Max glorified God in gratitude for his factory job. He could provide for a young family while some folks didn’t see a paycheck during times of strife. Whenever he could, however, Max would nurture the spirits of others in faith as kind of an ad hoc rabbi. His spiritual volunteering for other families served as occasional capstones to long hours at the factory. It was therapeutic.
Growing up, the two boys sensed the stress on their parents from trying to provide for a Jewish family in wartime. Even though World War II wasn’t fought on American soil, racism was evident in New York. The introverted Morris kept to himself for the most part during high school. Conversely, Sam showed his personality hand often as early as middle school. That hand revealed an ace in the hole: charm.
***
While eighth grade came to an end in 1950 for Sam Sommer, life under the same roof with his only sibling reached culmination, too. Morris Sommer left for the unknown of battle. Sam eventually succumbed to enjoying the house to himself at the start of high school, but he worried often about his brother. His short-lived role as the sole child king of the house quickly faded.
Sam could barely get his stuff spread across state lines in the once-shared bedroom when he heard that Morris was returning home. He was scheduled to come home the following spring from serving in Korea due to the Marine Corps reassigning his duties. Mixed emotions for the younger Sam.
Sam’s charm and athleticism directed his acclimation to high school. Natural grit grabbed the attention of coaches in the fall of 1950. He turned a few heads on the football field and in gym class with an uncanny balance of agility and toughness for a smaller frame.
James Monroe High School in the South Bronx functioned more like a discipline station than a place where apples sat on teachers’ desks in symbolism of harmony. Its climate protruded activities designed to get a handle on a heavy influx of cultural diversity in the Big Apple. Getting along superseded getting good grades.
A spotlight continued to shine on Sam his freshman year. Spring 1951 meant baseball, and the diamond sparkled when Sam skillfully consumed base paths. He let go of the attention he felt at school when Morris returned home later that spring. His presence humbled Sam. The two started a different relationship together predicated on Sam’s maturation. Chasing grounders on baseball fields held nothing to what his brother went through on minefields.
The brotherly bond opened a new synergy in the Sommer household. The family grew spiritually before the plug was pulled on graceful memories when Morris departed again in a couple of months. He was going to learn sonar technology with the Marines. The Corps was impressed with his ability to work controls and read radar images while in Korea, and the military branch wanted to train him further on related applications.
Morris left home in early fall of 1951 to master a craft in digital technology that would bring him around the world. He did not return to New York other than a holiday here and there for several years. Sam and Morris grew apart over time from simple logistics, yet their childhood trials together would lead to a foundation of mutual success.
The summer gel of ’51 between Sam and Morris drove the younger Sommer to begin his sophomore year with budding confidence. Watching his older brother wear a uniform that stood for national pride and world leadership spurred the now-referred-to “Sammy” to don something similar. He wanted to get into the game of serving his country right there in the hub of influential America, albeit in a different manner.
The fall semester at Monroe welcomed a taste of time management for the young Sommer. While some of his classmates confronted teen stresses like what tune to play on the jukebox at the pool hall or how to dress cool for the dance, Sammy fretted over balancing sports and a new job before the age of sixteen.
He spent his after-school hours and weekends delivering butter, eggs, and meat provisions on a bicycle a few weeks into his sophomore year. Sammy had to quit football to focus on the demands of the new job. He put on a work uniform with pride like Morris wore his and hit the streets working for the father of a close friend who owned a dairy proprietorship.
When asked why he worked so much as a teenager, Sammy said, “I finally found a job that I like.”
Max and Anna Sommer tried to guide their youngest son in his juggling of time and priorities. Max’s hands burned a tired and rough tale of a worn out working man. He grew to realize that he wanted something better for Sammy now that Morris dutifully found his niche in the world.
Max pushed the importance of homework to his son with a fair degree of success but nothing exceptional. Sammy’s gifts carried both an aptitude for business and a line drive off of baseball bats. By spring of ’52, Sammy was making money and coaches happy.
The two merging passions kept Sammy focused and out of trouble on the streets. Temptations on sidewalks and in alleyways slowly began to bubble up in New York City in the shape of gangs, cultural clashes, and territorialism. On the flip side, immigrants worked in booming factories, creating a dangling carrot for entrepreneurs and business developers.
Enterprisers on the brink of building a strong economic America embodied a shopping cart full of negotiation skills. Some preferred a handshake; others dealt in written contracts, and a few talked with guns and car rides to no man’s land. Past decades gradually dripped steady drops of organized crime behind the scenes. Sammy’s deliveries carved out short-cuts over time through alleys and catwalks. That put him in unexpected positions to detect a few deals in the dark, suggesting a changing business landscape.
Sammy recalls knowing what he wanted to do the rest of his life by saying to himself after completing delivery routes, “I was born to serve.” He continued to shine around the bases as well. His former introduction to competition by way of a sibling rivalry now morphed into understanding perhaps what he wanted to be when grownup. He struggled, however, to find a twenty-fifth hour of the day.
