by Ann Rule
The trio walked through the rec room, lighted now with only a few dim table lamps. Margaret Bowman was already home and was waiting in the rec room, anxious to talk to Melanie about her date. Leslie’s boyfriend didn’t have a ride home, and Margaret loaned Leslie the keys to her car.
Melanie and Margaret walked to Melanie’s room, discussing the events of Margaret’s date while Melanie got into her pajamas. Then they walked to Margaret’s room, number 9, and continued talking as Margaret undressed.
Nancy Dowdy returned from her dinner date a few minutes after Melanie and Leslie did. She too found the door mechanism ineffective and tried to make sure the door was shut tight. She paused for a moment at the top of the front stairs to say “good night” to Melanie and Margaret, and then went to bed. She was asleep by 2:15.
It was 2:35 A.M. exactly on Margaret’s clock when Melanie said “goodnight” to her. Margaret wore only her bra and panties at that time. Melanie shut the door to Margaret’s room tightly, heard it click, and then walked down the hall to the bathroom, where she chatted with another sorority sister, Terry Murphree, who had just gotten off work at Sherrod’s.
The time sequence would become extremely important.
Melanie Nelson had a digital clock in her room, and she glanced at it as she turned out the light. It was 2:45 A.M. She was asleep almost at once.
It was 3:00 A.M. when Nita Neary arrived at the Chi Omega House, accompanied by her boyfriend. They had attended one of the beer parties on campus, but Nita had had only a few beers. She had a cold and wasn’t feeling very well. When Nita came to the backdoor, she found it standing open. This didn’t particularly alarm her. She too was aware that it hadn’t been working right. Nita stepped inside and moved through the rec room, turning off the lights. Suddenly, she heard a loud thump. Her first thought was that her date had tripped and fallen on his way to his car. She ran to the window, but saw that he was fine, just getting into his vehicle. A moment later, she heard running footsteps in the corridor above.
Nita moved to the doorway leading into the foyer, hidden there from anyone coming down the front stairs. She could see the foyer well. The chandelier was still lit. The double white front doors were about sixteen feet away.
The footsteps sounded on the front stairway now, running.
And then she saw him, a slender man, wearing a dark jacket. A navy blue knit cap (what she called a “Toboggan”), something like a watch cap, was pulled down over the top half of his face. She saw him only in profile, but she could make out a sharp nose.
The man was crouched over, his left hand on the doorknob. And, in his right hand, incredibly, he held a club, a club that seemed to be a log. She could see it was rough, as if covered with bark. At the base of the club, where he held it, there was some cloth wrapped around it.
One second. Two. Three … and the door was open and the man was gone.
Thoughts flashed through Nita Neary’s mind. She hadn’t had time to be frightened. She thought, “We’ve been burglarized … or maybe one of the girls had the nerve to sneak somebody upstairs.”
The only man who she was used to seeing around the sorority house was Ronnie Eng, and for a moment, she wondered, “What was Ronnie doing here?” She hadn’t seen the man’s eyes at all, only that glimpse, now frozen in her conscious mind, of the crouching figure with the club. She ran up the stairs and woke her roommate, Nancy Dowdy. “There’s someone in the house, Nancy! I just saw a man leave.”
Nancy grabbed the first thing at hand, her umbrella, and the two girls tiptoed downstairs. They checked the front door and found it locked. Nita had shut and locked the rear door when she came in. They debated what they should do. Call the police? Wake Mom Crenshaw? Nothing seemed to be missing. Nothing seemed to be wrong. Nita demonstrated to Nancy the way the man had crouched, described the club. “At first, I thought it was Ronnie, but this man was larger and taller than Ronnie.”
They walked back up the stairs, still discussing what they should do. As they reached the top, they saw Karen Chandler come out of number 8 and begin to run down the hall. She was staggering and she held her head in both hands. They assumed she was ill, and Nancy ran after her.
Karen’s head was covered with blood, blood that, streamed down over her face, and she seemed to be delirious. Nancy led her into her own room and gave her a towel to help stanch the flow of blood.
