Pathological

by Henry Cordes

  In the end, Mois did hear one familiar refrain from the PEO sisters: speculation that the killer had to be “that crazy Russian doctor.” But the PEO sisters also had nothing to back their belief. When it came to evidence that would actually help solve Mary’s murder, these interviews were getting Mois nowhere fast.

  On May 27, after going through his eighth PEO interview like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” Mois had heard enough. He sought out Sgt. Mike Ratliff, his boss both in the homicide unit and on the task force. “It was a mirror of the last seven interviews I’ve done,” Mois said. “There’s nothing there.” They agreed it was time to move on.

  A number of task force investigators were currently going through the reams of pathology department personnel files that had been culled from Creighton. The records had been sorted into binders, each bearing the name of a current or former employee, and were now set out on shelves in the task force room. I’ll see where we stand and get you one of those binders, Ratliff told Mois.

  A half hour later, Ratliff walked up to Mois’ desk and handed him a black binder containing the records of a former Creighton medical resident — a book that over the next 48 hours would dramatically alter the course of this investigation.

  Mois for the first time read the name on the spine: Dr. Anthony J. Garcia.

  CHAPTER 12: MORE THAN A NAME

  Means, motive and opportunity. It’s Homicide 101, Derek Mois would later say, a mantra drilled into every detective’s head.

  Means, motive and opportunity together make up the three elements of a crime, and the three pillars of guilt that often must be proven in court to make for a successful criminal prosecution. Find someone who had the tools to commit the crime (means), a reason to commit it (motive), and who was there at the right time and place (opportunity), and you just might have your man.

  With that in mind, Mois sat down with a mug of coffee and a pad of Post-It notes the afternoon of May 27 and started sifting page-by-page through the Creighton University personnel files of Dr. Anthony J. Garcia. In those dry pages, Mois was looking for anything out of the ordinary.

  The first pages of the Anthony Garcia file were medical licensing documents that shed some light on his history. Garcia was a native of California and had received his medical degree in May 1999 from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Mois could see from his birth date that Garcia was now just a week shy of 40.

  Dr. Garcia had come to Creighton as a medical resident, a freshly minted medical school grad who was seeking on-the-job training in his chosen medical specialty of pathology. Mois also saw Garcia had started his pathology residency at Creighton in July of 2000, some 13 years earlier.

  Mois quickly saw something else noteworthy about Garcia’s time at Creighton: he’d been fired. The records showed he’d been booted out of the school in May 2001, just 11 months into the four-year program. In documents related to that firing, Mois also saw a name that kept coming up: Dr. Chhanda Bewtra.

  As Mois read on, it soon became clear that Garcia and Bewtra were having a pretty serious conflict in the weeks leading up to the firing, the dispute spelled out in copied memos and emails. Given the Bewtra break-in just hours before the Brumbacks were slain, Mois’ interest in this Dr. Garcia was on the rise. Mois was suddenly placing sticky notes highlighting his observations all over the file. “Every time I turned a page,” Mois would later say, “I was learning something new I thought was relevant.”

  Then Mois flipped a page and saw something that shook him: Garcia’s actual termination letter. It was dated May 22, 2001. And most striking were the two signatures at the bottom:

  William J. Hunter, M.D., and Roger A. Brumback, M.D.

  Fuck, Mois thought. This guy had motive to kill everybody. Hunter, Brumback and Bewtra. The detective’s interest in Garcia suddenly was rising exponentially.

  Mois became so struck by the possibilities Garcia presented that by mid-afternoon, he decided to have a department technician run the doctor’s name through the “Triple I” — essentially a nationwide criminal arrest record database maintained by the FBI.

  The search didn’t show much of a criminal history for Garcia. The only rap on his sheet was a very recent DUI in suburban Chicago. That arrest record listed Garcia at a Terre Haute, Indiana, address. It also gave a physical description for the man: Ht: 5-8. Wt: 250. Skin: Olive.

