A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  “Did she cut you?” Crowell asks.

  “Yes,” says Upshaw. His breathing is slowing, becoming more labored; his head is angled down.

  Deere feels a surge of energy. His suspect seems defeated. The interrogation has reached a critical point; he and Crowell have to keep Upshaw rolling, not give him time to think too much and build a defense. It has been an hour since they reentered the box, and Deere senses the momentum building. This is how it often happens: they ride a river of lies that finally ends in a waterfall of truth.

  “How many times did she cut you?” asks Crowell.

  “Three or four,” Upshaw says.

  “How did she cut you?” asks Crowell.

  He makes a slashing motion.

  “She slices you?”

  “Yeah,” says Upshaw, adding that he was holding her while she was flailing at him with a knife.

  “If you went back there, or you had been there before, now is the time to tell us,” Deere says, referring to Denise’s house. “If you went back there to talk to her, that is fine.”

  “You saying you have never been in that house is wrong, dead wrong,” Crowell says. “Being in her house don’t make you a bad dude. Not being honest is what jams you up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you go back to her house that night to try to apologize or something like that?” Crowell asks.

  Upshaw mumbles, his words unintelligible.

  “David, please,” Deere says. “Be honest.”

  “We have your DNA in the house, bottom line,” Crowell says.

  “Were you afraid she was going to call the police?” Deere asks. “Did you try to talk her out of it?”

  “About what?” Upshaw says.

  “About making up some bullshit rape,” Deere says.

  “Did you go there for that purpose?” Crowell asks.

  “I went there to try to make it right.”

  “Did you all go into the house?”

  “I didn’t go in with her.”

  “You went in the house?” Crowell asks again.

  “Yeah,” Upshaw says quietly.

  Deere is startled by this sudden reversal. Did he just say that? Did he just admit going inside the house?

  “Where do you go?” asks Crowell. “Explain it to me. Go in the house and sit on the couch? Go in the house and go downstairs?”

  Upshaw hesitates—and then once again claims he didn’t enter the house. He says he went with Denise to her street and then watched her standing at her front door, yelling at him and taunting him, threatening to sic her friends on him. He says that after listening to her for a bit, he walked to the corner and smoked a cigarette. A few minutes later, he says, he saw a tall stranger emerge from the darkness, go to the front door, and speak with Denise. Then the stranger walked from the house to where Upshaw was standing and beat him up. After losing the fight, Upshaw says, he ran away.

  Deere is skeptical. A stranger appears out of nowhere and beats him up? Denise never mentioned asking a friend to go after her attacker. He’s not even sure Denise has such a friend. The story sounds bogus.

  As Deere considers this new twist in his suspect’s account, Crowell presses ahead.

  “Okay, you are pissed,” Crowell says. “You got cut up and your ass whupped. She is going to call her people—what do you do?”

  “I call my people,” Upshaw answers.

  “So, at some point, you go back over there,” Crowell says. “The problem we have is that your DNA isn’t in the house yet. How the fuck is your DNA in the house? I am going to tell you. You went back over there mad. Am I right?”

  “Right,” Upshaw says.

  “And when do you go back to the house?” Crowell asks. “Do it right, David. Do it right.”

  “Couple days.”

  “What is a couple? A couple to him”—Crowell nods toward Deere—“might be two. Couple to me might be five.”

  “Three or four days,” Upshaw says softly, his eyes glued to his hands, which are resting on the table.

  Jesus, thinks Deere. The timing fits just about perfectly. “How did you get there?” he asks.

  “Bus.”

  “Went by yourself?” Deere asks.

  Upshaw shakes his head and says he was joined by a friend named Vincent, whom he’d contacted through his Facebook page.

  “Both of you went in the house?” Crowell asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you get into the house?” asks Crowell. “Be straight. You should see your chest, the way it’s going up and down, a lot faster than ten minutes ago. This is your chance to make it right, David.”

  “The door was unlocked. She was at the door.”

  Deere glances at Crowell and sees him shaking his head. Tightening his grip on his pen, Deere thinks, Careful, Mike. Be careful.