Nita ran to wake Mom Crenshaw, and then went into number 8, the room Karen shared with Kathy Meiner. Kathy sat in her bed, holding her head in her hands. She was moaning unintelligibly and blood gushed from her head too.
Nancy Dowdy dialed 9-1-1, almost hysterical herself, and said that help was needed at once at the Chi Omega House at 661 West Jefferson. The first call was garbled. The dispatcher understood that “two females were fighting over a boyfriend.”
That was the way Tallahassee Police officer Oscar Brannon received the call. “To my sadness,” he would later remark, “I found out differently.”
Brannon was a mile or two away from the Chi O House and arrived at 3:23 A.M. Within three minutes, he was joined by a fellow Tallahassee officer, Henry Newkirk, Florida State University police officers Ray Crew and Bill Taylor, and paramedics from Tallahassee Memorial Hospital.
Neither the officers nor the paramedics had any idea what lay ahead of them.
Brannon and Taylor remained downstairs and got a description of the man Nita had seen and broadcast it to all units working the area. Crew and Newkirk ran upstairs. Mrs. Crenshaw and eight or ten of the girls were milling around in the hall. They pointed to Karen and Kathy. Both girls seemed to be terribly injured.
Paramedics Don Allen, Amelia Roberts, Lee Phinney, and Garry Matthews were directed to the second floor where the victims lay moaning. Allen and Roberts worked on Kathy Kleiner. Kathy was conscious, but she had lacerations and puncture wounds on her face, a broken jaw, broken teeth, and possible skull fractures. Someone had given her a container to catch the blood that gushed from her mouth. She called for her boyfriend and for her pastor. She had no idea at all what had happened to her. She’d been sound asleep.
Allen’s supervisor, Lee Phinney, moved to help Karen Chandler. She too had a broken jaw, broken teeth, possible fractures of the skull, and cuts. The paramedics fought to open an airway for both the injured girls to keep them from choking to death on their own blood.
The injured girls’ room, number 8, looked like an abattoir, with blood sprayed on the light walls. Bits of bark—oak bark—covered their pillows and bedclothing.
Karen did not remember anything either. She too had been sleeping when the man had hammered blows on her head.
Pandemonium reigned. While the other policemen moved down the corridor, checking room by room, Officer Newkirk gathered the girls into number 2. No one could answer his questions. No one had heard a thing.
Officer Ray Crew came to number 4, Lisa Levy’s room, with Mrs. Crenshaw trailing behind. Lisa had gone to bed around 11:00 and she apparently hadn’t awakened, despite the chaos on the second floor. Crew opened Lisa’s door. He saw her lying on her right side, the covers pulled up over her shoulders. The housemother told Crew her name.
“Lisa?”
There was no answer.
“Lisa! Wake up!” Crew called.
The figure on the bed didn’t move at all.
Crew reached out to shake her shoulder gently and started to roll her over on her back. It was then that he observed a small bloodstain on the sheet beneath her. He turned to Mrs. Crenshaw and said tightly, “Get the medics.”
Don Allen grabbed his gear and ran to Lisa. The paramedic checked for a pulse, and found none. He pulled her onto the floor and immediately began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and cardiopulmonary massage. Lisa’s complexion was pallid, her lips blue, her skin already cooling, and yet the paramedics could not see exactly what was wrong with her. She wore only a nightgown. Her panties lay on the floor beside the bed.
Allen cut off her nightgown, searching for some injur
y that had caused her condition. He saw pronounced swelling around her jaw, a condition usually produced by strangulation, and an injury on her right shoulder, an ugly purpling bruise. Her right nipple had been bitten almost off. There was no time to dwell on the horror of what had happened. Allen and Roberts inserted an airway into the girl’s trachea, forcing oxygen into her lungs so that, to the lay observer, it seemed that she was actually breathing on her own as her breasts rose and fell rhythmically. They inserted a catheter needle into her vein and started a solution of D5W to keep the vein open preparatory to the administration of drugs. They were on standing orders to follow all these procedures in the case of a patient near death. Next, they called the emergency room doctor on standby via radiotelemetry for drug orders. They administered drugs that might start her heart beating for ten to twenty minutes.