  Olive skin. Some of the witnesses in the Dundee case had used that exact word to describe the complexion of the mysterious man who had come and gone from the Hunter home in March 2008. Mois put a sticky note on that, too.

  Mois was so engrossed with his reading of Garcia’s file he ended up staying late into the evening. By the time the detective headed for home, this doctor who had been completely unknown to him hours earlier still had not risen to the level of suspect in his eyes.

  But if anyone had asked Mois at the moment, he would certainly have described Garcia as “a person of interest.”

  * * *

  On May 28, Mois’ second day with his nose in Garcia’s Creighton files, the detective put in a call to the police department in Terre Haute. He asked a detective there for any records they had for Garcia: contacts with police, auto registrations, gun licenses. Terre Haute detective Darren Long was very open to helping out, the next day emailing Mois a report of what he’d found.

  Included in the May 29 multi-page document was an image of Garcia’s Indiana driver’s license. For the first time Mois got a look at Garcia, a meaty-faced man who indeed had olive skin.

  Mois saw in the records previous addresses for Garcia, including Omaha; Chicago; Walnut, California; and Shreveport, Louisiana. This doctor had been around. Looking at Garcia’s vehicle records, Mois saw the doctor currently had both a black Mercedes SUV and a Ferrari registered to him. Then Mois flipped to page 11 of the report, and his heart skipped a beat.

  From June 2007 through June 2009, the vehicle registered to Garcia at his address in Louisiana had been a Honda CRV.

  Oh shit.

  Mois wasted no time making his way back over to the department’s database technician, the same person who had given him the report on Garcia’s criminal history two days earlier. This time, he asked her to run the vehicle identification number for Garcia’s old CRV. Mois wanted to learn more about this vehicle, particularly its color.

  The result came back in an instant, and for Mois it jumped right off the screen.

  COLOR: SIL.

  At that moment, everything else in Mois’ world completely fell away. The vehicle was silver. A silver Honda CRV — the exact description several witnesses had given for the car driven by the Dundee killer.

  This sent Mois’ mind racing, the thoughts flashing through his head like electricity. At long last, could this really be the guy?

  Mois could also see in the report that the CRV was currently registered to a Frederick Joseph Garcia in California. It appeared a relative of Garcia still had the car.

  Mois drew in a deep breath and pondered his next move. Then he got on his computer and found a website where he could peruse images of state license plates from years past. Looking through the Louisiana plate images, he took particular interest in the one that appeared on passenger vehicles in that state during 2008. That plate displayed a pelican silhouetted against a sunset of yellow and pink.

  Mois printed off the image and carried it over to the desk of task force detective Doug Herout. Mois knew Herout, a longtime homicide detective, years earlier had extensively researched the plate on the SUV that the Dundee witnesses had observed. “Is this at all consistent with what the witnesses saw?” Mois asked.

  “That looks pretty good,” Herout replied. “Absolutely. That could be it.” Just to be sure, Herout opened a drawer and pulled out his old reports. The witnesses indeed described the plate as prominently featuring pastel colors like peach or pink. The two detectives agreed this plate fit the description.


  Mois also asked Herout about Garcia. Herout had been the prime interrogator of Bill Hunter the night his son was killed. “Has this guy ever come up?” Mois asked. Herout said Hunter never mentioned Garcia to him at all.

  Mois started back for his desk, the significance of what he’d just found sinking into his soul. In the five years since Dundee, he and other detectives had been absolutely bedeviled by their inability to figure out who was behind the wheel of the silver Honda CRV. Now, for the first time, here was a person of interest who drove a vehicle of the same make and color as that 2008 mystery man. Mois knew this could well be the most significant break ever in Dundee.

  Up to this point, Mois had been keeping Sgt. Ratliff apprised of his growing interest in Garcia. Now Mois felt Garcia had risen to another level entirely. We need to put this guy under a microscope, Mois told Ratliff. And to do that, Mois would need some help. He wanted Ryan Davis and Nick Herfordt, two task force members who were on Mois’ regular detective team in homicide, to work with him on a deep dive into Garcia.

