Chasing the Boogeyman

by Richard Chizmar

  “By the time we returned downstairs, our backup had arrived, and they were every bit as freaked out as we were. They followed us single-file into the basement, where the stench of blood and decay was the strongest. And right there, among all the burning candles, the washer and dryer, these rows of cardboard boxes stacked up against the wall, this tangled mess of at least twenty old bicycles, and two dozen or so mannequins, we found the bodies of three women, all in their forties. Two were prostitutes and the third was a day-care worker who’d been reported missing three days earlier. They were naked, disemboweled, hanging from the ceiling. Their heads had been shaved, and their hair replaced by cheap wigs. In the opposite corner of the basement, behind this big pile of junk, we found Thomas McGuire. He was naked too, curled into a fetal position. Sobbing. Every inch of his body smeared with the blood of his victims. A fourth body, the guy’s ex-wife, was discovered later in the trunk of his car. That one had been there for a few days as well.”

  “Jesus,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach. “When did this happen?”

  He answered immediately: “October 9, 1976.”

  We didn’t talk the rest of the way back to the station.

  4

  That’s not funny,” I said.

  Carly Albright sat across the table, smiling, clearly enjoying herself. It was early the next afternoon, and we were sitting at what was fast becoming our regular corner table at Loughlin’s Pub.

  “All I’m saying is that it’s a pretty common tactic that police use. You see it in the movies all the time. They pretend to get close to a suspect in order to draw them in and create trust.”

  “That’s not what he was doing. He was a legit nice guy.”

  She ignored me. “And then the suspect gets a little too comfortable, makes a mistake, and boom they’re busted.”

  “That’s not how it went. And busted for what? I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Does he know that?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “He actually asked for my opinion on stuff relating to the case.”

  “Classic misdirection.”

  “Oh, never mind.” I picked at the plate of chicken nachos sitting between us. “You’re impossible.”

  “All I’m saying is that Detective Harper might not be the buddy cop that you’re making him out to be.”

  “I never said he was! I simply said he was nice.”

  “Well… I’m not so sure you should trust him. He has a job to do and he’s under a lot of pressure.”

  “Now you sound like my mother.”

  Carly stacked several loaded nachos on top of each other, crammed them into her mouth, and started chewing. “Suit yourself,” she mumbled, crumbs flying everywhere.

  5

  Later that night, just before heading upstairs to get some writing done, I went into the garage, pressed the button on the automatic door opener, and walked outside to haul the garbage cans to the curb.

  I was halfway down the driveway before I realized how dark it was. Glancing at the front porch, I noticed that the exterior light was off—either my father had forgotten to turn it on after dinner (which almost never happened) or the bulb had burned out. The moon and stars overhead, shrouded behind heavy cloud cover, offered little help. Hanson Road was silent and still, unnaturally so, and the sound of my footsteps was eerily loud. By the time I’d positioned both cans at the curb for early-morning pickup, the back of my neck was bathed in cold sweat and I could hear the thumping of my heart inside my chest. My eyes darted nervously back and forth into the shadows.

  And then I knew—I didn’t know how I knew with such absolute certainty, but I did—the Boogeyman was hiding nearby, watching me.

  Instead of turning and fleeing for the open mouth of the garage—What if he’d slipped inside while my back was turned and was waiting for me in the darkness?—I stood there frozen in fear at the bottom of the driveway, my right hand still gripping the handle of one of the trash cans.

  My mind suddenly flashed back to a story I’d once heard—a story about a good man not much younger than I was now, but considerably braver.

  * * *

  I’d spent the summer before my senior year of high school working as a laborer on Edgewood Arsenal. The hours sucked, but the daily commute was short and the pay was good. I did a little bit of everything—mowing and trimming grass, repairing broken playground equipment, laying asphalt. But my most memorable task that summer was shredding government documents.

