by Linda Wolfe
Later, passing the Boston train station, he got out and telephoned Nancy again, once more demanding to know if anyone had been to the house and whether she and the kids were all right. Nancy wanted to know what was going on, but he wouldn’t tell her.
He drove some more. He drove right through the Combat Zone, where he had first met Robin, and along Commonwealth Avenue, where he had once broken into her apartment. Eventually he came to Brookline, and there, on a quiet residential street, he saw a garbage dumpster and decided to put her body into it.
His mind made up, he got out of the car, went around to the back, and started to haul her out. Suddenly, he jumped. The body was making a noise. It was not a breath but a sort of eerie sound, the sound of the residual air in her lungs being expelled. It was a sound he would never forget.
Nor would he ever forget, he said, the way, at precisely the same moment, a light came on in a house close to where he was standing. Petrified, he banged down the door of the hatchback and, keeping Robin’s body inside, got back in the car and started driving again.
He drove for hours. At one point during the night he found himself in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and stopped for a cup of coffee at a Howard Johnson’s. Then he made his way from Pawtucket to Providence. There, he left the highway and came to a large housing complex and shopping center. He saw a big supermarket, a Radio Shack, a Rhode Island blood bank, and lots of dumpsters. The sun was starting to come up. It was now or never. He got out of the car and, removing several bags of garbage from a loaded dumpster, made room for his own discards. Then, seizing the bloody comforter, blankets, and Robin’s body, he shoved them into the trash. He was done with her now.
That morning, Nancy met him at the bus station near their home in Sharon. He’d telephoned her from Providence, where he’d parked Robin’s car in a lot after throwing her pocketbook and the bloody towels in various dumpsters, and asked her to pick him up. But although she complied, she was in a stormy mood. She kept insisting that he tell her what was going on.
He said he didn’t want to talk about it.
She said, “I’ve got a right to know. You were out all night.”
He started to make up a lie, started to pretend he’d been in Boston all night, and then, without meaning to, broke down and spilled out what had happened. They were on the road, nearly home, early churchgoers passing them on the quiet Sunday morning streets, and he blurted out that he’d killed the girl.
Nancy responded as any wife might. She began screaming. But he was bewildered. He’d always thought of her as a quiet, controlled person, and now here she was, positively hysterical, and one of the things she was yelling and screaming about was that he shouldn’t have told her. This, even though she’d pushed him to it. Resentful, but hoping to calm her down, he swore to her that no matter what happened in the future, he would never ever admit to anyone that he’d told her of the killing. Then, together, they entered their home.
Inside, he went into the bedroom, shut the door, and checked his head wound. He’d been wearing a tight knitted cap over it, but as soon as he removed the cap, the wound opened up and started bleeding. He sopped up the blood with tissues, flushed them away, and made himself a proper bandage. Then he went out, drove to a grocery store in a nearby town, and called Robin’s answering service. Once again using his girl’s falsetto, he pretended to be Robin herself, with a message for J.R. She’d left Joe’s in Charlestown, ran the message, and was going over now to visit that rich new john she’d been with the evening before. His voice high, he trilled out the address. He’d jotted it down the night before while monitoring her calls.
Back in his bedroom at home, he made his final plans. So far, everything had gone nearly perfectly. He’d really gotten things under control. But there was still the matter of Robin’s car. He’d have to get rid of it. But how? He thought about the scientific meeting he was supposed to attend in Washington the next day. Perhaps he could go back to Providence, get Robin’s car, and dispose of it in Washington. Or, better yet, dispose of it on the way to Washington. He decided that was the best idea. He’d get Nancy to drive him back to the bus station. He’d tell her, since she’d said she wanted to know nothing further about the killing, that he was taking the bus into Boston in order to catch his train to Washington. But, in fact, he’d take a bus to Providence, get the car, abandon it somewhere safe, and then catch a train to Washington.
