After five years in the crucible of murder investigation, Deere thought he had seen everything—until he caught the red ball express the night Amber Stanley was killed. Since then, he has worked an almost endless string of sixteen-hour days, conducting scores of interviews, compiling hundreds of reports, filling seven binders with meticulous dossiers on witnesses and suspects. He has listened to mind-numbing recordings of phone calls from jail, delivered at least three detailed briefings to the police chief, and passed far too many nights staring at the bedroom ceiling, fretting over what crucial piece of evidence or information he has missed. Though he blames his weight gain on the long hours and the abrupt demise of his vegan-and-cigarettes diet, the real culprits were stress and anxiety. With twenty-three years on the force, Deere is nearing retirement; for better or worse, his reputation will ultimately be defined by this one case.
Deere is well aware that some of the county’s most infamous red balls have never been solved. In fact, the twentieth anniversary of one such case is fast approaching. In May 1993, ten-year-old George Stanley Burdynski Jr. left his family’s white bungalow on his bicycle in the working-class town of Brentwood, never to be seen again. For months, Junior’s disappearance was a major news story, with reporters chronicling the frantic efforts by the police to find the boy, or at least his missing red bicycle. For a while, investigators suspected that a ring of pedophiles was responsible, but eventually that trail went cold. On a number of anniversaries of Junior’s disappearance, the department has displayed thousands of pages of reports to prove to reporters how hard the case has been worked, as if the stacks of dusty documents demonstrate anything other than the obvious: despite enormous effort, no killer has ever been brought to justice.
Five years after Junior’s disappearance, fifty-year-old Sherry Crandell was discovered bound, raped, and strangled in her office at Prince George’s Hospital Center. The crime shocked the DC region: was the county so dangerous that hospital employees were not safe at work? The police promised a quick arrest; they believed the killer was a thief who had assaulted Crandell after she surprised him while he was rummaging through her office. Not only had the killer left behind his DNA, the hospital also boasted security cameras that were likely to have captured crucial evidence. Yet the investigation went nowhere, and now, nearly fifteen years after Crandell’s death, the investigation’s lead detective remains tormented by the failure.
These murders haunt the PG police force like phantoms. In particular, they plague Sean Deere, who yearns for Amber Stanley’s case—his investigation—to be solved. In his darkest moments, he imagines a painful phone call ten or twenty years hence, from some young detective who brazenly asks how he had missed an obvious piece of evidence. This is his waking nightmare: that the answer to the Amber Stanley riddle lies somewhere in his seven binders, that he has somehow missed the critical clue among hundreds of facts and rumors, reports and scribbled notes. The clue waits there, unseen and uncaring, and it will wait there as he retires, grows old, and dies.
* * *
TEN MINUTES AFTER grabbing Jeff Buck, Deere parks his Impala behind police headquarters, leads the suspect through a set of double doors and down a long hallway, and then turns left into the unmarked door of the homicide office. They pass one closed door before Deere opens a second one—this is Interview Room 2. He deposits Buck inside, telling him that he and Detective Crowell will return in a few minutes.
After closing and locking the door, Deere shuffles through the 1,350-square-foot squad room. The low-ceilinged space is crammed with five rows of workstations, each topped by a filing cabinet decorated with work schedules, family photos, and sports logos. The room’s fluorescent lights are harsh, and though one wall has five windows, they are small and their curtains are drawn, so almost no natural light enters the room. On each desk, a whirling fan circulates the stuffy air, which smells of stale pepperoni pizza and fried chicken, the last two meals devoured by investigators.
Deere passes between two rows of desks piled high with case files, papers, and boxes. His is the last desk in the last row; it sits next to a concrete wall so thick that it blocks most cell-phone signals from the bunkerlike room. A moment later, Crowell arrives and takes a seat at his desk, which is next to Deere’s. For five minutes, the two detectives silently review notes and check e-mails. Then Deere stands and signals for Crowell to follow him. It’s time.