  “I need Ryan and I need Nick,” he told Ratliff. “And I need everyone to leave us the fuck alone.”

  Ratliff agreed. He could see Mois was potentially on to something big. The rest of the task force investigators would continue to follow their own paths. But from this point on, Mois, Herfordt and Davis would be laser-focused on just one man.

  CHAPTER 13: TEAM GARCIA

  Derek Mois told very few people about it. He didn’t want anyone to think he was nuts. But twice in the five years since Dundee, Mois had awoken in his bedroom to see Tom Hunter standing right over him.

  There was the 11-year-old, with his wiry frame, shock of brown hair and round eyeglasses. The vision was so vivid, so clear, it was Tom in the flesh. Mois even felt the boy’s presence.

  Both times it happened, Mois sat up with a start, a chill charging down his spine. In the dark, he composed himself. He tried to rationalize what he’d seen.

  Mois didn’t believe in ghosts. The afterlife or such spiritual matters held no meaning to him. In the end, he had to conclude it had all been just a dream, one conjured by subconscious regret over never solving the boy’s murder.

  Now years later, Mois felt he truly might be on the verge of finally securing justice for Tom and his family. If Dr. Anthony Garcia indeed had anything to do with the murders of Tom, Shirlee and the Brumbacks, Mois was committed to making sure he was called to account. The detective absolutely would not rest until he did.

  Mois’ drive at that moment could be well summed up by the lyrics of a song by the indie band Lord Huron that Mois would later post above his desk. From the moment Mois heard “The Yawning Grave,” it seemed to him to speak directly to a homicide detective’s relationship with the killer in his sights:

  Oh you fool, there are rules, I am coming for you.

  Darkness brings evil things, oh the reckoning begins.

  With their new assignment, Mois and partners Davis and Herfordt now rarely showed up in the task force operations room. They instead took their work back to their regular desks, sitting elbow-to-elbow in the fourth-floor homicide section. Not only was Mois happy to be working back in these cramped but familiar quarters, he was quite comfortable with the guys he was working with.

  Herfordt, five months shy of his 40th birthday, brought much to the newly formed Team Garcia. With silver-streaked hair and olive skin — his grandfather was Santee Sioux, rooted on the tribe’s reservation in northeast Nebraska — Herfordt was a solid homicide investigator known for his love of food trucks and McRib sandwiches, offbeat sense of humor and ease around computers. In recent years, he’d become the department’s foremost expert in the fast-emerging field of digital forensics — mining evidence from cell phones, computers and other electronic devices.

  That role had come naturally to Herfordt, the son of an Omaha computer programmer. Back in 1997, amid looming fears of Y2K computer meltdowns, Herfordt had decided to follow his father into the field. After enrolling in an accelerated study program, he soon realized he knew more about computers than his instructor did. Herfordt dropped the class and landed a job with an Omaha firm. But after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Herfordt felt a calling to do something more. He left the corporate world two years later and got on with the Omaha police.

  Herfordt was no gung-ho cop, and he didn’t consider himself one. Unlike many of his brothers in blue, he abhorred guns and didn’t even like carrying one. He just saw law enforcement as a profession that fit his skills and let him do some good.

  Herfordt soon after became a detective and over time took on the role as the bureau’s unofficial go-to guy on all things relating to computers or technology. They’d hand him a Rubik’s Cube of a problem and he’d hand it back with all the colors matched up.

  That’s why when the department for the first time decided to assign a detective to work in digital forensics, Herfordt was an obvious candidate. For the past two years, Herfordt had been splitting his time between investigating murders and cyber-sleuthing for clues on seized cell phones and computers. Herfordt embraced this new role, later taking on the Twitter handle “Nerd Cop.”

