to say, “That’s my child.” It bothered him that the boy lay yet in Potter’s Field, the graveyard for the forgotten and shamed purchased, in biblical tradition, using thirty silver pieces returned to the Jewish priests by a repentant Judas. “It’s not right,” he mumbled to himself at his desk in the pale lamplight, failing to concentrate on a corporate theft case. They were simple words that were the marching orders of his life. A sharp feeling came unbidden, but the large, bearded head wagged as if to shake it off. It was ancient history, a boy’s dream. The man was too busy solving today’s crimes.
He tossed and turned that night. He imagined the nameless boy all alone under the moonlight beneath the frozen crust of Potter’s Field.
John Martini was a flashy Phoenix restaurateur, a high roller and a charmer filled with dark American dreams. He started as a mob hit man, worked his way up to FBI informant, and became one of the most brazen serial killers in modern times. By the time he reached death row, he was terrifying to look at, as if his body was indeed the smoky window of his soul-enormous, fat, balding, with huge hands and a broad, pockmarked face, loose fleshy lips, big hooked nose, glowering dark eyes. He was a pro who allegedly killed for New England gangster Raymond Patriarca. But he’d freelance killing friends and relatives if the money was good-including, police believed, his aunt and uncle.
He was a bad guy, in other words, for a woman to be introduced to by one of her best friends. That’s what happened to Anna Mary Duval, a retired New Jersey office worker who’d moved to Arizona. Her new friend Martini persuaded her to put $25,000 in a hot real estate investment, and told her to meet him in Philadelphia in the fall of 1977 to complete the deal. Martini kept Duval’s money and killed her, too-his version of a real estate closing.
Now, in 1997, twenty years later, Martini finally admitted to killing Duval and was convicted of her murder-brought to justice by the art and vision of Frank Bender.
“This guy Martini is the worst,” Bender said, “except for maybe Vorhauer. He’s too far out there even for the movies-sort of Goodfellas meets Scarface.” Bender, Walter, and Fleisher were having lunch in a Center City diner.
“Richard, as a psychologist, how would you handle this type of criminal?” Fleisher asked.
Walter sneered in disgust. “Seven cents’ worth of lead.”
When Duval was introduced to the forty-four-year-old, Bronx-born Martini, the brother of one of her best friends, she was impressed. She was apparently unaware that he had served federal time for hijacking a truckload of women’s underwear in New Jersey, or that the FBI considered him one of the “nastiest” criminals in America. She couldn’t have known-not even the police did-that Martini also had been on the FBI payroll for more than a decade, tipping off the bureau about hijacked trucks in New York and New Jersey.
In October 1977, Duval flew through Chicago to Philadelphia, where Martini picked her up at the airport. He introduced her to another gentleman, an off-duty policeman, quietly sitting in the backseat behind her. Minutes later, the man in the backseat pulled out a handgun and pumped three bullets into the back of Duval’s head, execution-style. The two men dumped the body near the airport. Martini later told police that the shooter was his apprentice. He was teaching the cop how to “work on a contract, you know, killing people.”
The Duval murder sent Martini on a wild killing spree. He was the lead suspect in at least four murders for which he was never charged, including the shooting deaths of a cousin and his former son-in-law, and the shooting and stabbing of his aunt and uncle Catherine and Raymond Gebert in their Atlantic City home (Martini was awarded $175,000 as the benefactor of his aunt’s estate).
By the fall of 1988, Martini was running from the law and desperate for cash. He was nursing a $500-a-day cocaine habit, being sued for divorce, and had recently lost his longtime employment with the FBI because of his “dishonesty with the bureau,” according to court records. In October in Arizona he shot and killed his drug supplier and her companion. Three months later, with his girlfriend-accomplice Therese Afdahl, he kidnapped Secaucus, New Jersey, warehouse executive Irving Flax at gun-point. Martini, cleverly eluding an FBI trap, extorted $25,000 from Flax’s wife for his safe return, and put three bullets in Flax’s head anyway. Finally arrested in a nearby hotel, Martini was convicted in 1990 for the kidnapping-murder. He was sentenced to New Jersey ’s death row, where he was also convicted of Duval’s murder, and given a concurrent sentence of life in prison for killing her.
“Duval’s family said in court they were happy about the conviction and sentence,” Bender said. “They felt it showed their mother’s life had worth.”
“Frank, you are truly amazing,” Fleisher said. “What you do for law enforcement can’t be duplicated.”
That spring of 1997 was a season of triumphs for the Vidocq Society. At the April 18 luncheon in the Downtown Club, a gruesome image appeared over the white tablecloths: The decayed corpse of a twenty-seven-year-old woman lay between hedgerows in a remote part of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, apparently strangled to death. The case had languished with the Pennsylvania State Police for six years. Walter and other VSMs picked a prime suspect before dessert. “It is not, in this case, rocket science,” Walter said.
The victim’s twenty-four-year-old live-in boyfriend was a pizza deliveryman with no criminal record. But he had abused and threatened the victim, and drew additional attention to himself with his unusual nickname, “Ted Bundy.” It was one of many truth-too-strange-for-Hollywood moments in the Murder Room, and as it happened, a herd of Hollywood types was at the round tables listening.
They later were escorted to Frank Bender’s studio, where they ogled the artist’s unique collection of the living and the dead. The producers took the Vidocq founders to Le Bec-Fin, the renowned French restaurant where dinner for two can cost $700, and wooed them for their life story rights. Walter, who hated to be sold anything, found the process disconcerting.
“Kevin Spacey will play you,” a producer told him as a limousine whisked them through the Philadelphia night. “He’ll make a great, great American detective.”
Walter blinked in astonishment. “That’s wonderful! That’s truly grand! Who’s Kevin Spacey?”
“You… you don’t go to the movies?”
“Oh, no, my dear boy. I can’t stand the sound of popcorn being chewed.”
Four days later, Fleisher, Bender, and Walter celebrated as Jersey Films, owned by Danny DeVito, offered $1.3 million for the society’s movie rights. Before long, DeVito was inviting Bender to Hollywood for a party, and Robert De Niro, it was reported, was an unabashed Bender fan. The artist’s friends shuddered imagining the possibilities of Bender’s social life in Hollywood.
By May, retired FBI agent Robert Ressler, VSM, was touring to promote his new bestselling book, I Have Lived in the Monster, including his exclusive interview with “the Monster of Milwaukee” Jeffrey Dahmer, the worst serial killer he had ever encountered.
Ressler had spent two days interviewing the gay cannibal convicted of murdering seventeen men and boys and eating from their remains. He was sickened by Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment. Three heads in a freezer, one in the refrigerator, hands in a cooking pot. No food in the apartment-just a chain saw for butchering, vials to drink blood. Dahmer had drugged and tortured his victims and told them, “I’m going to eat your heart,” drilled holes in their skulls, and poured in battery acid to make them sex-slave zombies.
Yet Ressler surprisingly came away from his meeting with the killer feeling “only empathy for the tormented and twisted person who sat before me” who said he killed and ate his visitors to overcome loneliness. Dahmer was insane, Ressler said, and deserved life in a mental hospital, not his prison sentence of nearly a thousand years. He testified in Dahmer’s defense.
Walter was horrified by his friend’s view. Walter insisted that Dahmer was a sane, cold psychopath who must be held accountable. In all but a very few criminal cases, Walter said, “People make choices. If you deny them that ability, you take away their humanity and that of everyone around them, including the victim.”
Ressler had grown up in the same Chicago neighborhood as John Wayne Gacy. When Ressler refused to attend the serial killer’s execution, Gacy cursed him, saying he would haunt the FBI agent from the grave. Though Walter was skeptical of Ressler’s account, there were few people not moved by Ressler’s story that he had fallen asleep in a hotel room in Houston when he was awakened by an immensely powerful unseen force that was holding him down so he couldn’t move or breathe. As he broke free with a desperate strength, he heard the TV on in the background-CNN reporting that John Wayne Gacy had just been executed.
“How does one avoid becoming the victim of a serial killer?” Fleisher asked in a rave review of the book in the Vidocq Society Journal, now published quarterly. “The conclusion I drew from Ressler’s book is not to talk to, or get into a car, with strangers, to stay away from ‘gay’ S amp;M bars, and not to join a cult. Follow those rules and you can reduce your risk of being murdered by a monster to near zero. Simplistic? Maybe, but it couldn’t hurt and it has worked so far for me.”
Fleisher was proudest of Vidocq Society Members’ work on major murder cases. Renowned forensic dentist and VSM Haskell Askin made headlines by providing the crucial testimony that led to the conviction of repeat violent sexual predator Jesse Timmendequas in the brutal sex murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in Hamilton, New Jersey, on July 29, 1994. Kanka’s death inspired the creation of Megan’s Law, a varied network of community laws requiring police to provide information about neighborhood sexual predators. In testimony on May 17, 1997, Askin matched bite marks on the defendant’s palm to the young girl’s teeth, evidence that so excited one juror he “punched the air with his fist and loudly clicked his tongue,” a reporter said. The juror was relieved of his duty, but Timmendequas was convicted and sentenced to death.
VSM Barbara Cohan-Saavedra, an assistant U.S. attorney, successfully prosecuted Soviet spy Robert Lipka, a U.S. National Security Agency employee in the 1960s who pled guilty to photographing top-secret documents with miniature cameras and stuffing others in his pants and under his hat to sell to KGB agents for $27,000. Lipka was sentenced to eighteen years in jail.
The multitalented Cohan-Saavedra, a jewelry artist and pastry chef, helped persuade Fleisher to add another annual dinner celebration to the Vidocq Society calendar-July 14, Bastille Day. Fleisher thought it a splendid idea. “Vidocq’s spirit of redemption lives in the Vidocq Society,” he said. “How better than to celebrate that famous day in 1789 when the Bastille was stormed and the prison doors thrown open.”
Fleisher had recently helped exonerate a man falsely accused of murder in Little Rock, Arkansas. After Fleisher appeared on 48 Hours, he received a remarkable phone call from Little Rock schoolteacher Teresa Cox Baus, whose brother, restaurant manager William Cox, had been murdered in March 1991. Baus wanted the Vidocq Society to help exonerate a black dishwasher she believed was falsely accused of killing her brother. The schoolteacher had stopped working for the prosecution of her brother’s alleged murderer-and was now helping the public defender. “I can’t stand to see an innocent person convicted,” she said. “I grew up in Little Rock, and I don’t want to say this, but they’re charging a black guy with a white guy’s murder, and it’s very hard for them to see it any other way.”
Fleisher asked two renowned VSM profilers to examine the case file-Walter and FBI special agent Gregg McCrary, who had handled many major cases, including the Sri Lankan massacre of thirty-three Buddhist monks in 1987. After the profilers confirmed Fleisher’s suspicions of the dishwasher’s innocence, the lawyers for the accused won an acquittal in forty-five minutes. “Teresa Baus is an American hero,” Fleisher said. “That’s how justice is supposed to work.”
But the Vidocq Society’s greatest victory in a springtime of good news was its least known.
On Friday, May 16, as Haskell Askin prepared to testify in the Megan Kanka trial in New Jersey, Richard Walter sat in the Lubbock County Courthouse in Lubbock, Texas, anxiously waiting with Jim and Barbara Dunn, waiting for justice to be served, at last, to Alicia “Leisha” Hamilton for the torture-murder of Scott Dunn. Minutes earlier, a cheer had erupted from the jury room and spilled through the thrown-open door and down the hallway; deadlocked for four hours, the jurors had reached a decision.
Hamilton stood erect and proud in the center of the courtroom, wearing a conservative blue dress that complemented her long, dark hair. Judge William R. Shaver, his square jaw and silver hair set off smartly by his black robes, had asked her to stand to receive the verdict. Now the judge frowned as loud murmurs raced through the overflow crowd.
Hamilton appeared confident and at ease as she had been throughout the four-day trial. That morning she had laughed and joked with her parents and attorney, and tossed a big smile at the jurors, especially the handsome young man she’d been hitting on with her big green eyes for four days. According to testimony, she had told an ex-lover, “There’s no way I can be convicted because there’s not a body and there’s not a weapon.”
Judge Shaver pounded his gavel for quiet. “I don’t want any of the spectators to forget that this is a court of law,” he said sternly. “I want absolute silence in the courtroom.” The courtroom fell hushed in the dull light of late afternoon slanting through tall drapes.
Richard Walter, in his crisp blue suit, leaned forward in anticipation. Jim Dunn wore his best dark suit and tie, with a pocket handkerchief that was more than decorative. Barbara wore a lovely matching dress, and clutched Jim’s hand. It was almost six years to the day since Roger “Scott” Dunn had been last seen walking with Hamilton into their apartment and was never seen again. Walter believed in the notion of proper revenge, which had fallen out of favor but the Greeks knew was essential to a civilized life. This was their chance. Their long wrestling with angels and demons had distilled to a moment.
At the state’s table, Rusty Ladd, the lanky assistant district attorney in cowboy boots, nervously leaned forward. The case had been a prosecutor’s nightmare, with the years of delays allowing memories and evidence to go cold. The first grand jury hadn’t found sufficient evidence to indict; the district attorney who brought the case was bounced out in an election; the new DA had a conflict of interest-his old law partner had once represented Hamilton ’s alleged collaborator Tim Smith. So the DA reached out to Ladd in another county to be special prosecutor. A new grand jury labored over the case, and Ladd wrestled for eight months to get it to trial with its epic limitations: For one of the few times, if not the first time, in history he believed the state was asking a Texas jury to convict for murder without a body or weapon. It had been a daunting challenge to meet the most basic standard that a crime had been committed, to prove corpus delicti (“body of the crime”). In an arson case corpus delicti usually meant producing a burned building; in a murder case, producing the body. The jury needed to accept the psychological nuances of Hamilton’s Machiavellian revenge-and in a terrible blow to Ladd’s case, Walter, the profiler who could explain Hamilton’s psychopathic charm and murderous rage, had been unable to testify. Judge Shaver ruled that a “profile” of an accused murderer was speculative and not worthy of his court.
In the third row, Walter was still quietly fuming over the slight. His esteemed testimony had been accepted around the world. Who was this West Texas wig, this country gavel jockey, to stand in judgment of him, an international expert?
The judge was unfolding the piece of paper the jury foreman handed to him. He held the paper in front of him, cleared his throat, and read, his voice booming through the courtroom: “We, the jury, find from the evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant is guilty of the offense of murder as charged in the indictment.”
Murmurs swept the length of the courtroom. Jim and Barbara Dunn turned and looked at each other for a long moment, holding hands, then Jim threw his arms around Barbara and held on, tears streaming down his face. Walter was thrilled to see husband and wife, now his good friends, emerge into light with one swift embrace. But he couldn’t take his eyes off Hamilton.
Hamilton ’s mouth fell open, uncomprehending, then she raised her chin defiantly and closed her eyes, before she bowed her head and began to cry. “I will never, never, never forget it,” Walter said. “The good psychopath was absolutely convinced she was going to be found not guilty. She was standing proud when she stood up to hear the verdict, and her head just flipped up, instead of down in a submissive position, flipped up in contempt and disbelief. How could anybody ever do this to me? You can see the pathology continues-in her refusal to accept justice, boundaries, her contempt for anyone who would put restrictions on her.”
Judge Shaver sent the jury back to deliberate on a sentence. Even with a murder conviction, they had wide latitude in punishment-they could send Hamilton away for life, or only five years. Two hours later, the jury came back with a sentence. Hamilton stood in front of the judge, head high and proud. He opened the paper and read it: The jury sentenced her to twenty years in prison. Again, Walter noted, Leisha’s face collapsed, as if it were inconceivable she would be locked up.
Outside the courthouse, nine of the jurors, all women, approached Dunn and eagerly told him they’d desperately wanted to give her life. “Oh, God, they hated her,” Walter said. “They didn’t know the word ‘psychopath’ but they knew the type and they said they saw the evil in her. However, they had to compromise because of Billy Bob, Mr. Macho, who just couldn’t believe that a woman could kill a man.” Yet it was satisfying to Walter that his judgment matched that of the community.
The handsome young man Leisha had tried to influence with her big green eyes introduced himself to Dunn. He’d voted resolutely to convict. He told Dunn he was frightened by her charm, and he easily could have ended up like Scott; “There but for the grace of God go I.” Walter, chopping the words with a cigarette on his lip, commented, “That’s fitting. She’d gotten everything before by lying on her back. Not this time. It puts her where she belongs.”
Walter sensed a great weight lifting from Dunn. He had grown red-faced with rage even being in the same courtroom as Hamilton. He’d stalked out of a room when Hamilton’s relatives or supporters appeared. It was time, Walter felt, for him to bury some of his anger. Vengeance is normal, healthy, and sweet to contemplate, Walter counseled him. “In fact, you MUST feel the need for revenge, sweet revenge, deeply.” The just society does not repress it. It’s important to feel the fury of being wronged and the deep pleasure of imagined revenge, the “wrath,” as Aristotle noted in Rhetoric, “sweeter by far than the honeycomb dripping with sweetness… [that] spreads through the hearts of men.”
“Then let it go,” Walter said. “The virtuous man feels the proper anger for the proper things for the proper amount of time. It’s important that he controls himself, moderates it, listens to the law, friends, family, standards of decency.” For Jim Dunn, the time was coming. The time to let go.
Yet the father was not satisfied. Before leaving Lubbock, he had erected a fresh granite tombstone, engraved with Scott’s yellow Camaro, in the Dunn family plot. Bowing his head before the vacant grave, he vowed he would not rest until his son’s body was found and properly buried. Walter was certain that the young man’s body had been completely destroyed to cover up the crime. Scott would never be found. But he could not convince Dunn of the truth. Recognizing the father’s powerful need, he suggested Dunn bury a piece of blood-soaked carpet in the grave. “Remember what the courts decided, Jim. The blood is the body. His blood is Scott.” Dunn agreed.
That evening, the Dunns and Walter celebrated Hamilton ’s sentencing at a local restaurant. Wine and satisfied smiles ringed the table. Walter encouraged feelings of triumph; these were the sweet drafts of justice spiced with revenge. It was time to drink deeply.
The profiler was quite pleased with himself. “In the course of events, it’s most satisfactory to vanquish a power-assertive personality, a killer who believes he can mow down anything in the way with raw power, even more than the other types,” he said. Dunn asked him why. The profiler grinned conspiratorially. “Well, as it happens, I’m rather power-assertive myself.” The two men laughed heartily.
But by the end of the evening, alcohol and euphoria began to ebb. Walter pointed out that Texas ’s lax parole laws would spring Hamilton long before her sentence was up. Walter saw Dunn still warring with the fates, still fumbling along between the rocks of retribution and forgiveness, trying to find the path of the virtuous man. He reached out and put his arm on his friend’s shoulder and said they would press on together. They would do whatever it took, whatever could be done, whatever was just and right.
He looked in his friend’s tragic face and hoped that would be enough.
One evening in October 1997, William Fleisher stood in the formal, polished-wood elegance of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia studying a gallery of horrors. In the brilliantly lit cases rested the conjoined liver of the world-famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng; the cancerous growth removed from President Grover Cleveland’s throat; shriveled baby corpses; and the Soap Lady, whose fat mysteriously turned to soap lye in the grave in the 1830s. Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter, who founded the world-famous museum of medical oddities in 1858 to train physicians, had contributed a gangrenous hand and a woman’s rib cage torturously compressed by tight lacing. Not far from Supreme Court justice John Marshall’s gallstones was the skull of an ax murderer, an ancestor of the actor Jack Nicholson, who chopped up shop clerk Ellen Jones in 1863 in rural Pennsylvania.
Fleisher was waiting to hear forensic anthropologist Bill Bass discuss “Death’s Acre,” also known as “The Body Farm,” his Tennessee laboratory for scientific study of decomposing bodies. Fleisher prided himself on his ability to spot a reporter crashing a roomful of cops-the longish hair, softer slacks and shoes, open collar, no tie-and saw one in the crowd. It was Philadelphia magazine writer Stephen Fried, who’d arranged to get into the speech through the good offices of a source, New Jersey pathologist Jim Lewis, just so he could speak with Fleisher. Fleisher turned to listen. This was the reporter’s chance.
“I want to talk to you about Marie Noe,” Fried said. Fried, winner of national awards for investigative reporting, said he had been working on the long-dormant story of Marie Noe, the tragic Philadelphia woman who lost eight of her ten children, born between 1949 and 1968, to crib death. In 1963, Life magazine wrote a heartrending story of the deaths of Richard, Elizabeth, Jacqueline, Arthur Jr., Constance, Mary Lee, Cathy, and Little Artie despite the couple’s heroic attempts to make a family. Never in American history had such an awful fate befallen a mother. Fleisher knew all about sad Marie Noe; he waited for Fried to reach his point.
His point was that Marie Noe had murdered all her children. That’s what it looked like to Fried, who was inspired to dig into the case after reading The Death of Innocents, by Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, the true story of a New York woman convicted in 1994 of murdering her five children decades earlier. The book explored new scientific research that indicated that many “crib deaths” were in fact murder. Fried had spent hours interviewing Marie and her husband, Artie, at the elderly couple’s Kensington row house, turning over their scrapbooks.
He’d interviewed Joe McGillen, VSM, a retired medical examiner’s investigator, a tough, diminutive Irishman who worked part-time as a “bird dog,” or baseball scout, but spent most of his time trying to bring to justice the killers of nine children from the 1950s whose murders he had never stopped investigating-the Boy in the Box and the eight babies of Marie Noe. He’d waited for decades for somebody to ask him about his investigation of Marie Noe’s babies, whom he always thought were murdered.
Fried had interviewed Dr. Marie Valdes-Dapena, now seventy-seven and the “grandmother of sudden infant death research,” who had performed the autopsy on Constance, baby number five, in 1958. After several hours of looking at Fried’s evidence, Dr. Valdes-Dapena said, “It just seems impossible that this woman is still walking around as free as a bird… I’m ninety-nine percent sure that these deaths were not a natural happening.”
Fried had two boxes filled with research material. But he needed access to decades-old police records, the case files, to get any further. He needed help.
Fleisher shook his head sadly. “I can’t get you records, but I can get you help.” Fleisher later introduced Steve Fried to Sergeant Laurence Nodiff, Philadelphia PD’s cold-case squad supervisor. “I made a shidduch, an arranged marriage, between Steve and Larry.”
Sergeant Nodiff was stunned by Fried’s files. The reporter had conducted an investigation worthy of a top-flight detective. Nodiff reopened the case based on Fried’s work. One of his first steps was to take Marie and Artie’s polygraph results to Fleisher and Gordon for a review. In the 1960s, both husband and wife had been judged to be truthful when they claimed to know nothing about how the babies died. If that was still the case in Fleisher’s and Gordon’s view, Nodiff was less likely to go interview the Noes.
In the brownstone headquarters of the Vidocq Society, Fleisher and Gordon studied the charts. They shook their heads in bewilderment. “Marie’s charts are clearly deceptive,” they agreed. “Arthur’s charts are inconclusive at best.”
Fleisher also persuaded Hal Fillinger, the esteemed Philadelphia medical examiner and Vidocq Society Member, to take a new interest in the deaths of Marie Noe’s babies. The cold case was reuniting three graying forensic warriors, all stalwart figures from the renowned Philadelphia medical examiner’s office of the 1960s. Dr. Fillinger had been treated for cancer; investigator McGillen recently had a quadruple bypass; Dr. Valdes-Dapena was becoming forgetful. Marie Noe’s babies had been one of the first major cases of their careers; now it would be one of the last.
Dr. Fillinger had been long frustrated by the case. “I remember telling a nun there were two ways of looking at this. ‘If you give Marie Noe a baby, she’ll either kill it quickly… or, if she had no hand in these deaths, nobody deserves a baby more than she does.’ ” He’d long regarded the case as a “ditzel. A ditzel is a case that looks like a goodie, but means nothing. It’s a fairy tale you bought and you get it home and the last chapter is torn out. So there is no answer… I wonder what happened to those little kids. But there are so many blind alleys. You think you’ve got something meaty, but it’s like a papier-mâché pizza. You keep thinking, somebody must know something somewhere. But they don’t, because, well, it’s a ditzel.”
After reading the reporter’s file, Fillinger said, “This changes my whole concept of this case. This file really accuses them of murder… I would have to go to the DA and say these people should be investigated.”
Many of the official records of the Noe case had since been destroyed. But in a spare bedroom of his home, McGillen had kept for four decades his investigative files on the Noe case. It was a startling record, and it gave Fried, Nodiff, the VSMs, and the district attorney a foundation to build upon as they developed the case.
It was registered as Vidocq Society Case No. 55, The Babies Noe Case. It looked to Fleisher like Marie Noe, right in his hometown, had been the most prolific killer of her own children in modern history-and gotten away with it.
The child was dead, brutally murdered, and the cops were converging on the scene from across the region. But they were driving more slowly now, forty-one years later. Patrolman Sam Weinstein, who carried the boy for the trip to the morgue that distant morning, was seventy-one years old now, but still burly with a hard glint in his eye. Bill Kelly, the gentler-natured fingerprint man, in his late sixties with white hair framing his liquid blue eyes, doted on his six daughters-“Kelly’s Angels”-and grandchildren. President Eisenhower, young pilot John Glenn setting a California-to-New York speed record, Hamilton’s electric “watch of the future,” the world they knew on February 25, 1957, was gone, but not forgotten. The cops were still working the case. From Ike to Clinton, through nine U.S. presidents, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and the first terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, they had never stopped.
Kelly, retired from the police department, still never passed a hospital without checking the footprints on file of newborns from the early 1950s; he’d studied 11,000 prints, but maybe the next one would identify the boy. Weinstein sorted through the case records, boxes stuffed with files, photographs, hundreds of tips and notes, looking for anything they may have overlooked. Remington Bristow, the medical examiner’s investigator, had devoted thirty-seven years to the case, traveling everywhere with a death mask of the boy in his briefcase. When he touched the boy’s death mask he grieved as if he had been touched by a spirit, and he urged others to touch it, too; some investigators believed he had gone around the bend on the case. When Bristow moved from Philadelphia to Arizona, where he died in 1993, his granddaughter drove him across the country, stopping so that her grandfather, sickly and half-blind, could check new leads all the way. “Rem was ‘The Man,’ ” said Kelly, who had worked alongside him for years on the case. Rem’s work went on.
The boy, who would have been nearly fifty years old now, still lay in Potter’s Field, under the small monument the homicide bureau long ago purchased-the only monument in the field of body parts and the insane, criminals, and the forgotten. For four decades the detectives had visited with flowers in the spring, a yellow sand pail in summer, a newly oiled baseball glove for Christmas, as if he were growing up to be a fine young boy. Bristow had said that with his slender build the boy had the makings of a basketball player instead of football. The cold-case cops kept the boy alive with the heat of longing and memory. He was the boy who would never grow up, who would never die.
They prayed over the legend the homicide bureau once wrote:
“Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Child.”
If devotion to solving a child’s murder is a measure, the boy so little cared for in life had been more loved by two generations of police detectives than any child in Philadelphia history-loved when there was no hope.
Now there was hope. The Vidocq Society was on the case.
On Thursday, March 19, 1998, Weinstein and Kelly entered the old Public Ledger Building, across a side street from its twin, the Curtis Publishing Company building, where The Saturday Evening Post was once published, and took the elevator to the tenth floor, to the walnut-paneled Downtown Club. The former men’s club was the new meeting place of the Vidocq Society; the white-linen-covered round tables overlooking Independence Hall were now the setting, on the third Thursday of each month, of the Murder Room.
Vidocq Society commissioner Fleisher greeted the retired cops warmly. Weinstein and Kelly, Fleisher’s former police department colleagues, were now VSMs. Following an invocation by Kelly, the devout Catholic, and then lunch, Fleisher announced that the society was now investigating “one of the most amazing cases in Philadelphia history.” Fleisher had put the full power of the Vidocq Society into finding the identity and the killer of the Boy in the Box.
