by Linda Wolfe
It was an unsettling interview. Douglas stuck to his story that although he’d known Robin, he knew nothing about her disappearance. Yet, throughout the interview, there was something peculiar about the scholar’s demeanor, something untrustworthy about his responses. Landry couldn’t quite put his finger on it. But in any event the shirt that had been found in the barrel was a man’s size 17-34, a size that would fit the thick-necked Douglas. And the shirt, as well as the hammer and Robin’s jacket, had been located a mere five miles from Douglas’s house—the last place Robin was known to have been going. Given these facts, Landry reported to his supervisors after his interview with Douglas that there was probable cause to believe that Robin Benedict had not just disappeared, but had been murdered, and probable cause to believe that William Douglas might have been responsible.
That night the case was turned over to a judge, and several state troopers, under the supervision of Lieutenant Sharkey, obtained a search warrant and proceeded to search Douglas’s house.
Lieutenant Sharkey was christened James Henry Horace Michael Patrick Francis Sharkey. “I was named for all my six uncles, and only one of them left me any money,” he likes to joke. A tough-minded detective who has helped to solve many of Norfolk County’s most baffling crimes, he is rugged-looking, with the face of a character actor who even when young could never play romantic leads.
Sharkey was to get to know William Douglas better, perhaps, than anyone else had ever known the secretive professor. He interviewed him repeatedly, read his private files and correspondence, examined his stockpile of pornography, tailed after him to all manner of assignations, and eventually heard his intimate confession. Knowing Douglas so well gave Sharkey a kind of attachment to the man. He would always maintain—even though he would be mocked for it by those of his colleagues who saw Douglas as a malevolent, unnatural genius—that the professor was likable. He would always maintain that the man had been no match for Robin and that, in fact, few men were a match for today’s new breed of prostitutes. Even himself. “When I got into this case, I thought I knew everything,” he told me. “But it’s a new world out there in the Combat Zone. I’ve seen girls there who frighten even me.” And he would always maintain that he felt sorry for the professor.
He certainly felt sorry for the Douglas family. By the night of the search, the emotional chaos that had overtaken the lives of the Douglases had assumed a virtually palpable existence in the house. The rooms were filthy, utterly disordered. There were stacks of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. There was decaying food on every counter. In the laundry, the washer had long before overflowed, and the floor was covered with greasy, soapy water. In the master bedroom, there were piles and piles of newspapers, with cockroaches crawling in them. Sharkey told me that it was as if Nancy had gone on strike and Douglas into a remote world of his own. “What got me,” he said, “what would always be some sort of a symbol for me, was that downstairs in the family room there was a bulletin board, and on it a note written in a child’s handwriting. It said, ‘Won’t somebody please clean up this house?’”
But if Sharkey felt sorry for the family, it didn’t affect the quality of his detective work. He was full of wiles. “Douglas was arrogant that night,” he told me, explaining what had happened. “He was looking down his nose at me. So when I read him his rights and wrote down his statements, I just played along with him. I took down his words, but every once in a while I’d stop and ask him how you spelled something, letting him think I was as stupid as he thought I was. It worked like a charm. I think he felt he could say anything he liked around me, and I just wouldn’t get it.”
With Nancy he was equally cunning but softer. Indeed, his cunning lay in his gentleness with her. She had been extremely shaken when the police arrived—at about 12:30 A.M.—and Sharkey had consoled her and even held her hand. When she asked him if she could take the children out to a neighbor’s, he said what a good idea that was and that she could if she wanted to. She didn’t, but by then he had won her confidence, and, as a result, he was shortly to be able to obtain from her a bit of evidence that was ultimately to prove extremely damning to Douglas. The evidence was a bit of thread.