  “Uh-uh,” Crowell says, his voice practically a growl. “Stop. Stop. Stop. Did you kick in the door or did your boy kick in the door? David, did you kick the door or did your boy kick the door?”

  Deere’s stomach knots: he hates feeding lines to suspects. Besides, not many people know the door was kicked in, and Deere believes it would be far better to get their suspect to confess that point without prompting. But he knows he cannot stop this train—the interrogation is now in Crowell’s hands.

  “I didn’t kick the door,” Upshaw says, sounding resigned.

  “Who kicked the door? Vincent?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Both of you went in?”

  “Yeah.”

  Crowell barely pauses before saying, “Who has the gun?”

  “The gun?” asks Upshaw. His eyes narrow, his back stiffens. His expression suddenly changes. It’s as if he’s just been jolted by a Taser.

  Deere leans back and rubs his cheek. Looking at Upshaw’s bright, angry eyes, he feels overwhelmed by dread. They’ve lost control of the interrogation: either Upshaw knows where their questions are going because he killed Amber Stanley or he has just realized that he’s on the verge of falsely confessing to a murder. One word keeps passing through Deere’s mind: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  “I didn’t have no gun,” Upshaw says vehemently.

  “I didn’t say you did,” says Crowell.

  “Vincent didn’t do nothing,” says Upshaw.

  And with that, Upshaw abruptly changes course. He claims that he is under the influence of marijuana, that he is not thinking straight. He says he has no idea what the detectives are talking about. He has done nothing wrong. He has never been to Denise’s house.

  “I’m still high, my man,” he says. “This shit is crazy.”

  Before Deere or Crowell can respond, Upshaw buries his head in his arms.

  It’s over.

  * * *

  TEN MINUTES LATER, just before 4:30 a.m., Deere drops into a rolling chair, leans back, and stares at the tiled ceiling of the old evidence bay. He leans forward, blinks, then closes his burning eyes. He listens as Joe Bunce and Allyson Hamlin chatter about how they were watching the interrogation on the monitor; when Crowell was hammering Upshaw with questions about the door and the gun, they were sure he was about to confess. Deere hears Joe Bergstrom say that Upshaw is cornered, that he has walked himself into a murder charge and is now trying to back away from his earlier admissions. Crowell is raving about how well the interrogation has gone.

  “Sean, he’s our guy!” Crowell says. “He did it! This is our guy. He kicked in the fucking door!”

  Hands between his knees, Deere opens his eyes and looks at his colleagues for a moment. His gaze shifts to the floor.

  “He’s there, but he’s not,” says Deere. “He’s playing dumb because he’s tired as fuck. He is just throwing a name out there. He’s just making shit up to make other shit fit.”

  “You don’t think he’s there?” Hamlin asks.

  “No,” Deere says. “No—that’s my gut.”

  “What do you mean, Sean?” Crowell asks. “He did what I told you. He put someone else there.”


  “You almost had him,” says Bunce.

  “He is playing dumb,” says Crowell, taking a deep drag off his Marlboro, savoring it, exhaling. “He did it. We have enough to charge him. He admits to kicking in the door!”

  Deere squeezes his eyes shut and tries to clear his foggy mind. Again he wonders: did they lose Upshaw because he realized he was implicating himself in the murder he committed or because he realized he was making a false confession? He can’t tell. He is pissed at Crowell for feeding the suspect too much information, but he knows that if Crowell hadn’t pushed Upshaw they would probably still be in the box, circling him and never getting any closer to the truth.

  “He is trying to make shit fit, and we don’t know if the shit fits or not,” Deere says, looking up at his partner. He can see that Crowell has no doubts. That is not his way.

  “The bottom line is that he killed this girl because he got punked,” Crowell says. He argues that Upshaw got spooked by their questions because he finally understood what they were after—a murder. He reminds Deere that Upshaw admitted that he went back to Denise’s house.

  Deere shakes his head. “He backed off all of it.”

