Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  Joffe said that when Wishart left the Asolo, it was on a harsh note. She’d had major conflicts with the theater’s executive director. Joffe thought there might still be a lawsuit pending. Joffe thought Wishart had a lover, but she didn’t know his name. Joffe was pretty sure it was a long-distance relationship, that the guy was from out of state. They only saw each other a couple of times a year.

  DeNiro quickly found the theater’s managing director with whom Wishart had had difficulties. Her name was Linda DiGabriele, and she said she hadn’t seen Wishart in more than a year, the last time at an arts event at the opera house. She said there was nothing remarkable about Wishart’s leaving the theater, that her contract had come up for renewal and it was not renewed. She recalled no harsh note. There was no lawsuit. She only knew Wishart as a coworker and knew nothing of her personal life.

  “She was a very pleasant woman,” Marsha Fottler told DeNiro. Fottler served with the victim on the city’s arts council, and wrote the “Shop Talk” column for Sarasota Magazine, where she once plugged Wishart’s gallery.

  Fottler got to know Wishart through working on committees with her, such as Smart Talk, the Sarasota Arts Council, and the Sarasota/Manatee Breast Cancer Committee.

  “The gallery was the joy of her life,” Fottler added. The thing that bothered Fottler the most was that the gallery became the place of Wishart’s worst and final agony. She died horribly in the place she loved the most.

  DeNiro interviewed a Sarasota artist named Linda Salomon whose work was exhibited at the Provenance. She said she had a fifty-fifty deal with the gallery. Anything that sold, she got half, and Wishart got half. Sadly, she said, her opening was supposed to be that night (January 22).

  A preview of Salomon’s show was in the December 2003 issue of Sarasota Magazine. There was a photo of Salomon and her animal dolls and a pull quote saying how Salomon’s friends teased her because she became attached to her dolls and didn’t want to part with them.

  Salomon told DeNiro that she last saw Wishart on January 8, and last received an e-mail from her on January 14. She’d always gotten along with Wishart, but she had heard verbal arguments between the victim and employees of the nearby A Step Above Gallery.

  A Step Above Gallery was DeNiro’s next stop. No one there remembered an argument, but Lois Ross, the owner’s wife, said she last saw Wishart on Friday afternoon, talking with a man outside the Provenance, a man dressed nicely but not in a suit. The sighting was either at one o’clock in the afternoon, when Ross was on her way to an appointment, or at four o’clock, when she was returning.

  A woman named Margaret Pennington had gone into the Provenance around noon on the day of the murder to admire Linda Salomon’s animal dolls. Wishart was very pleasant and introduced herself. No sign of trouble. She couldn’t remember what Wishart was wearing. “I was looking at her red hair most of the time,” Pennington said.

  DeNiro made a list of all of the callers on Joyce Wishart’s caller ID, both home and at the gallery. One by one, he tracked them down, looking for suspects. He found the chapters of Joyce Wishart’s life—old friends, neighbors, her dentist—but not a clue regarding her death.

  On the victim’s caller ID was Elaine Fox, who knew Wishart in Ohio, where they worked together at Chemlawn, and in Florida after both moved to Sarasota. Fox and her husband were the first to move south. Wishart came to visit, loved it, and she migrated as well. Fox told police that the last boyfriend of Wishart’s she remembered was a guy from Denver. She didn’t know his name, but she thought he worked for a government nonprofit group and had a daughter in St. Petersburg. Fox said she was under the impression that Wishart broke up with this man before she herself moved to Florida, maybe 1998. Fox said Wishart was the type of person who could make people angry, but not to the point of creating enemies. Wishart was kind of a “know-it-all,” Fox said, and could degrade people “without even knowing it.”

  Michelle Andersen, a coworker of Vicki Krone’s, had worked at Admiral Travel for thirteen years, a workplace with little turnover. Many of the employees had been there for that long, and longer. In comparison, Joyce Wishart had only been in Sarasota for a couple of years and was still a relative newcomer.