The Murder Room was filled beyond capacity with more than eighty detectives and their guests. Some detectives were forced to sit on stools at the bar. The menu was chicken, steamed vegetables, and a corpse with a small and unforgettable face. After lunch, the beaten, bruised image of the boy floated on the screen at the front of the room, his sunken eyeballs painted in shadows. Kelly fought back tears, as if he was seeing the picture for the first time. Fillinger, the city coroner who’d worked on the dead boy forty-one years ago, was ready to reexamine the case.
Fleisher had made another shidduch, this one with homicide detective Tom Augustine of the Philadelphia Police Department, which had agreed to reopen the case and work with the Vidocq Society investigators on the case. Augustine brought forty-one years of case files to the society’s brownstone headquarters on Locust Street. It was the sum total, from day one, of all “we’ve worked on day, night, and day year after year. Boxes and boxes, thousands of pages.” In a private second-floor room, Weinstein, Kelly, and McGillen were in the process of going back through all the old records. The three VSMs had formed a Boy in the Box investigative team, headed by Weinstein.
Now, at the meeting, a radiant energy emanated from the table of the old cops, white-haired, stooped, and balding, men whom only a heart attack or cancer could stop from pursuing the next lead. The old Catholic and Jewish detectives saw the murder of innocence not as an end but the beginning of a soul’s journey toward redemption. They were men who had a green thumb in the garden of death.
Fleisher introduced Ron Avery, the veteran Philadelphia Daily News columnist whose research for his new book, City of Brotherly Mayhem, had inspired the commissioner to revisit the case. Avery briefly reviewed the case he said was “indelibly emblazoned in our memory.” He tantalized the detectives with the fact that the case had provided “loads of clues and loads of evidence… dozens, scores, hundreds of good leads.”
Richard Walter was working on a profile of the killer based on the crime scene. Frank Bender, seated next to Walter, closely examined all the old photographs of the boy. Bender was doing an age-progression sculpture, but one even more challenging than John List’s. Bender was sculpting the bust of what he felt the boy’s father looked like, hoping someone would recognize the father and come forward with information on the case. With not an iota of knowledge of the boy’s parents, he was flying purely on intuition. But Bender had performed a miracle with List, and America ’s Most Wanted had committed to airing a fall episode on the Boy in the Box featuring the bust. There was a sense of possibility in the air.
Weinstein stood, heavyset and balding, his face worn with the curse of a photographic memory. He was thirty years old again, passing through the tree line to the field off Susquehanna Road; he was kicking his rubber boots through the muck and wet underbrush. “I saw all this garbage,” he said, “and a young white boy whose hair was chopped. It was a sad, heartbreaking thing to see. It was a dump. This was homicide.”
Weinstein said the case had been taken away from him, a patrolman, and assigned to detectives forty years ago. He’d stubbornly conducted his own investigation, and through a confidential informant found a local man who had photos of himself with a young blond boy on his lap and “an Indian blanket spread out.” He purchased the photos. He interviewed the man, who was “very cooperative” but “extremely nervous,” in a restaurant. The man “started to get shaky.” He had just agreed to go to the Homicide Unit for questioning when a superior officer saw Weinstein in the restaurant and ordered him to leave, ending his role in the investigation. Weinstein said he welcomed a second chance he never thought he’d have.
Kelly dreamed of solving the case as the crowning moment of his career, and in many ways his life. McGillen’s wife was proud of his efforts to help bring Marie Noe to justice and now perhaps helping to resolve the Boy in the Box murder. She was dying of cancer, and she prayed she would see him triumph in the cases.
Bender said he had a vision that the boy had been dressed as a girl. His caretakers had grown his hair out long and chopped it to conceal his identity just before killing him. Walter snorted and others laughed.
“Keep your day job, Frank,” Walter reminded him, his favorite dismissal of his creative partner.
Fleisher longed to give the boy a decent burial. “This case is solvable,” he said. Even if the killer or killers were dead, he said, their purpose would be to restore to the boy the dignity of his name, and avenge him with their only remaining weapon, the truth. They could bring the killer “to reckoning if not to justice.”
“Bah!” Walter glared at Fleisher, a look he usually reserved for people who peddle Bibles door-to-door. The thin man had grown weary of the sentimentality in the air. He openly mocked the consensus that had initially started with Bristow that the boy had been accidentally killed by loving caretakers who fled with broken hearts, unable to afford a decent burial. In 1957, police had seen it as a murder, but over time, at Bristow’s urging, they’d publicly said it was an accident.
The child, Walter thought, was sacrificed to the most malevolent murdering personality of all, and to preserve their own innocence the cops had made a fetish of his lost childhood, keeping him an eternal child as he moldered forty-one years in the grave. The killer represented a force so vile the cops couldn’t face the truth. Without truth, how could they find the killer?
They had waited forty-one years for the truth, and in fact now seemed energetically devoted to the long martyrdom of failure; the mystery gave them such purpose, and the truth admitted none of the romance of beach toys and baseball gloves.
“It’s hard to find something,” Walter sniffed later, “when you don’t know what you’re looking for.” The horror behind his cool, dry words seemed not to penetrate the others.
The fact was that after forty-one years of continuous investigation, thousands of police interviews across thirty states, and thousands of pages or pieces of so-called evidence, they still had nothing to go on. Never in American detective history, outside the Lindbergh kidnapping, had so much effort been expended on a child murder case to produce so little, he thought.
“We don’t have much,” Walter reasoned. “But I don’t need much.” The marks on the body told a plain and incontrovertible story, one the others were loath to hear.
On a Wednesday evening in late March 1998, an unmarked black Ford Explorer carrying Philadelphia police sergeant Larry Nodiff and two of his detectives from the Special Investigations Unit parked on a narrow street in the old working-class river ward of Kensington. The murky industrial air along the river was gray with twilight. A crescent moon, nearly black, hung above the lane of small brick row houses.
Sergeant Nodiff knocked on the door of a row home that looked like all the others. Nodiff looked up at darkened windows. His partner Steve Vivarina chewed his coffee stirrer. The day before, Stephen Fried’s investigative story on Marie Noe’s long-forgotten tragedy, “Cradle to Grave,” was published in Philadelphia magazine, and as the magazine hit the streets the city was abuzz with it. Sergeant Nodiff, who had read an advance copy, decided it was time to pay Marie and Arthur Noe a visit about the deaths of their eight babies. It was a historian’s task as well as police work. The babies had died across nineteen years, from the Truman administration to LBJ. The police had not questioned the Noes about the deaths in thirty years. Now a few minutes passed.
Presently the thin, hard face of Arthur Noe, seventy-six years old, filled a crack in the door. Behind him loomed the larger frame of his wife, Marie, sixty-nine. Sergeant Nodiff showed his badge and asked if they would come to headquarters for questioning. The Noes had the right to refuse but they said yes, they’d just be a few minutes. They had just finished dinner, and needed to take care of their cats and dogs.
“Will you put Asshole downstairs?” Arthur called to his wife. Asshole, he explained to the cops, was one of their cats. Marie tended to the cat, then they put on light jackets and slowly climbed into the police van. They had been together most of their lives. Marie was diabetic, and not well. Arthur was trembling. Theirs was an unbreakable bond built, as many are, on things understood, things not said.
Marie and Arthur were taken to separate interrogation rooms in the Roundhouse, the cement police headquarters downtown. In Interrogation Room C, Arthur, a chain-smoker, was downcast and nervous. A sharp, quick-talking man, he had worked in Kensington’s textile factories for years. He had served as a Democratic committeeman in the river ward and as an assistant to a city councilman. He hated to see Marie dragged through the tragedies again. Losing all those children between 1949 and 1968 had been like “taking away half her life.” As he had told a reporter, “It may be news to you. It’s suffering to us.” Detective Jack McDermott quickly realized that Arthur had nothing new to tell them, and offered him a ride home. Arthur said he’d prefer to wait for his wife.
As night came, Arthur lit a cigarette and sat watching the television on the battered filing cabinets lining the homicide division. Marie was in Interrogation Room D with Sergeant Nodiff and Detective Vivarina. Arthur worried about his wife’s health, looked at his watch, smoking all through the night. As the sky lightened, he was still waiting.
At five o’clock in the morning, Marie hobbled out of the interrogation room, her careworn face collapsed in fatigue and relief. It had been eleven hours with the detectives. Arthur came and touched her gently, his eyes lingering in concern. Marie held her husband’s eyes and her secrets. Even when she’d tried to tell the truth, Arthur always interrupted her. Among the couple’s many unspoken routines during the past forty years together, this was the most important. It was as if he didn’t want to know.
Sergeant Nodiff, the city’s lead cold-case detective and a member of the Vidocq Society, was one of the department’s sharpest interrogators. Detective Vivarina could amiably keep anybody talking. So they’d talked and talked with Marie all night. Then before dawn, Sergeant Nodiff confided years later to detectives at an out-of-town conference, one of the strangest things in his career happened to him. He blushed and said, “You just won’t believe it,” as he told it. Marie, sitting right next to the sergeant, reached out and put her wrinkled hand on the dark trousers covering his leg. Slowly, as she gently stroked the sergeant’s inner thigh, the unspoken words of decades came tumbling out.
She confessed.
She had smothered her babies with a pillow, she said. She and Arthur had ten children. One was stillborn. Another died in the hospital six hours after birth. The remaining eight went home in excellent health. None of them lived longer than fifteen months. Marie admitted to killing them all. She waited until Arthur was out of the house, a pattern she repeated each time. She hid all the murders from her husband and relatives. Marie was alone with the babies in the house.
She could remember the deaths of only four of her children in detail. They were the first three and the fifth. The murders of Richard Allen Noe, 1949; Elizabeth Mary Noe, 1951; Jacqueline Noe, 1952; and Constance Noe, 1958, were etched in her mind. She remembered Richard, her firstborn, very clearly. He was born March 7, 1949, a healthy seven pounds, eleven ounces. “He was always crying. He couldn’t tell me what was bothering him. He just kept crying…”
“The day that he died,” Marie said, she was getting Richard ready for bed. “I bathed him and put him in nightclothes and I was going to put him down for the night. I put him on his belly instead of his back in his bassinet, and there was a pillow under his face, he was lying facedown. Then I took my hand and pressed his face down into the pillow until he stopped moving.” Richard Noe was thirty-one days old. His cause of death was listed as congestive heart failure, but no autopsy was performed. It was accepted medical wisdom in the 1950s that a mother would not kill her children.
Two years later, in 1951, alone in the house with Elizabeth Mary, Marie picked up and held her pink, squirming, squalling daughter, a healthy and vigorous five months old. She put Elizabeth Mary in the bassinet. “I put her on her back, and then I took a pillow from the bed and put the pillow over her face and suffocated her.” Elizabeth was memorable because “she was fussing. Elizabeth was a lot stronger than Richard was, and she was fighting when the pillow was over her face. I held the pillow over her face until she stopped moving.”
A year later, in 1952, Jacqueline Noe died in infancy. Marie admitted to killing her second daughter the same way she did her first son and daughter, but couldn’t remember any details.
As she told the story, she called each baby “it.” Detectives kept insisting she call the children by name.
Six years later, in 1958, Constance Noe was born at St. Luke’s Hospital. Abraham Perlman, a pediatrician who treated the baby, was suspicious because Constance ’s four older siblings had all died. The pediatrician noticed a pattern to the deaths, he told police years later. Marie Noe was always home alone with the child. In each case, she took the infant to a hospital or called a neighbor to help her, saying, “Something’s wrong with the baby.” The children were all dead on arrival. Noe’s explanation was always that the baby had been “gasping for breath and turning blue.” It was medical orthodoxy then that children could suddenly stop breathing, and the fatal syndrome might be a defect that ran in families, so Dr. Perlman performed extensive tests on Constance to find any possible weakness. All the tests came back normal. Constance was a robustly healthy baby girl.
As mother and child left the hospital, Dr. Perlman told Marie that Constance was a beautiful child. Her mother replied, “She’s not going to live… just like the others.”
One month later, Constance, a healthy, thriving baby girl, was having difficulty sitting in a chair. “I was trying to train her on how to sit up in the chair,” Marie said. “I don’t know why, but then I took a pillow and laid her down on the chair, and I suffocated her.”
The autopsy of Constance was performed by pathologist Marie Valdes-Dapena at the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office. Dr. Valdes-Dapena, who would later become a recognized authority on sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), was baffled. Pathologists were mystified by “crib death,” she said. The scientific study of infant death was just beginning, and no one had coined the term “SIDS.” Doctors had no idea why approximately 7,000 babies a year simply stopped breathing. Even years later, when doctors suspected many of those deaths to be infanticide, it was extraordinarily difficult for a pathologist to distinguish a baby who died of SIDS from one who was suffocated.
Marie Noe had discovered the perfect murder.
Marie did not cry during the confession. She said calmly that she killed baby Arthur Jr. in 1955, but couldn’t remember how. Arthur Jr. was born nine months to the day after Marie said she was raped by a stranger and left bound with her husband’s ties in the bedroom closet. Her last three children were featured in the Life story, a compassionate tale of the mother who lost all her babies-Mary Lee, born in 1962, Catherine Ellen in 1964, and the last born, Arthur Joseph. The ninth child, Catherine Ellen, lived the longest-one year, two months, and twenty-two days. She died on February 25, 1966, of undetermined cause. The last born, Arthur Joseph, died on January 2, 1968, at the age of five months. At the time, Marie told police that Arthur Joseph just turned blue and stopped breathing. An autopsy was performed, but no determination was made on the manner of death. Marie now confessed to killing all three babies born in the 1960s, but couldn’t recall details.
As the sun came up, the confession was typed up. Marie read it over and signed it. She leaned back, her face flushed with relief. She told detectives she always hoped police would find out. “I knew what I was doing was very wrong,” she said. She stood slowly to leave Interrogation Room D. Suddenly, she turned to face Nodiff and Vivarina. Her face was creased in concern, her voice a whisper: “Don’t tell my husband what I told you.”
Sergeant Nodiff and detective Vivarina looked at each other. An old lady who would barely walk without assistance had killed more people than David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz or the Boston Strangler. They had a detailed confession of eight murders-infanticide, perhaps the most taboo of human crimes. In God’s name, why? And now what could they do with it?
Marie was weak; Arthur walked her slowly outside. They climbed in the police van for a quiet ride home.
Five months later, Marie Noe was arrested and charged with the suffocation murders of eight of her ten children. Noe’s attorney denied the charges. Prosecutors said they would seek life imprisonment.
Her husband, Arthur, who was not charged, said he was standing by his wife.
“I’ve lived with this woman for fifty years,” he said. “She was my life. That woman was not capable of doing such a thing. She wouldn’t harm a fly.”
She was murdered three times. That was the salient point of the horrific killing of Terri Lee Brooks, Richard Walter thought with grim satisfaction. He took a reluctant nibble of a thick-crust apple pie, a sip of black coffee-a Colombian blend, too weak-and stared at the corpse of the dark-haired young woman whose slaying had confused police for so many years.
Floating above the white tablecloths in the walnut-paneled club, the corpse lay in a large pool of her own blood, arms out in the shape of a cross. Her body was severely battered with cuts and bruises. A seven-inch butcher knife was sticking out of her throat, pinning her neck to the floor of the kitchen of the Roy Rogers restaurant on U.S. 1 in Bucks County. The knife had cut her throat and severed her spinal cord. Her head was wrapped in a clear plastic garbage bag. Her face was visible inside the bag behind a small cloud of condensation that itself had revealed a story of horror to the medical examiner. Paralyzed from the neck down, unable to move or speak, Brooks had still been breathing, watching her killer close in.
On the far wall the safe stood open-and emptied of its $2,579 in cash. The killer ransacked the safe and leaped out the drive-in window into the foggy predawn of February 3, 1984. He was careless, leaving fifteen fingerprints on the walls and floor. But the prints were all ruined in the thick restaurant grease. Police had never made an arrest in the robbery-murder in fourteen years.
A yellowed newspaper clipping from the Philadelphia Inquirer, published six months after the murder, still told the whole story: UNSOLVED KILLING STYMIES POLICE AND ANGUISHES FAMILY.
More than eighty detectives crowded into the Downtown Club in May 1998, an overflow drawn by a chance to reexamine one of the most highly publicized unsolved murder cases of recent years. VSM Lynn Abraham, the powerful Philadelphia district attorney, was among those once again forced to find a stool at the bar. After fourteen years of dead ends, the police of small Falls Township, Pennsylvania (pop. 34,000), twenty-six miles north of Philadelphia, had asked for help. Sergeant Wynne Cloud said he was grateful for the audience with the Vidocq Society, but had cautioned Brooks’s long-suffering parents, Ed and Cindy Brooks, not to unrealistically get their hopes up. There wasn’t much more that could be done.
“We investigated the murder quite strenuously over a two-year period,” Sergeant Cloud of Falls Township told the gathering from the podium. The police had logged more than two hundred interviews, interrogated twelve suspects, and catalogued ninety pieces of evidence. “But after all that, we came up with absolutely nothing.”
The restaurant safe was ransacked after the brutal murder, prompting the police to investigate the crime as a “robbery gone wrong” rather than a deliberate murder. They had never changed their focus.
Walter rolled his eyes. He had sipped enough coffee and heard quite enough from the police. But he kept his own counsel as he appraised the ferocious killing. It’s not a goddamn robbery, he thought. Any fool can see that. It was murder in triplicate. That was the point of the killing. But why? Who wanted to kill Terri Lee Brooks again and again and again?
The robbery theory gained traction with the police because as far as they knew, the young woman had no enemies, or at least none with enough animus to kill her. A native of Bucks County, she had graduated from the University of Maryland planning to seek a career in human resources, but after waitressing during summers in college, she followed her heart home and into the restaurant business. Brooks had recently been promoted to assistant manager of the Bucks County restaurant, confirming her initial excitement at joining the restaurant chain that was owned by the Marriott Corporation, with plenty of opportunity to grow.
Brooks was alone in the restaurant long after closing on February 3, 1984, sitting in her back office, doing paperwork. She had just locked the outer glass door after letting out the two “closers”-teenagers who helped clean and prepare the restaurant for the next day; the inner glass door locked automatically behind her, offering double protection. It was after midnight, an unseasonably warm and foggy winter night.
The roar of traffic on U.S. 1 had quieted. The empty glass-walled restaurant glowed in the night, a cube of light in the misty darkness. Brooks often stayed late, focused on leaving the restaurant in perfect shape for day manager Joe Hampton.
Sometime after midnight, she heard knocking.
At about 6:15 in the morning, still dark in late winter, Hampton arrived to open up the restaurant. He was surprised to find the outer door unlocked. The inner door was locked as usual, and he turned the key and entered. Near the door was a pair of moccasin-style shoes he recognized as Terri Brooks’s. Next to the shoes were her keys. He walked into the kitchen. Large swaths of blood were smeared on the floors and walls, mixed grotesquely with the kitchen grease. Terri was behind the counter lying on her back, brutally murdered. Police were admittedly stunned by the violence of the killing; indeed, Walter thought, they failed to understand it.
Vidocq Society Member Hal Fillinger, the noted medical examiner, had performed the autopsy in 1984, and recalled every gruesome detail. It appeared from the pattern of wounds that Brooks had been trying to leave, with her winter coat on, when a violent assault sent her purse, keys, and cigarettes flying. The killer repeatedly banged her head on the stone tile floor with tremendous force, immobilizing her. Then, sitting on top of her, he began to strangle her. He fractured her hyoid bone, a small U-shaped bone atop the Adam’s apple that helps produce swallowing and speech and is often crushed during strangulation. But that didn’t kill Terri Brooks. She struggled violently for her life, which prompted the killer to reach for the butcher knife. The cuts and slices on her hands indicated she had thrown her hands up in vain to stop the knife. It cut her throat and severed half of her spinal cord. A second knife thrust severed the spinal cord completely and with such force the knife blade stuck in the tile floor, pinning her throat to the ground.
Paralyzed but still alive, she must have heard the killer foraging in the restaurant supply area. He returned with the clear plastic trash bag, and wrapped it completely around her neck and head. It was Fillinger who noted the condensation inside the bag, indicating Brooks was still breathing and looking up at her attacker as he asphyxiated her.
As the corpse hovered above them in the gray light of afternoon, tall, broad-shouldered ex-major-crime homicide detective Ed Gaughan’s lantern jaw flushed in contrast to his sandy hair, the only sign he gave that he wanted to take someone out. Gaughan was friends with Sergeant Cloud, who had shared his frustration with the Brooks case while the two were watching their sons play football for Pennsbury High School. Gaughan convinced Sergeant Cloud to bring the case before the Vidocq Society.
The Falls Township Police Department threw all its resources at the crime, Cloud said. The killing made headlines in the local newspapers, and the Marriott Corporation put up a $5,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the killer or killers. It quickly became evident to police that it was a “robbery gone wrong”-terribly wrong. Brooks had interrupted the robbery in progress and tried to stop it, triggering her death.
Looking for the robber who, facing resistance, had become a murderer, police interviewed fifty past and present restaurant employees. They zeroed in on an employee whom Brooks had discovered stealing from the cash drawer, and another employee at a Roy Rogers restaurant in Philadelphia who had threatened her. Both were cleared. They talked to an old boyfriend in California, and ruled him out.
They tried to link Brooks’s killing to a spate of similarly violent fast-food robberies in the region and beyond. In April 1985 at a Philadelphia Roy Rogers only twenty miles away, fourteen months later, the day manager opened up to find the night manager stabbed to death, the safe empty. They contacted police in Massachusetts, Maryland, and California, where similar crimes had occurred, and interrogated suspects in all similar robberies they could find. On the tenth anniversary of the crime, a local television station crime watch program featured the case. The police received “lots of calls and our investigators ended up all over the place,” to no avail.
Shortly after 1:30 in the afternoon, Sergeant Cloud concluded his presentation. “We appreciate your ears,” he said. “We also appreciate your brains.” The room seemed to exhale, gathering itself for the inquiry. The first suggestions from Vidocq members focused on DNA testing, a technology unknown in 1984. Could the killer’s DNA be harvested from the victim’s body and articles found at the scene, including the knife and hair follicles in her hand? Cloud would look into it.
Fleisher, Bender, Walter, Gaughan, and Fred Bornhofen whispered among themselves and called out their opinions almost as one. The consensus was the police department had botched the focus of the case from the beginning, fourteen years earlier.
“Initially the investigators seemed to have gone after robbers,” Gaughan said. “Any time somebody was locked up who had committed a robbery like that, they were there interrogating the guy. They basically didn’t focus the investigation properly. A robber wants money, to get in and get out; he’ll kill if he has to but this was a more complex type of murder.”
Bornhofen wrote later, “It’s overkill and not the type of murder done by a robber. Even a rank amateur like me could see the case for what it was.”
Gaughan, looking sympathetically at his friend Sergeant Cloud, said the police had to start over. They had to interview everyone again, as if Terri Brooks had just been killed. This time, the Vidocq Society would be there to help.
Walter stood. “My colleagues are quite right. Robbers don’t swath the head of a victim in plastic. As it happens, this is the peculiar signature of a very complicated and dark personality subtype. It’s not a robbery at all. It’s a murder. The murderer staged the robbery to throw the police off. He succeeded, until now. We know quite a lot about the killer already.”
Walter paused. “In the information game, answers are meaningless. You have to ask the right questions, and the question is: Who cared enough to kill her three times?”
His rakish smile pierced the gloom.
“For whom did Terri Brooks unlock the door?”
The sweet hymn to Jesus awakened Walter abruptly. He was snoozing in the parlor of his Greek Revival mansion when the glorious notes of “Lift High the Cross” floated in on the spring air. He put on his glasses and stood on the porch glaring at the offending Gothic tower of St. Paul ’s Episcopal Church, diagonally across the street. It was time to teach the Episcopalians a lesson.
Wearing jeans and a red sport shirt, he pulled the Briggs amp; Stratton mower out of the garage, filled it with gas, and mowed the front lawn-as he did every Sunday when the choir reached full song, whether the grass needed it or not. He was “quite pleased” as the rattling old mower drowned out the choir, and the clatter crossed the street to the opened stained-glass windows of the stone church. “The Episcopalians are perfectly loathsome neighbors,” he later wrote to a friend. “When they get going on Sunday I must answer back with as loud a noise as I can muster.”
“Have you finished being psychopathic yet?” Stoud grinned as he stepped on the porch, where the thin man was sitting, his face a sheen of sweat, sipping an iced tea in the sudden quiet of a late spring morning.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it, that people want to sing in church on Sunday morning?”
“Indeed.” Walter laughed. “As you know, I don’t make a very good victim. And I’m not feeling terribly charitable toward Christians at the moment.”
Walter had just returned from Lubbock, Texas, where he’d watched Tim Smith, a devout Evangelical Christian, be tried for the murder of Scott Dunn as Leisha Hamilton’s accomplice, a year after Hamilton was convicted of Dunn’s murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Smith’s attorney had portrayed the cold-blooded killer as a clean-cut, young, Christian family man, with a wife and three-year-old son, who had never done wrong until he met the conniving Hamilton. Members of Smith’s church had mobbed the courthouse, calling for Christians all over the city to pray for him to be found innocent. “The nincompoops filled the courthouse wailing that the killer was an exemplary fellow in church,” Walter said. “It had an effect on the trial. It wasn’t good.”
Smith, thirty-five years old, slim and blond, was a poetic, submissive young man who had been easily seduced by Hamilton, who “used men like you use a handkerchief,” prosecutors said. He trailed Hamilton around like a lovesick sophomore, following her to the Copper Kettle just to look at her work as a waitress, and deluging her with love letters filled with jealousy of Scott. Smith believed if Scott Dunn “was out of the way everything would be bliss and happiness” with the woman he loved, according to the state.
Smith had been deeply involved in the murder for some forty-eight hours, prosecutors said. He cut away sections of blood-soaked carpet from the bedroom to hide evidence, helped wrap Scott’s body in rolled-up carpet with duct tape, helped dispose of the body and clean up the crime scene. Fibers from the bloody carpet were found on a roll of duct tape in Smith’s apartment.
According to Walter, Hamilton set Smith up to take the fall in an old-fashioned murderer’s scam.
After the killing, while Leisha was toying with the cops, playing the role of a wronged but helpful young woman, she moved in with Tim Smith to finish setting up the dupe.
Smith, believing his romantic dreams had come true, had instead lived a nightmare, subjected to walking in on his girlfriend having sex with other men, and being beaten by her for questioning it. Acting ever eager to help find Scott’s killer, Hamilton told police she was afraid of her new boyfriend. She showed them Tim Smith’s love letters, addressed to “Dear Green Eyes” and signed, “Superman” or “The Flash,” letters that called Scott a “snake” and an “asshole” and demanded she choose between them. “If only Scott wasn’t around,” Smith wrote, “we could be happy together.” Hamilton confirmed to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that her boyfriend was a “suspect” in Scott’s disappearance. He had been “fiercely jealous of her relationship with Scott.” The police soon considered Smith a primary suspect.
Moving in on her prey was exciting for Hamilton. “This need for stimulation is quite insatiable for a psychopath, the ego gratification to prove they’re smarter than anyone,” Walter explained to Dunn. “The ‘Gotcha!’ ”
Walter had rattled Smith in a private interview, squeezing him to reveal what had happened to Scott’s body.
Smith had refused to say. He said he “couldn’t turn on the others… it wouldn’t be Christian.”
“Is it Christian to commit murder?” Walter demanded. “Is it Christian to cover it up?”
Tim Smith didn’t reply.
Walter watched the trial at the Lubbock County courthouse with Jim and Barbara Dunn, and the three of them exulted as Smith was convicted of the first-degree murder of Scott Dunn. After six years, justice was finally being served. Walter felt vindicated. Though he had once again been prevented from testifying as a profiler, Rusty Ladd, the prosecuting attorney, praised him for helping the state zero in on Smith as Hamilton ’s chief accomplice. Leisha would never have gone to jail, Tim Smith never would have been convicted, if it wasn’t for Walter, the prosecutor said.
Smith was sentenced the next day. He faced ninety-nine years or life in prison for his involvement in Dunn’s prolonged torture, murder, dismemberment, and disposal. Hamilton had received twenty years. Walter had hated to tell Dunn, but the truth was that Hamilton could be out in less than a decade for good behavior.