Sharkey and his men had brought with them the blue shirt that had been found in the trash barrel. It had been mended under the armpits, and Sharkey commented on the mending and showed it to Nancy. Had she sewn it? he asked, and if so, would she mind showing him the thread she’d used? Nancy said she thought it looked like her sewing, and she went to the bureau drawer and got out a spool of thread. Sharkey contemplated it thoughtfully, then asked her if she had any other spools of thread with which she might have mended the shirt. Nancy, utterly cooperative with the kindly detective, went to another room and brought back another spool.
Eventually the spools would be submitted to the FBI lab in Washington, and a fibers expert there would discover that in color, composition, thickness—indeed, in every respect—the second spool matched the thread that had been used to sew Douglas’s shirt.
The search turned up other extremely incriminating pieces of evidence. One was a box of plastic garbage bags that appeared to match, in size, color, and brand, the bag that had been taken out of the rest area trash barrel. Another was one of Robin’s pocketbooks, which a trooper found in Douglas’s bedroom closet. It was stuffed with prophylactics. Robin’s address book was also found, as was the beeper to her Panasonic answering machine, her Armstrong flute, and her pink panties.
But the most damaging piece of evidence was one that the police chemist, Ronald Kaufman, stumbled across. Searching the living room closet, he came upon a man’s blue windbreaker. He did a presumptive test for blood on the windbreaker and found that there was a positive reaction in the right-hand pocket.
The jacket was confiscated. Later, it too would be sent to a lab for analysis, and it would turn out that in the right-hand pocket there was, not only a tiny smear of blood, but a fingernail-size piece of human brain tissue. The jacket was, of course, the one that Douglas had taken out of his closet right after killing Robin, in which he’d tried to conceal the hammer. Apparently he’d forgotten all about that effort.
Douglas wasn’t arrested that night. But by the time the police left his home, they had discovered, not just Robin’s personal effects and the blood-tinged windbreaker, but letters he had written to her, papers in which he’d spelled out her involvement in the Tufts swindle, and a page in her address book on which he’d made himself a note about a Joseph Murray in Charlestown. They took all these things with them. And they also took his telephone bills, gasoline receipts, and an Amtrak timetable.
It wasn’t enough evidence to justify arresting the professor, who had maintained throughout the search that he knew nothing of Robin’s disappearance and that someone, probably J.R., had planted her possessions in his home. To arrest Douglas, the police would first have to come up with strong proof of two separate contentions. One was that Robin Benedict was actually dead, not merely missing—a complicated proposition, since her body had not turned up. The other was that after Robin left Douglas’s home on Saturday night, the professor hadn’t gone to bed—as he kept insisting—but that he had gone somewhere else. Somewhere with Robin. Or her body. Still, the evidence that had been found was enough to get the police started.
And what of Douglas? How did he react to the fact that, despite his precautions, he was now under suspicion of murder? He seems to have believed that he could get away with the murder if only he were clever enough, and consequently devoted himself to his scheme of making it appear that Robin was still alive. In mid-March, neighbors above the last trick pad that she had rented heard someone playing the flute in her rooms. In April, on Easter Sunday, the Benedicts received a telegram signed “Robin,” which said that she was alive and well and living in Las Vegas.
But while his arranging these ghostly acts was, under the circumstances, logical and understandable, the efforts of a suspect to throttle suspicion, Douglas also began to behave in
illogical, unfathomable, and compulsive ways. Always, at least as far as anyone knew, a responsible scientist, he now started to produce—at a part-time job with Scott Laboratories in Rhode Island—unreliable work. He was doing experiments with cancer cells and coming up with interesting results, but his findings couldn’t be duplicated by others. In science, this is almost always a worrisome signal, and late in April his supervisor accused him of confabulating his findings and dismissed him. Subsequently, he was reduced to taking a job as a desk clerk at the YMCA in Boston. But there, too, he behaved oddly. On one occasion he pretended to want to buy, but in fact temporarily absconded with, the automobile of a Y resident.