  Andersen admitted to not being a close friend of the victim’s. Which wasn’t to say that Andersen and Wishart weren’t friendly. They greeted each other, “Hi, how are ya?”

  Of course, Palm Avenue had beauty, glamour, and palm trees—but it wasn’t all fancy-schmancy, either. There was a funkier edge to the big picture.

  All of those art galleries weeded through a scattering of hungry artists—some bohemians of uncertain hygiene—all eager to find wall space for their work. Andersen figured the killer could be any one of them.

  Joyce Wishart had the wall space and was not a big believer in negative space. Cluttered and busy was more like it. She had a lot of artwork displayed in her gallery and dealt with many artists, some strangers from heaven-knows-where.

  There were even homeless people who were semi-regulars along the block, but they were the same ones all the time, so folks learned to pay little mind. Now it was: “Should I have been afraid of that guy all along?” Andersen sometimes saw the same—pardon the expression—“bum” three times a day, stumbling down the street. Would she ever be able to look at him the same after all this?

  After the murder the cops came and didn’t leave. “They were there for a long time,” Andersen recalled, and by that she meant weeks.

  One part of her felt freaked out by the persistent heavy police presence, a steady reminder of the nightmare; the other part was reassured. It was easier to get through her day when protection was only a few feet away.

  The seemingly never-ending news stories on the murder, hinting at the ghastliness of the crime without being specific, made Andersen’s morbid imagination go wild. She found herself wondering what it was like for the cleanup crew. What mind-numbingly horrendous things would the crew have to see and do—just so that life could go on in that room.

  And what of the poor first responders? Joyce wasn’t found for several days and her remains must’ve been an assault on the senses by the time her corpse was discovered. What they must have seen! Whatever the ghastly secret, they knew firsthand. It was burned into their memories. How could a person ever sleep again?

  She had heard that the body was posed to resemble one of the pieces of art, but no one knew which painting or drawing it was, allowing imaginations to percolate.

  Years later, Michelle Andersen’s memories hadn’t faded.

  “It was so close! I mean really, really close!” she exclaimed.

  There were popular events going on at the time, a ritzy film series and an art festival. The town was teeming. So there was an exceptional amount of pedestrian traffic along Palm Avenue. Businesses kept their doors propped open, hoping strollers would wander in.

  Even when there weren’t tourists to be wooed, security was never tight. Even on days when the weather might be inclement and the doors to the businesses kept shut, they still weren’t locked. The proprietor would just put a little bell up on top to tinkle the news when someone entered.

  Not that Joyce Wishart’s end of the strip was the most traveled. Since it was at the west end of the street, not that many tourists strolled by. If they went there, chances were good that it was their planned destination.

  Andersen was there late on that Friday. How scary was that? She was in and out on Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday, she noticed that it was odd that Joyce Wishart hadn’t opened the gallery door. Andersen clicked on that—weird, no Joyce—and then moved on to something else. Andersen worked long hours that week. She worked her regular job, and then at night she made arrangements for the film festival, which had her working with directors. She’d probably been working alone in the office when it happened, just on the other side of the driveway. She thought out loud: “I’d been going back and forth in the parking garage alone. . . .” There must have been long hours that weekend wh
en Andersen worked alone at night and Wishart’s desecrated body lay posed only a few feet away.

  After noting her absence during the weekend, Andersen didn’t give Joyce another thought, until Wednesday, when all of a sudden there were cop cars everywhere, detectives prowling with a cool efficiency “across our roof and in the bushes.” They came into the travel agency, where Andersen worked, asking, “The owner of the gallery next door was murdered, anyone seen anything over the weekend?” No, no, no. Then came a second influx of large vehicles and activity when the news media caught wind and came swarming.