The detective walks to the interview room and presses his right eye to the peephole. Jeff Buck has removed his leather jacket and is now down to a black sweatshirt. With his hands deep in the pockets of his camouflage pants, he is half-sitting, half-lying in a plastic chair, his eyes closed. He appears to be asleep.
The felony nap, thinks Deere.
As every homicide detective in the unit knows, only the guilty sleep in the windowless, eight-by-eight-foot interview room known as “the box.” The innocent pace, bounce on their toes, sob, even piss their pants in fear. Who wouldn’t in this grim enclosure, with its gray walls, flickering lights, heavy door audibly locked from the outside, and black video orb mounted in an upper corner? No, the innocent do not nap.
The guilty, however, sprawl out on the wooden table or the dingy tile floor or in one of the hard plastic chairs. They sleep, or pretend to. Within the Homicide Unit, explanations for this behavior abound: maybe some kind of circuit breaker has tripped in their minds; maybe they are simply acting. Sean Deere has his own hypothesis: the guilty, the true killers, are reptilian motherfuckers who don’t give a shit, either about the life they have taken or the one they might be about to lose.
Stepping back from the door, Deere runs a hand through what remains of his hair and rubs the bags under his eyes. He takes a deep breath; glancing over his right shoulder, he spots Crowell checking the wall clock and jotting down the time on his notepad.
“Ready?” Deere asks.
“Let’s do this,” says Crowell.
Deere does not want to show Buck the flimsy warrant for collecting his DNA, partly because it will alert him to his status as a suspect, partly because Buck could challenge it and prevent jurors from hearing the evidence Deere hopes to collect. So the detective wants to keep the interview low-key for as long as possible and eventually persuade Buck to consent to giving them his DNA. The results of that test will either confirm that Buck is a serious suspect or force Deere to reevaluate two months of work. Deere also hopes to convince Buck to surrender his cell phone and its potential trove of e-mails, texts, photographs, videos, and social-media postings.
As Deere and Crowell step into the interview room, the detectives are assaulted by the pungent smells of marijuana and body odor. On the ten-minute ride to the station, Deere had sniffed the skunklike smell of weed emanating from Buck’s clothes. Now that aroma has merged with the stink of the room’s most recent occupant, most likely a homeless man. Deere wonders whether they should move Buck to a better room but decides against it. The detectives will get used to the smell; they always do.
“You got weed on you?” Crowell asks, his voice muffled by a golf-ball-sized plug of sunflower seeds in his right cheek.
“I don’t think so,” the man says.
“Are you sure you don’t have a J on you?” asks Deere.
“We don’t care,” Crowell says. “If you do, we’re just going to get rid of it.”
“Do you smoke?” asks Deere, referring to marijuana.
Buck laughs—of course he does.
“This morning?” Deere says.
“Yeah, this morning.”
Deere wonders if the man is too impaired by the drug to continue but decides that he’s reasonably lucid and presses ahead. The detective doesn’t like the way the furniture is arranged in the box, so he and Crowell move the table away from the wall, into the center of the room. Deere takes a seat across from Buck, while Crowell sits in one corner of the cramped room, his right knee two feet from Buck’s left knee.
Deere begins the interrogation with straightforward questions ab
out the man’s background. Buck is twenty-three and says he lives with his “baby’s momma”—the screaming woman from earlier that afternoon—in an apartment on Eastern Avenue in Capitol Heights, on the line between PG County and the District.
After he finishes with Buck’s background, Deere asks where he was last night and this morning. It’s a test, a question to which Deere and Crowell think they know the answer. They have spent weeks learning everything they can about the suspect, and for the past few days they’ve tracked his cell phone. They believe he spent the night at another girlfriend’s apartment, about three and a half miles from where they nabbed him.