It was hopeless and they knew it, but the girl who lay motionless on the floor before them was so young. They never got a pulse. All they elicited was a slight, irregular pattern on their heart monitor. It was only electrical-mechanical-disassodation, the electrical impulses of a dying heart. Lisa Levy’s heart itself never beat at all. Lisa Levy was dead.
Still, she was transported to the hospital with sirens wailing. She would be pronounced D.O.A.
Melanie Nelson was still asleep in her room. She wakened suddenly as she saw a man beside her bed, a man shaking her and calling her name. She heard him breathe, “My God! We have another one.”
But Ray Crew was relieved to see that Melanie was not dead. She’d been only sleeping. She sat up and followed him out into the hall, grabbing a coat against the chill of the early morning.
Melanie didn’t know what had happened. She saw her sorority sisters huddled together in one room, saw the policemen and paramedics milling about, and assumed that the house was on fire. She asked, “Is everyone home?”
And the answer came. “Everyone but Margaret.”
Melanie shook her head. “No. Margaret’s home. I talked to her.” She grabbed Officer Newkirk’s arm and said, “Come on, I’ll show you.”
The two walked down the hall to room number 9. The door was ajar now, although Melanie distinctly remembered shutting it when she’d left Margaret after saying goodnight forty-five minutes earlier. She pushed the door a little and could see Margaret’s figure in the bed. There was just enough light from the streetlight outside the window so that she could recognize Margaret’s long dark hair on the white pillow.
“See,” Melanie said. “I told you she was home.”
Newkirk stepped into the room and turned on the light. What he saw made him push Melanie into the hall, and shut the door firmly. He felt as if he were walking through a nightmare.
Margaret Bowman lay on her face, the covers pulled up around her neck, but he’d seen the blood on her pillow. Moving closer, he could see the red liquid that had welled up on the right side of her head and clotted in her ear. Oh God, he could actually see into her brain. Her skull had been shattered.
Newkirk pulled the bedspread down a little. A nylon stocking had been cinched so cruelly around her neck that the neck appeared to be half its normal size, and was probably broken.
Almost without thinking, he touched her right shoulder, lifted her a bit off the bed. But he knew she was dead, that nothing more could be done for her. He let go of her shoulder and placed her gently back in the position he’d found her in.
Newkirk looked around the room. There was bark everywhere—on the bed, caught in the girl’s hair, glued to her face by blood. And yet, there seemed to have been no struggle at all. Margaret Bowman still wore a shortie yellow nightgown, and a gold necklace was caught up in the stocking around her neck. Her panties, however, lay on the floor at the end of the bed.
Newkirk sealed off the room after paramedic Garry Matthews confirmed that Margaret was dead, and had been for some time. The postmortem lividity that begins soon after death, the purplish red striations that mark a body’s nether side, pooled blood no longer pumped by a living heart, was already apparent.
Newkirk notified Tallahassee Police headquarters that there was a confirmed “Signal 7,” a dead body at the Chi Omega House.
The terrible toll now stood at two dead and two critically injured, but the rest of the sorority girls were safe, all gathered in number 2, shocked, weeping, and unbelieving. How could they have slept through such mayhem? How was it possible that a killer could enter their sleeping area so easily without anyone knowing?
It had to have happened with such rapidity as to be unimaginable. Melanie Nelson had seen Margaret Bowman alive and happy at 2:35, and Nita Neary had seen the man with the club leaving at 3:00 A.M. Melanie had gone back and forth across the hall until 2:45 A.M.!
One of the coeds who huddled, shivering, in number 2 was Carol Johnston. Carol had come home about 2:55, parked her car behind the Chi O House, and entered through the backdoor. Like Nita would moments later, Carol found the door ajar. She went through the foyer and up the front stairs. When she reached the second-floor hall, she was somewhat surprised to see that all the lights were off, a most unusual occurrence. The only light at all was from a desk lamp her roommate always left on when Carol was out, and it made just a slice of light under her door.