Now the jury deliberated for about an hour. Timothy James Smith received no jail time at all for first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to ten years’ probation and a $10,000 fine.
Dunn was stunned. He couldn’t conceive how “Tim Smith, convicted of murdering Scott, was free to walk the streets of Lubbock ” and did not have to reveal the location of Scott’s body.
Because Smith had no prior criminal record, the jury had the option of probation.
Walter was outraged.
“It would appear that the jury attempted to do God’s work of forgiveness at the sentencing,” he later wrote. “In these matters, it would seem the jury should leave God’s work to God, and do the work of the State of Texas. Unfortunately, the jury allowed Timothy James Smith to benefit unfettered from the murder for which all life has been cheapened.”
Walter was concerned about Jim Dunn.
Within days of the trial, the aggrieved father threw himself on Smith’s mercy, now that the killer was “beyond harm,” begging to Smith to reveal, even anonymously, the location of Scott’s body. “Please… let him have the decency of a proper burial,” he wrote. “Look at your son, who is alive, then contact me. In your heart you know the right thing to do… I will be waiting for a message from you or your intermediary. Send it to Box 986, Morrisville, PA, 19067.”
Dunn also returned to taking phone calls from Leisha Hamilton, hoping to learn where his son was buried. Hamilton kept calling the grieving father from her prison cell, toying with his emotions. Dunn was a wreck. Leisha had murdered the son; now she was destroying the father.
“Stop talking to her,” Walter said, scolding him. “You’re dealing with a classic psychopath. The murder is not over with the killing. The murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is. The murder’s not over for her. She’s still enjoying it. Don’t feel hate toward Leisha. It weakens you. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is neutrality, ‘I don’t care.’ If you ignore her, she will lose her hold over you.
“Damn it, Jim, she got your son. Don’t let the killer take another victim.”
The quest to find his son’s body to put under the stone was destroying him.
Dunn sat quiet while Walter lit a Kool, and watched the plume of smoke disintegrate over the porch.
“But it was quite fascinating,” he said. “Here you have Leisha Hamilton, the dominating, power-driven killer, controlling and using submissive Tim Smith like a dog, seducing him into murder, setting him up to take the fall. The jury sees right through her, is repulsed by her, she goes to prison. Then you have Tim Smith, whose submissive nature makes him Hamilton ’s hapless victim, using that very quality to turn the tables on the jury. He’s no less psychopathic, but he’s dreamy, poetic, and the jury falls for his charming-nice-young-Christian-man act.”
He stood and looked across the street at St. Paul ’s, rising quietly now from its grove of old trees.
“I’m probably more agnostic than I am an atheist, but in any event, even if one doesn’t believe in God, in our line of work one must have substance, structure, strong faith, character.” He snuffed out the cigarette. “It used to be that people had character; now houses have character and people have personality. That won’t do. The eternal things, the good, the true, the beautiful, must be unbreakable.”
“One must have standards,” Stoud said, grinning.
“One must.”
“One should.”
“I do,” Walter said, “and mine are quite low.” They were laughing now.
Walter laughed himself into a coughing fit as he walked into the house.
The thin man sat in a wing chair with his hard green pack of Kools, battered metal ashtray, and ceramic coffee cup resting on a walnut side table from nineteenth-century Lyon. The coffee cup, a gift from an admiring Midwestern homicide squad, was inscribed “When Your Life Ends, Our Work Begins.” The parlor, dim at midday, was crowded with antiques; the front door was attended by the bust of a French knight, a chevalier of the last century, lit by an enormous red Chinese paper lantern.
The afternoon was quiet but for the ticking of the grandfather clock and Walter spinning the triple-digit combination on the steel-ribbed, aircraft-aluminum briefcase. It was the classic 1940s-style Zero Halliburton, the near-indestructible model that protects the U.S. president’s nuclear codes and red button.
“This is strictly proprietary,” Walter said as the double-bolt lock sprung and the case hissed open. “Not to be discussed outside this room.”
“I saw that attaché on Mission: Impossible,” Stoud teased. “I don’t believe it’s for country gentlemen.” He knew the classic Zero was fashionable with spies, federal agents, and pretentious film noir directors-but that Walter, with justification, used it to guard information that had proved extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.
“Information can be harmful when you’re not ready for it,” Walter said. “Dostoevsky said there were some ideas you could eat, and some that ate you. These are devouring ideas.”
Nested in the rich leather interior, protected from dust and moisture by the neoprene gasket-sealed case, was a stack of photographs of the corpse of Terri Lee Brooks with the knife sticking out of her throat. Under the stack were simple manila files.
Walter’s subtypes.
He and Bob Keppel, the famous Washington State investigator, had spent years refining their grand theory of murder investigation. They would soon publish in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology a paper, “Profiling Killers: A Revised Classification Model for Understanding Sexual Murder,” that would be internationally hailed as a landmark analysis and working system of murder investigation. Walter since the 1980s had been lecturing about murderer personality traits to detectives, prosecutors, and forensic specialists all around the world, from Hong Kong to London to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
It was a dream as old as the human condition, to understand the heart of darkness. To see the broader patterns. Walter hated to admit it, but his method was perfectly described in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in London in 1887, in the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, who explains to his roommate, Dr. John Watson, what a “consulting detective” does: “… we have lots of Government detectives and lots of private ones. When these fellows are at fault they come to me… They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able… to set them straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first.”
In analyzing thousands of murders, Walter and Keppel discovered the most violent murders, sex murders, were invariably committed by one of four personality types. These distinct personalities inevitably expressed themselves, could not help but express themselves, their traits, desires, and learning curve in the murder itself. The crime scene was a vast canvas; the detective had merely to read the signature. Or, as G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1910, “The criminal is the creative artist, the detective only the critic.”
The thin man returned from the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee, and Walter and Stoud both lit fresh cigarettes. Shortly after noon, they began the descent.
The first personality type of murderers identified by Walter and Keppel was the most common, the power-assertive or PA killer. Walter nicknamed this type the John Wayne-style killer. He bristles with machismo, muscles, tattoos, guns, girlie magazines, a pickup truck. He preens over his automobile. Among his signatures, he strikes massively to the head to overwhelm his victim, much like the first big bite of the great white shark. He disposes of his victim like trash, his power needs fulfilled. This is a man of ironclad principles (no character, but firm principles). For instance, if he’s raping and strangling a woman and she suddenly dies, he pulls out hurriedly because “he doesn’t want cops to think he’s a pervert,” Walter said. “Only a pervert would fuck a corpse.”
“Leisha Hamilton is a classic female PA,” Walter continued. “Scott Dunn unwittingly involved himself in an intolerable insult to power, and the PA annihilated him and disposed of him to sate her power need.”
Tim Smith, her collaborator in the murder, represented the seemingly gentler second type, the power-reassurance killer. He’s the Caspar Milquetoast killer, Walter said, lost in his own imagination. Instead of a brute grab for power, the PR killer achieved power through fantasy. This was the high school geek who skittered along the sidewalk robed in black, and turned horror movies into reality. This was the Gentleman Rapist who fantasized a strange woman was smitten with him, assaulted her with the line “Here I am at last, baby, open your wings,” Walter said, and flew into a murderous rage when “she let him know he wasn’t the best thing since sliced bread.” Unlike the John Wayne type, who scrupulously cleans the crime scene to avoid detection, this killer leaves a mess. Satiating the fantasy and rage is all that matters. James Patterson employed this type in his thriller novels, featuring characters such as Casanova and the Gentleman Caller in Kiss the Girls. David Dickson, the shoe-fetishist, was a power-reassurance personality who thought himself irresistible to women. When his fantasy was shattered by Deborah Wilson’s resistance to his charms, he murdered the Drexel student.
It was early evening, and Walter was sipping a glass of wine; Stoud’s thick hand held a can of beer.
For half an hour repartee and ragged laughter had penetrated a blue haze of smoke that drifted toward the crown moldings, as Rigoletto echoed through the parlor. Now they grew quiet. The tragic figure of Terri Brooks, beaten, strangled, stabbed, and asphyxiated, looked up from the nineteenth-century cherry side table.
“It’s an anger killing,” Stoud said. “All the violence, the percussion.”
“Indeed. This is darker, moving downward on the scale.”
It was the third type, the anger-retaliatory or AR killer, the first personality type to begin to take pleasure in the killing beyond the simple satisfaction of power. Stalking the victim from a distance, like predator chasing prey, and covering the victim’s face were two important AR signatures. Walter called the AR the O. J. Simpson-type killer.
“Although of course,” Walter said that evening, “we know that O. J. is an innocent man.” Stoud chuckled.
“This is classic AR, absolutely classic,” Walter said, “followed by a clumsy attempt, after the murder was done, to stage the crime as a robbery.”
The first sign of anger and passion was overkill, he said, as if Brooks had nine lives and the killer tried to extinguish them all. Next was the killer’s choice of intimate, close-up weapons-a knife, a lead pipe, and as an asphyxiation device, his bare hands. “If you and I have a dispute over my salary, and I decide to kill you, I’ll run and get my gun-it’s a power dispute; the killing can be clean and more emotionally remote,” Walter said. “But if it’s an affair of the heart, a betrayal, the murderer needs percussion, the cutting, stabbing, and beating, to achieve gratification.”
The AR killer’s pièce de résistance is to conceal the victim’s eyes. The killer of Terri Brooks did it with a plastic bag.
“In hundreds of cases I’ve looked at, an anger-retaliatory type will never allow the victim to view egress,” Walter said. “It’s a final expression of rage. A romantic relationship gone wrong is by far the most likely probability here. It’s the most logical because the overwhelming feature of the crime is the specialized-if you please, identifiable passion-and when you generally have passion, you have to have a reason for that passion, and sex is probably the most common one.”
Walter quickly developed a profile of the killer. “He’s an underachiever, but not without charm she finds quite appealing. She’s a nice strong woman, all the things he likes. He likes that tension back and forth, she allows him to be the immature little boy who never has to grow up. When she tires of his limits, in truth he’s a user and a loser, she thinks she’s ending her problem by getting rid of him, telling him to go peddle his papers, but now she inadvertently has signed her own death warrant because she’s no longer going to be there for him to use.”
He took a sip of wine. “Remember, with the AR the relationship isn’t over until they say it’s over. He’s quite pathological about it. Whether she wants to break it off or not, she doesn’t realize the fact of the matter is, he’s going to continue. He’s a parasite to her and has been all along, it just takes a more urgent, darker form. The coup de grace was ‘I don’t want you.’ When she cuts him off, he can’t stand it; that’s the justification. He feels righteously indignant. She has done him harm, therefore he has a right to kill her, therefore he hasn’t any guilt.”
The killer, Walter predicted, would be a low achiever in his late thirties, unkempt, stuck in the old neighborhood, working at a menial job, living with his mother. Walter’s profile explained why Terri Brooks let her killer in a locked door after 1:30 in the morning.
“She knew and trusted him,” Walter said. “It was her boyfriend.”
The fourth type of killer he was not prepared to discuss. “It’s the most complex and diabolical, the most difficult type of killer to catch, the greatest of human nightmares. It’s the black hole at the end of the continuum.”
Riding through the stone gate of Ivy Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia in his black sedan, Fleisher was happy the boy was moving up in the world. Around him were the immense tombs and obelisks of the great and notable: Charles Duryea, who invented the gasoline engine; gospel singer Marion Williams; Roaring Twenties tennis star Bill Tilden. The mausoleums of the wealthy towered over the simple stones and crosses of the masses. Through the good offices of undertaker Craig Mann, whose father buried the boy the first time, Fleisher and the Vidocq Society had secured from the Ivy Hill cemetery prime real estate near the gate for the boy, a place among the favored dead.
He should be here in hallowed ground, Fleisher thought, with other children.
It was November 11, 1998, Veterans Day. The morning sky was dark and brooding. It had rained all night on the hills of the nineteenth-century graveyard, darkening the stones and cenotaphs. The old detectives in dark coats and fedoras gathered around the fresh hole in the ground. Among them were Weinstein, Kelly, and McGillen; the young policemen of the winter of 1957 were disguised now as old men. A large black headstone, carved with a lamb symbolizing innocence, stood on the prominent new gravesite. The new burial plot and stone were donated, and the Vidocq Society paid for the reburial at Ivy Hill.
The small casket was a pearly white with a beveled lid. Weinstein, who carried the body to the police car long ago, now joined Fleisher in bearing the coffin from the hearse to the grave. A bag-pipe wailed “Going Home,” the old Negro spiritual:
Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a goin’ home…
It’s not far, jes’ close by,
Through an open door…
Mother’s there spectin’ me,
Father’s waitin’ too;
Lots o’ folks gather’d there,
All the friends I knew.
Fleisher placed the casket on the hydraulic platform. Now the boy lay as close to the sun as he had been since 1957. His only family was two generations of cops.
The old stone, HEAVENLY FATHER, BLESS THIS UNKNOWN BOY, had been set in the foreground of the new one at Ivy Hill.
Fleisher wept.
The commissioner moved to a makeshift podium and tried to compose himself. More than a hundred people stood around the grave, including District Attorney Abraham and an executive from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children from Washington, D.C. The media people stood at a distance across the road. In the crowd was a fifty-one-year-old woman nobody knew. She held a bouquet of blue carnations from the children who rode the schoolbus she drove. “I was ten when it happened, and I never forgot him,” said Rita O’Vary. “The poor little guy. Somebody has to know who he is.”
The old cops sat in folding chairs before the coffin. The clouds broke. Sun bathed the grove of rhododendrons and oak, and the cops said it was a good omen.
Fleisher reminded himself of the reasons to be hopeful. The reburial was only part of their effort, only the beginning. Hundreds of new leads had poured in since America ’s Most Wanted aired the special show on the Boy in the Box. Host John Walsh had revealed Bender’s speculative bust of what the boy’s father might look like.
Eight days earlier, the Vidocq Society’s lawyers obtained a court order to allow exhumation of the boy from his grave in Potter’s Field near Mechanicsville and Dunks Ferry roads in northeast Philadelphia, and to move him ten miles to the historic Ivy Hill Cemetery. A backhoe had lumbered up to the grave in Potter’s Field, and, after the stone was removed, opened the grave deep enough for the diggers with shovels, who scraped down to the lid of the coffin, then worked wide straps under the coffin. The backhoe lifted the boy’s coffin out of the earth for the first time in forty-one years. The diggers cleared dirt from the coffin, and carried it into the back of a waiting ambulance. The FBI’s evidence recovery team had done its work.
A woman from the neighborhood, in her fifties, had walked sadly away. She had come to watch, to let the boy know “we didn’t forget.” She was ten when the boy was found, and prayed for him her whole life. Like a lot of neighbors, she left flowers and toys. She thought of the boy as her little brother.
The ambulance drove to the morgue. The coffin was set on a worktable in the medical examiner’s office. As Kelly watched the lid being pried off, he thought, Rem Bristow should be here. Kelly crossed himself when he saw, remarkably, the boy after forty years had not been reduced to dust. Such preservation was seen by ancient Christians as a sign of the Almighty. The boy was a small pile of bones within the rags of the suit a detective’s son had long ago donated. A technician worked through the pile of dust and bones and found a tooth. It would be tested for DNA. With the boy’s DNA soon in hand, if a suspect or family member emerged, they could learn, at last, the boy’s name-and the name of his killer.
The new black stone said, AMERICA ’S UNKNOWN CHILD.
Fleisher said the boy was “a symbol of our nation’s abused children, missing children, and murdered children. We are validating this little boy’s life. Our mission is to go forward from this day and put a name on that tombstone.” A priest, a pastor, and a rabbi commended the boy’s soul to God. Weinstein, seventy-two years old, stood and described finding the boy’s body on February 25, 1957.
“I saw all his pain and his suffering and his anguish,” he said. “It was as though he was speaking to me: ‘What happened? Why?’ And that was an answer I couldn’t give.” In a faltering voice, Weinstein said the Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer-“in the world which will be renewed… He will give life to the dead… and raise them to eternal life.”
As the hydraulic groaned and the little coffin disappeared into the ground, Weinstein snapped to attention and gave the boy a military salute. Then he hugged a police sergeant, and then gripped Fleisher as if he would fall.
Kelly’s prayer was simple: Dear God, what more can I do? Tell me and I will do it.
As the sun illuminated the little grove of fresh earth, Weinstein sat in a folding chair with his head in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably.
“C’mon, Sam,” Fleisher whispered as they held on to each other. “We’ll solve it.”
Fleisher had told the stonecutter to leave room on the serpentine black surface for a name.
As if the murder of Terri Brooks had happened only yesterday, Detective Sergeant Cloud started the case at the beginning, visiting her father and stepmother at their home in Warminster. George and Betty Brooks easily accepted the idea that the case was now newly open; for them it had never closed. The couple had been interviewed by the Falls Township police fourteen years earlier, but were pleased Sergeant Cloud wanted to talk to them.
Sergeant Cloud explained that he was new to the case and starting over. He had hundreds of pieces of old evidence, a thick case file, Walter’s profile, and not much else.
George and Betty said they remained determined to find their daughter’s killer.
“Hopefully, that son-of-a-gun is still out there walking around and something happens that will bring him out of his hole,” Betty had recently told the Trentonian newspaper, when the reporter called to see what she thought of the Vidocq Society’s involvement. The newspaper headline had read ROY ’S RIDDLE: CAN GROUP CRACK CASE?
Betty reiterated her conviction that Terri had been killed by her boyfriend. “I thought it was the boyfriend all along.”
Her husband, George, quickly disagreed. “They were engaged,” he said, shaking his head. He just couldn’t see it. But Betty said she’d had a funny feeling when the boyfriend showed up at their house to give them the terrible news that Terri had been murdered. He expressed his grief, but something was not right. They’d seen him only one more time in the ensuing fourteen years, and that incident still bothered her, too. Two weeks after Terri was buried, they ran into him on the street. “He made a point of letting us know he had a date,” Betty said.
Sergeant Cloud held up his hand to clarify the point. He’d committed the case file to memory, all two hundred interviews, and the Brookses weren’t making sense. The police had eliminated Terri’s boyfriend as a suspect almost immediately fourteen years ago. Unable to pin it on him or any of Terri’s coworkers, they quickly saw the crime as a robbery gone wrong.
“The boyfriend had an airtight alibi,” Cloud said. “He was in California at the time.”
Betty’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “Not that boyfriend! There was another guy.” Terri had already broken up with the guy who went to California. There was a new one.”
“What was his name?” Cloud asked.
She shook her head. She couldn’t remember. She’d barely gotten to know him during the eight months he was engaged to her daughter. “He was not the type that would come over to the house,” she said. But a few minutes later, a surname came to her. “O’Keefe, I think.” She couldn’t recall a first name.
Thanking the couple for their time, Sergeant Cloud drove back to the Falls Township Police Department and asked around about O’Keefe. He got blank stares. He ran the name through the computer and came up empty. Frustrated, he called his friend Ed Gaughan, the private eye, at the Philadelphia brownstone headquarters of the Vidocq Society, and asked him about “O’Keefe.”
Gaughan had never heard the name, but he and Fleisher both searched for “O’Keefe” in their computers, using proprietary databases designed for lawyers, private eyes, and bail bondsmen to find anyone with an arrest record. Both men struck out on “O’Keefe.”
Gaughan called Sergeant Cloud back. “Are you sure of the spelling?”
No, Cloud wasn’t sure.
“Was he at the funeral?” Gaughan asked. “Check the guest book.”
Sergeant Cloud had the large, leather-bound book right on his desk. He ran his fingers down the ruled pages where the mourners had signed in at Terri Brooks’s funeral. There was no O’Keefe. But there was a different name: Keefe.
Alfred Scott Keefe. “Son of a gun,” Cloud said.
Finding nothing on the police department computer, he called back Gaughan at the Vidocq Society. Gaughan and Fleisher ran the name “Alfred Scott Keefe” of Warminster, Pennsylvania, the town where Terri Brooks was living when she was killed.
“Alfred Scott Keefe” in Warminster was a hit. He was in his thirties, with a clean record except for a minor offense, driving under the influence.
Reading back through the case file, he found Keefe’s name. The police had interviewed Terri’s friends about Keefe fourteen years ago, and uncovered a story that made them suspicious. Terri Brooks and Alfred Scott Keefe were engaged to marry that summer. Two days before her death, Brooks and Keefe made a deposit on a honeymoon trip to Hawaii. Brooks was planning to buy a wedding dress in a few days. Yet even as they went through the motions, their relationship was tense, her friends said. Brooks was getting cold feet. Keefe was angry at her for leaving a better-paying job to seek advancement with the Marriott Corporation. He was obsessed with the fear that she was seeing someone else, and was threatening to break off their engagement. To the police at the time, a spurned lover had a passable motive, but they had no evidence implicating Keefe.
Sergeant Cloud learned that Keefe had stayed in the area. He had married and had a child, and was separated from his wife. He had a menial job in a local pizza parlor, and had moved back into the same family home he occupied while dating Brooks. Keefe was living with his mother.
Sergeant Cloud spoke with Walter about his profile. An intriguing detail jumped out at Walter from the old police file. An hour before the murder, Alfred Scott Keefe’s pickup truck had been seen in a parking lot next to Roy Rogers. Unique among the personality subtypes, the anger-retaliatory killer stalked his prey. “From a distance, the AR builds and reaffirms his rage,” Walter said. “When he begins to close the distance, the commitment to kill has been made.”
“Congratulations,” Walter told Cloud. “You’ve found your killer.”
In September 1998, Sergeant Cloud noted a significant fact in Keefe’s DUI, his only offense on record. When Keefe was stopped while driving under the influence, on the front seat of the car was a pack of cigarettes.
Keefe was a smoker; Newport Filters.
Thanks to the forensic savvy of VSM and medical examiner Hal Fillinger, who had performed the autopsy on Brooks fifteen years earlier, the police had DNA samples of the killer. Fillinger had carefully saved the hairs on Brooks’s clothing, and the skin lodged under her fingernails during her desperate fight for life, having no way of knowing how useful the genetic material could be fifteen years later. The material contained the DNA of a male human, but was it the genetic material of Alfred Scott Keefe?
Early one morning in October, Keefe walked out of his mother’s house in the one hundred block of Horseshoe Lane in Warminster Township -the historic burg where William Penn signed his treaty with the Indians-left a bag of garbage on the sidewalk, and returned inside. He was unaware that Warminster had been alerted not to pick up his trash that morning. Falls Township, twenty miles away on the Delaware River, would be providing the service.
Officer Nelson Whitney, who had been watching, quietly drove an unmarked car up to the curb on Horseshoe Lane, grabbed the garbage bag, and drove away. Back at the station, he and Sergeant Cloud were pleased to find a treasure in Keefe’s trash.
It was a cigarette butt. A Newport Filter.
They sent it to the lab to test for the presence of DNA in dried saliva.
Walter chuckled when he heard. “Maybe cigarettes are bad for your health after all.”
Alfred Scott Keefe, a skinny man with nervous dark eyes, was sitting in a windowless interrogation room the size of a storage closet. The cops had taken him from the pizza parlor and he smelled faintly of mozzarella cheese, cigarettes, and body odor. He was seated in a hard wooden chair, with his back literally against the wall. Two pneumograph tubes crossed his chest. A cardio cuff clamped his arm. Galvanic skin electroplates pinched his fingers. The large shadows of Vidocq Society Members Bill Fleisher and Nate Gordon, sumo wrestlers in suits and two of the best polygraph examiners and interrogators in the world, were very close.
Keefe had volunteered to come in from his job making pizzas that afternoon to answer questions to clear himself. He’d agreed to take the lie-detection test. But now his whole body was vibrating as if the scientific instruments were medieval irons holding him fast, and the cool, mechanically repeated questions the incessant falling of a whip.
Gordon asked him if he had killed his fiancée, Terri Lee Brooks.
Gordon could make a man who had something to hide very nervous. Sitting directly in front of the wan Keefe, Gordon was a hulking man, bald with a white fringe of beard, a disarmingly high, quick voice, and hyperalert blue eyes. He had the bulk of an offensive lineman, a black belt in karate, a master’s degree in criminology, was credited with numerous innovations in lie detection, and published in scholarly journals like Radiology articles such as “Brain Mapping of Deception and Truth Telling About an Ecologically Valid Situation: An MRI and Polygraph Investigation.” He began his forensic lectures by shredding conventional assumptions with razor logic; he ended them by splitting a brick in half with his head.
Fleisher could play “good guy” to Gordon’s “bad guy” if necessary. Fleisher could play it any way you wanted. With the FBI and Customs, Fleisher had literally written the federal book on detecting lies in the human face. Seated on Keefe’s right, the Vidocq commissioner was dapper in his brown suit and neat gray Old Testament beard, leaning forward into the green glowing monitor of a computer, where the polygraph test whirred and dipped its digital judgments.
Were you engaged to Terri Lee Brooks? Did you cause the death of Terri Brooks? Do you know who killed Terri Brooks? Did you use a knife to kill Terri Lee Brooks? Where were you when Terri Brooks was killed? Gordon pounded the same question from a dozen different angles; Keefe volleyed back with terse, controlled denials. But the rest of his body was telling a different story.
For a guy who claimed to have done nothing wrong in his life but skimp on the pepperoni, his sympathetic nervous system was going haywire. His head shook like a bobble-head doll’s. His hands were sweating like he was on a bad first date. Nothing was clipped to his eyebrows, which exploited their freedom by twitching.
Fleisher stared at the computer screen and quietly shook his head, a small, controlled motion of amazement. Keefe’s physiological responses were charted immediately as waves moving across the green-glowing monitor, rising and falling like a miniature emerald sea. Deception all over the lot, he thought. In his decades conducting and teaching the polygraph in New York, London, Rome, Dubai, Keefe was a record breaker. His blood pressure was spiking. His breathing was slowing. His sweat gland activity was not what you’d expect of a bereaved fiancé. Homicide generates stronger emotions than any other crime, and Gordon and Fleisher were expecting big reactions. But this was something else-these were the biggest reactions they’d ever seen.
Keefe’s nervous system was stirring up a perfect storm on the monitor. Whoever was watching behind the one-way observation glass was getting a show.
It was February 4, 1999, the fifteenth anniversary of Terri Brooks’s murder. Richard Walter had read the tea leaves at the murder scene and predicted that Brooks’s killer would be a man in his late thirties with an unkempt appearance who held a menial job and lived with his mother. Alfred Scott Keefe, pizza maker, age thirty-eight, lived with his mother.
In the hallway had gathered the combined powers of Bucks County law enforcement, waiting to pop the champagne on the biggest cold case in county history. The group included District Attorney Alan Rubenstein, a man with ambitions to be a judge, eager to crack what he called one of the “most brutal, heinous, and malicious homicides” he had ever encountered. There was Police Chief Arnold Conoline, the reformer hired to clean up a troubled department. One of his first moves had been to assign his detective sergeant, Wynne Cloud, to reopen the cold case. There was Cloud’s ambitious young patrolman, Nelson Whitney II, working his first murder case, who scored the coup of quietly convincing the pizza maker to voluntarily come in for questioning from his job at the pizza parlor in Horsham, some twenty miles away. There was the deputy DA who had worked long hours on the case with Sergeant Cloud and Officer Whitney. VSM Ed Gaughan, the private eye and former Philadelphia homicide investigator, was on hand, eager to help crack the case he had brought to the Vidocq Society. The police had also invited VSMs Fleisher and Gordon with their polygraph equipment to assist in the interrogation if necessary. Though often challenged about its usefulness, the polygraph, in the hands of experienced examiners like Gordon and Fleisher, had been shown to be accurate in measuring truth versus deception better than 95 percent of the time. Few doubted its value as a tool to help pry loose a confession, or the fact that the Vidocq men were two of the most accomplished polygraph interrogators in the world. The men and women in the hallway behind the glass were confident he had done it, as confident as cops could be with DNA evidence in hand.