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PROLOGUE
I’ve Seen Where You Live, I Know What You Eat
A tremor went down my spine the day I heard that Leonard was planning to sell his ranch-style house in the New Jersey suburbs and move to my neighborhood, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a gray, chilly spring day, fittingly gloomy. The dank weather compounded my mood and lent itself to a scene from a grainy noir movie, dilapidated factories in stages of decomposition everywhere that he could hide, stash a weapon, stash a body. Stash me.
It seemed that Leonard thought a loft might better suit his lifestyle. Leonard, the schizophrenic child math prodigy, who had blossomed into a wealthy swinger, painter, and collector of sexual paraphernalia. This wasn’t a good sign since his present residence had apparently been suitably outfitted for his bacchanals for quite some time. He claimed he wanted something bigger, hipper, something located in an area where he wouldn’t stand out quite as much from his cookie cutter neighbors in New Jersey. But I knew that wasn’t it. His wealth could have easily afforded him lofts in SoHo, Tribeca, or Chelsea—all within striking distance of the downtown dungeons and secret after-hours places. The real attraction for him was his new “cousin Susan.” Was he intent on intensifying the deviant nature of his parties with me as his guest of honor?
I’d never met Leonard, but I knew a lot about him. I knew that he had been charged but never convicted of rape and kidnapping. I knew that he had a lavish psychiatric history and that he often went off his meds and had been repeatedly hospitalized. His doctors had decided that he was mentally competent for release. He had been able to keep down his Wall Street job, at least well enough to amass a fortune. Leonard had the knack of appearing so normal at times, so non-descript. If he wanted to, he could look like an ordinary person. He was just an ordinary person, one who just h
appened to be obsessed with me.
I fearfully imagined him dazed, wandering the streets searching for me. The area could readily conceal someone like Leonard by virtue of the eclectic mix of people it attracted. Much to the chagrin of natives and old timers, the “weird folk” had moved in and found that it suited their alternate lifestyles all too well. Williamsburg. It was a forgotten New York neighborhood with exotic, dark alleys; a Mecca for artists, musicians, yuppies, skinheads, and those of the tattooed persuasion. The hulking smokestack of the Domino Sugar factory belched out an aroma of burned brown sugar that draped everything with a sweet, invisible mist. It was a hipster zone, where a chameleon like Leonard could crawl unobtrusively from building to building, from playground to lounge. Leonard, a master of stealth to begin with, might find that Williamsburg rendered his avant-garde lifestyle and morbid moods virtually invisible.
Early spring in New York City can be depressing, and the gloomy weekend served only to fuel my imagination as my mind’s eye saw Leonard examining lofts and surveying the neighborhood. He was near, possibly peering through the window from the back seat of a Town Car as it rolled past clothing stores, cafes, delis, a subway stop, the Salvation Army, the Domino sugar factory. He was examining the landscape, beads of water sliding from the glass to the shiny black exterior of the car. These images sliced through my mind like sharp, piercing screams. Had he come to the conclusion that all Williamsburg residents were creatures of darkness and decay? Or was it just me? Did he believe that I was a perfect match for the side of his personality never seen by his Wall Street clients? Did he picture me in his harness?
The cold gray rain made me feel only more desolate.
***
It wasn’t long after Leonard’s trip to Brooklyn that he let his observations be known by updating his Yahoo! profile. It now featured a graphic close-up photo of a vagina tattooed with a fanged red devil, a shiny metal earring piercing the clitoris. He knew I would see it. He knew he had scared me so much I couldn’t stop looking. On his new profile, below a list of his favorite torture and rape websites was a taunting poem:
Dear cousin, my cousin, Oh cousin so sweet.
I’ve seen where you live, I know what you eat.
I want to see your eyes when we first meet.
He was getting closer, I could feel it. He was emerging from my email inbox, coming out into the real world, my world. He was going to get a closer look at me, see me on the street, go by my house, and run a finger along the gate. And I had nowhere to go.
CHAPTER ONE
Information Not Released to the Public
Murderers are not monsters, they’re men.
And that’s the most frightening thing about them.
—Alice Sebold
After an hour of questioning and getting nowhere, one of the detectives pulled out a photograph. He looked at it, placed it on the table, and with his index finger, slid it toward me across the metal desk. My heart constricted like a convulsion of sharp pins. Fearing it might be a crime scene photo I braced myself. But then I recognized it immediately, it was a simple color photo of Jennifer Whipkey in life, one of two images that I had seen in internet news reports about her murder. Her beaming face seemed to hover ghostlike above the cold steel desk, lying in front of me, looking at me. A presence that was chillingly real. Her cheerful expression was frozen in time. The atmosphere in the blue lit room felt like a morgue. A mere one hundred pounds, she perished under a frenzy of sixty-three stab wounds.