In the meantime, before he had to leave, he’d best dispose of the contents of Robin’s pocketbook. Getting out a scissors, he cut her driver’s license into tiny pieces; later he would toss away the pieces. But he couldn’t bear to part with her new little address book. It made him so curious. He kept it, hiding it in his bedroom alongside the pink panties she’d tucked in his pocket the night of his false-alarm heart attack.
Savi Bisram called Douglas a couple of times that afternoon. Robin hadn’t shown up for Taj’s birthday party, and since it was altogether unlike her to disappoint the child, she was afraid something might have happened to her. Had he seen her?
Not since midnight, he said, since Savi seemed to know that they’d had an appointment. Robin hadn’t stayed long, he went on. They’d talked, looked at some porno slides, and then around midnight she’d gone off to some party. In Charlestown, he thought. Then he told Savi he was sorry he couldn’t be of more help, but he was leaving town shortly to attend a conference in Washington. Later, he must have feared he’d sounded callous, for he called her back and, not reaching her, left a mesage for her with another hooker friend. If Savi needed any more assistance from him, he said, she could reach him at his Washington hotel. He left the number.
Late in the day, he proceeded with his plan to get rid of Robin’s car. Nancy drove him to the bus station; he was, had anyone noticed him that chilly Sunday afternoon, just another suburban husband being chauffeured by his wife, hurrying to catch a commuter bus to Boston, waving a fond goodbye. But as soon as Nancy drove off he went not to Boston but to Providence. He took Robin’s car out of the Providence lot and drove it to New York. He parked it in a garage close to the railroad station and, removing the inspection sticker and license plates, abandoned it. Feeling more secure than he had in hours, he then walked from the garage to New York’s Pennsylvania Station and bought a train ticket to Washington.
He arrived in Washington at around 8 A.M. on Monday, March 7, and it must have seemed to him, at that moment, that he had committed the perfect crime, engineered the perfect cover-up. He had disposed of both the body and the car, and he had planted clues, all sorts of clues, suggesting that Robin had been with other people after she left him—and therefore she had obviously been alive when she left his house. If his luck continued to hold, the car would never even be discovered. It would sit in the garage for years. If his luck continued to hold, Robin’s body would never be found. It would be crushed by a garbage compactor and incinerated or buried. And if he was really lucky, people would assume that the always erratic, always unpredictable Robin had just decided to leave town.
Did he never for a moment that weekend think of how he had once loved her? I remember expecting, as I leafed through his confession, that sometime soon he would refer to his long-gone passion, express, if not remorse, at least nostalgia. But in fact whenever he spoke of Robin, he did so with, at best, disdain, at worst, something far stranger, more impersonal.
Ultimately, it was as a result of one of these impersonal references to Robin that I grasped the emotional distance he had at last achieved from her. Describing to the district attorney’s staff how he had hoisted her body into the dumpster, he referred to it as “the material.” It was so strikingly peculiar and inappropriate a word that even the detective who was interrogating him—Lieutenant James Sharkey, a man with over thirty years on the Massachusetts State Police force—was brought up short. “‘Material’ being the body?” he interrupted Douglas. And Douglas said yes, he’d meant Robin’s body, although of course it was wrapped in the comforter at the time, so he’d lumpe
d the two together in his phrase.
Shadows
One day, long after Douglas had been caught and sentenced for the murder of Robin Benedict, Lieutenant Sharkey commented to me, “Our catching the professor was really just a matter of coincidence. He almost went scot-free. But there was one thing he didn’t consider. About a month before he did away with Robin, Massachusetts went ecological and passed a bottle law. It was the bottle law that put Douglas behind bars.”
Sharkey was joking with me. He’s a garrulous, wisecracking Irish cop, who never answers a “How are you?” without a “Couldn’t be better if I was twins” or “Ready to run off with ya, but don’t tell your husband.” In fact, he and his staff worked heroically to put Douglas behind bars, and the police work that went into solving the case was meticulous. But there was some truth to his observation, for if it wasn’t for the bottle law, the police at the Norfolk County D.A.’s office might never have had the opportunity to do their work because the fact that Robin had been murdered might never have emerged.