The DNA evidence was indeed damning. The trash that Whitney collected from Keefe’s curbside had yielded a treasure: the Newport Filter cigarette butt was Keefe’s brand. Testing of the dried saliva on the cigarette revealed male caucasian DNA-the same DNA found in the hair on Terri Brooks’s clothes, in the blood on the knife protruding from her throat, and in the bits of skin from under her fingernails that she had clawed off her attacker.
But was it the DNA of the other male caucasian living in the house, Keefe’s brother, Charles Keefe? Whitney tailed Charles Keefe to a restaurant, watched him smoke a cigarette, and retrieved the butt from the ashtray after Charles left the restaurant. Lab testing showed that Charles Keefe’s DNA did not match the DNA found on Terri Brooks.
It was technically possible that there was some other male caucasian DNA in the universe matching Alfred Keefe’s, and he was the wrong guy. But the odds were long-one in five quadrillion. If Keefe was going to find someone else to take the fall, a thousand new planets with five billion human beings on each would have to be discovered quickly.
Alfred Keefe was the killer.
All they needed now, after fifteen years, was a confession.
Whitney and another officer had started the interrogation shortly after 6 P.M., when Whitney brought Keefe in from the pizza parlor. As hours passed without a confession, Gordon and Fleisher had paced the hallway like caged beasts. Gordon lobbied the chief hard to let him and Fleisher go in with the polygraph. Keefe had had fifteen years to get his story together, and he had it down. He’d kept the interrogators at bay for hours with a cigarette and a sneer. Gordon and Fleisher believed the cops had not properly focused the interrogation, and squandered away the hours out of inexperience.
In Gordon’s view, the young officers had let Keefe get too comfortable by taking an extraordinarily detailed statement from him-where he was born, his mother’s name, and so forth. Keefe never felt pressured; interruptions didn’t help. A technician came in, swabbed Keefe’s cheek for additional DNA material, and left. Keefe was made to feel important, the center of attention, in control-not like the hunted man he was and needed to feel like to break.
Then the police began to run out of time. If the police didn’t bring Keefe before a magistrate on charges within six hours, they’d have to let him go. But letting Keefe go, now that they’d showed him their hand, was unthinkable. He’d have time to think up a better story, time to go twirl pizzas in Patagonia.
In the hallway, Gordon was about to explode. The police interrogators weren’t even detectives, Gordon thought. Patrolmen handed out traffic tickets, they didn’t bust down killers. What are you going to war with cavalry for when you got the fighter jets on the run-way itching to attack? he wondered. Finally the chief nodded to the Vidocq examiners to give it a try. Whitney left the interrogation room, and Gordon and Fleisher went in.
They’d been hammering away at Keefe now for more than an hour, watching the green digital sea whip into a frenzy, and Keefe was weakening. Fleisher looked over at Gordon and knew he was thinking the same thing: The guy’s bombing the test as bad as anyone, and his guard was down.
Fleisher stared hard at Keefe. It was time to go in for the kill.
“You blew it,” he said. “Your charts are some of the clearest ever. And they got the DNA. You’re doomed.”
Confronted by Fleisher with the overpowering evidence, Keefe seemed to lose the last of his composure. He was off balance, ready to drop. We could get a confession in two minutes, Fleisher thought.
Fleisher glanced at Gordon, who nodded his assent. Despite their drive to nail Keefe, their honor as VSMs was more important: Their role was to provide advice and counsel, “not steal anyone’s thunder.” Both men abruptly stood, told Keefe to stay seated, and left the room to find the cops.
Chief Conoline agreed his men would take it from there, finish what they started. He told Whitney and his partner to go back in. Fleisher asked what they thought of Keefe’s violent shaking when they watched through the observation window. The cops shrugged. They didn’t think anything. Nobody had been watching at the observation window.
Minutes later, the police adopted a new strategy. Whitney and his partner were joined by a uniformed officer said to know Keefe personally, and the three cops marched Keefe out of the small interrogation room and into a large, comfortable conference room and shut the door. Gordon and Fleisher exchanged puzzled looks. Twenty minutes later, with no confession emerging from the new room, Gordon couldn’t stand it any longer. He walked up to Chief Conoline and said, “I’m going in.” The chief nodded OK.
As Gordon opened the door, he saw the problem right away. Four faces around a long conference table turned to the huge bald man with the intense blue eyes. The room set-up is horrible, he thought.
Keefe was sitting nonchalantly at one end of the table, leaning close to the table. He was calmly smoking a cigarette, with an ashtray in front of him. He’s too comfortable, Gordon thought. He looks like he’s about to have dinner.
Keefe was using the expanse of table as a barrier to protect himself. “There can be no barriers between you and the suspect,” Gordon noted later. “You have to be in his face.”
Whitney was seated at Keefe’s left, going through a pile of photographs of Brooks’s corpse. One by one the officer showed Keefe the gruesome photographs of the bloodbath, as if their horror held great power. He told Keefe the police thought he was involved. Keefe was calmly shaking his head no. The uniformed cop who knew Keefe was on his right side, sitting up on the table nodding. “We think you were involved.”
The third cop sat opposite the suspect far across the long table, nodding his agreement, too.
Keefe drew on his cigarette, tipped it into the ashtray, and said coolly, “No, you got the wrong guy.” His eyes went from man to man.
Gordon knew that Keefe couldn’t be “induced by guilt and remorse into a confession.” Walter had advised the Vidocq agents and police not to even attempt it. With an anger-retaliatory or AR, “all attempts to create remorse will fail spectacularly, just empowering the suspect ARs who aren’t capable of guilt,” Walter said. “They’re not like you and me.”
Walter gave the example of a classic AR case he had worked of a lovers’-lane killer in upstate New York. The murderer viciously attacked a young couple, raped the woman while the boyfriend watched, then pumped twenty-five bullets into both of them. Arrested within an hour of the slaughter, the killer was sitting in the back of the police car en route to the police station, drenched in his victims’ blood, when he fell asleep. He was tired. “Anyone can understand it,” Walter said sarcastically. “He’d been very busy. It was a long day. Typical AR-absolutely no guilt.”
“You can’t show them photos of the killing and expect to weaken them into tender remorse,” Walter said. “These guys are euphoric half an hour to an hour after the killing! It’s a big relief, and that hardens into a certainty that ‘the bitch deserved it’! A guilt or shame-driven attack backfires. Lacking any such feeling he grows cooler and more powerful, more sure of his web of lies.”
Walter thought police were “always too hyped up about getting a confession. I’d rather establish fifteen different points of inconsistency in a perp’s story, fifteen lies, than one confession that can be overturned.” Yet with an AR killer, “the trick to a confession is to attack their weakness, get them off guard, then incite rage-reproduce the out-of-control anger that led them to commit murder in the first place.”
Gordon asked the cops to leave the room, then went to work. He walked swiftly to Keefe at the end of the table, grabbed a chair with one hand and plunked it down on the suspect’s right side, invading his space. Keefe turned to face Gordon. The large bald head leaned in, inches way. Gordon’s blue eyes looked fierce, and he talked fast.
“I just gave you the polygraph test, and you can tell them anything you want, but you and I both know you did it,” he said. He let that sink in a moment. “I just have one question. Did you kill her for drug money, or was it a lovers’ spat and she came at you with a knife and you defended yourself? The clock is running and you don’t have any more time.”
Keefe said, “Neither.”
Gordon’s eyes flared. “Listen, don’t insult my intelligence.”
“Neither.”
Gordon scowled. “OK, if you’re telling me it’s neither, I know you’re lying. Therefore I have to assume it’s the worst-case scenario: You killed her for the drug money. There’s no reason to talk to you anymore.”
Gordon propelled his bulk from the chair, stood up, and walked out, shutting the door behind him.
As Gordon emerged, the chief sent Whitney and his partner back in. The young cops were itching to close the case they had worked so hard on. Meanwhile, Gordon conferred with Fleisher. It was time, the two Vidocqeans agreed, to use the technique Fleisher called “The Everything Must Go Sale.” Getting a confession was the ultimate sales job, Fleisher said.
“You’re convincing a guy that it’s better to confess and go to jail for twenty years than to say nothing and walk free,” he said. “It’s the all-time sale. You’re convincing him he needs the very last widget the company has made, when in fact there are seven million more gathering dust on the shelves. Time is everything. You gotta act now; the clock is ticking.”
He and Gordon discussed possible approaches. “We have DNA evidence,” Fleisher suggested, “and if you don’t tell us what really happened by midnight, we’re going to have to go with it. We’re going to have to nail you.”
Gordon looked at his watch. They had less than a half hour to go. Whitney and his partner were still in the interrogation room with Keefe, getting nowhere. Gordon grabbed the biggest guy in uniform he could find, a sergeant, and pulled him aside. “I want you to go into the room and say, ‘Mr. Gordon came out, he says you did it, we don’t want to talk to you anymore,’ and walk out.” The sergeant went in, made his announcement, and came out.
Less than a minute later, patrolman Whitney came out of the interrogation room, grinning widely. He’d gotten the confession. “Keefe confessed. It was a lovers’ spat. He says he was trying to defend himself.” The suits and uniforms congratulated him as cheers filled the hallway.
Gordon quietly pulled the young officer aside. “I want you to go back in and take his cigarettes from him, turn your chair so you’re parallel at the table, right across from him, and tell him, ‘Bullshit. There’s no way a woman gets stabbed twenty times, suffocated, and beaten; it’s not gonna work as self-defense.’ ”
Whitney returned to the room and three or four minutes later emerged with a report. “As soon as I turned the chair and sat across from him, his head went down, his body gave in, and he admitted he killed her for money to buy drugs.”
Gordon nodded. “Good work. Now I want you to go back in and take a statement, name, birth, graduated, such and such-start from the beginning and then everything he did that night. I want it written down he’s confessing of his own free will, no threats or promises of anything. Ask him, why did he confess? In court it’ll be attacked-why would a person voluntarily give a confession against his own interests? So we need him to write down what his interests are-why did he confess?”
Whitney went back in. Minutes passed, the door stayed shut. The group in the hall fidgeted nervously.
Half an hour later he came out waving a handwritten confession and cheers went up in the hallway, louder now. The DA and deputy DA, the chief, Sergeant Cloud and his officers, and Gordon, Fleisher, and Gaughan were shaking hands, slapping backs, high fives all around. The Vidocq men felt excited to be part of the team. Rivalries and criticisms melted away instantly with success; they were all human, it was a natural part of the process. The VSMs said the cops had done a great job.
The charge would be first-degree murder, the DA said with an air of triumph. The deputy DA grinned as she studied the written confession.
“Didn’t these cops do a great job?” she said.
Later that morning, the DA held a press conference to announce an arrest in the county’s longest-running cold case. Surrounded by beaming cops, Rubenstein praised the police chief and his officers and their “dogged” and “high-tech” work. “These things don’t happen by accident,” he said. “It takes good police work. You can’t imagine the man- and woman-hours put into this.” Headlines in all the regional papers sung their praises. Betty Brooks said she was shocked but “relieved” and applauded the wonderful police work. The New York Times saw the arrest as nationally significant because of the use of a daring new technology; as the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “What really cracked the case were the DNA tests the police had done.” Chief Conoline noted that coroner Halbert E. Fillinger Jr. was “a great pathologist” for having flawlessly saved the skin and hair samples that provided the DNA evidence. A week later, the Families of Unsolved Murders Victims, a local support group, honored Detective Sergeant Cloud, Officer Whitney, and Deputy District Attorney Lori Markle for their outstanding achievement. Rubenstein said he would seek the death penalty.
Nowhere was the Vidocq Society mentioned.
Sixteen months later, on June 5, 2000, Bucks County judge John J. Rufe sentenced Keefe to life in prison without parole for the murder of Terri Brooks. Keefe had pled guilty on the advice of his attorney, who said the evidence against him was so “overwhelming” the most they could hope for was to avoid the death penalty. Keefe refused to address Brooks’s parents directly, who said they were not surprised, and were satisfied with the outcome. In a related civil case, the Marriott Corporation, owners of Roy Rogers, paid Brooks’s sister, the administrator of her estate, $675,000 in a wrongful death settlement; $276,322 of the settlement went to the attorneys.
Nowhere were VSMs mentioned.
Fleisher admitted his disappointment in a Vidocq Society Journal column, headlined, WE KNOW WHAT WE DO… AND DID.
He praised the Falls Township Police Department, and especially Sergeant Cloud, now a Vidocq Society Member, for its “great work.” Yet, “It still hurts me that members who selflessly volunteer their time and expertise are not always publicly appreciated,” he wrote. “Whoever said, ‘Success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan,’ knew of what he was speaking.”
Fleisher said the case was a reminder to VSMs to “stop and remember what we are really about in the Vidocq Society and who is our ultimate client. The client was, is, and will always be the truth. And our client is an unforgiving one.”
He signed the column:
Bill Fleisher, VSM, Commissioner.
Veritas Veritatum (“Truth begets Truth”).
In the darkness before dawn in her Ohio home, Mary turned in the coils of a nightmare. When she opened her eyes she was sweating. She got up and went into the kitchen, but the nightmare followed her. Even in waking hours now, she couldn’t escape it. She tried to calm herself, apply reason to the problem. She was in her fifties, a scientist, a Ph.D. chemist with a logical, orderly mind that had fueled an impressive executive career at one of America ’s largest pharmaceutical companies. “I was always good in the sciences,” she said. “You can trust science. It yields up its secrets, if one keeps looking. Science can play tricks, but it doesn’t lie.” But this problem didn’t respond to logic; it was at the farthest end of the spectrum from reason. She lived alone. It was terrifying. The horror had trailed her her whole life, but she’d managed to repress it. Now this demon of memory was demanding notice. The ghostly hollow eyes stared back, wherever she looked.
Before sunup, she picked up the phone and called her psychiatrist.
Early that morning of February 25, 2000, the psychiatrist called from his Cincinnati office to the Philadelphia Police Department and asked for homicide. He had a murder to report. Or rather, his patient, who had been wrestling with the memory in therapy for many years, had a murder to report, forty-three years after the fact. Her brother had been killed on February 25, 1957, by her mother. She had witnessed it, been an accomplice to it. She needed to unburden her soul.
The officer took the information. The report was filed with the hundreds of other leads that had come in, especially after the America ’s Most Wanted episode.
Kelly and McGillen were struck by the dates, surely more than coincidence. Mary called in her confession on the anniversary of the murder of the Boy in the Box. It was exactly forty-three years after the boy was killed. The memory of her brother was haunting her, she said. She wanted to talk to the police. Sergeant Augustine, and VSMs Kelly and Joe McGillen called the psychiatrist to see if the woman would come to Philadelphia. No. Perhaps the cops could travel to Cincinnati. No. Suddenly, the woman panicked. She said she couldn’t talk about it. Not yet.
Kelly and McGillen kept in touch with the psychiatrist. They wrote on Vidocq Society stationery. They called. Not yet, the psychiatrist said. He refused to press his patient. She had to volunteer it, he said. She had to heal. It was a tremendous leap of faith to decide to go public. Suddenly the psychiatrist cut off all communication with the Vidocq Society; his patient was regressing. Kelly and McGillen were polite, understanding. Fleisher was stunned by their persistence, “classic shoe-leather stuff, great old-fashioned detective work.” But like the previous half century of efforts on the case, nothing had come of it.
Mary needed more time, years more time, to sort it out.
When a weary Frank Bender picked up the phone in his studio and heard the voice of a young New York detective excited about an impossible murder case, he was tempted to say, “The wizard is not in. No miracles will be performed tonight.” But Keith Hall, the twenty-five-year-old detective from Manlius, a small town outside of Syracuse, said that after banging his head against the impenetrable cold case for two years he’d just had a revelation. He knew that nobody on earth could solve the murder but Frank Bender of Philadelphia.
“My wife and I knew it as soon as we saw your work on America ’s Most Wanted the other night, a rerun of the John List case,” Hall said. “I told Kathy, ‘This guy’s a genius. I’m going to call him in Philadelphia. He’s our last hope.’
“Frank, we need you.”
Bender was intrigued. He liked to be told he was an irreplaceable genius as much as the next guy, and he heard in Hall’s voice “sincerity, a real good guy, a tremendous passion to solve the case.” When Hall explained that his small police department couldn’t pay Bender the $1,500 he now asked for his busts, not one cent, that about sealed it. Money was tight and Jan might not be pleased, but pro bono work appealed strongly to Bender’s conviction that money shouldn’t matter as much as art or justice.
“Tell me about the case, and we’ll see.”
The scant remains of a skeleton had been found in a shallow grave in woods that ran along a farm outside Manlius, Hall said. At first they thought it was a nineteenth-century farmer or Revolutionary soldier, but the corpse was dated as more recent, perhaps twenty years old. The skull had been smashed, and it was clearly a murder. They were the small bones of a female, possibly a victim of notorious serial killer Arthur Shawcross of Rochester who killed and mutilated eleven Rochester prostitutes from 1988 to 1990. The Genesee River Killer’s reign of terror sent frightened Rochester hookers fleeing the ninety miles to Syracuse.
That was about it.
If Bender could reconstruct the skull and police could learn its identity, they might be able to track down the killer, Hall said.
“Can you mail me the skull? ” Bender asked. Well, that was the problem, Hall said. He could mail a photograph, but there really wasn’t a skull. The skull, such as it was, was a U-shaped collection of bones framing the face. But there was no face-no eye, nose, mouth, or cheekbones. It was a donut skull-mostly hole.
“Send me what you have,” Bender said.
As soon as he saw the picture of the donut skull, Bender thought, I can’t do this. How could he rebuild the surface of a face without bones? Not wanting to give up easily, he consulted with a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., for another opinion, then another expert at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. All agreed: It’s impossible. Nobody can do it. Don’t even try. If you try, the implication was, it’ll be perceived as an act of stupidity or hubris; it’ll make a mockery of the profession of forensic reconstruction. “It’s impossible,” Bender told Hall. But the young detective wouldn’t hear of it. “Frank, I know you can do it.”
“OK, you win,” Bender said. “I’ll do it, but I’ll only ask for money if you make identification.” Hall enthusiastically agreed.
On October 19, 2000, Detective Hall, a burly, fair-haired twenty-five-year-old, stood before the Vidocq Society luncheon at the Downtown Club. Up flashed a PowerPoint image of the Skull with the Missing Face on the screen. Bender beamed at Hall, a bright, outgoing, no-nonsense cop he liked even more in person.
Walter fairly gasped.
“Frank, what the hell are you thinking?” he hissed to his partner one seat away. “Or are you relying on your sixth sense instead of your brain on this one?”
Bender, sitting quietly with a loopy smile, ignored him. The artist loved a challenge, and this was shaping up as maybe his biggest ever. As he studied the photo, he could feel the sensation like an electric charge searching for ground-the nameless dead calling him. He lived for that feeling.
“I figure it’s better to try something, Rich,” he said, “than to try nothing at all.”
“Frank, be honest. Are we playing God again?”
Bender grinned. “Rich, I forgot to tell you. Manlius asked for help from the FBI, and the bureau refused. They said there wasn’t enough material to do a profile. They said it was impossible.”
“Hmmm.” Walter arched his left eyebrow, and his eyes shone with a fierce light. He looked up at the photo and down at the police report. In addition to the face, the left arm and hand, left pelvic bones, left leg and foot were all missing. He himself had seldom seen a case with less to go on. Perhaps it would be interesting, he thought, to profile a murderer based on tiny fragments of bone found in a grave many years after the crime, and nothing else. Perhaps it would be fun.
“This was an ideal place to hide a body,” Hall said. The corpse was found buried in a shallow grave in an isolated patch of woods alongside an abandoned farm outside Manlius. Manlius, the wealthiest burg in Onondaga County, is a bedroom community of Syracuse with 31,000 people spread over a wide and picturesque rural area of hills, pastures, woods, and lakes. Named for Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, the consul of Rome in 390 BC, the prosperous town is composed of three small villages, one of which, Fayetteville, has a proud history as the boyhood home of President Grover Cleveland, as well as the first magazine publisher of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the noted suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage (whose son-in-law L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is said to have used her as the model for the Wicked Witch of the West).
Thus the town’s first murder in a quarter century was shocking, unseemly, not what one expected of the good people of Manlius. It was not committed by or against one of them, they hastened to add, or even within the village limits. It was done by outsiders, “out there.”
The grave was hidden in the woods some four and a half miles east of Fayetteville and an equal distance from either of the other two villages in an unincorporated area-a barren spot locals know as “the middle of nowhere.” The nearest road was impassable in the snow and ice of winter, and in the summer a visitor had to walk through a cornfield to reach the woods. It was there that the ex-con Robert Updegrove, a transient, as locals were quick to mention, was hunting deer without a license on the morning of Saturday, November 29, 1997.
By midday, he was sitting on a log having a smoke, rifle on his knee, when he saw something small and white lying in the brush and leaves. He thought it was a cigarette, he later reported to police. But when he reached down to pick it up, it was hard; a bone, a fragment of a human skull. Updegrove had disturbed the grave.
Hall ordered the remains guarded overnight. After determining the grave was “nonhistorical,” they began excavation the next morning, Sunday, November 30, in a murder investigation. The Manlius detective regarded Updegrove as an immediate suspect. To cover the fact that he was hunting illegally, the convicted felon concocted a story that he was looking for his lost dog, not for deer. Updegrove denied involvement in the murder, but Hall wasn’t convinced. Updegrove rented a cottage on one of the abandoned farms, so close that Hall could almost see it from the grave site. Had Updegrove just discovered the bone fragment? Or had he put it there many years earlier and returned to memorialize the murder, enjoy his trophy, and flaunt it to cops?
Hall and his men dug up the grave with their hands for five days until their fingers were numb with cold, uncovering only a partial skeleton, indicating the work of animals or a depraved human.
The remains were so sparse they were extraordinarily difficult to identify. A Cornell University forensic anthropologist claimed to identify a raccoon bone. Another noted anthropologist said it was a child, before Dr. Anthony Falcetti at the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory in Gainesville, Florida, identified the bones as belonging to a small, slight woman in her midtwenties to early thirties, probably of mixed race, about five foot five, 100 to 110 pounds. The bones indicated she had suffered from poor nutrition as a child. All of it supported Hall’s hunch that the young woman was a prostitute-and possibly Shawcross’s victim. Hall sent her description to all the national crime databases in the United States and Canada, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. There were no matches. Two dozen police officers swept the area with metal detectors and rakes, examined nearby trees for bullet holes, and collected bird nests for possible hair samples woven in. They came up empty.
Hall was left reading fragments of clothing, a zipper, and a Virginia Slims Menthol 100s cigarette pack found in the grave for the story they might tell.
Hall was disappointed that the blue stamp on the cellophane pack had faded so badly the date sold could not be read, even in a forensics lab. But the manufacturing dates of the clothing-size ten or twelve Gitano jeans, size six Sergio Valente-brand underpants, and a small Cappacino-brand shirt-indicated the young woman was alive on June 15, 1986, and probably dead by April 1988. Those dates coincided with Shawcross’s reign of terror. Paroled from prison after serving only fifteen years for the admitted rape and murder of a ten-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl, Shawcross moved to Rochester and began killing in early 1988. He was arrested in January 1990, when police left his eleventh victim floating in a creek based on a psychological profile that suggested the killer would return to the scene. Shawcross was arrested masturbating as he sat in his car on a bridge over the creek. He confessed in custody, and his eleven victims were all identified. Maybe this was a twelfth?
The detective was deeply frustrated. He hadn’t ruled Updegrove out, but he’d been unable to build a case against him or anyone else. He’d interviewed thirty-nine people who lived in the area around the crime scene during the suspected period of the crime and had since moved away. Nearly nine months after the grave was discovered, he led a team of police officers, state troopers with cadaver-detection dogs, and a state wildlife expert to search for other graves and for animal dens that might contain bones or artifacts taken from the grave. Nothing was adding up. He asked for help from the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit in Quantico, Virginia, but the FBI “felt there was insufficient data for case profiling,” Hall said. The Vidocq Society was his last hope.
Following the presentation, after Fleisher had given the Manlius police the ceremonial magnifying glass, “symbolizing the first scientific tool of detection,” Walter approached Detective Hall. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “despite what our friends at the bureau say, a profile might be possible in this case. More than one may think is revealed by fragments of bone in a grave.”
Killing a prostitute and dumping her body in the woods was a “classically efficient, practical, cold” crime that bore “the marks of a power-assertive killer,” he said. Walter said he’d already formed “bits and pieces” of a psychological profile.
Of the dozen suspects the Manlius police had considered, he said, “only Updegrove fits the profile.” Walter invited the Manlius officers to visit the Biddle House, his home in Montrose, Pennsylvania, to discuss it further.
“I believe,” he added, “that we’re looking at a serial killer.”
“I don’t think Updegrove did it,” Bender blurted out from the circle of cops, his face reddening. The artist had been busy researching the crime, his first step of the process of reconstructing the bone fragments into a skull and face. But it was a gut feeling, rather than any particular research that told him Updegrove was innocent.
Walter rolled his eyes. “Frank, I appreciate your thoughts, OK, but you’d best stick to your day job. Don’t let your emotions carry you beyond your pay grade.” Walter admired his partner’s extraordinary forensic art and intuitions, but did not appreciate it when those intuitions crossed onto his turf of psychological profiling of killers.
“Richard, you’re good,” Bender shot back. “But you’re not always right.”
“My dear boy, your thinking has no structure, no foundation,” came the arch accent. “You pick up your primary ideas from TV shows. You’re like a fart in a bathtub.”
VSMs on the edge of the conversation tittered. A decade after their most famous case, the capture of mass murderer John List, Bender and Walter had become even more nationally prominent in their fields. They had collaborated successfully on Vidocq Society cases, and seemed closer-than-ever drinking buddies and brothers-in-arms. But their teamwork resembled the work of an anvil and hammer; the more productive they became, the more sparks flew.
Bender had taken to telling anyone who would listen that it was he, not Walter, who had the idea to put thick tortoiseshell eyeglasses on John List’s face-a key detail that helped lead to the swift identification and arrest of the killer. Bender claimed Walter was stealing undue credit.
Exasperated, Walter patiently reminded his friend that indeed he had first suggested that List would be wearing thick-rimmed glasses “like mine” to convey power and authority. But he happily acknowledged that Bender had accomplished the crowning work, the “coup de grace,” of finding an old pair of tortoiseshell glasses at an antique store that he put on the bust. They worked perfectly.
“So I suggested the concept, and you made it reality, which some might suggest is the harder and more praiseworthy part. I know it’s hard to follow, but this is called teamwork, and in such instances, credit is shared.”
Fleisher was beaming like a football coach watching his star players beating each other up at practice before a big game. The Case of the Missing Face was one of the most challenging cold cases ever brought before the Vidocq Society, he thought, and they needed this level of passion and commitment to solve it.
It was clear as Bender returned to his South Street warehouse studio in Philadelphia and Walter to his Victorian mansion in the Pennsylvania mountains that the partners would be simultaneously working together and competing, as only they could.
“I think Richard’s got a good profile going, and there’s nobody like Frank in giving name and face to the dead,” Fleisher said. “There’s nothing to go on but if anybody can do it it’s this group, my friends.” He grinned. “The question is: To whom will the bones talk?”
Stripped to the waist in his studio, Bender animated the dead with clay using unknown powers that frightened those who saw him as arrogant, a Dr. Faust making deals with the devil. These people never knew the deep humility that Bender brought to his work. As he began to build up a skull with clay he abandoned all ego, left the moorings of space and time, gave himself utterly to “enter the flow of nature. You start with the eye, nose, and mouth and you keep them all flowing at the same time. Beautiful or ugly, our features were made to harmonize together.” Yet the Girl with the Missing Face was beyond humbling; with no nose, mouth, eyes, cheeks, or chin to go on, he called Hall up and repeated his fear: “This is impossible.” After parts of three days mulling the gaping hole in the center of the skull, he still didn’t know where to begin.