Something in him seemed to have snapped. He was out of control, a man who had lost his rudder, who had drifted far from the machinery of middle-class propriety which had previously kept him on course. He and Nancy were barely communicating. He took no interest in the children. And he began to turn up in the Combat Zone once again, there to pick up prostitutes and accompany them to trick pads or cheap motels or just into cars for quick sex. His sexual appetite was urgent, mechanical, seemingly insatiable. Lieutenant Sharkey, observing him from an unmarked car, noticed that on occasion he would climax with one prostitute and then, an hour later, find himself another and repeat the experience. He had become, like Tantalus, a man for whom there could be no satisfaction.
His life throughout this period was filled not only with sociopathy and satyriasis but with bitter ironies. He had used up all his savings back in the days before he’d begun stealing from Tufts. Now, the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, which had reimbursed Tufts for the losses he had caused, wanted to recover. They took a lien on his house. Needing money desperately, he began to work at any job he could find, no matter how demeaning. For a while he even did market research over the telephone. Then he looked for a job as a laborer, like his father before him, but found none. After a while, his circumstances were so straitened that he was reduced to picking up extra cash by scavenging for refundable cans and bottles.
While Douglas was spiraling ever downward, Sharkey and his men were making strides toward uncovering his actions on the night of the killing. Here they were helped by another irony, for even then Douglas had been so strapped for cash that he had used credit cards wherever he went. Obtaining his credit card bills, the police discovered that he’d bought gas in Boston that night and that he’d telephoned Nancy from a highway rest area near the one where the hammer was found, as well as from a Howard Johnson’s in Pawtucket and a bus station in Providence. Clearly, whatever he claimed, the professor hadn’t been home in bed that night.
Clearly, too, on the next night, he hadn’t gone directly to Washington, as he’d insisted. Once again, because he’d used a credit card, the police were able to ascertain that he left for Washington not from Massachusetts but from New York City. On Sunday, March 6, he’d presented his card in New York’s Pennsylvania Station to purchase an Amtrak ticket to Washington on a train leaving at 3:33 A.M.; Sharkey, sorting through boxes of ticket stubs at Amtrak headquarters, eventually found the very ticket that had been issued to Douglas.
“Mrs. Douglas,” Sharkey said to Nancy one day in late April, “why don’t you tell us where your husband was on the night Robin Benedict disappeared, and what he told you, so we can recover her automobile and body?” By this time he and his fellow police officers had established that Douglas had lied to them about his movements, but they still didn’t have enough evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Robin had in fact been murdered. There was a tiny smear of blood and brain tissue in the pocket of Douglas’s windbreaker. But there were no tests that could prove that the speck of tissue had come from the brain of Robin Benedict and no other. And while there were new and excellent tests for identifying victims through their blood, the amount of dried fluid found on the windbreaker was very small. William Delahunt, the district attorney of Norfolk County, was eager to have Robin’s body itself or, failing that, at least some more substantial remains. But where to look?
Nancy, ever so wistful, ever so sad, deflected Sharkey’s question. She couldn’t talk, she told him; “I can’t. I’m sorry. You would have to be married to a man for twenty years to understand.”
Delahunt, an experienced district attorney—he had been Norfolk County’s chief prosecutor for years—suspected that since Douglas had been in New York on Sunday, March 6, he might have disposed of Robin’s body there. Other people connected with the case had more fanciful notions. Some believed that Douglas had dismembered Robin and, en route to New York, discarded bits and pieces of her body along the highway. After all, he was a professor of anatomy, wasn’t he? Others believed that he might have cremated her body in the incinerator at Tufts Medical School. A Harvard Medical School professor had done just that back in the nineteenth century, murdering a colleague to whom he owed a debt, then incinerating the victim in his laboratory. There’d been nothing left of the man except a portion of his pelvic area with the male genitalia attached. Still others thought that most likely Robin’s body had been placed in her car and the whole pushed into the waters off the coast. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a young woman had been found dead in that fashion in New England. Throughout the spring and early summer, divers from in and around Robin’s hometown of Methuen made exhausting underwater searches for her car in the still-frigid waters.