  The nickname was typical of Herfordt’s fun-loving ways. Around homicide, he was the guy who kept everyone loose with his crackpot humor and practical jokes. If you arrived at work and found a Hulk Hogan action figure or a cryptic note set out on your desk, you knew to go talk to Nick. Warner was his favorite target. With a straight face, Herfordt told his colleagues that he one day hoped to use his technical knowledge to become a Lex Luthor-like super villain after he retired.

  As the Garcia team in the weeks ahead delved deeper into their target’s background, Herfordt would lighten things up by initiating a game he called “Dr. Tony Trivia” — quizzing the team on obscure, often off-color details he’d pulled out of Garcia’s past.

  “Most of his stuff is so inappropriate,” Mois would later say of Herfordt. “He’s not stable.”

  But when it came time to play detective, Herfordt was dogged. And he was intent on learning everything he could about Garcia. Herfordt’s oldest son was about the same age as Tom Hunter when he died. It was impossible for the detective not to think about what Tom went through, and the immense pain the crime brought to his parents. “I wanted the person who snuffed out his life caught,” he’d later say.

  Davis, Mois’ other new right-hand man in the Garcia case, was a relative newcomer to homicide, having joined the unit just a year earlier. But this was a job the 34-year-old had been preparing for his whole life.

  Trim with wavy red hair, Davis grew up in blue-collar, ethnic South Omaha, the kind of neighborhoods where lots of guys grow up to be either crooks or cops. Davis always wanted to be the latter. So he studied criminal justice in college, already with an eye toward becoming a homicide detective. During his first week in the police training academy, he was asked where he wanted to be in 10 years. “I want to be working homicide,” he replied.

  To Davis, the homicide unit seemed a magical place. He wanted to be in that room. And after eight years as a street cop and detective, he finally landed there in 2012.

  Davis would have a distinct memory of one of his first days in the unit. Mois led him back to a meeting room and closed the door. Then he showed him the old files for the Dundee case. Mois walked him through the details, what they knew, what they didn’t, what they might have done differently. Davis could tell Mois was haunted by the case.

  In homicide, no one was more enthusiastic than this newcomer. Fueled by the cans of energy drink he downed each morning, he’d eagerly take on any task thrown his way. He absolutely lived for this job.

  Davis also became known around the unit for the way he looked up to the Mois. Even when Davis was working robbery, he used to come over to the homicide section to pick Mois’ brain.

  They did have much in common. Davis shared Mois’ deliberate investigative approach. Lik
e Mois, he put all he had into his cases. And he even had his own impressive collection of tattoos inked down both arms. There was a reason some Omaha cops dubbed Davis “Mini Mois.” Davis always took it as a compliment.

  As Davis joined the task force, the topic of one of Davis’ college criminal justice research papers suddenly seemed awfully relevant: serial murder. From 1893 Chicago World’s Fair stalker H.H. Holmes to modern-day terrors like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, Davis over time became a virtual encyclopedia of America’s serial killers. He knew all their names and twisted ways.

  Now Davis had this unique opportunity to track a serial killer of his own. He and Herfordt talked about it over lunch one day shortly after they’d been named to the task force. “Can you believe we’re investigating a serial killer?” Herfordt said.

  The new Garcia team sat down together for the first time on May 30, the day after Mois discovered Garcia’s silver CRV. Their work at that point was completely hush-hush, even within the task force, known only to them and Ratliff. They felt getting too many people involved now risked having their probe run off the rails, with a million opinions of where to go next. They felt they knew what needed to be done.

  Mois briefed Herfordt and Davis on what he’d found so far. They could see they still had lots to learn. Just who is Anthony Garcia? Understanding his life history and what made him tick would be crucial to establishing whether he indeed had true motive to harm Drs. Hunter and Brumback.

  At this point, the detectives had only the barest outline of the man’s life, gleaned from the Creighton records. But as the Garcia investigators over the coming six weeks reviewed hundreds of additional pages of records from Creighton and other medical schools where Garcia had spent time, covertly peeked at the doctor’s emails and perused his financial records, they would paint a fuller portrait of Garcia. A dominant theme for Garcia’s troubled life would emerge.