Frustrated, he returned to his high-profile commission sculpture Unearthed. He was sculpting two slaves-a man and two women-from their exhumed eighteenth-century skulls to make a memorial for the African Burial Ground in New York City. Working with a slave skull, he noticed the small sphenoid bone behind the eye was nearly the same width as the nasal bones. The Girl with the Missing Face still had a sphenoid bone and since she was believed to be partly African American… had he stumbled upon a way to gauge her nasal aperture?
He called a Howard University anthropologist working on the Unearthed project; the professor made a series of measurements on other skulls and said, “I think you’re onto something.” So Bender started with the nose. A broad coffee-colored face quickly appeared with soft brown eyes; the bones seemed to be telling him they did not belong to a typical coldhearted prostitute. She was a warm person with the weight of the world on her, Bender thought. It was a wild guess, he admitted, but it was somehow more than that. “I can feel it.”
The unmarked police sedan came out of Manlius, New York, south on I-81, and down into the Appalachian ridge-and-valley country of Pennsylvania. It was a melancholy tumble of twisted forested roads and steep bluestone hills shadowing rocky streams. A hundred miles south, they reached the Biddle House at noon. Richard Walter answered the door himself.
He ushered them into the parlor, seated them in the nineteenth-century chairs. As they laid the case file on the antique cherry table, he offered them a spot of coffee or tea. “Would anyone like cookies? I bake them myself, chocolate chip and gingersnaps, with real butter in the old-fashioned way, and I don’t fool around with the chemistry. They’re quite wonderful recipes.” Lieutenant Kevin Barry and his two officers said they’d love some cookies.
Over steaming coffee, Walter lit a Kool and said, “As a point of fact, there are only about five of us profilers in the world who know what we’re doing. The rest who claim to be profilers are fucking charlatans and frauds.”
The cops grinned. It was true that profilers were getting a bad name in some quarters.
“In truth, I prefer the term ‘crime assessment’ to ‘profiling,’ ” Walter continued. “Now because of all the TV forensic dramas and the amateur hour on the nightly news the public thinks profilers are wizards who come out of caves with their fantastic visions or some Borborygmic grumblings, but you can’t get there from here. The frauds read our stuff and give flip out-of-context assessments like, ‘He’s driving a blue car and hates women.’ It doesn’t work that way. Like anything else, it takes a lot of hard work. We’re talking probabilities and years of experience with similar cases, and analyzing them through the psychological continuum as well as the crime scene continuum.”
Walter tipped his chin and blew cigarette smoke to the ceiling. “Gentlemen, let me explain the case to you in terms of a crime assessment.”
Many factors, he said, including the remote burial of the young woman’s corpse, suggested the victim was a prostitute. Power-driven killers “love to kill prostitutes,” and when they do they dump the body as if disposing of trash. This type of killer typically makes a bold assault to the head, a straight-on attack, and here “we find that the victim’s skull has been smashed, the apparent cause of death.”
The half of a zipper police found near the surface of the grave was a valuable clue. “With this type of killer,” Walter said, “we often find that the clothing of the victim had been forcibly torn off.” According to a police report, four teeth of the zipper were damaged. Detective Keith Hall led the painstaking effort to find and interview the zipper manufacturer and learned that “the damage appears to have been caused by the slider pulling out over the teeth when the zipper was forcibly pulled apart.”
“Given these and other factors and probabilities, it’s highly likely that the killer is in his early to midtwenties, an ex-con, very muscular, lifts weights, macho, emotionally primitive, arrogant, drives a pickup truck, has girlie magazines lying around.”
“As it happens,” he went on, “Updegrove fits the profile. That’s not to say he did it. But it was a guy like him, happy brandishing guns or other weapons-a guy with a criminal record.”
They left with pages of notes, and cookies in freezer bags.
Women around the wealthy, seventy-one-year-old Alabama businessman had a nasty habit of disappearing. So when he called the police to report his second wife missing, he was a suspect. Thirty years earlier, he had murdered his former mother-in-law-strangled and then stabbed the dead woman thirty-seven times with an ice pick-then returned home and told his first wife, “Our life is going to change. I killed your mother.” He had done only thirteen months in a reformatory, then received a partial pardon from Kentucky ’s governor.
“That’s one for Bartlett ’s Book of Perverse Quotations,” Walter said. He was intrigued as the Alabama police presented Vidocq Society Case No. 112 at the August 2002 luncheon. He was afraid the suspect was a rich, brilliant, experienced psychopath too smart for the police. But he was more concerned that afternoon by his uncharacteristically glum partner. Bender had buried his eighty-nine-year-old mother, Sarah, in June. Bender had previously buried his father, Francis A. Bender, and taken the unusual step of participating in his father’s autopsy. Holding his father’s heart in his hands, Bender had tried to understand and make peace with him. Now his mother was gone, and Bender looked like he was holding her heart, too.
That summer Bender felt as if the other dimension was shadowing his daily life. He and Walter flew to Chicago to make a joint presentation, “Criminal Case Studies,” to the Federal Bureau of Prisons national training program. After the lecture at the Chicago Hilton, two nuns who worked in prisons approached the artist and profiler with rosy praise, broad smiles on their faces.
“You two do the work of angels,” one said.
“Killer angels, perhaps,” Bender said.
Walter was taken aback. He was quite sure that if a God had made the world He would not have created Theodore Bundy, but he held his tongue and mumbled a polite thank-you. Though it made him profoundly uneasy, he had to admit the seraphs of God seemed to be following him.
At Christmas, he had received an unusual gift-a crystal obelisk depicting an angel-from a young Pennsylvania couple who had long suffered the agonies of grief, fury, and uncertainty over the unsolved murder of the wife’s brother. He had met them at a convention of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children, and his heart went out to them, as it did all the woebegone men and women at POMC who called him, there was no getting around it, “the avenging angel.”
Yet it was not merely vengeance the profiler peddled to the stricken; it was wholeness and health. He had volunteered his services in the name of the Vidocq Society to speak to parents about the unspeakable, to wield sword or soft words, whatever tool necessary to vanquish their demons. “Their tormentors are all in the mind,” he said. “Either their own or the mind of their child’s killer. It’s a matter of bringing the darkness to light.” Just he, it seemed, could explain it all.
Only at POMC conventions could one find a hotel conference room filled with fifty mothers whose children had been murdered. At the Cincinnati Westin they gathered to hear a talk on murderer subtypes, earnest faces turning to the tall, balding, bespectacled, thin man they had seen rushing through the hallways in his dark suit like a blade.
He began his lecture by asking jauntily, “How many of you folks have not heard my little talk before?” Hands went up. “Liars!” he bellowed, and they roared with laughter. He approached a woman in the front row with a small trash can. “Madam,” he said, “if you are about to eat that butterscotch candy, please unwrap it and put it in your mouth now. I will not have plastic crinkling whilst I attempt to speak.” They gasped and laughed again. They loved him. Blasphemous, courtly, reeking of smoke and profanity, they loved him. After the speech, one by one, the mothers filed into a small smoking room of the hotel for private meetings with Walter in his cloud of Kools. In gentle, ten-minute confessionals, each gave a capsule description of their child’s murder, answering the detective’s questions-was the body face up or down? Was the knife at the scene?-and one by one they left with palpable serenity, careworn faces smoothed in some sense of peace. “He told me why Brian died,” an Asian woman said, leaving the confessional in Cincinnati. “For the first time I know. Now I can really grieve and heal.”
Walter had the mind to discern and the heart to explain within the limits of human understanding why and how a heart of darkness took their child. He gave evil its place, however difficult, in the human family; saw shapes and forces at work that others did not. He was, one journalist said, the Stephen Hawking of the universe of the damned.
Bob Meyer, a retired Tampa doctor, and his wife, Sherry, told Walter they were devastated to the point of emotional breakdown by the senseless, vile murders of their daughter Sherry-Ann Brannon, a lovely thirty-five-year-old blonde, and grandchildren: Shelby, seven, and Cassidy, four. The murders had occurred in Sherry-Ann’s large, new dream house with pool in Manatee County, Florida. There was no sign of forced entry. Meyer was convinced his son-in-law, Dewey Brannon, who had recently left the dream house and Sherry-Ann for another woman in the midst of a contentious divorce, was the killer.
Police also considered Brannon the main suspect. The most intense six-week murder investigation in county history had revealed that it was Brannon, estranged and banned from the house on Father’s Day, who had called 9-1-1 for help on the morning of September 16, 1999. He told the dispatcher he’d found the bodies of his wife and older daughter and thought it was a murder-suicide, but then he saw that Cassidy was badly hurt, too.
He was cradling the four-year-old, dying from multiple stab wounds, in his arms.
“Sir. It’s gonna be OK, all right,” the dispatcher tried to calm him.
“It’s NOT gonna be OK,” he replied. “I’ve got two dead people here ’cause of me, all right. So just get somebody out here.” Three little words-the colloquial for “because of me”-had the whole county convinced Brannon was the killer, reporters wrote.
But as the crime lab did its work, all the physical evidence at the scene pointed to Larry Parks, a forty-seven-year-old landscaper who had recently dug the family’s pool. Parks’s DNA was found in a piece of skin under Sherry-Ann’s fingernail. Parks confessed that he was “mighty high” on cocaine and crystal meth that morning when, after a failed night of hunting hogs to sell for cash for more drugs, he knocked on Sherry-Ann’s door with the ruse that his truck had broken down, and forced his way in intending, he said, to rob her. When she fought back, he stabbed her ten or more times with a kitchen knife, went upstairs and stabbed Shelby to death in her bedroom, then dragged Cassidy downstairs and stabbed her in front of her dying mother.
Even though Parks pled guilty in exchange for three life terms-to avoid the death penalty-Bob Meyer said the case was destroying his family. He wanted Larry Parks dead. His wife had tried to enter the courtroom for Parks’s trial with a gun in her purse, an attempt at frontier justice all too common at POMC. His son-in-law, now exonerated, had plunged over the wooden railing to try to kill Parks. As deputies handcuffed him and took him away, his wife shouted toward the judge and Parks: “He killed our babies!”
Bob Meyer, boiling in anger and confusion and still suspecting his son-in-law, said he just wanted the truth: How and why could a human being do such things, and was it Parks, and why him, or his son-in-law? He asked for Walter to help. The Vidocq profiler studied the case file, and then flew to Tampa on Meyer’s request to sit in on Parks’s sixty-seven-minute confession to six attorneys and police officers. Afterward, Walter told Meyer that the killing, down to the last detail, was a perfect expression of Larry Parks’s history, personality, and character. Parks was “absolutely the killer and the only killer. He’s the purest, coldest power-assertive killer I’ve ever seen.”
The Meyers continued on their imperfect path of healing, but Walter remained concerned about Bob and Sherry. Passionate about music and baking, Sherry no longer found pleasure in her hobbies. She was dropping weight, growing sickly. Grief, Bob said, was literally killing her. Walter returned to Florida and walked in the door demanding one of Sherry’s “famous tangerine pies.” She said she didn’t feel like baking. “I want it now!” he insisted. She was out of tangerines, and the stores were closed. “Well, let’s go find some damn tangerines.” They drove country roads together until Walter spotted a tangerine tree behind a diner. The fruit was too high; laughing and scheming like schoolkids, they got a ladder. The pie was delicious. Late that night over Scotch, Bob confessed he was haunted by dreams of vengeance against Parks that sounded like something out of ancient Athens. “I’ll deny it if you tell anybody,” Meyer told the others, “but I want him blinded. I want Mr. Parks to live in prison not knowing what’s coming at him for the rest of his life.”
“As it happens, it’s not uncommon for one to have such feelings,” said Walter. “Indeed since the Greeks, it was deemed important to vent them in appropriate places-to the courts, to family, to friends, to one’s god-until we find our way again.” He left knowing there was still work to do.
Joy and Brian Kosisky also had a murder in the family that was ruining their lives. Joy’s brother had been murdered in Greenville, Pennsylvania. In gratitude for his work in helping them understand the case, the couple had sent him the crystal obelisk for Christmas. As Walter turned the glass in the sunlight, there appeared in the crystal the delicate lines of an angel, acid-etched into the interior of the glass.
“An acid angel,” he mused. “I quite like that.”
Now the acid angel, ensconced in a cloud of cigarette smoke, sat in his Chicago hotel room the day after his presentation with Bender. Before him sat a pair of Urbana, Illinois, police officers with their bulky cold-case file. The police from the southern Illinois city had presented one of the most notorious and puzzling cold murder cases in the state’s history to the Vidocq Society the previous spring, March 15, 2001. It was the 1988 murder of the wealthy, popular University of Illinois veterinary student Maria Caleel, a case that had earned Urbana police little but frustration and embarrassment for fourteen years.
After hearing Walter’s luncheon theory on the murder, police sent him the case file. They had driven the 140 miles from Champaign-Urbana to meet him while he was in Chicago and hear his thoughts.
“Gentlemen, now that I’ve read the file,” Walter said with a grim smile, “let me explain the case to you.”
The file for the fourteen-year investigation had grown to more than 1,600 pages. Police had accumulated forty suspects, but never made an arrest. “I’ve read the 1,600 pages on the computer, so I couldn’t make notations,” Walter said. “Nonetheless, I eliminated thirty-nine of the forty suspects. In the course of events, one is the killer, who has flown all these years just below the radar.”
“The killer was obviously someone Maria knew,” he continued. Sometime after three o’clock in the morning on March 6, 1988, Caleel was asleep in her garden apartment in Urbana when someone knocked on the door, or perhaps entered using a key. Her attacker struck in the dark, grabbing her from behind and plunging a six-inch knife upward and deep, precisely nicking her heart, and fled. As Caleel crawled to an apartment across the hall, dying from a single stab wound, a female student called police and asked her, “Who did this to you?”
“I can’t believe it,” Caleel replied. “I just can’t believe it.” Those were her dying words. She never identified her killer.
The murder of the attractive, bright, gifted twenty-one-year-old vet student made headlines across the country. Her friends said that Maria’s family dined with princes, yet they never knew she was wealthy. She had entered Brown University at sixteen, graduated with a biology degree, and was a straight-A student at the highly competitive Illinois vet school. Grounded in her love for animals, she rode her horse Tristan early on the day she died, and later that day tried to save the life of a prematurely born foal.
The police were “absolutely gobsmacked” by the murder, Walter said. It defied logic. There was no break-in, no robbery, no sexual assault. The popular young woman had no enemies who would want to kill her. The FBI was brought in to study the case, to no avail. Maria’s parents, the prominent Chicago physician Dr. Richard Caleel, and former model Annette, hired private eyes, and personally provided most of a $50,000 reward.
As the years passed with no arrests, the Caleels did everything in their power to keep the case and their daughter’s name alive. They donated a small fortune to create Maria Caleel funds and scholarships across the country-a Maria Caleel polo trophy at the Oak Brook Polo Club; Maria Caleel conferences on violence against women; a Maria Caleel University of Missouri journalism school award; Maria Caleel horse shows, equine research grants, a Maria Caleel prize for the best biology student at Brown. Finally, the Caleels asked their family-friend Lynn Abraham, the renowned Philadelphia district attorney and VSM, for advice. The DA recommended a Vidocq Society investigation.
Walter had sparred at times with Illinois investigators, using lines such as “I fully respect your constitutional right to be wrong, nonetheless…” But now his voice purred as he coolly described the killer as a young man in the vet school and friend of Caleel’s who bore a psychopathological anger toward her for her “relatively innocent college student flirtations.”
The signs of a murderer who killed neatly and efficiently “in a manner of disposing of trash” to correct a perceived wrong were evident at the scene. The killer’s precision with the knife was no accident given his anatomical skill with animals. With a misogynistic hatred, Walter said, “His thought process was thus: I didn’t realize she was a disgusting and despicable whore, but I’m responsible for her, and I’ll clean up the mess. So he killed her.” Walter raised an eyebrow. “With no one else among the forty suspects,” he explained, “can one draw a straight line connecting the crime and pre-crime and post-crime behavior? This guy is the lemons falling into place-the jackpot.”
At first skeptical, police grew enthusiastic and were finally stunned by the analysis emerging from billows of menthol smoke. They talked about zeroing in on the killer, now a prominent man with a wife and children, and unearthing his secret of fourteen years. It would not be easy, but the Vidocq Society would advise each step of the way.
“Are the police happy with our work? ” Fleisher asked later when Walter called to report in.
The thin man began to laugh. “Oh, yes. They’re as happy as a pervert with two dicks.”
As Walter worked the Illinois murder, two of the oldest Vidocqeans reached Ohio on a Sunday night, pulling a big American sedan into a Cincinnati hotel in time for dinner. Bill Kelly and Joe McGillen had left Philadelphia that morning right after mass, with city homicide detective Tom Augustine sharing the wheel during the nine-hour drive. Time had not been kind to the Vidocq senior investigative team. VSM Sam Weinstein, the third retired Philly cop on the Boy in the Box team, was in Israel working with the Israel Defense Forces. The widower McGillen, fearless on a murder, was deathly afraid to fly, thus the 600-mile drive. Kelly had spent the long drive quietly praying for a break in the half-century-old case, fearful he too was running out of time. After another year of beseeching God for help, he’d attended the St. Joseph ’s Seminary annual retreat, the weekend that kept him sane. Steeped in prayer, he asked a sister to help him ask God for a solution to the case, and she replied that she had been asking. Her words haunted him: “Maybe God said no.”
The next morning, the three of them were seated stiffly in a psychiatrist’s office. The psychiatrist was a tall man with wavy white hair. None of the cops had ever been in a shrink’s office. Kelly had teased McGillen in the car: “Maybe you want to confess this flying phobia of yours.” Now, after setting some ground rules, the psychiatrist led them into an inner room, and introduced them to a middle-aged woman, sitting at a table, they would call “Mary.” Mary was a tall, handsome woman with unusually broad shoulders and keenly intelligent eyes. She seemed nervous, yet also distant. She demanded her identity be protected; she was an executive at one of the largest drug companies in the world, and “they mustn’t know.” The old cops nodded their promises. She breathed deeply to compose herself. “Oh, God,” she said, “this is so hard.”
Two years after her psychiatrist first contacted the police, and fifty years after witnessing the horrors that had scarred her for life, Mary was finally willing to talk about the murder of her brother Jonathan, the Boy in the Box.
“No one outside our house could have imagined what went on… My parents did not have normal sexual desires. My father molested me… My mother didn’t just silently let it happen, the usual scenario. She was enthusiastic about it, even joined in. The agreement was that my father let her indulge her taste in little boys. She preferred them to adult men because she thought them purer, somehow… One night a little boy came into our lives…”
It was a hot August night, she remembered. “I was thirteen when my mother took me in the car to get him.”
Kelly bent his head to his maker and the weight of the words, and scribbled notes on a pad.
Between them, Kelly and McGillen had nearly a century of investigative experience, and as Mary rambled on, both men felt in their guts she was telling the truth. Mary was highly credible and had no reason to lie. This was the real story, at last. It was horrifying, Augustine thought. It was a story that even Hitchcock would have been afraid to film.
On the surface, as Mary told it, her childhood in the 1950s on the Main Line of Philadelphia was one of comfort and privilege. She lived in a house in Lower Merion, a lovely, affluent town, an only child of highly educated, well-respected parents. Her father was a teacher at the high school, one of the better public schools on the East Coast. Her mother was a librarian.The students loved her parents;“I bet my parents autographed a thousand yearbooks,” she said.
But in the privacy of their home, life was a horror from which Mary could not awaken. At thirteen, Mary knew in her heart something was wrong, but she was unable to fully face it, couldn’t begin to understand it. That August night when her mother parked in front of a row house in Philadelphia, she rang the bell, gave the woman an envelope apparently filled with money, and was handed a baby who had peed his diapers. Mary, excited, confused, scared, held the baby in the car. She didn’t mind the smell; she felt a sudden sympathy for the helpless child. She could feel that “this baby, this little human being, needed me. Needed somebody.”
She asked her mother, “Can he be my brother?”
“Sure,” her mother said. “Only we can’t keep him upstairs.” Her mother put the baby in the basement in a small room that used to be a coal bin. He had a box to sleep in, some blankets, and heavy dishes like dog dishes. A drain was his toilet. Mary thought, It’s just like we got a new puppy. Her mother called him Jonathan. She went down to visit Jonathan and play with him. She took food and water down to him. He always had coal dust in his hair. She got him to laugh once. Jonathan never said a word. She realized he was retarded.
Her mother said, “Don’t go down there.”
Jonathan’s hair grew long, like a girl’s. His parents never cut it. They never took him outside. When Mary was fifteen, feeling weighted now with a terrible secret, her mother dragged Jonathan upstairs for a bath, “cursing… his feet going thump, thump, thump on the steps as she dragged him along.” She put him in a bath that was scorching hot and he started screaming. She took him out of the tub and he was crying and stamping his feet. She put him back in the water and he threw up their baked-beans dinner. “My mother shrieked like I’d never heard before. She yanked him out of the tub and slapped him. I mean hard.” He cried but she kept slapping until he fell and hit his head on the bathroom floor and then she was punching him all over with her fists. “My mother’s head was shaking from side to side, she was swinging so fast.”
Jonathan was still. “I could tell he was dead. His eyes were open but not seeing. There was sadness in his face. If I live to be a hundred, I will never feel as sorry for a human being as I did for Jonathan right then.” His parents chopped his hair short; Mary was ordered to trim his fingernails. “I tried to be gentle,” she said. The next morning her mother lifted Jonathan from the tub, where he’d been kept all night. They wrapped him in a blanket and carried him out a side door in the basement that faced the driveway, hidden by a hedge, and put him in the trunk of the car. Her mother drove past a church and down a country road and stopped by a patch of woods. A car came by as her mother opened the trunk, and she told Mary, “Don’t say a word.” They carried Jonathan into an overgrown field. Her mother found an empty box near the road. “Oh, good,” her mother said. “Tilt it.” Mary tipped it and her mother slid Jonathan into it and made sure he was out of the rain. “Did it matter?” Mary wondered. They stopped at a diner on the way home and Mary had a donut. She threw it up in the car. Her mother was very angry. “Then we went home and tried to act like everything was normal.” Her father died years ago from a heart attack, her mother died after that at a nursing home in Florida. She never told anyone but her psychiatrist.
As they drove back to Philadelphia, Kelly could hardly contain his excitement. He recalled that the Good Samaritan saw a young boy wearing a raincoat standing next to a woman-the tall, wide-shouldered Mary said she was wearing a raincoat, and she easily could have been mistaken from behind for a boy. Kelly and McGillen agreed the route Mary described to the field made sense. Her account of the boy vomiting baked beans was intriguing; the autopsy, not widely reported, noted a brown residue in the boy’s esophagus.
Mary gave the address of the family’s house on the Main Line, and Kelly and McGillen raised their eyebrows. The address matched an earlier tip the society believed to be reliable and had never made public. To pick a matching address in a metropolitan area of more than five million people seemed more than coincidence. Kelly and McGillen confirmed the existence of the house, and of Mary’s late parents, a teacher and librarian. They were stunned by what she witnessed and suffered, and amazed at how she struggled to make her life a success.
As Augustine listened to Mary, he kept thinking, Why does she hate her parents so much, to tell a story like that? He didn’t believe Mary, and even Fleisher was skeptical of the story. Augustine pointedly asked the psychiatrist why he didn’t have any notes confirming Mary’s story. The therapist was offended. “I don’t need notes. My job was to help Mary unlock the memory, series of memories, and free herself from them… And I can tell you… her account has been consistent from the start. What you heard is what I’ve been hearing for thirteen years now, long before there was a Web site about this case. I believe Mary is telling the truth.”
Later that summer, on Philadelphia ’s top-rated TV news station, Eyewitness News reported that according to confidential sources the Vidocq Society had achieved a breakthrough in the case “that has tormented Philadelphia police for more than four decades.”
Augustine remained unconvinced. “It may be true. It may not be true. Hell, there’s just no corroboration for any of it,” he said. Bruce Castor, the Montgomery County district attorney, said the information was “sketchy and unreliable.” He said Mary’s story is “akin to Martians coming down and marching somebody off in a spaceship.”
But within days Kelly and McGillen located Mary’s old house. The white-haired cops walked up and down the street interviewing neighbors. Several neighbors recalled the couple who once lived there, a very conservative, conventional teacher and librarian, and dismissed the lurid story as ludicrous. None of them ever saw a boy come out of the house.
Kelly and McGillen knocked on the door of Mary’s old house. Kelly explained the situation and politely asked the current owner if they could see the basement. No, she said firmly. But Kelly and McGillen figured it was a good start. It was just their first conversation. They would be back.
They wanted to see if there was a coal bin.
The fax arrived at the nineteenth-century brownstone headquarters of the Vidocq Society, on Locust Street in Philadelphia, at midday. Fleisher walked down the hall and crossed the large red Oriental rug in the waiting room, past the mantelpiece with the Vidocq bust and the cadaver skull, to the fax closet. He barely read it as he brought it back, scowling, to the “war room,” where he was meeting with Bender and Walter. It was the winter of 2002, and the commissioner of the Vidocq Society should have been happier. Before Christmas, the society had heard one of his favorite cases. VSM Richard Walton, a California investigator, had come east to describe his thirteen-year effort that led California to exonerate American Indian Jack Ryan, wrongly framed for a celebrated 1920s double murder in Humboldt County.
“Redemption is the sweetest human event,” Fleisher said. He had just been named one of the seventy-six finest minds in Philadelphia by Philadelphia magazine. He and Nate Gordon had recently published a book, Effective Interviewing and Interrogation Techniques, exploring his favorite subject, the historic search for truth. New tips on the Boy in the Box case were pouring in since VSM George Knowles, a New Jersey volunteer, had created an “America’s Unknown Child” Web site; Knowles had been haunted by the case since he went to his local police station in central New Jersey to register his new bicycle at age eleven, and saw the police “Information Wanted” poster-“my first exposure to death.”
Even the planned Vidocq Society movie was getting media attention now, helping attract more cases, more chances to help the helpless. The movie “will be full of thrills, murder, mayhem, and disgust,” Walter told a Binghamton, New York, newspaper. “A typical day for me.”
But Fleisher’s optimistic view of human nature had been challenged that fall by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. A number of VSMs answered the call, including forensic dentist Haskell Askin, a leader of the identification effort in the New York medical examiner’s office, and Utica College forensic anthropologist Thomas A. Crist, who worked night shifts at the Fresh Kills Landfill sorting human remains from other materials and rubble brought by barge and spread over seven acres. Richard Walter was contacted by shadowy figures in American intelligence asking if he could profile Osama bin Laden.“Why of course, said I,” he related.“He, like Stalin and assorted other monsters of history, is a malignant narcissist. He is all about power; religion is a guise. Ultimately he will be defeated because he can’t take a step backward.”
Fleisher said America and other nations must “find the evil animals responsible for this horrific act… and dispatch all of them back to Satan. However, it’s critical for the global community to acknowledge that true Muslims around the world are good, religious people who equally abhor what these traitors to true Islam have done.” He issued a fresh call in the Vidocq Society Journal for VSMs “to live by our motto, Veritas Veritatum, and help protect ALL innocent people from prejudice and hate.”
Now as he reentered the war room, he looked down at the fax and his face brightened. “Good news. The suspect confessed to killing Lorean Quincy Weaver, the Girl with the Missing Face that Frank identified.” Fleisher threw the paper fax on the table, and Bender and Walter took turns studying it. The police dispatch warmly congratulated Walter for his profile.
“Richard’s profile was right on the money,” Fleisher said with pride, as Walter smiled graciously, and Bender’s face fell. “Way to go, Richard.”
The killer was a macho ex-con known for carrying weapons, and he’d struck Weaver in the head, just as Walter predicted. But the killer wasn’t Robert Updegrove, the ex-con who found the grave and Walter said also fit the profile.
“I knew it wasn’t Updegrove!” Bender said. “Rich, you’re not always right.”
Walter rolled his eyes, wondering how to fend off the coming attack. For once, he wished his partner would be satisfied with the remarkable role his forensic art had played in bringing a killer to justice.
“Frank, you’re going to push me only so far.”