  The conversation goes on for another ten minutes, until Deere slowly gets up from his chair and leaves the evidence bay. The other detectives fall silent; after a minute or so, they return to their desks.

  Bergstrom goes into the computer room, where a video of the interrogation has been playing on a monitor. He eyes the live feed and grimaces: Upshaw is doing push-ups. He walks back into the office and signals his detectives. “Guys,” he says, “you need to get back in there.”

  Deere and Crowell return to the box. Over the next two hours, they take several more runs at Upshaw. They get nowhere.

  “You said somebody kicked the door in,” Crowell pleads.

  “I wasn’t serious,” Upshaw answers.

  “You were lying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why would you lie about that?”

  “I want to get back to my bed,” Upshaw says. “I have cooperated as much as I can. I have nothing to do with this shit.”

  Finally the detectives run out of steam and leave the box. Though he knows it’s futile, Deere agrees to let Boulden take a crack at Upshaw.

  At 6:30 a.m. Deere is sitting at his desk, staring at a blank page in his notebook. He turns and spots Hamlin putting on her wool coat; she says she’s heading home, but something on her desk catches her attention, and she sits down again. Then exhaustion exerts its inexorable pull, and a moment later she rests her head on a large case file and falls fast asleep.

  Bunce tells Deere he has to help his wife get their kids to school. He stands up, pushes his chair under his desk, and moves carefully past Hamlin. Boulden returns from the box at 7:15 a.m. and says that Upshaw isn’t changing his story. After gathering up his coat, the rookie slips out the door. Bergstrom leaves next; before he goes, he tells Deere that they will all meet that afternoon to discuss the interrogation.

  Now it’s just Deere and Crowell. They argue for a few minutes about the interrogation and what it means. Crowell continues to insist that they have enough to arrest Upshaw, and he wants to push their commanders to let them file charges. Deere disagrees, saying he needs to review the interrogation before deciding whether Upshaw actually confessed. He hopes that watching the video will change his mind, but instinct tells him it won’t.

  Crowell volunteers to brief the major after going out for breakfast; Deere says he’ll arrange for one of the day-shift detectives to take Upshaw back to jail. Crowell nods, forces a brief smile, and then heads for his Impala and a quick trip to McDonald’s.

  This is Deere’s case, his burden, but the weight of the interrogation of David Upshaw will not fully land on his shoulders until he has had some time to think about how it went wrong. Already, though, a swirl of questions are racing through his mind. What if Crowell hadn’t fed Upshaw that detail about the door and then frozen him with the question about the gun? What if he had taken the interrogation away from Crowell when he’d first sensed that his partner was going too far? What if he had handled the interrogation better only to get a false confession from an innocent man? And worst of all: what if he has just let a killer off the hook?

  Shaking off his doubts, Deere decides that he is certain of one thing: he and the squad gave it all they had. If they made mistakes, they didn’t do so out of negligence or incompetence or dereliction. They slipped up only because he and Crowell and the others shared a burning desire to solve an unsolvable case.

  Deere closes his notebook, pushes it to the middle of his desk, and stands up. He sighs, suddenly remembering that his day isn’t done. Jesus, he thinks. I’ve got the fucking midnight shift.

  Donning his coat, he takes a last survey of the empty office. He smiles at the slumbering Hamlin, then walks out of the Homicide Unit, down the long hallway, and into the back parking lot. He squints in the bright early-morning light. It’s the last day of February, and before a new day begins, another body will fall in PG County, the twelfth homicide of the shortest month of the year.

  Now feeling nothing beyond pure exhaustion, Deere gets behind the wheel of his Impala. He sits for a moment, rubbing his face. He switches on the ignition and checks the clock radio: it’s nearly 8:00 a.m. After lowering the window a few inches, the detective lights a cigarette, puts the car in drive, and begins the long ride home.

