Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  After a profile of the foreign blood was created by the FDLE DNA scientists, that profile was sent by SPD detective Glover to DNAPrint Genomics on Cocoanut Avenue in Sarasota for a bio-geographical ancestry analysis. The corporation doing the analysis had developed proprietary technologies for efficiently targeting “single nucleotide polymorphisms,” which predict a subject’s gene pool. This analysis concluded that there was a 96 percent chance that the killer was of European descent. He was a white guy.

  One of the white men police talked to was Peter Hooten, who said he’d known Joyce Wishart for about a year. He went into her gallery once a month. He characterized her as a woman constantly on the Internet, trying to learn as much as she could about art. He was an art collector and had purchased one painting from Wishart. He’d been out of town, in Claremont, on the night of the murder. When Detective DeFrancisco asked Hooten if they could collect a DNA sample, he said he’d prefer discussing the matter with his lawyer first. DeFrancisco subsequently received a letter from Thomas D. Shults, of the Kirk-Pinkerton law firm, saying that Hooten would not be supplying a DNA sample for “privacy reasons.”

  Another white guy whom police interviewed was Robert Lyman Ardren, who made it onto the suspect list because he was a contributing writer for Sarasota Magazine, the periodical that had been found near Joyce Wishart’s body. Robert “Bob” Ardren worked as the director of public affairs for the Ringling Museum of Art, and he was curator for a time for the Ringling Circus Museum. He told Detective DeFrancisco that he worked full-time for the Pelican Press, and part-time for Sarasota Magazine and the Herald-Tribune. He hadn’t seen anything odd. He believed if there had been something odd, he would have seen it, since he was constantly hanging out in downtown Sarasota, in particular at that “new coffee shop where Charlie’s News used to be.”

  How well did he know Wishart?

  As far as he could recall, he’d never had much conversation with the dead woman. Just hello and good-bye.

  “I haven’t spoken to her in a while, maybe a couple of months,” Ardren said. “Is it true what they are saying?”

  “Is what true?” DeFrancisco asked.

  “Is it true that she was . . . sexually mutilated?”

  “I can’t talk about the crime scene,” the detective replied.

  Ardren took that as yes. In his humble opinion, he told DeFrancisco, that this was no crime of passion. Maybe it was supposed to look like a crime of passion, but no.

  “I believe this was the work of the Colombian Mafia,” Ardren said.

  DeFrancisco asked Ardren for a DNA sample. Ardren said no problem.

  Mark Ormond, a local art consultant who wrote a column for the magazine, was also asked for a DNA sample.

  Jimmy Dean, the executive publisher of Sarasota Magazine, was interviewed twice by investigators.

  Bottom line: If you were a white guy and knew the victim—even slightly—chances were good the Sarasota police asked for a DNA sample. Even non-acquaintances were asked for samples if they had been known to “hang out downtown.” Investigators had high hopes for one guy who was known to loiter downtown and “say inappropriate things to women.” But his DNA, like all of the rest, didn’t match that found in the gallery.

  During the afternoon of February 2, Detective Glover interviewed Kevin Elias (pseudonym), who had worked for two and a half years at the parking garage across the street from the murder. He said he saw nothing out of the ordinary on January 16, but there were elements of his bio that intrigued the investigator. Elias told Glover he’d grown up in a military family that frequently moved from place to place, and once had been arrested for burglary. He didn’t know the victim. Didn’t even know what she looked like. Glover asked Elias what he thought had happened. Elias said he only knew what he’d heard: how the victim had been stuffed into the exhaust vent, how she’d been mutilated, cut to pieces, and then reassembled. Glover asked what type of individual might do such a thing, and Elias said some strange things: “I feel a little guilt for what I did,” he said at one point. “I hope I’m not involved,” he said. The killer, he believed, might have been “a veteran.”

  Detective Carmen Woods interviewed a man in a wheelchair named Henry Gibeau, who was among the last to see Wishart alive. He had visited the Provenance at two-thirty in the afternoon on the fatal day. During his visit he engaged the victim in conversation. They were soon joined by a man, who had gray hair, who tried to dominate the conversation. Gibeau did not feel that Wishart was afraid of the man, but she did ignore him.

  A human resources director at a local museum asked cops to check out a peculiar ex-employee.