The Vidocq Society had lost track of the case in the two years since Bender completed his facial reconstruction. The department had transmitted the image widely to police departments and the media, with no results. Keith Hall, the officer who led the investigation, had left the small department to become a detective with the Onondaga County sheriff ’s office, taking his passion with him. The case had gone nowhere.
Then in September 2001, Thaddeus Maine, a bright, young Manlius officer, was ordered by his commander to throw out hopeless cold-case files, including that of the Girl with the Missing Face.
But as Maine looked over the old files, he was intrigued. He had guarded the grave five years ago, and had hung a photograph of Bender’s bust on his office wall. It was still there, staring down at him, a coffee-colored woman with a broad nose and lips, close-set eyes, and a high forehead fringed with short curly hair. He saw decency, and a world of pain, in those eyes. They chilled him. He liked the woman, whoever she was, and felt sorry for her.
Maine decided to make a few phone calls. A respected investigator, he had been given permission to look into any worthwhile cases one last time before shredding them, but he had been asked to do it quietly. He began to interview residents of nearby farms, asking about itinerant laborers who had passed through the area more than ten years before. Hundreds of phone calls later, he came across the name of Roland Patnode, an American Indian carpenter from Massena, New York, on the Canadian border who had rented a cabin on a farm within sight of the grave-the same cabin Updegrove rented years later.
Patnode quickly became Maine ’s chief person of interest. The six-foot-four, 230-pound man, a great high school athlete who’d earned a wrestling scholarship to college, had served time for a 1986 murder committed within the likely range of time the Manlius victim had disappeared. While working as a carpenter in Syracuse, Patnode was convicted of murdering a transvestite prostitute. At the July 1987 trial, Patnode claimed he’d stabbed David McLaughlin, twenty-two years old, to death in the throat after discovering the slim figure in a dress giving him oral sex was “not a female, it was a man.”
The jury, apparently sympathetic to his lawyer’s claims that a “sleazy homosexual transvestite… duped this poor country boy,” found Patnode innocent of murder and convicted him of man-slaughter. After serving only four years in prison, he’d violated parole and fled to Canada. Rochester police, Maine learned, considered Patnode a possible suspect in the disappearance of several prostitutes, including a missing person from 1986 named Lorean Quincy Weaver.
Following routine procedure, Maine got a copy of Weaver’s mug shot from Rochester. As he studied the young black woman’s short hair, wide mouth, and soft eyes, he literally felt a jolt running through him. While the faces were not identical, he felt certain it was the same young woman who was staring at him from the bust on the wall. He ran down the hall to two superior officers with the photographs and his gut feeling; they all felt the same thing. When they “compared the photo to the bust prepared by Mr. Bender,” a police report later said, “we were certain we had identified the victim.”
It was Lorean Quincy Weaver, twenty-six years old; when her mother saw a photo of the bust she said, “I always wondered what happened to Lorean.” DNA from Lorean’s relatives matched DNA taken from bone marrow in the scattered remains. Police were amazed that Bender had captured her personality in the bust, as well. Lorean, they learned, was a sweet young woman who never wanted to be a prostitute but started as young as fourteen, and never made much money. Her story was the rare one that touched the cops. “She was unlucky,” said Manlius Sergeant William Becker, “right up to getting in the car with the wrong man.” She had last been seen alive getting into a pickup truck in late 1986 with Patnode.
In February 2002, two Manlius detectives went to interview Patnode at the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill about the murder of Weaver. Patnode, thirty-nine, had just been picked up on his parole violation from an Indian reservation in Canada, expecting to serve only a few months on the minor infraction. Then the interrogators put Weaver’s picture in front of him, and his eyes filled with tears. “She’s my ghost,” he said. He confessed to the murder twelve minutes into the interview.
Patnode admitted to killing her in late August or early September 1986. As Walter reviewed the confession, he saw that the crime was a “classic” fit for the profile. Patnode went looking for a prostitute after drinking in a downtown bar, he told detectives, and picked up Weaver and paid her twenty dollars for a sexual encounter in his pickup truck. When that was done, he told her he was breaking up with his girlfriend and wanted a second, more extended sexual encounter, but Weaver objected. Patnode began to force her and she slapped him. He slapped her back hard, four or five times in the face, and then began punching her. She drew a small knife and cut him in self-defense.
“She kept trying to fight me off, but I was much bigger than her,” Patnode said. “I then grabbed her around the neck with both of my hands and started squeezing. I couldn’t stop, and I was feeling so angry. She was trying to get out of my grip, and I kept squeezing her neck. I don’t remember how long I squeezed her neck for, but she slowly stopped moving, and she went limp.”
Patnode began to drive home, wondering what to do with the body, when suddenly Weaver moaned and tried to sit up. Patnode said he grabbed a framing hammer from the center console of his truck and struck her on the head four or five times until she stopped moving. In a three-page confession, he also admitted to sexually violating the corpse before burying her at the edge of a field off Salt Springs Road in Manlius.
The Manlius detectives realized that Richard Walter’s profile was correct in another respect-Patnode was a serial killer. It was a month after killing Weaver on October 1 that Patnode picked up transvestite prostitute McLaughlin and killed him, and he was a likely suspect in other murders.
Weaver’s body went undetected for eleven years. Patnode had all but gotten away with two murders, and might never have been brought to justice if he’d buried Weaver deeper than eleven inches-and if Bender hadn’t been willing “to take a long shot rather than no shot at all.” In October 2002, Patnode was convicted of the murder. As Patnode wept and apologized, Judge Anthony Aloi sentenced him to the maximum penalty of twenty-five years to life in state prison for committing “an unbelievably heinous, atrocious, and cruel act.”
“Lorean Weaver may have been your ghost, Mr. Patnode, but she was a human being. She was a daughter. She was a sister. She was a mother. She was a memory to her family. She was a crack in their broken hearts for all those years… Mr. Patnode,” he said, “you should remain in prison for the rest of your life.”
Lorean’s daughter, Schmillion Weaver, an infant when her mother disappeared, thanked the police for bringing justice to the killers. “I feel closure now,” she said.
“I knew it wasn’t Updegrove!” Bender repeated. “Rich, you got the wrong guy.”
“Frank,” Walter said wearily, “I’ve told you a thousand times a profile is not a suspect. It’s a description of the traits of the likely suspect based on a crime assessment, including the signature at the crime scene and a series of other probabilities. The profile was on the mark.”
But Bender, his eyes shining with glee, seemed not to understand or care about the distinction. The Girl with the Missing Face, the case everyone said was impossible, had turned into one of his greatest triumphs. And Walter had named the wrong guy.
If God had made Lorean Quincy Weaver the first time, Bender had re-created her in clay the second time, and he would never let Walter forget it.
The crowns of great trees made shadowy tracings on the moonlit peak, but the upstairs windows of the Greek Revival were black. Hedges hid the downstairs panes in shifting walls of darkness. The only light came from the far rear of the house, the orange glow of a cigarette floating under the proscenium arch of the music room. Sitting at his beloved 1926 Chickering grand, a classic American piano he had “stolen from a fool quite ignorant of its value,” the thin man placed the cigarette in the ashtray on the lid of the piano and his hands over the keys. He let his mind go, free as the cigarette smoke wending lazily in the faint moonlight by the spray of ostrich feathers in a black vase on the lid. The thin man, so disciplined to the cold beauty and rules of order, was consciously summoning chaos.
Of its own impulse a finger struck middle C.
He had started at dusk with a variation on Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1, gloriously filling the house with music as it drained of light. Now, from the single key, a song of his own creation leaped into existence, spontaneous and brilliant. “I play my mood,” he said. He let his mood soar mightily, exalted in the knowledge that he was creating something new that would never fall on ears other than his own and he would never play again.
He had been a musical prodigy as a youth before the opera of the streets turned his head. Music was his joy, but also a discipline he practiced to enter the labyrinth of the criminal mind. “I do not know a great detective without musical sense,” he once said. “The problem the police often have is that one cannot analyze human behavior with merely logic. You can’t do it. Man is a creature of associative thinking.”
In the thrall of the creation he no longer sensed the darkness beyond the piano, the moonlight on the windowsill, the cigarette smoke bending in the soft breeze from the garden.
Walter was a proud scientist, disdainful of things of the spirit, who lived by strict rules of evidence, the logical assessment of a crime scene bathed in the unsparing light of deduction. Among murder investigators he was often reputed to be the coldest mind in the world. He worshipped the god of reason. Yet his was a classical mind finely tuned to the Doric columns and classical harmonies of his house, stubbornly resistant to modern illusions. Many in our time have forgotten, he said, that “reason is born of twins-rational thinking and emotion. When one denies emotion, it’s still there-we’re animals-and it bites you in the ass, expressing itself now as anger and vehemence. The Greeks struck this balance best.”
The warring Greek gods-Apollo, the sun god of order, forms, and rationalism; Dionysus, the wine god of revels, chaos, ecstasy-shared the same temple and space in men’s hearts, forever in conflict. “As it happens,” he said, “Apollo was the Greek god of detectives; Dionysus was the god of murder.” A man could not think clearly without recognizing both sides of his nature, could not unite them without art or music.
As he played he closed his eyes and saw a boy materialize. He was a small boy in a dark wood on a winter night and he was very cold. He was tied up, perhaps to a tree. The boy was shivering and naked but did not cry anymore. There was an old church in the distance and maybe the boy heard its bells ringing. The night was clear and filled with stars. He felt terrible pain but even stronger were things he not could name, fear, confusion, sweet pleading love, anger, degradation, terror. Maybe he tried to speak but it’s not likely he could get a word out by then. He was not alone. The person who loved the boy the most, who had always taken care of him, who bathed him and dressed him, was there with him now, too. He could smell him close, a large shadow smiling in the darkness, near enough now to blot out the stars. The boy might have screamed then but it was not likely.
This was what happened. Walter was certain of it. The hidden story told by the condition of the body and the crime scene was incontrovertible. Dozens of good men had gone to their graves, afraid to face it. That was OK. It was natural. This darkest of shadows was death itself and men could only live by turning away. “The truth is, the cops just didn’t want to know.”
He saw into the present. He saw the old killer living alone on the edge of a city, a decrepit shell of wantonness and stale pleasure. He saw the old man who had committed the most diabolical of crimes, an especially depraved and merciless child sex murder that would shake any decent person’s soul. No doubt he was considered a little aloof or odd by his neighbors, a “funny old man,” it was a shame he had no family on the holidays, one of those old bachelors who stank of alcohol and cigarettes and showered once a week, not pleasant but nothing to worry about-if they only knew! It was many years later now and the old man had nothing left but his memories. Walter could see him in his dim row house turning the yellowed and crumbling newspaper pages with appalling arrogance to read about himself once again, reliving the sweet memory of the killing when he was young, the zenith of his power and achievement, the high point of his life! What kind of society allowed such a monster his freedom for nearly fifty years, while the nameless and innocent child, he would be a father now, perhaps a grandfather, moldered unknown and unmourned? Walter was offended to the core of his sense of decency. The old killer had exulted over his dark triumph for too long. It was time to go get him.
The piano thundered. This new creation of his seemed to summon shades from every corner of the parlor. It was thrilling to make but it was good he would never hear it again. It was the song of the beast.
Lost in his music, Walter didn’t detect the soft, dissonant tympanic beat in the darkness of the great house, the click of the door against the jamb.
A thick-shouldered man stood in the gloom. He had shining black eyes and the glint of a gun at his hip. His smile was brilliant.
The mighty music stopped, and the echoes faded in the lower rooms. A big hand clapped Walter on the shoulder.
“Nice!” the thin man exclaimed with a hoarse laugh. “I could have had a heart attack! I assumed I’d be enjoying libations alone. The least you could do is call.”
“I did! You were too busy being Beethoven to answer the phone.”
“I think not,” Walter shot back.
Stoud. Walter walked into the parlor turning on lights, and tossed a Hallmark-style card to Stoud with a smirk. It was the invitation to the fifth anniversary of the reburial of the Boy in the Box, also known as America ’s Unknown Child, in his prominent new grave at Ivy Hill Cemetery. Stoud hadn’t been able to go; Walter had brusquely declined the invitation.
Inside was a drawing of a baby being sung up to heaven and a poem, “Little Angels”; Stoud snorted. “Your cynicism is apt, check this out,” Walter said, reading: “From this day forth he becomes a symbol for every child in America who has paid the ultimate price for abuse.”
The thin man took a long drag on his cigarette. “Fleisher thinks my heart has finally turned to stone. OK, he may be right.” He smiled wickedly. “But first they bring him toys, fetishizing the joys of a childhood that was spent six feet underground. Now they’re quite happy to ignore what really happened to him.”
His eyes flared. “The child is not a symbol of anything. He was not a trendy victim of ‘child abuse.’ He was murdered, tortured and murdered. He was prey to the darkest, most complicated murdering personality type the human race has produced, and since we can’t bring a dead boy back to life, it’s not our job to imagine him playing second base. It’s our job to go get the S.O.B. who did it.”
Stoud grinned. There was nothing quite like Richard Walter reaching for the sword.
“AE,” the state trooper said. It was a statement, not a question. The boy had clearly been murdered by the fourth and most diabolical type of killer-the anger-excitation killer.
“Of course,” Walter said, as he spun the triple-digit combination of his silver attaché on the coffee table in front of him. Stoud watched the thin fingers carefully lift out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper.
“The Helix,” Walter said, holding it up. “The map to the bottom, the black hole at the end of the continuum.”
Walter was loath to discuss the Helix, and was downright paranoid about showing it to anyone, even his protégé. When murder descended to the fourth personality subtype, AE, Walter’s schemata described a murderer who killed not for any tangible achievement-money or power or revenge-but simply for the unmatched excitement and pleasure of killing. The AE or sadistic killer murdered and tortured strangers, killed purely for secondary sexual enjoyment, and couldn’t stop. The complex pleasures of sadism drove him insatiably to kill and kill again until he was caught and incarcerated, was killed himself, or died of old age. It was the kind of killer responsible for the dark legends in all cultures of human beasts like Dracula and the werewolf-and in modern times men like Pedro Alonso Lopez, “The Monster of the Andes,” arrested in 1980 after killing more than three hundred women. Yet it was a monster rare enough in American civilization until the 1960s and ’70s, until it went by the names Bundy, Gacy, Boston Strangler, Night Stalker, Green River Killer, and dozens of others. Now the FBI said there were sadistic serial killers operating in every state.
The Helix was a hand-drawn illustration of a swirling spiral cone, marked all along its length by tiny neat handwritten legends in black ink.
“Richard,” Stoud teased. “Turn on that computer yet? Revolutionary papers in forensic journals are generally not handwritten.”
Walter scoffed at the idea he would publish it. “I do not even want to expose it to a hacker, or leave its impressions on a typewriter ink ribbon.”
Walter was right to be paranoid about the Helix and keep it locked away in the steel-ribbed attaché, Stoud thought. The thin man sounded grandiose when he described it as “the most dangerous knowledge in the world.” But he had a point. While it didn’t teach a man how to build a nuclear bomb, it showed him something more perilous-how to release the darkest evil in himself.
“I have to be careful,” Walter said. “The sadists are the first ones to attend my lectures, to order reprints of my papers. Like everyone, the sadist is eager to find out who he really is, how to achieve his dream. In the wrong hands, the Helix is a self-help guide for a serial killer or a mass murderer.” Once, when making his speech in Marquette, Michigan, “Sadistic Acting Out: A Theoretical Model,” at a forensic convention, Walter saw a suspected rapist in the audience.
Sadists take their work seriously, he said. Sexual sadists, like Ted Bundy, represent the class of criminals with the highest IQ, an average of 119. They are often very bright, charming, and utterly normal and trustworthy-until, being master manipulators, they get an unsuspecting victim alone, and the monster emerges. The learning curve is complicated and absorbs all the senses-touching, viewing, smelling, tasting, hearing. It’s difficult and time-consuming to figure out exactly what to do next. In Kansas, Walter spent a day consulting with the Wichita police helping them piece together a series of murders that police believed were caused by one man. That afternoon as he was about to lecture on sadism to the First World Meeting of Police Surgeons and Police Medical Officers, “a detective came up to me and said, ‘I just kicked the suspect out of your audience.’” The suspected serial killer had been prepared to take notes.
As one of the founders of modern criminal profiling, Walter was widely known for describing the four personality subtypes of killers with Keppel. He was the first to deeply analyze the psychology of bite-mark evidence left by murderer-rapists. He pioneered a system for analyzing pre-crime, crime, and post-crime behavior of murder suspects. But the Helix, containing his theory of sadism, was his greatest contribution to criminology. When FBI agent Robert Ressler heard him lecture on it in the mid-1980s, he immediately invited Walter to Quantico to lecture to the bureau’s Behavioral Sciences Unit profilers, and the two profilers began a lifelong friendship. Walter teased Ressler that “the bureau still doesn’t understand sadism. Bob, the FBI hasn’t had a new idea since 1978.”
Unlike the first three personality types of killers, for whom murder is the goal, murder is not the motivation for the anger-excitation killer; the process of killing itself is the pleasure and the goal-prolonged torture that sparks the killer’s fantasy life. While other murderers acted as deeply flawed or evil human beings, the sadist’s indoctrination and transformation was so thorough he or she seemed no longer human. Once a murderer reached the complex fury known as anger-excitation, it was as if a trapdoor opened beneath him, with eight steps down to the very bottom, the worst killers of humankind. Based on thousands of interviews with sadists and other murderers as well as the testimony of cops in the field, Walter’s Helix charted those eight steps with psychological and behavioral precision.
It was a time-honored path of self-discovery pointing toward annihilation blazed by the Marquis de Sade, the seventeenth-century father of sadism, and all who follow. The journey could also be seen as the precise opposite of the hero’s journey, the timeless climb to redemption, the soul’s climb to enlightenment or God; in ages past it was known as the downward journey, to the Father of Darkness. The medieval imagery was apt. It was the wasteland of the soul. Although visually the Helix resembled Francis Crick and James Watson’s DNA double helix representing the code to life, it functioned more like Dante’s fourteenth-century map of the underworld, leading through increasing human sins, betrayals, and monstrosities to the bottom, the Ninth Circle of Hell.
“Sadism is a crime of luxury,” Walter said. “Not everybody can afford it. It takes time, investment, it takes a covert life, it takes a whole series of learning requirements-it’s like a Ph.D. There’s a sequential learning pattern for them; you just don’t wake up one day and you’re a sexual sadist. It’s the growth curve of evil.”
But like other arts that were once the exclusive province of the aristocracy, sadism is now within the reach of the masses. Once a man needed wealth, power, position to have the luxury of time and access to victims. Now all he needed, Walter said, was “a minimum-wage job, a studio apartment, a cheap panel truck, cable TV to instruct him, and his full suite of constitutional freedoms.” Sexual sadists are rarer in repressive societies; they are a dark fruit of democracy.
In the Helix, Walter charts an inexorable eight-step pattern of increasing depravity that leads to the sadistic killer and beyond, to the very depths of human evil.
“If I locate a developing sadist on the Helix, I know where he’s been, and I know where he’s going.”
In the beginning, the developing sadist, lured by the temptation of his own obsessions, is drawn to a self-destructive fetish, such as “pornography, a lust for women’s shoes or teens’ underwear, or whatever. All sexual sadists have fetishes, usually three or four operating at one time. All fetishists don’t become sexual sadists.”
Once snared by his fetish, however, the potential sadist has entered the Helix. And once inside, there is no way out. Walter spoke of it as if it were a “House of Sadism.” “A man enters a room,” Walter said, “and the door closes behind him. Men make choices, and there are doors that close permanently. There is no going back.” He may never progress to step two, but that is the only direction available-downward, to the depths of the pathology.
The pathology is insatiable. When the fetish no longer satisfies, the next step is voyeurism. The voyeur can be highly specialized. “I had a case where the voyeur was a Peeping Tom specializing in Army lieutenants’ wives,” Walter said.
The following step, when the voyeur needs more, is frotteurism. “We’ve all been victims of frotteurs,” Richard Walter said. “These are the people who get sexual gratification from anonymously rubbing against you in a crowd.” As an adjunct professor at Michigan State University, Walter investigated two students, homosexual twins, who wore tight jeans every Saturday and waited for the 72,000 faithful to pour out of Spartan Stadium after football games, touching and feeling as they worked unseen against the crowd.
The sadist is now on a path to achieve intimacy and sexual gratification without vulnerability, making the wrong choice endlessly depicted in the oldest stories, taking without giving his heart. Unable to form authentic relationships, he becomes a “master at manipulating others to get what he wants. Sadists even go through marriages, but by and large unless the person has something they want, they just don’t count.” Many achieve normal sexual relations with wives, husbands, or lovers, but after a time that level of emotional vulnerability becomes intolerable. It’s “far more satisfying to target potential victims and imagine or later actualize out the relationship with them in the total control position.”
Fetishists, voyeurs, and frotteurs choose and control their victims from an emotional distance. But in subsequent steps the sadist crosses a dangerous divide. Fantasy or limited touching or striking is no longer enough; he desires the more intimate relationship, and approaches the victim with punishing control in mind: dominance, submission, bondage, and discipline.
“He can’t bond, he can’t achieve sexual satisfaction by being honest and legitimate, can’t emotionally invest in anybody else, is totally exploiting, so he finds secondary sexual gratification by dominating a victim utterly. It’s a systematic way to feed and empower himself through fantasies by creating a sense of dread and dependency in the victim. Their thrill comes from the feeling ‘I own you. You don’t eat unless I say so. You live and breathe at my request. Your life is not your own.’ It gives them a messianic sense of importance.”
When bondage no longer satisfies, the developing sadist inevitably becomes a devotee of picquerism. A picquer derives from the French, meaning to penetrate, cut. “Picquers derive sexual satisfaction from stabbing, cutting, slicing, rendering human flesh. It’s the people who cut leather coats in stores as a second skin, a practice skin. They’re freeway snipers firing rifle shots into the victim, like the Tower Killer, or lovers’-lane killers like the Son of Sam.”
The final descent is to full-blown sadism. One becomes a sadistic killer, deriving sexual satisfaction from a complex ritual of torturing and murdering a victim. Bundy, who said pornography started him onto the path of the Helix, ended here.
The Bundy-type killer has prepared extensively for this moment. He has taken health classes so he will not contract AIDS or another illness. He becomes expert on the universal methods of saving his victim’s life-again and again-to prolong the pleasure of torture. He strangles her to within an inch of death, stops to apply Red Cross-approved mouth-to-mouth. He strangles her again, this time with ligature, a pleasure of a different shade, and moments before death revives her again with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Then it’s on to the bathroom, where he holds her head under a full tub of cool water and drowns her to within an inch of her life yet again. This is a subtly different pleasure entirely; while instructing police worldwide on the varieties of sadistic experience, Walter tells them to fill a bucket with cool water and hold a large sponge underwater with both hands, allowing themselves to feel the tingles on the small hairs along the arm, the awakening of an erogenous zone. Then they realize why so many female strangling victims are found near or in water or bathtubs-it’s not, as police commonly assume, to destroy the evidence. The water heightens the killer’s sensitivity and pleasure.
The horrors are limited only by the sadist’s imagination. The endgame, always, is sexual gratification produced by constantly exposing the victim to dominance, degradation, and dread. Walter has interviewed a few extremely lucky and rare women who survived twelve hours at the hands of a sexual sadist and somehow escaped. “They were begging to die,” he said.
Even during the torture and murder, the killer cannot expose himself emotionally to the victim. Only after he takes body parts back to his lair can he feel enough in control to open up sexually. Through more than forty victims, this was Ted Bundy’s raison d’être. His souvenir was the head. In the privacy of his home, he masturbated on the young woman’s head, then burned it in a fireplace.
When taking souvenirs doesn’t gratify anymore, the sadistic killer knows three final, descending options: necrophilia, or sex with the dead, historic vampirism-the ancient practice of blood draining, driven by sexual sadism-and finally cannibalism. Eating human flesh is the sadist’s ultimate sexual union, the ultimate intimacy without vulnerability: “I own you entirely.”
This was Jeffrey Dahmer’s final stop, the subfloor of the house of sadism. The centuries of fables about an angry man who must open his heart to love, to the vulnerability of life, or face psychological death-the tale of beauty and the beast-are not without meaning. Dahmer was simultaneously gratified and mocked by the insatiable hollowness and evil of his choice-a literal feast of death. For him, cannibalism was only the beginning. He literally could eat all he wanted, but he’d never be satisfied. “The desire is insatiable.”
The eight steps led to the abyss, the root of the myth of Dracula and the reality of Hitler, the grotesque killing forms Walter called the “ultimate nightmare.” Walter was an atheist, but despite his Christian metaphors Dante had done a fine job of portraying evil, Walter said.
The thin man went to the shelf and pulled down a beaten old copy of The Inferno, which he hadn’t read since college. He was intrigued to see the fourteenth-century poet had done similar work, apportioning hell into nine concentric circles, the last of which had four zones.
“The Ninth Circle of Hell is impressive,” he said. It was the lake of ice known as Cocytus, where betrayers of humanity were frozen for eternity, each encased to a different depth, from the waist down to total immersion. Walter admired the many excellent forms of vengeance portrayed, such as Count Ugolino beating the head of Archbishop Ruggieri, who had imprisoned and starved him and his children. At the center of the lake is Satan, waist-deep in ice, a huge, terrifying, winged beast with three heads. The three mouths each chew on traitors such as Brutus and Judas Iscariot. The six eyes weep tears that mix with the traitors’ blood. The six wings beat to escape but send an icy wind that further imprisons all. Judas suffers the most, his head in the mouth of Lucifer, his back forever skinned by Lucifer’s claws.
“I quite like it,” Walter said. “A little overdramatic, perhaps. But perps haven’t changed much, nor their just deserts.”
Stoud saw the photographs of the boy covering the trestle table. His studied the old police photos from 1957. Walter pointed to the cuts and bruises all over the body. He saw evidence of burning, cutting, spanking, and ligature marks. There were signs of starvation and dehydration. The anus had been sodomized, evidently with all manner of instruments. One hand and one foot were severely withered, a process caused by overexposure to water.
The burn scars on the torso showed perhaps where cigarettes had been put out. There was evidence needles had been inserted here and there. The narrow head squeezed in on the sides by some terrible pressure, probably a vise.
As soon as he saw the photographs, Walter realized that the police, led by the late Remington Bristow, had built much of four decades of investigation on the wrong premise. Bristow’s sentimental attachment to the idea the boy had been accidentally killed by loving parents was absurd.
“It’s sadism,” Walter said. “Now we see that what Mary told Kelly and McGillen in Cincinnati makes perfect sense.” Mary’s mother had an ideal setup to enjoy her exploitation of the boy, he said. The irony of being a respected librarian, working with schoolchildren on the prestigious Main Line of Philadelphia, would have excited her. It was the 1950s, when the world of suburban mothers and children was portrayed by June Cleaver standing in the kitchen in her apron saying with a frown, “I’m worried about the Beave.” And the Beaver saying, “Gee, Wally, that’s swell!”
The boy’s secluded basement prison was a perfect cover for her. Emotionally drained after her attacks, she could clean herself of blood or hair, lock the boy back down in his box, and reassume her roles in society. Neighbor. Friend. Librarian. Wife. Mother. She’d become more rigid, sadism would change her personality, but she’d handle it far below the radar, a few more Bloody Marys with her husband, a few more appearances at church.
She would have thrilled with the sense of power of dominating her secret, far different world.
“She didn’t need to cover up in front of her husband or daughter; they were thoroughly terrified of her, totally submissive,” Walter said. “Guilt was nonexistent. She was comfortable with the facts-this is who I am. While everyone else is searching for who they are, she knows the truth.”
The torture would have proceeded slowly and escalated over the months and years. “The fancy term for the cuts and bruises we see is polymorphic perverse-all over the body, equidistant, no one particular preference. Keep in mind this boy’s penis is not going to give this woman any satisfaction, what’s going to give her satisfaction, in this heaviest and most complicated of subtypes, is in the process of killing. So therefore one administers torture in a systematic way that then gets them off. Each time she’s injuring him she’s fantasizing the ultimate death, but she’s trying to maximize the experience of emasculation over time.”