  Each morning a truck pulled up and delivered several pallets of cardboard boxes containing thousands of sheets of paper that needed to be destroyed. My supervisor—a soft-spoken African American gentleman named Lonny—and I unloaded the boxes, stacking them at the head of an industrial shredder that very much resembled a wood chipper with a long, narrow conveyor belt leading to its hungry metal teeth.

  We then took turns feeding the machine, one of us carefully staggering stacks of documents atop the belt so the gnashing teeth wouldn’t jam, and the other emptying tangles of shredded confetti from the collection basket into a number of nearby dumpsters. The work itself was long and boring. From time to time, we stumbled upon something interesting—black-and-white photographs of blown-up vehicles after multiple rounds of long-range weapons testing was my personal favorite—but for the most part, it was a dull and monotonous routine.

  Despite the drudgery, Lonny and I didn’t have a whole lot to say to each other in the beginning. We were both quiet by nature, and on the surface, we couldn’t have been more different. I was a skinny seventeen-year-old White dude from the suburbs getting ready to graduate in the spring and head off to college. He was a husband and father in his early thirties, muscular and with dreadlocks, from a small backwoods town in western Texas.

  But that all changed one afternoon when Lonny noticed the book I was reading at lunch. I no longer remember the exact title, but the subject matter was the Vietnam War.

  “You reading that for school?” he asked in that thick drawl of his.

  “Just for myself. I read a lot of history books.”

  “Learning anything interesting?”

  “A ton,” I said. “Mostly what a clusterfuck it was over there. I still can’t believe they sent kids like me to fight in those jungles. I can’t even imagine what it must have felt like.”

  He looked at me then, really looked at me—and later, when I thought back on that conversation, it was clear he was deciding in that moment whether or not to trust me with his story. “I was there,” he finally said, eyes lowered.

  And that’s all it took.

  For the next several weeks, he shared his story with me, and I peppered him with a barrage of questions. I learned about weapons (why the U.S. grunts preferred the enemy’s AK-47 rifles to their own M16s), firefights (anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes of hell on earth), wartime racism (how the African American soldiers almost always got stuck walking point when out on patrol, and how they always ended up lugging around the heavy M60 machine gun known as “The Pig”), but mostly I learned about the friends he’d made and lost during his tour of duty (his “brothers,” he called them). It was a powerful and emotional experience—for both of us—and one I soon learned he hadn’t shared with many people. I felt honored.

  Of all the stories Lonny told me that summer, one in particular always stood out. He’d been in-country for less than a week when he was ordered to walk point for the first time. He was green as hell and didn’t have a clue what he was doing, but that didn’t matter. It was his turn. It was a night patrol, and another company had made contact with the enemy in that same area just days earlier. A couple hours in, while climbing a steep trail, Lonny held up a fist, signaling for the men following behind him to stop. He didn’t see anything waiting in the dark jungle ahead, but he felt it—with every fiber of his being, he felt the enemy hiding nearby, watching them at that very moment. The word he used to describe that feeling was “hinky”—he went on to say that he would experience it
over and over again during his time in Vietnam, a kind of instinctual survival trait—and he had no idea from where it came. He told me that, squatting there on that dark trail, he felt the tiny hairs on his forearms rise to attention, the sweat drenching his uniform instantly turn ice-cold, and a bad taste come into his mouth. The taste of fear. Thirty seconds later, he was in the middle of his first firefight…

  * * *

  Standing at the bottom of my driveway, still holding on to that trash can lid as if it were some kind of lifeline, I tasted that same primal fear flood my mouth, threatening to drown me. Eyes scanning the shadows, I couldn’t spot anything out of the ordinary—but I knew better. Everything around me felt hinky.

  He was out there in the darkness.

  Somewhere.

  Close.

  I have no idea how much time passed before a line of cars crested the hill on Hanson Road, illuminating my frantic retreat into the garage and the safety of my house beyond. It could have been forty-five seconds, or more like five or ten minutes. My brain had thrown a cog and temporarily stopped working.

  All I knew was this: neither before that night nor since have I ever felt such stark fear completely paralyze my mind and body. And I’ve never again known with such certainty that I was in the presence of pure evil.