  No work was getting done on Palm Avenue. Folks were out in the street talking a mile a minute about what happened. Some in tears, some just stunned, their eyes a little too wide. Some felt ill. The smell, now that they knew what it was, was so damned sinister! Vague gossip about the crime scene spread. Someone thought Joyce might be missing a body part. Snippets of police conversation had been overheard. They were looking for something that didn’t just belong to her, but was part of her.

  No one knew the details, but it had to be bad. The Provenance Gallery’s windows were covered to protect the crime scene’s privacy, and they stayed covered for a long time.

  Andersen had a friend, maybe more of an acquaintance, who was a cop. She asked him what it was like in Joyce’s gallery. The police officer said, “Michelle, you don’t even want to know.” She’d known a lot of cops in her life, and she recognized his tone. Her stomach raced, spun, and dropped. She felt the little hairs at the nape of her neck prickle.

  She would never be able to go to the parking garage alone again. It was too dark and creepy—a world where psycho killers lurked in shadows.

  Andersen felt intense grief, of course, but news of the murder also overwhelmed her with her own raw vulnerability. That feeling was common with her neighbors. She thought about how the storefronts on Palm, built as they were with no back doors, could turn into a trap. She remembered the shock—and the indignity—felt by the Palm Avenue crowd. Sarasota was special and this sort of thing didn’t happen here. This—and it shouldn’t even need to be mentioned—was not Middle America!

  Some wondered if keeping the details of the murder from the public was such a good idea. “It leaves your imagination going crazy,” said a Palm Avenue neighbor, interior designer Sherry Simons. “We will all feel better when they disclose how it happened.”

  The shops along Palm Avenue were thinking in terms of security for the first time. Sherry Simons’s boss, Sally A. Trout, said that she grew up in Sarasota and it had always been one of those charmed cities, relatively untouched by modern dangers.

  “No one locked their doors,” she recalled. “Mom would take us all to the beach and just drop us off. It was an easy time. We were all so innocent.”

  She thought back to all of the times she’d been in her office alone. It had never occurred to her in a million years that she was in danger.

  She did recall—well, it wasn’t really a problem, but rather an annoyance from homeless people. They would move up and down the street looking for handouts. A lot of them were familiar; but every once in a while, there would be one who was creepier than the others.

  Now everything was different. She planned to install a buzzer on the front door and keep the back door locked at all times—precautions that had not previously occurred to her.

  Trout’s interior design space was only a couple of doors down from Wishart’s gallery. Sally herself had done business with Joyce. She bought a painting, only two days before her murder.

  Trout remembered vividly the shock that Wednesday when all hell broke loose on Palm Avenue. She had been working with a client, when all of a sudden it seemed as if an ambulance and police cars were coming from all directions. She went outside to see what was going on; eventually word got around that Joyce Wishart had been murdered. Curiosity seekers couldn’t get close to the gallery. The front of the business was monitored, to keep pedestrians from accidentally contaminating the crime scene.

  Trout had heard the rumors that there was a psycho killer at work, but she didn’t give them any credibility. “I can’t believe that this was a random crime,” she said.

  But if it wasn’t random, that would mean that Wishart had an enemy, which was every bit as difficult to believe.

  In the days following the murder, a dark cloud hovered over the street. It was a sadder and quieter world. No one spoke loudly. Neighbors, who had shouted greetings across the street only days before, now settled for a silent wave. In the nearby grocery store, where people once conversed at a distance, neighbors now stood closer and exchanged pleasantries in hushed tones.

  The gallery and travel agency were not on the busiest sections of Palm, because there were no restaurants on that side of the street. The Provenance’s end of the strip was quieter and darker to begin with. After the murder the block was deserted, and there was a tainted feeling to the air.

  Like Michelle Andersen, Joyce Wishart’s friend Lois Schulman felt positively traumatized by the murder.

  “I’ve been a nervous wreck,” Schulman said. “I have been talking to God, asking that he hold her in his arms. Think of how horrible the end must have been, looking at her killer in the eyes.” Schulman had a personal friend who was a psychic, a gifted man. She was sure he would do whatever he could to help the investigation.