The bottle law is the law that enables anyone returning beer or soda cans or bottles to obtain a refund. When it first went into effect in Massachusetts, middle-class, relatively comfortable people hardly gave it a thought. But those who were out of work or otherwise economically strapped immediately saw the law as a bonanza, a way to make a bit of cash by scavenging for cans and bottles.
Thus it was that on Sunday, March 6, two unemployed men, Joseph Plotegher and Robert Jewell, both of them with families to support, decided to go out scavenging on I-95. It was a cold morning, but they pursued their task assiduously, checking for cans on the side of the highway and, in particular, in the trash barrels at rest stops. At a rest stop near Foxboro, Plotegher peered into one trash barrel and saw a large brown plastic bag, knotted at the top. He hefted it out and, curious because it was unusually heavy, ripped it open. Inside were a beige jacket, a blue shirt, and a small sledgehammer, all covered with blood.
Plotegher was frightened. He called Jewell over to look at the items, and the friends conferred. It was clear that the things were ghastly. But should they report them? If they did, mightn’t they be accused of some kind of foul play? Nervous, the two men decided to put the plastic bag back into the trash barrel, leave the rest area, and continue their search elsewhere. But after a couple of hours Plotegher’s conscience started to bother him. Suppose some dangerous criminal was on the loose? Determined to do what was right, he went home and telephoned the State Police at Foxboro to report what he’d seen.
A young state trooper named Paul Landry was the first of many policemen who would eventually become involved in the case. On Sunday afternoon he went to the rest area, examined the bloody jacket, shirt, and sledgehammer, had them photographed by another trooper, and took them back to the Foxboro barracks, where he logged them into the contraband journal. On Monday morning, at precisely the time Douglas reached Washington, Landry turned the materials over to a police chemist for analysis. Working on the assumption that he might be able to connect the property to someone who’d disappeared, he spent the remainder of Monday checking police teletypes about recently reported missing persons.
Landry didn’t learn anything useful from the teletyped reports, but the following day, Tuesday, March 8, a fellow police officer mentioned that he’d heard a story about a missing girl on a television news program the previous night. He didn’t recall what channel. Landry contacted all the local channels, to no avail; but late in the afternoon, one of the channels called back and said yes, they’d aired a brief report about a missing girl the evening before. She was from Malden.
A few minutes later, Landry was on the phone to the Malden Police Department. Sure enough, a Clarence J. Rogers had reported that his live-in girlfriend, Robin Benedict, had been missing since Sunday, March 6. The police sergeant over in Malden said that according to information he’d gathered, Rogers might be a pimp and Benedict might be a prostitute. He also said that apparently the girl had last been known to be going to Sharon to pay a call on a William H. J. Douglas, Ph.D.
What had she been wearing when she disappeared? Landry asked the Malden police sergeant. Slacks, a beige shirt, and a beige jacket, he was told.
Landry reported back to his supervisors that he had an ID on the person who had, in all likelihood, owned the beige jacket. On an official level, the Benedict case had begun.
It had already begun on an unofficial level. By Tuesday the eighth, J.R. had hired a private detective agency to help him search for Robin. He felt certain that whatever had happened to her, William Douglas had had something to do with it. And even as Trooper Landry was talking with the Malden police sergeant, Jack Da Rosa and Jim Smith of Boston’s Central Secret Service Bureau were en route to Washington, D.C., to scout out Douglas.
Da Rosa and Smith knew where he was staying because he’d left his phone number for Savi Bisram. They checked into his hotel, the Hotel Washington on Pennsylvania Avenue, and by 10:30 P.M., they had persuaded Douglas to let them come to his room. They were investigating the case of a missing girl, they told him, and they understood he knew her.