  Major Buck Flemings (left) and Detective Lyle Harper (Photo courtesy of Logan Reynolds)

  Cedar Drive military housing (Photo courtesy of the author)

  Cedar Drive Elementary School (Photo courtesy of the author)

  seven Maddy

  “By the middle of August, most residents of Edgewood were in a state of full-fledged hysteria.”

  1

  On the morning of August 10, I was sitting in a rotating barber chair getting my hair cut, listening to a bunch of grumpy old men—not one of them under the age of seventy, including Big Ray, who was busy trimming my sideburns—argue about the forthcoming presidential election, when the news came on the radio: another Edgewood girl had gone missing.

  Her name was Madeline Wilcox, and she was eighteen years old. Maddy, as she was known to family and friends, lived with her parents at the end of Hanson Road, four blocks east of the library. Beautiful and spirited, she was set to graduate from Edgewood High School the following spring, but only if she managed to pass the two make-up classes she was taking this summer. So far, so good—at the time of her disappearance, she had earned Bs in both classes. Maddy’s older sister, Chrissy, was spending her first summer off from college working as a lifeguard in nearby Dewey Beach. Maddy had plans to visit her the following weekend.

  Earlier in the morning, as was her routine, Mrs. Wilcox carried up a load of laundry from the basement, and, on the way down the hallway, cracked open her daughter’s bedroom door to wake her. To her surprise and immediate concern, Maddy wasn’t there and her bed didn’t appear to have been slept in.

  The night before, Maddy had driven some friends to a party in Joppatowne, but Mrs. Wilcox was an early sleeper and had been in bed by nine thirty, so she hadn’t heard if her daughter made it home in time for her midnight curfew. Her husband was away on a three-day business trip, so he wasn’t any help either. Mrs. Wilcox looked around the empty bedroom and suddenly thought: What if Maddy never made it home last night?

  She placed the laundry basket on the bed and went to the front window. Peering outside, she spotted her daughter’s candy apple red Camaro sitting at the bottom of the driveway. She immediately breathed a sigh of relief. Thank you, Lord, she made it safe and sound.

  Walking downstairs, she glanced at the small crystal bowl on the foyer table, checking for her daughter’s car keys. They weren’t there. She later told police that’s when a bad feeling washed over her.

  Hurrying outside in her bare feet, Mrs. Wilcox was halfway across the lawn when she noticed the Camaro’s driver’s-side door was slightly ajar and the interior light was on. Her fear deepened.

  Fighting back tears, she was reaching for the door handle when her right foot landed on something sharp in the grass. She yelped and looked down: it was her daughter’s key chain.

  That’s when the tears flowed freely, and she ran back inside to phone the police.

  2

  As I stared at Madeline Wilcox’s face on the afternoon news, it came to me why her name had sounded so damn familiar when I’d first heard it broadcast over the radio.

  An old friend and teammate from my lacrosse days, Johnny Pullin, had once dated Madeline’s older sister for a couple of months. At first I couldn’t remember the sister’s name or even what she looked like, but boy oh boy, I definitely remembered Madeline. Despite the fact that I’d only met her on two occasions, she’d made quite the lasting impression.

  Both times had been at the Rocks, a twisty stretch of Deer Creek located in northern Harford County, where generations of local teenagers had escaped to drink beer, do cannonballs off the old railroad bridge, and ride the rapids on inflatable tubes.

  Johnny Pullin and I had been eighteen that summer, which would’ve made Madeline no older than fourteen. But that hadn’t slowed her down one bit. The pretty young girl I remembered had cussed like a sailor, flirted like a homecoming queen, and worn all of us out with her brash, know-it-all attitude. I’d even caught her sneaking beers out of my cooler.

  Carly had done some quick asking around the morning of the disappearance, and, at first glance, it appeared not much had changed in the past four years. Madeline Wilcox was a below-average student and had been in frequent trouble for smoking on school property and cutting classes. In fact, she’d had to repeat the ninth grade due to an excessive number of unexcused absences.