  Also playing amateur detective was Nancy Hall, the Bay Plaza condominium manager. According to one coworker, Hall thought she was going to solve the mystery for the police. Compared to Wishart’s other neighbors at work, Hall was very chatty on the subject of the murder.

  Chapter 5

  Joyce

  Police quickly filled in the victim’s biography. Joyce was nineteen years old in 1961, when she married twenty-two-year-old truck driver Robert Wishart in Cincinnati.

  The couple had four children, two boys and two girls. The youngest was seven when she filed for divorce in 1981, accusing her husband of adultery and abuse.

  The victim’s longtime Columbus, Ohio, neighbors, Don and Bonnie McPeek, were very helpful, telling police how Wishart metamorphosed from a housewife and single mom into a career woman.

  It was a transformation to be reckoned with—inspirational, even—and the McPeeks helped as often as possible. Don fixed Joyce’s car for free and Bonnie offered babysitting services after school let out.

  Wishart was not going to allow material matters, such as the fact that she didn’t have a lot of money or possessions, deter her from her goal.

  “She didn’t have a whole lot. She was scrounging the bottom of the barrel, trying to keep her head above water. It would have been easy for her to give up—but she never did,” Don said.

  “She went through a lot of trials and tribulations,” Bonnie added. “But I tell you, that girl pulled herself up by her bootstraps and got through it.”

  Her financial problems were only compounded when her ex-husband failed to keep up with his child-support payments of $240 per month. She had to take him to court to avoid losing her house to creditors.

  She took night and weekend college classes at Dublin College, a small private college near her home in Columbus, and earned her first college degree, an associate’s, at age fifty.

  She attended Dublin during the years 1990 through 1993. In 1991, she began to date a fellow student named Jim Beauchamp, who was her boyfriend until 1996. But even after they broke up, they remained good friends.

  Her bachelor’s degree was in business administration and came from Ohio Dominican University. She subsequently earned a master’s in executive management from Ashland University. She clearly had her future mapped out. Her master’s thesis was in the economics of running an art gallery.

  She and her children had competed to see who could get the best grades. While Joyce was excelling in college, her kids made the honor roll on their own, both in high school and college.

  As is true with any brood, some of the kids flew farther from the coop than others. Friends said th
at Wishart’s two oldest children, Scott Wishart, who was forty-one years old and lived in South Carolina at the time of his mother’s murder, and daughter Kirsten Whitehouse, thirty-nine, who was still in Ohio, were not close with their mother. Joyce’s younger children, Patty Wishart, thirty-two, and James “Jamie” Wishart, thirty, had remained close and visited their mother regularly in Florida. Patty, in fact, had been planning to move in with her mother sometime during the spring of 2004.

  Joyce had started her own marketing consultancy called Portfolio Place in 1990. Soon thereafter she was elected president of the Columbus Chapter of the American Marketing Association. In July 1998, she was the subject of a profile in the business section of the Columbus Dispatch newspaper. She told the reporter that Portfolio Place—for which she was general manager—provided strategic planning, finance, marketing, operations and sales plans, advertising design and placement, pre-press and print production, training, public relations, and communications programs for both profit business clients and nonprofit organizations.

  Asked for a quick review of her résumé, Wishart said that she started with Chemlawn Corp. in marketing, and moved over to its subsidiary, Chemlawn Services, where she worked her way up to national marketing director by the time she left in 1989. She moved to CheckFree Corporation and worked in a similar capacity until September of 1990, when she left to start Portfolio Place.

  Asked what her first job was, she said, “Running errands for neighbors.” What did that job teach her? Well, first of all, she learned that her neighbors had more money than she did. She was a kid at the time and it was a revelation that when she did the same types of jobs for neighbors that she did at home, she received a lot more money than an allowance. “It was probably my earliest introduction to a free-market economy,” she commented.