The Serial Killer's Apprentice
Page 22
“Is that true?” I asked.
“Yes, but I can’t tell you anything more. The doctor killed his wife,” he said. Spaetzel motioned for me to step into his office.
I had imaged it would look like some film noir set: papers piled high on a well-worn desk, a second suit hanging on a coat rack for those occasions he worked through the night, a bottle of Jameson in the top drawer of his desk—all this behind a frosted-glass door marked HOMICIDE. The reality was anticlimactic.
Everything on his desk was in its proper place. There were a couple reports, but these were stacked neatly on top of each other and pushed to one side. No extra suit. Wooden door, not glass. And, this man did not have the look of a heavy drinker. He was more like a soccer coach, or an English teacher.
I knew better than to fall for this mild-mannered front. Spaetzel had earned a reputation as a sharp, cunning detective in 2001, when he solved a strange homicide that took place not far from Sam Sheppard’s old house on Lake Road. A roofer was found shot to death behind his residence. Based on a scrap of paper found near the body, upon which was written a fake name, Spaetzel was able to track down the killer. His investigative skills helped put the murderer behind bars for life.
Hanging to the right side of Spaetzel’s desk was the “missing” poster I remembered so clearly. Amy’s face was blown up ten times the size of a normal flyer photo and laminated to heavy foam board. It was the first time I had seen this picture for many years. I had remembered her ponytail on the wrong side; I thought it had been hanging to her right.
I noticed something else about that photo. The way Amy’s head was tilted, it didn’t look posed. It looked like an insecure gesture, a shy girl’s unconscious reaction to attention. But, then, maybe I was just looking too hard for minute evidence of her personality.
The door shut behind us and Spaetzel took a seat behind his desk. I sat in a chair to one side of him, facing the poster. I set my satchel on the floor and withdrew a legal notepad and a blue pen.
“Are you a fan of The Wizard of Oz?” I asked, pointing to a bright yellow brick mounted on a shelf behind him.
The detective smiled. “No. I got that for completing the FBI training course at Quantico.”
“Oh. Were you in the FBI?”
“No. Just did a little training out there.”
My eyes drifted to the window behind Spaetzel. Outside, a car drove down Wolf Road, sending a fishtail of snow in its wake before turning into a plaza across the street.
“So, what can I help you with?” he said.
“I want to write a story about Amy Mihaljevic. I think I remember most of the story, but I was hoping you could fill in holes before I pitch the idea to my editors.”
“Why do you want to write a story about Amy?”
For a moment, I didn’t say anything. This was a question I had anticipated, and I figured I had two choices: one, give this detective an easy answer, something like “I’m a fan of Unsolved Mysteries and I’m looking for unsolved cases in the Cleveland area to write about”; or two, share the story of how my father taught me to get the best out of my own autopsy. I took another look in Spaetzel’s eyes and made a decision. This man needed something personal.
“I was the same age as Amy, and although I didn’t live in Bay Village at the time, I followed the case on TV. The day her body was found, my dad came home and sat me down and gave me some advice . . . ”
Spaetzel’s eyes grew wide as I continued. By the end, he was laughing.
“Your father’s a smart man,” he said at last. He leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. “What do you want to know?”
“Well, I want to get my bearings first. Can you tell me where she was abducted so I can visit the site before I head back to the office?”
“Sure.” Spaetzel swiveled his chair and pointed out the window, toward the parking lot across the street. “Right about there.”
“Across from the police station?”
He nodded.
“In broad daylight?”
He nodded again.
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah. We took it kind of personally.”
“You were working then? I thought you’d be too young.”
He smiled and leaned back in his chair again. “I was a rookie at that time. It was my job to go to the school and talk to students about child safety.”
“That’s ironic.”
“It gets better. I spoke to Amy’s class that day.”
The hairs on the back of my neck shot up. A cool rush filled my body. How awful. During the next year I discovered many horrific coincidences related to Amy’s case, but this turned out to be the worst, the most tragic irony of them all.
Can it be mere happenstance that the last detective still working Amy’s case actually warned her about talking to strangers the day she disappeared? That kind of stuff keeps me up at night. Some people might think it was some higher power giving Spaetzel a chance to save her. Other people, and I’m afraid I fall into this category, see this coincidence as a device God might use to imprison the detective, something to make the case so personal he cannot rest until the mystery is solved. Spaetzel was drafted that day into a battle he didn’t choose to lead.
When the goose bumps settled, I asked him to walk me through Amy’s last day. I didn’t need a second-by-second account. The article hadn’t been approved yet. I just needed a refresher, and I didn’t want it to come from some old newspaper clipping.
Most of what Spaetzel told me that day I had heard before, as had most Northeast Ohioans. But there were some new details and at least one bit of information he probably shouldn’t have shared.
* * *
The week before she disappeared, a man called Amy at home. The call came after school while her parents were still at work. Class ended for fifth-graders at Bay Middle an hour before the older grades that year, around 2 p.m. That usually found Amy home alone for an hour before her brother, Jason, who was in the seventh grade, got there.
I work with your mother, the man said to Amy. She just got a promotion. If you’d like, I can meet you after school and help you pick out a present for her. You can have a present, too. Just don’t tell anyone about this. Let’s not ruin the surprise.
Amy’s mother, Margaret, worked for Tradin’ Times in 1989, selling classified ads for the Westlake-based barter magazine. She went from part time to full time that year but had not been promoted.
The ruse worked almost perfectly; Amy disobeyed the man by blabbing to her friends. She told them she was meeting this man on Friday. She lied to her mother, telling Margaret she had to stay late that day for choir tryouts.
Shortly after 2 p.m. on October 27, Amy was spotted walking with classmates toward the Baskin-Robbins located in the shopping plaza a quarter mile down Wolf Road.