She probably read to him. Hansel and Gretel would have given her pleasure. The fairy tale, stale and locked in a children’s book in the library, was one she brought to life in her own house.
“Get up, you lazy bones, fetch water and cook something for your brother,” the witch cried. “When he’s fat I’ll eat him up.”
Gretel cried and cried for she could do nothing to save Hansel.
The appeal of Jonathan was to snuff out a man when he was just developing. Destroying him will be the ultimate sexual pleasure, but she prolongs it by slowly degrading him. “She has him dependent, fearful, degraded, she’s created an image of him and now she’s trying to destroy the image, and he just becomes a prop. Everything that went wrong in her own life, she had a wonderful whipping boy.”
The narrow misshapen head indicates “she did a lot of head pressure, squeezing his head real tight with hands or implements or a vise, keeping him immobile in a head harness. She probably had a fair amount of bondage, tying up, whipping him, taking him out of the box, someplace where he was unseen. She had sex with him. She’s getting off as she’s doing this.”
She despises him for his innocence, youth, and his failure. “He’s likely retarded, has surgical scars from his first year of life so he’s damaged goods. He was told by his parents, he’s trash, a throw-away child. She knew what she wanted. She knew she needed a sex toy, and instead of choosing a dildo or a plastic doll, which they didn’t have then, she could have a real live one and it didn’t make any difference. Now you see how they view other people. Other people simply don’t exist.”
When the nightmarish headlines begin about the Boy in the Box, she follows it closely, getting high from it. At the library and in church she says, “Isn’t it terrible about that boy?” Her power feels ever more expansive; she is aggressing not only against the boy but the police department, the entire community of Philadelphia, and the Main Line especially.
By the time of the boy’s death, Mary’s mother had moved deep into the Helix and was on the high cusp of bondage and discipline. “He’s bonded in the basement, chained down, secured in that box.” Advancement down the scale is unpredictable; it can take weeks, years, or mere hours. The puncture scars on Jonathan’s body indicate that the next phase was starting-picquerism-when suddenly on an afternoon in 1957 the mother became a murderer. It was clear to Walter that the mother, having teased out her pleasure over years and then suddenly discovered the exhilarating rush of killing, “would have chosen another victim in short order, and dispatched him much more quickly.”
The Main Line librarian, he believes, was a serial killer in the making.
The hatred of innocence continued unabated, of that there is powerful evidence. Shortly before her death, the aging mother asked her daughter, now a young woman, if she could share her bed sexually one more time. The daughter refused, engendering rage from the old woman.
“So the mother was the perfect killer,” Walter said. “There’s only one problem with this scenario.” He took a long draw on a Kool.
“She didn’t do it.”
He smiled coolly in the gloom of the parlor.
“But I know who did.”
Late one Sunday night, the week before Christmas 2004, Walter was drinking wine and watching ultimate fighting on cable when he received a call from the police department in Hudson, Wisconsin (population 8,775), a small town on the St. Croix River west of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Was it too late to call? The officer sounded nervous.
“Not to worry,” Walter said.
“Erickson is dead.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“They found him at the church.”
Walter listened quietly. He had visited Hudson two weeks ago to consult with the police on the biggest cold case in the small town’s history-the double murder at the O’Connell Funeral Home nearly three years earlier.
On February 5, 2002, funeral director Dan O’Connell, thirty-nine, one of the town’s leading citizens, and his assistant, college intern James Ellison, twenty-two, were found shot to death in the funeral home in broad daylight. The police were astounded. It was as unthinkable as a spaceship landing in the river and little green men swimming ashore. In Hudson, folks only saw such things on TV, or read about them in the city newspaper.
The victims were respected people with no known enemies who hadn’t engaged in any risky behavior, such as drug dealing, that could have set them up for murder. O’Connell was one of Hudson ’s most prominent businessmen, a leader of the Catholic Church, a paramedic, and active in the Rotary Club, the Boy Scouts, and YMCA fund-raisers. He had been named King of the North Hudson Pepper Fest. Ellison was an upstanding young man with few local ties. There was no robbery, no motive for the double murder in the quiet small town.
As the police struggled to find suspects, O’Connell’s sister, Kathleen, heard from a friend about the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia. The local Star Tribune, in Minneapolis, said they were a group of “volunteer super sleuths” and “cold-case cowboys” who tackled murders that “stymied local law enforcement across the nation” and solved 80 percent of them. Willing to “grab on to anything for answers,” Kathleen O’Connell e-mailed the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia, pleading for help. She received a formal reply that, out of respect for local police, the society would not consider a murder case until it was at least two years old. On the second anniversary of the slaying, with the Hudson police still thwarted, she wrote again, and was approved. “The Murder of Daniel O’Connell and James Ellison” went on the Vidocq docket as Case No. 133. The society paid for Hudson lieutenant Paul Larson to present the case in the Downtown Club over lunch on April 15, 2004. The case “had Richard’s name all over it,” Fleisher said, and indeed Walter took an immediate interest and flew out to Hudson to assist.
Fleisher was convinced the case had attracted a strong collective commitment, the passionate heat “absolutely required” to solve a cold murder. “There’s a family very interested in their loved one’s case, a police department willing to go that extra distance, a prosecutor who’s willing to cooperate to get the job done, and the media willing to pay attention to the case,” he said. “You need all of it to get the job done.”
The famous profiler from Philadelphia arriving in Hudson was front-page news in the weekly Hudson Gazette. Walter was pictured grinning and standing alongside the young cops he quickly took under his wing. He used the story to plant seeds of doubt in the suspect. “We know more than the killer thinks we do,” he said, employing one of his favorite lines. “If I were him, I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”
In the first two days Walter read the case file, interviewed the cops, and considered the seven suspects of some interest to the police, none of whom stood out in their minds after two years. As the young cops trailed him around town, they, too, began smoking Kools.
“Gentlemen, it’s plain to me,” he announced. “It’s the priest.”
The suspect was Roman Catholic priest Ryan Erickson, thirty-one years old, who had a powerful motive to silence O’Connell. The funeral director, a leader of the Catholic Church, had confronted the priest the day before the murders about his alleged sexual abuse of boys. O’Connell didn’t like Erickson, whose tenure in the church had been disappointing, and threatened to force him out of the church if the charges were true. Walter advised the police to bring the Reverend Erickson in for questioning, and interrogated the priest himself. During questioning by the police and Walter, the priest had been reduced to tears. “He’s our guy,” Walter said afterward. “The double murder is executed just this way, all power, the removal of a threat.”
But now on the telephone, the officer sounded anxious. After Erickson told people that the police considered him a suspect, the priest had killed himself. Parishioners found him that Sunday morning, December 19, before early mass at St. Mary of the Seven Dolors Church in Hurley, Wisconsin, a town of 1,800 people near Lake Superior, where Erickson had been transferred to lead the parish. Churchgoers were confronted with the sight of the priest in full vestments hanging from the porch of the rectory.
Walter let out a low whistle.
Case manager Fred Bornhofen would record Case No. 133 in Vidocq Society records this way: “Investigation revealed that a Roman Catholic priest became a prime suspect and R. Walter assisted in an interview and a confrontation… Fr. Erickson was found hanged in front of his church… Erickson was suspected to be a pathological liar, embezzler, gun enthusiast, and a pervert.” Case closed.
But it wasn’t so simple. Erickson had left a suicide note in which he denied killing anyone. Investigators didn’t have anything on him, he wrote in the note. “None of my guns matched, no DNA of mine was found, and no one saw me leaving the funeral home.”
“Hmmmm,” Walter said. “It sounds less like the plea of an innocent man than a criminal defense argument. He’s unwittingly admitting guilt. It seems the supposed man of God lived a divided life between his professed image and his rather tawdry personal secrets. When events threatened to expose the charade, he refuses to take responsibility, killing to silence it, and when that doesn’t work, committing suicide.”
“Any thoughts on what we should do?” The police considered Erickson the prime suspect, but they were concerned about the ramifications of his suicide before he was charged, tried, or convicted. The department wanted to somehow resolve any questions and close the case. Walter had the novel idea of bringing the case to court posthumously.
“But first things first-good riddance to bad rubbish.”
The officer smirked. The Hudson police had never worked with anybody like Walter.
“By the way, Richard, we found a bunch of ripe bananas in the priest’s apartment. But we know he didn’t like bananas.”
Walter chuckled. The priest had read the newspaper, he said, and risen to the challenge.
“He used them as a timer, and as it happens I was right. He shouldn’t have bought any green bananas.”
Bender was walking along a remote lake on a sunny day. In woods along the shore he saw an old white Cadillac overgrown with vines, the trunk open. He went to investigate. The car had a vintage Jersey plate, the color of yellowing teeth, with the 1930s-style black block letters, GARDEN STATE. The license number swam away as he tried to read it. The trunk was empty, but he saw clearly the bloodstains on the carpeted face of the wheel well. He walked back to the lake and out onto a narrow wooden dock over the shallow blue-green water. Just under the surface a man was floating on his back, naked, his skin a rotted gourd, his black hair swirling in the current, the red dot of a bullet hole through his forehead. His eyes were wide open, bright blue. The lips were moving.
“Help me,” the lips cried. “Help me.”
Bender startled awake from the dream. An hour later, a New Jersey coroner called, a friend, looking for help in identifying a body. It was a new one.
“A wet one?”
“How’d you know?”
“I had a dream. A man in the water. I’ll let you know what I find out.” What I find out when I talk to him again.
Bender walked with the dead in his dreams. He felt comfortable with them, embraced, at home. They called to him, shielded him, welcomed him. But mostly they pleaded. It was a gift and he didn’t ask its source. He submitted to it without question. You had to do what you were made to do; this was why, in his youth, he was repulsed by art hanging on walls. He was the advocate of the dead, the voice for the voiceless who walked between worlds.
He told Walter about the man in the water. His partner scowled. “Frank, I’m not often intrigued by mob killings. I like challenges. Mob hits are all the same, all power, as nuanced as a tire iron to the head.” The dream of the man in the water stopped. But others came-the girl in the steamer trunk, the man hanging in the tree, the boy shot through the temple-crowding his nights and pushing into his days.
Now in his late sixties, Bender was increasingly sensitive to the shadowy realm of dreams. He felt like an instrument being finely tuned with age. Yet he was also more modest and wary of his gift. It spooked him sometimes that he just didn’t know how he knew things. Once, while sculpting a statue of a policeman standing heroically in a New Jersey park, a memorial to the courage of fallen officers, he had reluctantly included on the statue the badge number of the young officer he used as a model. “I warned him against it. It was a memorial statue, and it just felt like bad karma.” Shortly afterward, the young officer was killed.
Bender never used the word “psychic”; admit to that and he’d never work again. Cops and forensic intellectuals like Walter were the ultimate hypocrites: They mocked seers, except when they used them to spectacular result. Bender was more fully immersed in the world of the flesh than anyone he knew, but somehow it wasn’t his purpose.
That summer he found himself praying to God for the first time in his life. He had been given a single hard flame of purpose. Jan had been diagnosed with a fatal cancer, and Bender had abandoned all his other projects for the single task of keeping her alive.
The nonsmoker’s lung cancer had rapidly metastasized. Jan had left her job, and stopped chemotherapy after one session, saying it wasn’t worth the pain. Doctors at two city hospitals performed numerous tests and said she had weeks, perhaps months, to live. Bender held her through long sleepless nights of screaming pain; the morphine wasn’t helping. She was making plans to move into a hospice.
Bender’s partners were devastated for him and for Jan. Fleisher wept. All of them were feeling mortal. The Vidocq Society, now seventeen years old, was beginning to lose its old lions. Renowned pathologist Halbert E. Fillinger Jr., seventy-nine, said by many to embody the highest virtues of the Vidocq Society, died in June 2006 of complications from Parkinson’s disease. Fillinger, who worked as a pathologist for more than forty years, performed more than 50,000 autopsies, and helped solve hundreds of homicides, was nationally mourned in the forensics community. He was still working as the Montgomery County coroner the week before he died.
In May 2004, Detective Samuel Weinstein, the first officer on the scene at the Boy in the Box crime in 1957 and head of the Vidocq Society team still investigating the death, became the latest in a long blue line to follow the boy. Fleisher eulogized him as a “man among men,” a World War II combat Marine who served as a Philadelphia police detective for thirty-five years and voluntarily served with honor seven times with the Israel Defense Forces, including the tank division, making parachute jumps with the IDF while in his seventies. “Rest in peace, my friend,” Fleisher said. “You are in a far better place.”
Ressler, one of the FBI’s pioneers of modern criminal profiling, suffered from a rapidly advancing form of Parkinson’s disease. Walter was distraught. With Ressler in a wheelchair and unable to come to the phone, and his coauthor Keppel slowed by major heart surgery, his peers in the first generation of great American profilers were seriously ill or dying. “Who will I have to talk to?”
Fleisher had blacked out while at the wheel, with his wife and two daughters in the car, going sixty miles an hour on an expressway in upstate New York. He came to just in time, but was increasingly worried about his health and his weight. Walter lost days every winter to lung ailments.The training of Stoud took on a new imperative, as he felt his decades of heavy smoking closing in.
Walter was especially moved by Frank and Jan’s plight.
“Frank, I won’t pray for you,” he said, “because that’s not what I do. But I will bake some cookies and come down to Philadelphia and we will smoke and drink and enjoy life together. We will all have a marvelous time.”
That morning in July 2007, Bender returned to the only job he had allowed himself while supporting Jan through her battle with cancer. It was, ironically, a death mask, one of the crowning works of his career.
Bender had been commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church to sculpt the death mask for Saint John Nepomucene Neumann, the nineteenth-century Bishop of Philadelphia and the first American male saint. Neumann had died in 1860 and was buried in the basement of St. Peter’s Church at the corner of Fifth Street and Girard Avenue. The body was being fitted with new vestments, a new Episcopal ring, pectoral cross, and the new mask to mark the bicentennial of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
The body of the saint, now 147 years old and wearing the bishop’s miter and white robes, lay in a brightly lit glass case beneath the altar of the old Baroque stone church. Thousands of people from around the world visited the national shrine, pressing their hands against the glass and praying for intercessions, for favors and miracles. It was the intact skeleton of the saint, except for small bones that had been reverently removed many years before and cut into tiny pieces and set in very small, glass-covered containers that priests carried, sometimes set in crosses. These were the relics of the saint.
Bender, feeling a bit like Michelangelo, who had labored for popes, had to be approved by the Vatican itself to perform the sacred act of touching the body of a saint. Cardinal Justin Rigali, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, oversaw the opening of the saint’s casket and the exchange of the Episcopal garb. Bender was rebuilding the face from a single nineteenth-century photograph of Neumann.
That morning he gently caressed the plaster contours of the face again, and felt the familiar sense of awe and mystery he found hard to describe. Surely it was not the face of God he was touching, but to millions of people around the world, it was the next best thing.
He was pleased with his work. The Redemptorist Father Kevin Moley, the pastor of St. Peter’s, was coming to visit the studio that day to inspect his progress. Bender loved to talk to Father Moley about the amazing miracles attributed to the saint.
Within days of Bishop Neumann’s death at age forty-eight in 1860, devoted Catholics began coming to the church and praying at the tomb for special favors. Word spread that favors, even miracles, were being granted. Epidemics of typhoid and cholera that killed thousands of Philadelphians between 1891 and 1900 did not claim a single parishioner of Bishop Neumann’s church.
According to Father Moley, the first of the three documented miracles that led to sainthood occurred in 1923 in Sassuolo, Italy. Eva Benassi, eleven years old, beyond medical help with acute peritonitis, was given the last rites, as doctors said she could not survive the night. While praying over Benassi, a nun touched the girl’s abdomen with a picture of Neumann; that night the peritonitis disappeared.
The second miracle occurred in Villanova, Pennsylvania, on the Main Line of Philadelphia in 1949. On July 8, Kent Lenahan, nineteen years old, was standing on the running board of a moving car when it struck a telephone pole. His skull was crushed, his collarbone broken, a lung punctured. He was admitted to Bryn Mawr Hospital in a coma, and doctors said nothing could be done. Kent began his recovery after his parents prayed at the shrine of Neumann, and then touched him with a relic, a piece of cloth from the bishop’s cassock. A month later, he left the hospital on his own power.
In 1963, Michael Flanigan of Philadelphia, six years old, was dying from Ewing ’s sarcoma, a usually fatal form of cancer. Doctors said the boy had little hope of recovery. His parents took him to Neumann’s tomb, where a parish priest blessed the boy and touched his body with a crucifix containing a relic of the bishop, a chip of bone from the bishop’s remains. Another chip of bone, encased in glass, was pinned to the boy’s clothing. Six weeks later, all traces of the disease had disappeared.
Father Moley arrived on South Street that afternoon with a young priest. Bender showed them the death mask, nearly complete. The project had taken nearly a year of planning by the church, and now Father Moley was thrilled. “It’s magnificent,” he said.
Jan appeared, and Frank introduced her.
“My wife has cancer,” Bender said.
“May I pray for her?” Father Moley asked.
He looked at Jan, who nodded. “Please,” Bender said.
His assistant priest placed on her the saint’s relic, a tiny peice of Neumann’s bone. Father Moley gently laid his hand on Jan’s head and said the prayer to Saint John Neumann. It is a prayer for his intercession to bring a miracle from Jesus Christ that ends, “May death still find us on the sure road to our Father’s House with the light of living Faith in our hearts.”
Jan felt a warmth coursing through her body. “It’s not like a bolt of lightning. It’s soft,” she said.
Within days, the pain began to fade. Jan rose from bed and returned to work. Six weeks later, test after test confirmed the inexplicable: She was completely clear of cancer. Doctors were baffled; the local NBC station reported the “medical miracle.” The Benders were awed. Jan wept with joy with Frank; she believed his devotion to her and to his work with Saint John Neumann had saved her. Father Moley said, “Maybe Saint John Neumann wanted this intercession as a gift” to the artist for his magnificent work. Fleisher jubilantly shared the news with the Vidocq Society.
Walter, ever skeptical, didn’t believe it. He saw Bender talking about his wife’s illness in a firestorm of publicity. It didn’t work for him. It didn’t seem right.
Richard Walter, the thin man in black tie, was nearing the end of a Chardonnay and his patience, listening to a society woman prattle on about this and that. The Pen Ryn mansion, 250 years old, glowed with yellow light on the west bank of the Delaware River, America ’s first mansion row. Music and laughter floated out into the darkness over the broad lawn down to the river. Ladies were greeted by a string quartet, a flute of champagne, and a rose from a smiling federal agent who specialized in busting drug lords. Men had tucked Berettas and Glocks into the jackets and pants of tuxedos; women swapped DNA and blood sample kits for gowns and pearls.
Suddenly without a word Walter pirouetted and walked away from the woman, the back of his starched-proper figure disappearing swiftly into the crowd. She flapped her mouth open and closed like a magnificent egret.
“My God! He walked away right in the middle of my sentence!”
“Oh, it’s OK,” said the woman standing next to her. “He does that to everyone.”
No ball was quite like it: the Vidocq Society annual black-tie fête, event of the year for men and women dressed to kill.
“Where else can you see Frank Bender in a tux?” asked Bill Fleisher, magnificent in black tie with the bronze Vidocq medal around his neck on the tricolor ribbon. He raised a glass of champagne, toasting Bender’s remarkable identification of Colorado Jane Doe, fifty-five years after the young woman’s corpse was discovered by hikers in a Boulder canyon in 1954. The Vidocq Society’s latest triumph had unearthed another possible victim of Los Angeles ’s “Lonely Hearts Killer” Harvey Glatman. Fleisher impulsively grabbed Bender and gave him a hug.
Walter stood to the side, frowning at the public display of affection. In his classic tuxedo, Walter looked like a gaunt double for Holmes in the original Sidney Paget illustrations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in The Strand magazine in the 1890s. But no one had the courage to tell him.
The round tables in the great hall were crowded with detectives from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East on this Sunday in October 2009. Bottles of wine and sprays of alstroemeria lilies had replaced crime-scene photos and autopsy reports de rigueur the rest of the year. This one night of the year, the Murder Room, a portable feast, was decorated for butter, not guns, for celebration and sheer joy.
Commissioner Fleisher prepared for the event as if for a State of the Union address. After the prime rib and salmon, the cake and the coffee, and as the wine and whiskey made extra rounds, Fleisher would emcee the awards ceremony for the coveted Vidocq Society Medal of Honor. The ball was the moment to take stock; a chance to look back and ahead. For nearly twenty years now Fleisher had done so with pride, excitement, and keen anticipation of what was to come. He had watched the society grow from a social luncheon club for detectives to a crime-fighting organization with a global reach.
The Vidocq Society family had grown from three men at lunch to 82 full members, one for each year of E. F. Vidocq’s life, to more than 150 total members, including associates. They had investigated more than 300 unsolved murders, solving 90 percent, offering advice and counsel and the name of the killer. There were more tangible results: arrests, convictions, and depression, and perhaps suicide prevented among families haunted by murder. Truth was their client. It was Aeschylus who said the words of truth are simple, and so it was with the Vidocq Society’s achievements: the lost found, the nameless named, the guilty punished, the innocent set free. VSMs were helpmates to the living, heroes to the dead.
Fleisher, Bender, and Walter sat separately at the round tables, honoring the democratic fellowship. But even the casual views of them standing together in the great hall, draped in the bronze relief medals of E. F. Vidocq cast by Bender, their own Medals of Honor for meritorious service, were powerful affirmations of their unique partnership, the heart of the Vidocq family.
It was a family that kept growing. Jim Dunn, now a tricolor-pinned VSM, shared news that he said was “music to my ears”-his son’s killer was denied parole until 2013. Walter said in a letter to the Texas Parole Board that by refusing to reveal what happened to Scott’s body, Leisha Hamilton showed that “for her… the murder is not over!” She was an unrepentant psychopath with an “insatiable desire for stimulation and conquest” who would seek new victims: “If and when [Hamilton] is reviewed again for release, it is suggested that you re-read this letter.”
Dunn and Walter would continue to battle to keep her in prison the full twenty years, until 2017. But time and Dunn’s wife were steering him toward Walter’s wisdom that a man lets the fires of fury and righteousness burn down.
Walter’s wisdom was for others. He burned with the desire to put away a third killer of Scott Dunn who had “flown beneath the radar all these years.”
“I reminded Jim I’m a graduate of the Evelyn Woods School of Revenge. I’m in this for the long haul.”
It was a night for stories, family stories. Walter was full of them. He had received a strange package from a man in New Jersey some years ago, Mike Rodelli, who claimed to have solved the most famous unsolved serial killer case in modern American history. He’d learned the name of the Zodiac Killer, the unknown assailant who had killed five Californians in 1968 and 1969, taunting the police with letters and cryptograms. Walter had been skeptical, but he’d worked with the amateur sleuth for years, coaching him, and now he was convinced the man was right-the Zodiac Killer was still alive, an elderly and quite wealthy man in California, still living off the pleasure of his iconic murders. Few doubted Walter. He’d also worked for years with another amateur investigator, Ohio trucker Robert Mancini, whom Walter believed had finally cracked the case that Eliot Ness couldn’t. Years after the Vidocq Society studied the case, Mancini had identified the Butcher of Cleveland. The killer was a long-dead sexual sadist who’d worked for the railroads. Justice was a different matter in both cases; justice always was.
“Did I tell you about the time I killed a prosecutor?” Walter asked. He had gone to Oklahoma on a Vidocq Society case to confront the state attorney on a double murder the prosecutor refused to investigate for political reasons, and demanded he file murder charges. The prosecutor told him, “Screw yourself and leave the state.” Walter replied, “I could go through you as easily as around you, but I’d prefer to give you a chance to grow wiser. I will call you three days after Thanksgiving, and if you have not changed your mind, you and I will have a man-to-boy chat.” The prosecutor died of a heart attack before Thanksgiving. “Good!” Walter told the prosecutor’s office. “Whom do I have to deal with next?” Fleisher called the governor of Oklahoma, a friend of his, and the result was “an extremely cooperative new prosecutor,” Walter said. “We solved the case.”
Walter was nearly seventy years old and suffered winter ailments now of greater duration. But he hadn’t slowed down.
“Did I tell you about the time I killed a priest?” Walter asked.
The solving of the double murder in Hudson, Wisconsin, had become one of his favorite stories. After the suicide of Catholic priest Ryan Erickson, whom Walter had named as the prime suspect, the police had taken the profiler’s unusual advice to try to establish the dead cleric’s guilt in court. In a remarkable October 2005 “John Doe” hearing, St. Croix County circuit judge Eric Lundell determined the priest had committed the double murder to avoid exposure as a pedophile. The priest’s lawyer refused to attend, maintaining his deceased client’s innocence. There was no jury.
The prosecution presented fifteen witnesses. A young man testified that Father Ryan served him alcohol and sexually assaulted him repeatedly as a teenager in 2000 and 2001. An eyewitness described a car similar to Erickson’s parked outside the funeral home at the time of the killings. Detectives testified that Erickson knew crime scene details only the killer would know, such as how many bullets were fired into the victims (three) and where they struck (in the head). A church deacon testified that Erickson confessed the killings to him. Erickson was looking out a window when he blurted out, “I done it, and they’re going to get me… Do you know what they do with young guys in prison, especially priests?”
Judge Lundell wrote, “I conclude that Ryan Erickson probably committed the crimes in question. On a scale of one to ten, I would consider it a ten.” The Vidocq Society awarded the Medal of Honor to several members of the Hudson Police Department for solving the double murder at the O’Connell Funeral Home.
Fleisher was especially proud of their work on the tragic case of Marie Noe, convicted of killing eight of her babies. Three months after her arrest, Marie Noe, then seventy years old and walking into the courtroom with a cane, pleaded guilty in June 1999 to smothering eight of her ten children beginning in 1949. The case drew national attention, forcing police and medical professionals to rethink many cases long believed to be sudden infant death syndrome or “crib death” as possible murders.
Marie’s husband, Arthur, sat shaking his head as the names of the eight children were read aloud, and the prosecutor described his wife as “as much a mass murderer as Ted Bundy.”
Noe’s lawyer, David Rudenstein, said Marie did not have “the heart of a killer. This is one of those situations that make us human. Some things happen in life that we cannot understand.”
The court treated Marie more like a sad old mother than a psychopathic killer. She would serve no jail time for mass murder. By the conditions of her plea bargain, which took into account Arthur’s frail health, she was given twenty years of probation, the first five under home confinement, with at least a year with an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet. She was also ordered to undergo treatment sessions with a psychiatrist; her brain was said to be important to study for clues to the root causes of infanticide. Marie told detectives, “All I can figure is that I’m ungodly sick.”
The Vidocq Society had awarded Medals of Honor to Philadelphia magazine writer Stephen Fried and Philadelphia homicide Sergeant Larry Nodiff for their work on the Noe case.
Even amid celebration, Fleisher had regrets. “I’m Jewish,” he said. “I always have regrets.”
Near the top of the list was Carol Ann Dougherty, the nine-year-old raped and murdered in a church in 1962. The Bristol police investigation had gone nowhere. DNA testing advised by the Vidocq Society was “inconclusive.” In 1997, Chief Frank Peranteau told the Vidocq Society that “he considers the matter over as the Grand Jury had identified a possible suspect who has been convicted of another murder in another state,” O’Kane wrote in the Vidocq case log. “The investigation appeared to clear the suspect priest, but he could not explain the ligature,” the strangulation marks that matched a priest’s cincture. No arrests were made.
But thirteen years after the Vidocq Society called the priest the prime suspect, a Philadelphia grand jury in 2005 named Father Sabadish one of sixty-three pedophile priests that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had allowed to prey on their flocks in the past fifty years. The archdiocese was accused of routinely transferring molesters to keep hundreds of abuse allegations from surfacing.
Joan McCrane testified to the grand jury that Sabadish molested her when she was seven years old in 1960, two years before Carol was murdered, at St. Michael the Archangel in Levittown. It started with “tickling,” she said. “He’d put his hands on my shoulders. Then, on my chest. Then, down my pants… He told me that it was our secret and that I was never to tell anyone or we’d both go to hell. I never said anything because I was a little girl and I was scared to death.”