Buck says he slept at his baby’s momma’s house and, before that, was with a friend on Southern Avenue. In other words, he was nowhere near where his cell phone was pinging. He says he had just left a grocery store on an errand for his baby’s momma when the detectives found him. That part was no doubt true—he’d been carrying a shopping bag filled with the expected supplies—but it seems more likely that he had popped into the store on his way home from his other girlfriend’s apartment, or perhaps after conducting a few drug deals.
When Deere asks Buck why he went to the grocery store, Buck says his baby’s momma had run out of soap for her washing machine. He also says he needed cigarettes and bought two.
“You buy cigarette singles?” Deere asks.
“Yeah,” Buck says. “The guys around here sell them in singles.”
“How much is a cigarette?”
“Fifty cents.”
“Fifty cents for one?” Deere asks in the hoarse voice of a smoker who inhales a pack a day of Camel Blues.
“Yeah, two for a dollar.”
“You get a better deal with two for a dollar,” Deere deadpans.
Buck’s brow creases; he is perplexed. “It’s the same thing,” he says.
Deere laughs. “The more you buy should be cheaper. Hey, a carton is cheaper than a pack.”
“I’m trying to cut down,” Buck says. “But as many singles that I smoke, I should buy a pack.”
Deere taps pen to paper once, twice, a third time. The preliminaries are over. He asks Buck about his last visit to this office, five months earlier. Like a number of others who live in or near Amber Stanley’s neighborhood, Buck had been questioned about the murder. Deere has read the department’s report on the interview, and from what he can tell, the detective who interviewed Buck did a decent job. But the detective clearly hadn’t been particularly familiar with the details of the case; besides, in light of what Deere has recently uncovered, he couldn’t possibly have known the right questions to ask.
When Buck replies to Deere, his tone is casual: “He asked me if I knew her, who I think did it. He asked me a lot of random questions. I really can’t remember—it was a couple months back. He was asking me if I know the girl.”
“What did he say happened?”
“He didn’t tell me. He wanted my story first.”
“What did you hear?” asks Deere.
“Basically, some guys came into a house. I think they said three guys came into the house. They shot the girl while she was sleeping in her bed and left.”
The two detectives exchange quizzical looks. It is the first time Deere has heard anything about three men being involved; he also wonders if the confidential detail about Amber Stanley being slain in her bed has leaked out. He knows Buck has at least one fact wrong, however: Amber Stanley wasn’t sleeping when she was killed.
“Three guys came into the house and shot her while she was sleeping?” asks Deere, making sure he has the story straight.
“Yeah.”
Deere is quiet for a moment, again tapping his pen to paper, nodding slightly in thought.
“You knew her?” he asks.
“No, but I knew her sister.”
Deere and Crowell exchange another look. Good: Buck has admitted that he knows the sister. Not the older sister—the foster sister. Looking back at his suspect, Deere thinks, Okay, now it’s time.
* * *
FROM THE FIRST, Deere was all but certain that Amber Stanley was an innocent victim who had done nothing to deserve her fate. The murder had to be about something else, or somebody else. That somebody, Deere felt, was probably Amber’s foster sister, Denise Garner,2 a known prostitute who was a magnet for trouble.
A thin, pretty teenager, Denise seemed mentally unstable and had endured a deeply troubled childhood and adolescence. When she was three, her mother, a prostitute, was found sexually assaulted and beaten to death. Until she was thirteen, the girl lived with various family friends and relatives, including an aunt. She then moved through a succession of foster homes, finally arriving at Amber Stanley’s parents’ house eight months before the murder. Her new situation suited her; in fact, she described living with Amber Stanley’s mother, Irma Gaither, as the best experience of her life. Even so, the most recent move had apparently done little to improve Denise’s behavior. As police investigators quickly discovered, she was selling sex for cash, marijuana, and cigarettes.
Denise, who turned eighteen not long after Amber’s slaying, soon became the focus of Deere’s investigation. She had a lengthy list of clients who needed to be tracked down, but Deere was particularly interested in learning more about a violent incident that might be related to the killing. Just five days before Amber’s murder, her foster sister had reported having been raped.