An eyewitness remembers watching Amy twirl around a pole outside the ice cream shop at around 2:45 p.m. The witness recalls hearing a man’s voice calling for Amy.
When Jason Mihaljevic returned home shortly after 3 p.m., he called Margaret at work to let her know Amy wasn’t there. Worried, Margaret started packing her things to leave. Then the phone rang again. It was Amy.
Where have you been? Margaret asked.
Choir tryouts, Amy answered.
Margaret assumed Amy was calling from home. The conversation was brief. Amy sounded like she wanted to get off the phone. Feeling unnerved, Margaret left work and drove to the family’s house in Bay Village. When she arrived, Jason told her Amy had not come home.
Amy was reported missing that evening, and by sunup, the FBI was working the case; kidnapping is assumed to be a federal crime because most victims end up across state lines.
For the next 104 days, Bay Village police worked hand in hand with the Cleveland FBI office, Police Chief William Gareau coordinating his officers under the direction of Detective Lieutenant Jim Tompkins. They, in turn, assisted SAC (Special Agent in Charge) Bill Brannon and his point man Dick W
renn, who organized the FBI’s presence in Bay Village.
A command center was set up in the town hall—two, actually: an FBI post in the basement and an army of volunteers on the second floor. The volunteers were led by Howard Kimball, a local man who ran the Bay Village Youth Cabin during happier times. Kimball’s assistants copied hundreds of thousands of flyers, first of Amy’s school photo and then, once the sketch artist was done, a composite of her abductor based on the testimony of two secret witnesses. Kimball’s office was referred to as the “Amy Center” by the town folk.
Some eighteen thousand interviews were conducted by FBI and police. Inch by inch they searched the woods behind the horse farm where Amy took riding lessons. About twenty suspects were closely monitored. All but one took a lie detector test. The lone holdout was a local attorney.
One suspect who seemed promising for a time was a young man with the last name of Strunak. He lived in Fairview Park and volunteered at the Amy Center. To many, Strunak seemed too interested in the case. After police discovered Strunak had a criminal history, he was asked to leave.
The search became a hunt for a killer when Amy’s body was discovered in February 1990.
Fiber samples recovered at the dump site were sent to an FBI lab for analysis. Results were inconclusive.
A few days after Amy’s body was found, Strunak committed suicide. An FBI agent named Robert Ressler felt so strongly that Strunak was the killer that he later identified him in a chapter for his book on serial killers, Whoever Fights Monsters.
In 1999, as the ten-year anniversary of the recovery of Amy’s body approached, the FBI released a few new clues in an article that appeared in Cleveland Magazine. Whoever had murdered Amy had likely taken a few souvenirs from her. Missing items that should have been with her body included green horse-head earrings, a white nylon windbreaker, leather boots that laced up the front, and a black binder with “Best in Class” written on a gold snap on the cover.
No one was ever arrested or charged with her murder. Prosecutors never even convened a grand jury.
At the time of my interview with Detective Spaetzel, Amy’s case file was sealed in an old photographic darkroom. The lead sheets and interviews rested inside four maroon filing cabinets. The remaining forensic evidence was stored in locked cabinets.
* * *
“Do you think it was Strunak?” I asked when Spaetzel had finished his account.
“No,” he said. “I think it’s someone else. I think he’s still out there.”
That would not be the last time I sat in Spaetzel’s office, not by a long shot. However, there would come a day when he refused to give me any more information, possibly at the behest of retired FBI agents.
By the time I left Bay Village that day, I knew I had my story. No paper had yet named a suspect in the Amy Mihaljevic case. I already had one—Strunak. I wondered if I had it in me to find the other nineteen?
More information at:
www.grayco.com
Also by James Renner
Amy: My Search for Her Killer
Ten-year-old Amy Mihaljevic (Muh-ha-luh-vick) disappeared from the comfortable Cleveland suburb of Bay Village in the fall of 1989. Thousands of volunteers, police officers, and FBI agents searched for the girl. Her picture was everywhere—anyone who watched the local TV news remembers the girl with the sideways ponytail. Tragically, Amy was found dead a few months later. Her killer was never found. Fifteen years later, journalist James Renner picks up the leads. Filled with mysterious riddles, incredible coincidences, and a cast of unusual but very real characters, his investigation quickly becomes a riveting journey in search of the truth.
More information at:
www.grayco.com
Also by James Renner
The Man from Primrose Lane (A Novel)
In West Akron, there lived a reclusive elderly man who always wore mittens, even in July. He had no friends and no family; all over town, he was known only as the Man from Primrose Lane. And on a summer day in 2008, someone murdered him.
Four years later, David Neff is a broken man. The bestselling author of a true-crime book about an Ohio serial killer, Neff went into exile after his wife’s inexplicable suicide. That is, until an unexpected visit from an old friend introduces him to the strange mystery of “the man with a thousand mittens.” Soon Neff finds himself drawn back into a world he thought he had left behind forever. But the closer he gets to uncovering the true identity of the Man from Primrose Lane, the more he begins to understand the dangerous power of his own obsessions and how they may be connected to the deaths of both his beloved wife and the old hermit.
With a deft and singular blend of suspense, literature, and horror, The Man from Primrose Lane boasts as many twists and turns as a roller coaster. It’s a spellbinding journey of redemption and a reflection on the roles of fate, destiny, and obsession when it comes to matters of the heart.
More information at:
www.jamesrenner.com
About the Author
Christopher Yohn
James Renner is freelance writer and author. His film adaptation of a Stephen King story was an official selection at the 2005 Montreal World Film Festival. A graduate of Kent State University, Renner lives in Akron, Ohio. He is also author of Amy: My Search for Her Killer and the novel The Man from Primrose Lane.
More information at:
www.jamesrenner.com