  EPILOGUE

  Lieutenant Billy Rayle’s prediction proved to be accurate: February 2013 was indeed a good month for murder. PG County’s Homicide Unit tallied twelve killings over those twenty-eight days, a harrowing challenge that pushed the unit’s detectives to their limits. Over time, they solved ten of these homicides, an impressive feat. Five ended in guilty pleas, and two others led to a federal indictment that has not been completely resolved. One case went to trial but resulted in a hung jury; prosecutors have pledged to retry the case. A suspect in another was charged, but due to legal maneuvering he has yet to go on trial. The gunman in the tenth murder committed suicide.

  For the remainder of that year, PG’s homicide detectives continued their successful run, making arrests in thirty-three of the fifty-six murders that occurred in 2013 and arrests in fifteen murders that took place in previous years. Including six murders closed by exceptional means—such as those in which the suspect has been killed—the unit posted an overall clearance rate for 2013 of 96 percent.

  The people killed that February were fairly typical of other victims of violence in PG County. One was white, three were Hispanic, and the remaining eight were black. One was a woman; the rest were men. The manner of death was also typical: nine of the victims were fatally shot and three were stabbed.

  The February spree put the county on pace to record nearly 120 murders for the year. Facing the onslaught, Chief Mark Magaw and Assistant Chief Kevin Davis implemented a crime-suppression program that was both aggressive and expensive: every day for weeks, they placed officers in marked squad cars at forty-four high-crime spots throughout the county from 3:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. It’s impossible to determine whether the initiative worked or violence ebbed for other reasons, but the facts are these: the department logged just three murders in March and then went thirty-four days straight without catching a homicide, the longest such streak in memory. Despite the bloody start, the department finished 2013 with eight fewer murders than the previous year. The county posted similarly low numbers in 2014 and the first six months of 2015, even as violence escalated in nearby Washington, DC, and Baltimore.

  Besides deploying police officers in high-crime locations in the spring of 2013, the department continued working closely with other county agencies to target trouble spots. Further, Magaw and Davis were convinced that homicide detectives helped stem the spate of murders by making prompt arrests following many of the killings that occurred that year. In their view, the arrests dampened the chances of retaliatory violence and also sent the message that it is not easy to get away
with murder in Prince George’s County.

  * * *

  DETECTIVE EDDIE FLORES managed to solve the murder of Salaam “Slug” Adams, the drug dealer from North Carolina who was fatally shot in a park in Hillcrest Heights. The rookie’s instincts had been correct: his chief witness, Harvey “B-Gutter” Gunter, had lied repeatedly. After initially thinking that Gunter was a witness, Flores came to believe that he may have shot Adams and then tried to shift the blame to others when confronted by the police. Gunter eventually pleaded guilty to first-degree murder; he admitted to playing a key role in Adams’s death, though he did not confess to pulling the trigger. Gunter was sentenced to life in prison with all but thirty years suspended, meaning he could theoretically be eligible for parole someday.

  Flores also concluded that both Brandon Battle and Robert Ofoeme were involved in Adams’s murder and charged them in the slaying. But state prosecutors eventually dropped both cases, telling the detective it would be difficult to win convictions because the case would be based heavily on Gunter’s shaky word. Even so, Flores enjoyed a modest courtroom victory: Battle was sentenced to ten years in prison for possessing an illegal handgun and a stash of marijuana, both of which Flores had seized during the search of his apartment. Throughout the court proceedings, Battle and Ofoeme maintained their innocence with respect to the murder charges, and Ofoeme asked the court to expunge that charge from his record. A judge in 2015 denied his request.

  After solving the murder of Adams, Flores went back into the rotation, eager to catch his next case. He soon found himself the at-bat detective, but then the county went quiet. Every day, he hurried into work, checked the murder board, and saw his name right there. After every shift, he kept his work phone on his hip so he wouldn’t miss the call for his homicide. He eventually realized that it wasn’t a nightmare or a trick being played on him by his colleagues. (In the end, it proved to be the historic thirty-four-day lull.) Surely, he thought, all of the suspense meant that his next case would be a doozy. And it was: though the murder he caught was eerily similar to his first—a drug dealer shot dead in the woods—he couldn’t crack it. Despite countless hours of hard work, the slaying remains the only unsolved homicide of the eight Flores has investigated since Adams’s murder.