  There were, however, numerous indications that she’d recently been making changes in her lifestyle and was finally headed in the right direction. She was going to summer school and had gotten a job working three days a week as an aide at a Bel Air nursing home. Her bosses had only good things to say about her performance. Many of the neighbors also spoke highly of her, praising her friendly attitude and thoughtfulness. Mrs. Peters, an elderly woman next door who’d recently lost her husband to cancer, said that Madeline had shoveled the snow from her driveway all last winter without ever being asked, and when the woman had tried to pay her for the work, the teenager had refused to accept a single penny. According to her friends, she’d recently quit smoking and was saving the money she used to spend on cigarettes to buy a golden retriever puppy at the end of the summer. She planned to name it Sawyer.

  3

  After arriving at the scene, crime-lab technicians immediately began working over Madeline Wilcox’s Camaro, dusting for prints and scouring the dash, seats, and floor mats for trace evidence. Uniformed police and detectives canvassed door-to-door along both sides of Hanson Road and spread out onto surrounding streets. Additional officers—along with two teams of dogs—began searching the woods that bordered many of the backyards along this stretch of Hanson. Winters Run snaked through much of that heavily forested area, eventually passing under historic Ricker’s Bridge as it wound its way north toward Route 24 and beyond.

  Detectives spoke at length with both of Madeline Wilcox’s friends who were supposed to have accompanied her to the party the night before. Frannie Keele and Kendall Grant explained that the three of them had changed their minds because they were tired, and had decided to skip the party. Instead, they’d spent the evening at Kendall’s house a few blocks away, eating pizza that’d been delivered by Gus’s and playing video games. Madeline had left at five minutes before midnight to make the short drive home. According to the girls, she’d been in a good mood throughout the night.

  Mr. Wilcox caught a flight back from New York within an hour of his distraught wife’s phone call. A sheriff’s deputy was waiting for him at BWI Airport to bring him home. At twenty minutes past one, breaking news reports interrupted episodes of All My Children, The Young and the Restless, and Days of Our Lives for tens of thousands of local viewers. Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox stood side by side on the fr
ont porch of their house. Detective Lyle Harper stood behind them, looking suitably grim. A sobbing Mrs. Wilcox stared directly into the camera and pleaded with whoever took their daughter to please return her unharmed. “Maddy is such a sweet girl,” the mother said, tears staining her quivering cheeks. “She means everything to our family. Please let Maddy come home.” A stone-faced Mr. Wilcox put a steadying hand on his wife’s shoulder, but didn’t say a word.

  When they were finished, three of the four networks returned to regular programming, but the Channel 13 news team remained on-air, first interviewing Frannie Keele and Kendall Grant, and then wrapping up with a neighbor from down the street.

  It wasn’t long before someone made up a HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? poster featuring Madeline’s photograph, a brief description (5'5", 120 pounds, blond hair, green eyes, small scar above left eye, butterfly tattoo on right ankle), as well as contact information for the Harford County Sheriff’s Department. By dinner, practically every business in Edgewood had at least one poster plastered on its front door or storefront window.

  That evening, Kara and I joined a group of about thirty or forty civilian volunteers in searching a wooded area that ran parallel to much of Perry Avenue, the next street over. Plans were also solidified to check out the ball fields and woods behind the three schools on Willoughby Beach Road the following morning. I’d talked my father out of coming—the last thing he needed to do was take a day off work and come out here and catch poison ivy with the rest of us—but I saw plenty of other familiar faces from the neighborhood. Mr. Vargas was there with several other dads from Bayberry Court; Coach Parks and his wife; Carly Albright and her mom, both wearing bright orange vests like it was the middle of deer season; Mrs. Tannenbaum from the front desk at the Edgewood Library; Jim Solomon from the Texaco station; and a trio of old high school wrestling teammates: Len Stiller, Frank Hapney, and Josh Gallagher.