Carol had changed into her pajamas and made her way down the black hall to the bathroom. The door to the bathroom is a swinging door. As Carol stood inside, brushing her teeth, the bathroom door creaked, something it invariably did when someone passed by in the hall just outside. Carol had thought nothing of it, assuming it was one of the other girls. A moment later, she emerged and walked down the hall, guided by the light from her room.
Carol Johnston had gone to bed, unaware that she had missed the killer by no more than a fraction of a second.
The man in the dark knitted cap may have entered the Chi Omega House earlier in the evening, may have waited until he thought all the girls were in and asleep, or he may have entered through the unlocked rear door after 2:00 A.M. Some investigators feel that Lisa Levy was attacked first, and her killer waited in her room for other victims to come home. It is more likely that Margaret Bowman was the first victim, Lisa the second, and Kathy and Karen almost afterthoughts. If that is true, the man, in the grip of compulsive, maniacal frenzy, moved through the Chi Omega House second floor with his oaken club, killing and bludgeoning his victims—all within a space of less than fifteen minutes! And all within earshot of almost three dozen witnesses, witnesses who didn’t even hear him.
Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman were now lying in the morgue of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, awaiting postmortem examinations early Sunday morning. The area around the Chi Omega House, indeed the whole campus, was alive with patrol cars and detectives’ cars from the Tallahassee Police Department, the Leon County Sheriff’s Office, and the Florida State University Police Department, all looking for the man in the dark jacket and light trousers. They had no idea what he looked like—no hair color, no facial description beyond the fact that he’d had a large, sharp nose. It was unlikely that he still carried the bloodied oak club. It was likely that he might have bloodstains on his clothing. There had been so much blood let in that catastrophic fifteen minutes as he ravaged the four sleeping girls.
In the Chi O House itself, room numbers 4, 8, and 9 were littered with the debris left by both the killer and the paramedics, the walls sprayed with droplets of scarlet, and the floors and beds full of blood and bits of bark from the death weapon. Officer Oscar Brannon went to the rec room, and, on his hands and knees, collected eight pieces of the same bark on the door of that room. Entry had obviously been made through the backdoor where the lock had been nonfunctional.
He found a pile of oak logs in the backyard of the sorority house. It appeared that the killer had picked up his weapon on the way in.
Brannon and Sergeant Howard Winkler dusted for latent prints in all the rooms. They dusted doorways, wall posters, and around the combination lock that had failed. They took photographs. In Margaret Bowman’
s room, Brannon noticed a Hanes “Alive” stocking package lying across the wastepaper basket—empty—only the cardboard and cellophane remaining. A new pair of pantyhose lay on her roommate’s bed. It seemed that the killer had brought his own garottes with him.
A BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) bulletin was quickly in the hands of every officer in Tallahassee and Leon County.
There had been no pictures taken of Lisa Levy in her room. She had been rushed to the hospital in the vain hope that some spark of life remained, but Tallahassee I.D. Officer Bruce Johnson had taken photographs of Margaret as she lay on her bed, her face pressed into her pillow, her right arm straight down beside her body, her left arm, hand palm up, bent over her back, her legs straight. No, Margaret had not fought her murderer at all. It had been the same with Lisa. She had been found with her right arm beneath her.
Sheriff Ken Katsaris of Leon County was there, along with Captain Jack Poitinger, chief of detectives, and Detective Don Patchen of the Tallahassee Police Department. In fact, there wasn’t a lawman in all of Leon County who was not aware of what had happened within an hour after the mass slaughter. Not one of them had ever had to deal with anything like the savage violence they were faced with.
Patrol officers fanned out through the neighborhood in a door-to-door canvass. Nothing. A surveillance van parked on the street stopped everyone who passed by. Nothing.
The suspect was simply gone.
The paramedics had delivered the victims, alive and dead, to the hospital, and were back on the street shortly after 4:00 A.M.
Their night’s work was far from over.
The old frame duplex at 431 Dunwoody Street was approximately eight blocks from the Chi Omega House, closer as the crow flies. Two-tenths of a mile. It was typical of many of the 1920s vintage structures bordering the campus proper which had been turned into rental housing, nothing fancy, but adequate.