According to Denise, she had been walking home from a friend’s house at about 8:00 p.m. on August 17 when she was pulled into some bushes by a man wielding a knife. After forcing her to the ground and threatening to kill her, the man sexually assaulted her. “I almost died in the dark, all alone, in the grass somewhere,” she told sex-offense investigators a few hours after the assault. She initially denied selling herself to the man, but investigators were well aware of her background and suspected that she was lying about what had happened.
Soon after Amber’s murder, Deere talked with the sex-offense investigators who had interviewed Denise. They expressed considerable doubt about the teenager’s story: under questioning, Denise had changed several details of her account, and by the end she’d decided that she didn’t want to report the crime. The investigators came away from the interview feeling somewhat skeptical that a rape had taken place; their guess was that a client had probably refused to pay and brandished a knife when Denise got angry.
Deere came to a different conclusion. Early on in their investigation of Amber’s murder, Deere and Crowell interviewed Denise and felt she was being honest about the rape. Though she admitted to selling sex for money, she was persuasive when swearing that she had not filed a false report to punish a client who’d refused to pay. The detectives inspected several cuts and small bruises on her arms, knees, legs, and hands, physical evidence that corroborated her description of struggling with a man threatening her with a knife. And Deere took note of two other salient facts: not only had her attacker used a condom, he’d also worn gloves, despite the summer heat. He had seemed to go out of his way to make sure that he didn’t leave any forensic clues behind—behavior that was hardly typical of a random trick gone bad.
Ever since learning of the assault, Deere had been guided by the wisdom of a former sergeant: “There are no coincidences in homicides.” Though Deere believed that his victim had not played a role in her own demise, her foster sister was a prostitute who had been raped a few days before the murder. The investigator’s suspicion that the sexual assault and the murder were connected gained credence as detectives learned more about Denise’s actions in the days after the rape. Soon after the assault, she had taken to Facebook to taunt her assailant, at one point writing, “ALL I GOTTA SAY IS LET ANOTHER PERSON HIT ME OR TRY TO. ITS GOING DOWN! BECAUSE NIGGAS COMING OUTSIDE WITH KITCHEN KNIVES AND BLACK GLOVES, NIGGA I WILL GET YOUR ASS SHOT!”
Given that Denise was displaying such bravado on the Internet, her attacker could have concluded that she’d also talked to the police about the rape. To Deere,
that suggested a motive for shooting Denise, which in turn suggested that Amber Stanley could have been slain in error. Now Deere had a scenario that seemed plausible: desperate to stop Denise from talking further to the police or broadcasting details of the rape on social media, the rapist had gone to Denise’s house, kicked down the front door in a fury, and shot the young woman standing in the hallway. As he’d watched Amber run up the stairs, he might or might not have realized that he had shot the wrong girl. To Deere, it didn’t matter: the killer had to finish what he’d started, so he’d followed Amber up to her room and murdered her in her bed.
As Deere dug into the details of Denise’s rape in the days following Amber’s murder, he came across an intriguing piece of evidence: after the assault, a small spot of blood had been discovered on Denise’s shirt. The attacker had been careful, but Deere wondered if perhaps he had been cut during the encounter. Though the detective scoured the reports, he found no mention of Denise having been injured beyond scratches and bruises—certainly nothing that would explain the spot of blood. Further confirmation came from the injuries he and Crowell had noted when inspecting Denise’s extremities: none were terribly serious, though they were extensive enough to convince Deere that they corroborated her story of fending off an attacker.
In mid-October, Deere received the DNA test results on the blood and learned that it had indeed been spilled by a man. Now Deere believed he’d found another piece of the puzzle, a deduction that Denise would later confirm: during the assault, the teenager had wrestled the knife away from her assailant long enough to turn it on him. If the detective could locate the man whose DNA matched the blood found on Denise’s shirt, he might also have Amber’s killer.
A Good Month for Murder Page 3