Feeling helpless, I thought of her young child, motherless, like my nephew when my sister died. Death and sorrow—my uninvited twin companions, the feeling was always the same—my soul touching the third rail. I wondered what the detectives thought of me. They seemed like any other overworked cops following up on leads and hitting dead ends three years and counting. Could they really hold suspicions that I was connected to murder? Or were they hoping for just a shred of detail that could point them in the right direction and spring the case back to life? I told them that I felt horrible about her death, about the nature of this extremely violent crime, and how terrifying it must have been for her. That I had heartfelt sympathy for what her family was going through. I knew all about how the violent death of a young woman decimates the surviving family. My words felt futile. I wished that there something I could do to help them, but I knew nothing.
The meeting was long and unsettling. It was obvious they really wanted to solve this case which almost seemed personal for them. They had to answer to her family and her community. Their labor, frustration, and emotion were coming through in their questions about my life, my social life, how I came to know about Jennifer Whipkey’s murder. The killing wasn’t highly publicized outside of the small New Jersey Township of West Deptford. They wanted to know why I had information about a crime that wasn’t made public. Of course it would draw the immediate attention of homicide detectives; that was completely understandable. But I was far removed from the terrifying deed and had only been pulled in by a net of lies as complex as a spider’s web.
When it concluded, I thanked Special Agent Waller. I had the feeling I would be seeing him again very soon.
I was escorted to the elevator by another FBI official. I passed once again through multiple security checkpoints, each time fishing out ID from my wallet. All the while I reflected back in hopes of finding some sense in it all, while at the same point realizing that there are some things in this world that will never make any sense, things that you are forced to accept. Like actions with no reason or purpose, minds without conscience. In the thick glass that seemed to be everywhere, I caught a glimpse of my transparent reflection. It was still me, at least I looked the same, which surprised me as my life had been bluntly interrupted and thrown around like rag doll. I waved ‘thanks’ to the last security guard who buzzed me out and pushed through the revolving door. Out into the financial district, the city sunlight and street noise brought me back to normalcy. My town, New York City; ever moving along, never stopping, and reverberating in a million directions. It reinvigorated me.
It was a relief to re-join the ordinary world. I had emerged from the underworld, an ‘other’ realm, an unpretty world where bodies washed of their evidence are posed in caked puddles of blood. A world of chaos and order where square-shouldered law enforcement personnel dutifully knocked on doors, chased down witnesses, and presented evidence to prosecutors. Most of the time they wrapped up their cases, but tragically sometimes not, moving on to the next one in a ceaseless cycle of reward and frustration. I was left with the indelible knowledge that there were butcherers traveling the highways and lurking in back yards never to be found. Maybe even in my own backyard.
At the core of this saga is the reason I was here in the first place. This very strange thing that I had encountered had affected me in ways I could not have imagined. It had been almost two years since this all began in 2003, like a carnival of cracked mirrors with a quicksand floor with phantoms reflected in the distorted glass. I had to shake off these images and get back to my desk at Rizzoli International Publications just a few stops away at 22nd Street and Park Avenue South. I had missed enough time already.
My life started out unsheltered, I was spared little in the bad old days of New York, but it was now all about books and publishers, authors, tours, media lists, and high expectations. A book publicist is essentially a salesman, a pitchman with an idea clutching a roster of ambitious authors and anxious editors. It’s at times a waltz on a high wire, at others glamorous, yet bone-grinding hard work. I hopped on the uptown subway immersed in a reel of thoughts of how I came to be exhaustively questioned by two New Jersey Homicide Detectives at One Federal Plaza, FBI Headquarters in New York City.
How did I get here? How did an otherwise normal everyday New Yorker who did not operate in the world of crime, wind up at FBI headquarters in downtown Manhattan now being vigorously interrogated about an unsolved brutal murder?
>
CHAPTER TWO
Into the World
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets in the future.
—Graham Greene
In the cab, my sister wouldn’t even look at my mother. She stared straight ahead in a fury on the way home from the hospital. It was just hours after I was born. Upon news of my arrival, my father almost fainted because he had another daughter. Less than a day old and already my reception into the world was fractured. My father and mother met in a Greenwich Village café. He was twenty-four and an aspiring actor; she was nineteen and had moved to New York to study fashion illustration at Parson’s School of Design. My father, John Fensten, studied at the Actor’s Studio with Lee and Susan Strasberg (Susan, my namesake, visited mom in the hospital when I was born). He landed a role on Playhouse 90, the acclaimed ninety-minute live TV series that ran from the late fifties to the early sixties. One would think that such a couple, blessed with talent and connections, could look forward to a happy life together. After my parents married in 1961, however, things unraveled almost immediately. The years that followed would be tough—at times grueling—for my mother and father and their children, my sister Ilia and me.
Still, I love to think about the early years of my childhood even though they don’t represent an idyllic time of innocence or white picket fences. My parents lived on the Upper West Side when I was born in July of 1962, but by the time I was two, we lived on the Lower East Side, moving from apartment to apartment just one step ahead of the rent collector. My father began to disappear for weeks at a time, occasionally landing in Bellevue Hospital. We had no clue as to his whereabouts during these disappearances. He was generally unemployed except for a brief stint as an insurance clerk, and my mother worked as a waitress, standing on her feet eight hours a day for thirty-five bucks a week.
Ted Bundy's Murderous Mysteries Page 30