Transferred to St. Mark’s in 1962, Sabadish molested her for two more years, then started abusing her ten-year-old brother, Bill Henis. Sabadish’s assaults on the siblings occurred at the rectories at St. Mark’s and St. Michael’s, the priest’s home, his car, and his mother’s home, often weekly.
“I hated the guy and I was afraid of him,” Henis said. “He didn’t like kids. He’d slap you around, call you stupid. You never knew what would set him off… Sabadish said this is how he showed his love for me. He’d always give me candy. The glove compartment of his car was always filled with it. He’d tell me candy fairies had put it there.”
Sabadish didn’t live to see his secret exposed. After serving as chaplain of the Norristown church, he was appointed in 1994 to the fifteenth parish of his career, as the parochial vicar of St. Stanislaus in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, before retiring. He died in 1999 at the age of eighty-one. He was eulogized by another priest as a man who “touched countless souls, especially those of children.”
Fleisher remained confident the VSMs were right, and the police had missed it. “It was the priest all along,” he said. “The guy was a monster.”
Forty-seven years after her murder, the Carol Ann Dougherty murder case remained cold.
As the great hall filled, a crowd formed around Bender. The sculptor was, as he often had been, the man of the moment. His ID of Colorado Jane Doe, which would make national news, helped crack the oldest case the Vidocq Society had ever worked on in the field.
Fleisher had just learned that the Boulder County sheriff ’s office had identified the unknown corpse found by hikers along the banks of Boulder Creek on April 8, 1954, as Dorothy Gay Howard, an eighteen-year-old blond woman reported as missing from Phoenix, Arizona.
VSMs had worked the case since 2004, when the sheriff ’s office reopened it. The Vidocq Society sent two nationally renowned forensic scientists to exhume Jane Doe’s grave-VSM Dr. Walter Birkby, a forensic anthropologist at the Human Identification Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, and forensic pathologist Dr. Richard Froede, the former U.S. Defense Department chief medical examiner.
Dr. Birkby had appeared in the Discovery Channel documentary Mummies: Frozen in Time, and been part of a scientific team that uncovered the remains of Colorado cannibal Alfred Packer and the five gold prospectors he killed and ate in 1874 (their bones showed “an insatiable hunger”).
Jane Doe’s grave had collapsed in half a century, crushing the skeleton, and forcing the two VSMs to work painstakingly for two days recovering her remains. Dr. Birkby spent three to four weeks at the Human Identification Laboratory just piecing together the many shattered pieces of the woman’s skull before Bender could build a face on it. Bender’s bust appeared on America ’s Most Wanted, adding to an avalanche of publicity that prompted Michelle Marie Fowler to contact the sheriff ’s office, saying she thought Jane Doe was Howard, her great-aunt. A DNA sample from another great-aunt-Roberta Marlene Howard Ashman, a surviving younger sister of Howard-matched the DNA that Drs. Birkby and Froede had recovered from the grave. The mystery that had haunted the family was over, Ashman said. They could “begin the journey of healing and closure that has eluded our family for the past fifty-six years.”
Howard’s ID was so new that the Boulder sheriff ’s office would not announce it until three days after the Vidocq ball, in a press release that didn’t mention the Vidocq Society by name. But Boulder sheriff ’s detective Steve Ainsworth-the lead detective on the case-said, “Frank gave Jane Doe a face and a personality. The likeness was uncanny.”
Bender seemed to grow more amazing as the years went by. Yet this evening was shadowed by the fact that his wife was too ill to attend. Her cancer had come back. Jan believed her husband’s love and divine intervention had allowed her to beat the prognosis for more than a year. But recently she had quit her job as a law firm receptionist. The exhaustion and pain were too much. She was planning for hospice care. Doctors did not expect her to live another year. Bender was trying to remain positive. “Jan’s beat it once, and the doctors couldn’t explain it. If miracles can happen once, they can happen again.”
Joan, his longtime Girlfriend No. 1 and art assistant, was his date for the evening. Tall and blond, with her hair done up over a black dress, she looked on with tenderness and pride as he received a stream of well-wishers and kudos.
Bender still felt the loss of legendary medical examiner Hal Fillinger, the old lion of the Vidocq Society who died in 2006, and who had launched Bender’s career in the Philadelphia morgue in 1977. In those thirty-two years, Bender’s forensic art had changed the face of American crime and criminology. The FBI, after years of slighting Bender and experimenting with computer forensic busts, had returned to old-fashioned art by human hands-to doing it like Frank did it.
His powerful assist to the marshals in bringing in their number one Most Wanted fugitive in 1987, Cosa Nostra kingpin Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, had shaken up the Joseph Colombo crime family in New York City. Persico was the older brother and right-hand man of Carmine “The Snake” Persico, the godfather of the Colombo family.
On September 12, 1989, two years after his arrest, Allie Boy died of cancer of the larynx at the age of sixty-one while serving a twenty-five-year sentence at the federal correctional facility in Lompoc, California.
Mass murderer John E. List, whose capture two decades earlier brought Bender international notice, had also recently died in prison. On March 21, 2008, List, an inmate at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, succumbed to complications of pneumonia. He had enjoyed the largesse of New Jersey taxpayers until the ripe old age of eighty-two.
List lived eighteen years behind bars, nearly the same amount of time he spent as a fugitive. He outlived the family he murdered by thirty-seven years. In a 2002 television interview with ABC’s Connie Chung, List said he killed his family out of fear they would be destroyed by debt and fall away from their Christian beliefs. List prayed aloud for their souls as he laid the bodies of his wife and children under the Tiffany dome skylight in the ballroom. Walter pointed out that if List had simply sold the Tiffany, he could have erased his debts instead of his family.
Until his death List corresponded monthly with the ninety-three-year-old Lutheran pastor he knew as a young man, who believed God had forgiven List for killing his wife, mother, and three young children. The Newark Star-Ledger begged to differ. “If the hell John List so strongly believed in exists, surely he is there today.”
The New York Times told its worldwide readers that a producer at America ’s Most Wanted had asked “Frank Bender, a forensic sculptor, and Richard Walter, a criminal psychologist,” to help capture the fugitive mass murderer. For the previous eighteen years, “dozens of FBI agents and investigators from Union County, New Jersey, found no trace of Mr. List in the United States or overseas.” Bender’s bust led to List’s arrest in eleven days.
John Walsh, the host of America ’s Most Wanted, was widely quoted crediting Bender’s List sculpture for launching AMW as a phenomenon. “I call Frank with the tough cases,” Walsh said. Bender’s legacy as a crime-fighting artist was secure.
The Times described his work in admiring detail. “Studying photographs of Mr. List when he was in his mid-40s, Mr. Bender imagined how he might look in 1989, his face sagging with time,” the newspaper wrote.
But the sculptor was apoplectic when he read the next sentence in the Times: “Mr. Walter theorized that Mr. List would still be wearing horn-rimmed glasses, to make him appear successful.” Although the newspaper had gotten it mostly right, Bender grew more determined to extinguish Walter’s small but important contribution from the record. He talked about suing media organizations that made the same mistake. “Frank, are you nuts?” Walter replied.
But the thin man let his own fires tamp down. “If he’s nuts, he’s our nut. Frank’s my partner, for better and often for worse.”
Just a month before the Vidocq banquet, on September 10, Bender’s thirty years of forensic work came full circle. John Martini, the mob hit man and serial killer who murdered Anna Duval at the Philadelphia airport in 1977, Bender’s first case, died in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, also the jailhouse of John List.
Martini, seventy-nine, New Jersey ’s oldest death row inmate, was confined to a wheelchair, ill, obese. Depressed, he told his attorneys in 1991 that he wanted to drop appeals and be put to death rather than eat bad prison food and live in “horrible” conditions. The week before he was to be executed, a nun working as a prison chaplain got him to change his mind, and the execution never occurred.
The long suffering of Marilyn Flax, the widow of business executive Irving Flax, kidnapped and murdered by Martini in 1989, reminded Fleisher of the passion that still drove him to help America’s victims of crime, who still were often victimized by the justice system as well.
For years the widow was afraid to go to the bank where she withdrew their entire $25,000 savings to pay the ransom to Martini (who shot her husband anyway). She had negotiated with the kidnapper herself, a “horror,” looked into his ice-cold eyes at the drop-off. For years she slept three hours a night, terrified Martini would fulfill his threat to “have somebody kill me.”
She still wore the first diamond pendant her husband gave her, kept his pajamas, socks, and ties in a dresser in her bedroom, carried the first note he ever sent her, “Miss you already.”
“We were madly, madly in love,” she said of her husband. “I couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning to see him. He felt the same way.” When she realized she would never have the satisfaction of seeing Martini die by lethal injection, she wrote him a letter on death row.
“You took away the love of my life,” she wrote. “They say God is a forgiving God… but I am certain that Heaven’s doors are not open to you. Just to think that your soul will be tormented forever and ever-what a comfort that gives me. Enjoy hell.”
Walter and Bender were still tight as warring brothers. They had gone up to Manlius, New York, together to be honored at the Manlius Police Benevolent Association banquet for joint work in solving the murder of Lorean Weaver, the Girl with the Missing Face. After the banquet, they celebrated at the crowded hotel bar in what seemed a competition to drink the most vodka. At four in the morning, they were the only two standing. Later, they lectured together to a high school criminal justice class in Manlius taught by Kathy Hall, wife of detective Keith Hall (who’d first called Bender and the Vidocq Society in on the case, and received the Vidocq Society Medal of Honor for his work).
As he talked to the students, Walter realized that despite their differences he and Bender shared a rare bond, a sense of mystery. Bender told the students the trick to “putting a face on a faceless skull” was to feel the invisible harmonies in the universe. Walter told them, “Once you have crawled inside the soul of the criminal and heard some of the just evil people do, it has an effect. It can put the cold water to innocence. There’re lots of things if I didn’t have to know, I’d rather not.” The thin man said that when one faced these things as he and his partner did, when one acknowledged true evil, life became very precious.
“Remember, life is grand,” he told the students. “Life is wonderful!”
It wasn’t long before Bender was telling everyone he met that Walter had named the wrong suspect in the Manlius murder.
At the podium Fleisher called for quiet. It was time.
In past years, the Vidocq Society had also honored the famous forensic anthropologist William Bass, for founding “The Body Farm” at the University of Tennessee, which revolutionized the study of human decomposition; FBI special agent John S. Martin, America’s top Soviet spy catcher, who investigated the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Meridian, Mississippi; and Dr. Henry Lee, who investigated the JonBenet Ramsey and Laci Peterson murders, and O. J. Simpson’s alleged slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
The first two winners this year were Vidocq Society stalwarts.
Philadelphia district attorney Lynn Abraham was known for unflinching toughness and integrity and her relentless pursuit of French fugitive killer Ira Einhorn. Haskell Askin, one of the nation’s top forensic dentists, had worked on a string of major cases from the Megan Kanka trial to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Abraham spoke movingly about her determination to become a lawyer after medicine, her first choice, was denied to her as a woman and a Jew. Askin, to the surprise of those who hadn’t seen him lately, had gone from a hearty man in the prime of a brilliant career to a frail, smiling, wistful man at the podium, shrunken by terminal cancer. Surrounded by family and friends, he thanked his VSM colleagues with courage and humor and the air of a noble farewell.
It was the first surprise in an evening of unexpected revelations.
Finally, Fleisher bestowed the Vidocq Society’s highest honor, the Halbert Fillinger Lifetime Achievement Award, reserved for an illustrious forensic investigator at the end of a long career.
The award went to Frank Bender.
Frank Bender thanked his late mentor, Hal Fillinger, for introducing him to corpse No. 5233 in the morgue thirty years ago. He said it was a shock to feel the cold gray flesh-“You know I like bodies warm.” He grinned, his silver incisor winking in the lights, and there was laughter.
The tuxedo couldn’t conceal Bender’s fit boxer’s body or sense of vigor. Sixty-eight years old, balding with a white goatee, he looked like a man at least a decade younger, the envy of younger men, capable of chasing muggers and drawing justice for years to come. His eyes gleamed with energy, like a bulb too bright for the fixture. He looked like a man women would always love.
He said he felt the great forensic pathologist was with him, watching him now. Fillinger had said, “Once you get bit by the forensic bug, you’re hooked forever. And he was right.” Looking back on his career, Bender loved being a part of the Vidocq Society because it gave him a feeling of camaraderie he had experienced only once before, in the Navy.
He wanted to do more with Vidocq; there weren’t enough cases that needed his art. He always wished he could do more.
He smiled again and thanked everybody, and the applause rang through the great hall. They were still cheering him when he sat down. He was Frank, a cad among moral men, a hero among mortals, the incarnation of the wild Vidocq, and they loved him. He could say anything to them.
Walter scowled. What had Bender-the same age as him-accomplished to deserve such crowning recognition? Others thought it was odd. It was strange hearing Frank look back fondly on his career when he was smack in the middle of it, fresh from one of his greatest cases, Colorado Jane Doe. Strange, too, when Fleisher introduced “my great friend Frank Bender” in an emotional speech that summed up their decades together, and then gave Frank a sloppy bear hug. No one burned with more passion for the work than Bender, the all-night iron horse. No one lived more in the moment and less in memory.
After the speech, Bender, Fleisher, and Walter walked together out onto the patio overlooking the river. The founders were joined by other men in tuxedos, with cigars and port, Cockburn’s Special Reserve, and women tippy in high heels and gowns with light throws. The autumn evening was unseasonably warm. They stood looking out at the river rolling by in darkness. Pushing the bank, it looked joined to the flat landscape, the rough stitching between two states.
Frank said, “I feel great right now. And it’s now that counts, right?” His smile, like his voice and his eyes, was electric, joyful.
His partners nodded. “Yeah, sure, Frank. It’s great.” They knew. Some others knew but Frank had not wanted to share it widely.
Frank Bender was dying.
Walter stared at Fleisher, who laughed nervously. “Yeah, it was a last-minute thing. We weren’t going to give Frank the award, but then we found out he’s dying. We gotta give it to him.”
Walter glared. Bender roared with laughter.
In recent days he’d learned that he had pleural mesothelioma, the cancer brought on by exposure to asbestos. The cancer was extremely rare, a thousand times rarer than lung cancer caused by heavy smoking. Only about one in a million people worldwide developed it. And it was deadly.
Mesothelioma took twenty to fifty years to develop after exposure. Bender was exposed to asbestos in the Navy, having fled the art establishment and an art college scholarship, knowing only that he didn’t want his art to hang only in museums. The Navy had offered to make him a photographer, but he refused. He wanted to work in the engine room, a mechanic like his dad, although he still couldn’t stop pencil-sketching the other mechanics. He spent three years in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the engine room of the destroyer escort U.S.S. Calcaterra, loving it. “I not only worked with asbestos,” he said, “I slept with it.”
The cancer filled his torso. “It’s bigger than a baby’s head,” the doctor said. The image made him feel bitterly miraculous, like he was giving birth to his own death. Radiation could ease the pain, but it wouldn’t save him. Chemotherapy could shut down his kidneys. “Surgery would be fatal,” Bender said, “because the cancer is already around my heart and lungs like a spiderweb. I have no options.”
Shaken, he had taken his partners into his confidence. He asked Fleisher to read the medical reports for him and give his impression. “It looks very grim, Frank,” Fleisher said sadly. Then Fleisher let out a small laugh.
“It’s just like you, Frank. There could be a movie on your life, and you kick the bucket. The big check comes, and you won’t be here to cash it.”
Bender laughed. They had been friends forever and Fleisher could do no wrong, ever. Bender loved life and he was going to keep at it. He wasn’t frightened. He was Frank.
The pain was very bad at night. The doctors gave him morphine, but he wouldn’t take it.
“Vodka and orange juice works much better,” he said. A screwdriver eased the hurt more smoothly, and it was still sexy. It was hard to pick up a woman after you did morphine.
“His biggest worry,” Fleisher told Walter, “is he still wants to have sex.”
Walter rolled his eyes. “Typical Frank.”
“I don’t think he has as much sex as he says he does,” Fleisher said. “I think he just likes to say it.”
Walter agreed. He didn’t even completely believe that Bender had cancer. The fact was, he hadn’t believed it when Bender had crowed to the media rooftops about the divine “miracle” of Jan’s cancer disappearing, and Jan’s cancer came back. Had it ever really gone? Or was Frank just addicted to getting his name in the paper, exposure that might mean work? It was a harsh thought, but in Walter’s world, such psychopathic deceptions and worse happened with every dawn. But deep down, Walter knew his cold reaction was largely a defense.
He didn’t want Frank to be sick. He didn’t want him to die.
“Richard, if you don’t believe me I can show you the medical report,” Bender said at the next Vidocq Society meeting.
“Not necessary,” Walter said, grabbing his friend’s arm. “Come with me.” He dragged Bender over to talk with Dr. Maryanne Costello, distinguished VSM and former chief medical examiner of the state of Virginia. Dr. Costello was one of the nation’s most esteemed forensic pathologists. The living Sherlock Holmes was investigating, searching for evidence.
“Tell Dr. Costello what your doctors told you.”
Bender launched into detail about his cancer, and the two of them were going back and forth, “using a lot of words I didn’t understand,” Walter said.
Dr. Costello said, “How long did they give you?”
Walter lowered his head. “I knew then that this was real,” he said.
Bender said, “Eight to eighteen months. It’s already destroyed one of my ribs.”
Walter arched an eyebrow. “I’ve got an extra rib,” he said.
Bender stared at him.
“Really. Do you want it?”
“No, thanks, I’m watching my weight.”
They laughed.
“You see, doctor, he’s all about vanity to the end.”
Bender was determined to make his time with Jan sweet time. He knew they’d always been meant to be together, and now he felt it in a deep soul way. He remembered when he was eight years old, standing on the stoop of his row house at 2520 Lithgow Street. A young couple carrying a baby knocked on the door of number 2518 next door, the Schwartzes’ house. The door opened and the Schwartzes excitedly welcomed the couple. Frank saw them carry the baby into the house. Many years later he learned the Schwartzes were Jan’s aunt and uncle. The baby was Jan, on the day of her christening. “I saw my wife when she was just born,” Frank marveled. “Now that’s having history.”
Now they were dying together. The doctors had them going at almost the exact same time. It stunned him, like the plot of an opera. “It’s kind of romantic, in a way.”
Frank poured his energies into taking care of Jan. Sixty-one and very tired, with nerve damage from chemotherapy, she said, “I’m like a fuse that burned out at the tip.” He was still a forensic artist, willing to take on any assignment, hoping the Vidocq Society would need him. But it was harder than ever to find work in a recession.
Bender took up the brushes that had started him in the art world. He began painting again. A watercolor of Jan as a smiling ghostly presence floating above a green field; a stark Gothic sketch of a black-and-gray wasteland above which triumphantly rises a tall church (St. Peter’s Church, the shrine of Saint John Neumann, the miracle worker); a man making love to a young woman on a train.
He’d made seven paintings inspired by Jan when she first got sick, and put them on his Web site with a one-line legend: “And she survived!”
On Halloween 2009, the couple that had had their wedding reception in a graveyard celebrated their thirty-ninth anniversary with the gusto of a first date. They drank and danced to “Nobody Does It Better.”
“They’ve had a rich life,” their daughter Vanessa Bender, thirty-eight, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We wish they had more time.”
Frank said he wasn’t afraid of death. “I can’t say, ‘Wow, I wish I had done this or that,’ because I realize what I’ve done. If I go in eight months, I’ll still feel fulfilled.” Death wasn’t something foreign; he’d had his hands on the Reaper for years. And there was a lot of good karma waiting for him wherever it was he was going.
“My father would rather see a victim identified than make money,” their daughter Lisa Brawner, forty-four, told the Inquirer. “It drives my mother crazy, but I know when he gets to heaven, people will be lining up to thank him.”
“In all my dreams,” he said, “the dead protect me.”
That night in the mansion, with the lights and the music floating out over the river, it still all seemed like a dream to him. A friend, VSM Barb Cohan-Saavedra, the former assistant U.S. attorney, warmly congratulated him on his award. She said she always thought of him as a wizard.
“We always knew you were Merlin,” Fleisher quipped. “I’m glad somebody announced it officially from the podium tonight.”
A speaker had told them that men, and now women, had met at round tables to battle evil for a thousand years. There was evidence for a historical King Arthur. Yet, why, he asked, had the Arthurian tales featured three men? Why had these archetypes lasted for ten centuries? Looking at Fleisher, Bender, and Walter, he said there was always in the old stories a wounded king struggling to save the wasteland; his right-hand knight to destroy evil; and the wizard, Merlin, a seer who introduces the life of the spirit, transcendence of good and evil, but is bewitched and finally entrapped by women. Bender grinned, and laughter rippled in the room.
Why did the king keep the seat next to him empty? It was the Perilous Seat, fatal to all but a knight worthy of the journey, who could claim the Holy Grail. More laughter. Fleisher, they knew, kept the seat next to him at the round table empty as a memorial to his late brother-in-law Sal. “That was Sal’s seat, and I loved him. There was nobody like Sal.”
“It’s perfect!” Cohan-Saavedra said. “Frank is Merlin. Richard is Lancelot, and Bill is the Fisher King.” She turned to Bender. “Frank, next year you’ll have to come dressed in a long robe and a tall wizard’s hat.”
“If I make it next year.”
She hadn’t heard. He told her his news, and she didn’t hesitate a second. “Frank, you’ll make it.”
Two men stood nearby, at the edge of the conversation. One short, one tall, both white-haired. Kelly and McGillen were quiet that night. Their table felt empty. Weinstein was gone, having died quietly in his sleep on his seventy-eighth birthday, and Earl Palmer, too. The Vidocq Society Boy in the Box investigative team was the two of them now. Life was pills, prayers, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They were slowing down. But they didn’t stop.
There was a gentle wistfulness about the two old Irishmen, but they were ironweed stubborn. They declined to share the police skepticism about Mary. They had finally talked to the owner of Mary’s old house, who was terrified about what her children and the neighbors would think, into letting them see the basement.
On a fall day when the children were at school, Kelly, McGillen, Detective Augustine, and two police crime technicians arrived at the house in two unmarked cars. The basement walls, floor, and drain seemed just as Mary described. So did the side door that led outside, blocked by shrubs as it opened onto the driveway. Kelly took pictures and the crime tech measured everything. “Those beams show where the coal bin used to be,” said Kelly, who’d tended a coal furnace as a child. “Do you see?” Extra ceiling beams formed a rectangle that looked like it once supported the walls of a coal bin. Augustine said they could go ahead and dig into oil company or real estate records to see if the house once had a coal furnace, but it didn’t matter if they proved that, too. It just didn’t add up. The police closed the case. The old men of the Vidocq Society smiled and nodded, but they knew in their hearts that Mary told the truth.
“We see the boy in three weeks, Bill,” Kelly reminded Bill Fleisher. “The fifty-second year.”
It was just the three of them now at the grave every Veterans Day, the anniversary of the reburial. The park cemetery was gray in the fall, but they brought armfuls of bright flowers. They stood at the tombstone and said a few words to one another and to God. Then they took pictures standing together behind the stone. There were years of pictures like a family album, once five and now three of them standing with the boy in their fedoras and military caps and autumn smiles, guardians of something nameless. It was a private ceremony; the media and public were not invited. They were carrying on Rem Bristow’s thirty-seven years of work, the blue unbroken line. Sometimes Kelly went alone, an errand of joy. The old man leaned down and kissed the stone. “I’ll see you soon, Jonathan.”
Fleisher wasn’t convinced that Mary had told the truth. But he believed “we’re going to get it. The case is solvable.”
Walter wrinkled his nose, as if he smelled sentimentality. “I know who killed the Boy in the Box,” he said, “and Mary’s mother isn’t it.” Walter said it was the young college student who discovered the boy but delayed reporting it for days because the cops had already been hassling him about being a Peeping Tom. The cops at the time couldn’t have understood the significance of the sexual perversion, the signs of the pathology in the suspicious man who discovered the body.
The student admitted he’d spied on the unwed mothers of the Good Shepherd Home, Walter said, and the newspapers in the 1950s didn’t publish the rest of the story: Hidden behind the tree line the young man masturbated as he watched the women across the street. “First, the guy’s an admitted liar and he’s a pervert. The police gave him a rough time about the peeping, but nothing came of it.” With his sexual perversion, he had already entered the Helix, the “House of Sadism.” He was on the growth curve of the sadistic killer.
“This is the guy who found the body,” Walter said. “I don’t believe in coincidences. As it happens, he’s still alive. He’s in his eighties. He’s had a long time to revel in the memory of raping and killing the boy. In fact, he’s still taking pleasure from it. The murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is.”
Fleisher looked over his shoulder to make sure no society women or laymen were in earshot. The Murder Room had unexpectedly rematerialized in the foyer of the Pen Ryn. Sexual sadism hadn’t been on the menu.
“Joe, I’ve got a job for you.” Walter turned to his friend Joe O’Kane, the burly, bearded crooner, poet, and federal agent. “I know where the killer lives. Are you game?”
O’Kane tonight had been singing sad Irish songs he wrote himself to a lovely blond woman, singing with a power that caused her to hold his hand, close her eyes, and tremble with the ancient trails of the O’Kanes. His eyes gleamed with Tullamore Dew, “the milk of my race.”
“I’m there,” O’Kane said in his strong tenor.
Walter had a simple plan. They’d park the Crown Vic on the crowded block in the small eastern Pennsylvania city. He saw it in his mind’s eye. He and the hulking O’Kane would knock on the row house door. An old man, living alone, would peek over the chain, white-haired, probably decrepit and smelling of booze, face tight.
The killer would most assuredly refuse to invite them in. With O’Kane behind him, Walter would set aside his Victorian manners. There was a child to remember, a child who would be a man of fifty-five now, probably a husband and father. It didn’t matter how many years had passed, who forgot or remembered that the boy had ever existed, what the movies and TV news said, who cared or who didn’t. There was fundamental decency at stake. “One is never too old to do the right thing.” He would push his way in, decline a seat if offered. His face would become stone, the prison stare he’d developed in Michigan long ago. Unsmiling, his eyebrow raised up like a blade, he would say, “My dear fellow, it’s high past time you and I had a man-to-boy chat.”
“Rich, can I come with you?” It was Bender.
Walter startled. Bender had already taken one of his well-publicized long shots in the case, and missed. His speculative bust of what the boy’s father might look like had gone out on America ’s Most Wanted and a thousand other media outlets like a note in a bottle. It had been a decade, and nothing came back.
“Frank, what the hell you talkin’ about? You’ll be haunting me soon. Even more than you do now.”
Bender stared at him, grinning like a cat, a cat with a secret. He said nothing.
Walter flushed. “See,” he said, turning to the commissioner, the judge of truth and lies. “What’d I tell you? He’s such a flimflam artist I won’t believe he’s sick until he’s in the grave. He’s the type who would make a deal with the devil and beat it.”
“You guys.” Fleisher smiled and shook his head. “The greatest show on Earth.”
The three of them stood in the parking lot. The night was overcast, no stars. From the great house came the sound of voices, men talking. The lights were going out. The river was black, indistinct, an inky mass with land and sky. When the moon flickered on the water you could see it, wide and slow, moving in the dark.
Bender said he’d gotten full veteran’s benefits now from his time with the Navy, just as if he’d retired from it, because of the cancer.
Fleisher grinned. “Frank, with your fucking luck, you’ll get recalled to Afghanistan.”
They all laughed.
Fleisher looked up. He felt a touch of winter. “A beautiful night.” Bender’s voice was reverent. “It’s the form of nature. Can you see it, the harmony?”
“Bah.” Walter blew cigarette smoke into the night air.
“I’ll pray for you, Frank.” Fleisher and Michelle were getting in the car. “We all will. We love you.”
“Thanks, Bill.” He waved.
It was just the two of them, still standing.
The thin man coughed. Bender looked pale to him in the moonlight.
“I still won’t pray for you,” Walter said. “But I’ll cross my fingers.”