Sure, he knew her, he said. She was a prostitute who worked out of Good Time Charlie’s. Sure, their information was right; sure, she’d been to see him at his home on Saturday night. But she’d left at about midnight to go to a party. Had the detectives looked into the whereabouts of some contact of hers in Charlestown, a guy named Joe?
The private eyes listened impassively. Then one of them, noticing that Douglas was wearing a large, three-by-three-inch bandage on his forehead, asked him what was wrong. He said he’d walked smack into a kitchen cabinet at home just before he’d come down to Washington.
When was that? Da Rosa and Smith also asked him. He’d taken a train down from Massachusetts on Monday, March 7, he said.
Why hadn’t he flown down? they wanted to know. Because, he explained, he’d had a lot of paperwork to do in connection with the meeting—an important meeting of the Veterans’ Administration Merit Board—and taking the train had given him a perfect opportunity to get the work done.
Soon the two detectives left, but they paid Douglas a second visit about an hour later, and this time, when the subject of his head wound came up, he told them that it had happened as the result of a mugging. Someone had tried to steal his briefcase and in the scuffle had hit him over the head with it. The incident had occurred in Washington’s train station, he said.
Contradictory and nervous, he struck Da Rosa and Smith as suspicious, and they asked him if they could take a look around. He must have been afraid that to refuse would somehow be incriminating, for he said okay. Then, trembling, he stood by warily while they searched the room cursorily. In his suitcase, tucked between his clothes, were the license plates he had removed from Robin’s Toyota. But although Da Rosa and Smith opened the suitcase, they didn’t discover the plates, and the next day they headed back to Boston, leaving him to finish his conference.
Back in New England, the private eyes were informed by the Malden police that the police over in Foxboro had in their possession a jacket that might have belonged to Robin. And on Monday, March 14, they and their client, J.R., as well as Robin Benedict’s father, were taken to the State Police Chemical Lab in Boston to view the jacket and see if they could identify it.
Trooper Landry and the chemist who had analyzed the bloodstains produced the beige corduroy jacket and showed it to J.R. and Benedict separately. J.R. was first. The chemist raised the jacket. Suddenly J.R. became visibly upset and began to shout “No, no! That’s hers! No! No!”
His reaction, so extreme and so volatile, made Landry suspicious, and he grabbed the jacket and took it closer, placing it right under J.R.’s nose and demanding that he smell it. The jacket, everyone who handled it had observed, still bore a strong odor of perfume despite the dried blood on it. Did J.R. recognize the smell? Landry asked. But J.R., violently upset now, took one sniff at the jacket and started to run out of the room. Landry go
t him back; then, somewhat subdued, J.R. stated that without a doubt, the perfume was the kind his girlfriend, Robin Benedict, used to wear. He was certain of it because he’d bought her the scent.
A few minutes later, Landry showed the jacket to John Benedict, who said it was definitely his daughter’s. She’d worn it on a visit home only the week before, and he remembered it distinctly because there’d been some talk about it. His other daughter, Rhonda, had coveted it, and she’d tried it on, admired the fit, and half grudgingly given it back, joking that Robin could keep it because Rhonda didn’t like the style of the collar. As John Benedict described the conversation, tears welled up in his eyes.
Right after the incident in the lab, Landry believed that J.R., who had seemed to be overreacting, had killed Robin. But during the week that followed he changed his mind. He spent that week learning everything he could about Robin Benedict and her movements just prior to her disappearance. He spoke to Savi Bisram and some of Robin’s other hooker friends. He visited her trick pads, talked to the operators at her answering service, interviewed the real estate man she’d been with before going to Douglas’s house, and tracked down the mysterious Joe from Charlestown. And he heard about William Douglas’s obsession with Robin, about the Tufts investigation, and about how the professor had haunted the young prostitute at the Saugus health club and quarreled violently with her in front of Officer Testa of the Sharon police. At last, on March 19, almost two weeks after the murder, Landry called Douglas down to the Foxboro police barracks.