By this time, the police were intensely eager to arrest Douglas. In Sharon, the body of a naked thirteen-year-old girl had been found in a sandpit. She had been killed by a blow from a blunt instrument to her head, and the crime had never been solved. In Plattsburgh, too, a girl had died under mysterious circumstances that were never resolved. Her death had occurred while Douglas was living there. The professor, the police worried, might be even more dangerous than a one-time murderer. He might turn out to be a serial killer, a stalker of girls and women. They wanted him off the streets, but without proof that Robin had been murdered their hands were tied.
Then, at last, they had a breakthrough. On July 16, in New York City, a policewoman on a routine patrol noticed a silver Toyota without plates parked on the street about a block from Pennsylvania Station. The policewoman ran the information through the computer at the station house, and a report came back. The car, said the report, might belong to a missing person named Robin Benedict who might have been the victim of a homicide in Norfolk County, Massachusetts.
Two Manhattan South Precinct homicide investigators were promptly dispatched to go to Penn Station and examine the automobile. They opened the door, and immediately a strong odor of decay assailed their nostrils. It was the unmistakable odor of decomposing human matter. “Once you’ve smelled it, you never forget it,” one of the investigators told Manhattan reporters, describing how he and his partner, nauseated, had pushed back the seat of the Toyota and there, in the back of the car, observed a mass of pine needles matted with dried blood.
Sharkey and his men came right down to New York City. They needed to figure out where the car—it was definitely Robin’s—had been before the policewoman spotted it and how long it had been in its previous location. They began interviewing the owners and employees of every parking garage in the area.
It took them several days of pounding the unfamiliar Manhattan sidewalks, but after a stretch of round-the-clock interviews they had their answers. The silver Toyota had been parked in a garage called Myer’s, directly opposite Penn Station, until, after months of not being able to determine the car’s owner and collect a parking fee, attendants at Myer’s shoved the car out of the garage. When had the car first been parked in the garage? On the evening of Sunday, March 6, the detectives learned.
In Boston, where the car itself had been returned, Kaufman, the chemist, went to work. He examined the car’s bloodstained upholstery and deck mats and submitted them to the FBI laboratory in Washington, which already had the other bloodstained items from the trash barrel. And he came upon a less obvious find—another piece of what l
ooked like human tissue. It was minuscule, no larger than the head of a pin, but perhaps it would be useful. Kaufman took the tissue and submitted it to a pathologist.
By the late summer of 1983, Delahunt’s office had begun to weave a tight web around Douglas. The police were still shadowing his every move. A special grand jury had been convened to hear testimony concerning the case, and efforts were under way to force Douglas’s children to testify in front of that jury. Delahunt was speculating that they and their mother might have seen the killing, or at least the aftermath of it, when they arrived home that terrible night. Getting Nancy to describe what she had seen would be out of the question. By Massachusetts law, a wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband. However, there is no law that children can’t be made to testify against their parents, and Delahunt was determined to examine the Douglas children. What had they seen? What had they heard? A legal battle ensued, with the Douglases struggling to keep their children from having to give testimony and Delahunt’s office struggling to force them to do so.
Ultimately, the prosecution won the legal struggle, but even before that happened, Delahunt’s confidence that he could win a murder conviction against Douglas grew, for at last his office was informed that the blood in Robin’s car was most likely hers. The FBI lab in Washington, using complex new genetic marker tests, had analyzed the stains on the upholstery and deck mats of the Toyota and compared them with blood samples taken from Shirley and John Benedict and Robin’s four siblings. The blood in the car was composed of precisely the same elements as that of the rest of the family.
Finally, the pathologist to whom Kaufman had submitted the tiny bit of tissue he’d found in the car turned in his report. The tissue was white matter, from the inner or deeper part of the brain.