  The SPD heard from the friend of a psychic detective. The psychic, the friend said, had touched the door of the Provenance and had “seen many images.”

  Detective DeFrancisco interviewed more friends of the victim, Sara Dechart and Barbara Derfel, in Dechart’s home. Dechart had been one of Joyce’s best friends at one time. When Joyce was getting the shop ready to open, she’d been the one who helped out painting. And she had helped keep the gallery running when Joyce was sick and had gone off to the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa for treatment. For a long time Dechart had a key to the gallery, along with the electronic gate opener for the parking garage. However, she had given those items back in May 2003 when she and Wishart had a “falling-out.” In fact, she hadn’t spoken to Wishart since then.

  Derfel said that at one time she had a key to Wishart’s house, in case of emergency, but she had never had a key to the business. Like Dechart, Derfel hadn’t spoken to Wishart since the spring of the previous year.

  On February 9, Detective Woods spoke with a post office worker named Cindy Lizarralde, who complained that she’d had a coworker back in 2002 who was creepy. She’d gone out with him twice and was never sure she knew his real name.

  He said he was “Charlie Brown.”

  He threatened suicide and would sometimes utter horrible things: “Go fuck yourself, whore. I’m going to slash your face and stab your heart.” She’d been to his apartment and he hardly had any furniture. He liked clowns and deviant art. He was a clown and visited kids’ hospitals in makeup, which she remembered thinking was not a good idea.

  When a lady at the post office died of a drug overdose, Lizarralde asked Brown if he killed her. He didn’t deny it, but instead referenced another clown, saying, “You mean like John Wayne Gacy?”

  The witness remembered where the guy lived, and this was how Detective Woods learned his real name (which wasn’t Charlie Brown). Woods determined that, though the man was bipolar and had anger issues, he was miles from Sarasota at the time of Wishart’s murder.

  On February 18, a little more than a month after the murder, Detective DeFrancisco returned the key to the Provenance to the victim’s son Jamie. Leads were still pursued, but with each new crime the murder of Joyce Wishart pushed closer to cold-case status.

  On February 24, police learned of two more Bike Man sightings. Two Sarasota women, Martha Fuller and Barbara Sperling, reported to police that on the day of the murder, a thin, middle-aged white man on a bicycle had creeped Fuller out, riding past her slowly in the street and staring at her. A man named Douglas Berdeaux reported seeing a man on a bike on the night of the murder, standing at the corner of Pineapple Avenue and Ringling Boulevard. The man was staring back toward the crime scene for such a long time that Berdeaux became concerned about his behavior.

  During another night in February, a man was discovered wandering alone through downtown Sarasota. The guy turned out to be an insomniac who loved antiques. “It’s safer to walk here than where I live,” he explained. Police swabbed him, anyway.

  The owner of a furniture store reported that a strange man came in and said her shop’s carpets smelled like “gunnysacks used to hold dead bodies.” The odd customer added that he was a stump remover by trade, and owned a wood grinder that could grind up “anything, including a dead body.”

  Another man aroused suspicion when
he told his bartender he’d heard that the killer cut out Joyce Wishart’s ovaries. Police found the guy, who said he’d heard the rumor from his boss, who, in turn, said he’d overheard it from another customer while having coffee at Sarasota News and Books, a place where you could browse while simultaneously sipping award-winning coffee.

  More than a month after the murder, weirdos were still coming out of the woodwork. One man reported that a man he knew was a murderer who made snuff films.

  Detective Grant had a chat with the new tenants of the Provenance’s space and advised them what to do if anyone appearing suspicious entered the premises. What a way to start a new business! When the space reopened, it was under police surveillance, and one man was investigated because he stood for an extended period of time at the approximate spot where Wishart’s body had been posed.

  Posing bodies in order to make an “artistic statement” was not a new concept. The most famous instance of this was the still-unsolved “Black Dahlia” murder in 1947 Los Angeles. It was the most famous American murder case not involving a celebrity. The victim was Elizabeth “Beth” Short, a twenty-two-year-old wannabe starlet, who was drifting around Southern California, depending on the kindnesses of strangers. Her body was found naked, severed into two pieces at the hips, the pieces arranged at the edge of a vacant lot, only inches from a sidewalk. Faceup, her arms were over her head; like Joyce Wishart’s body, the legs were spread. Short’s upper body was parallel, but off line with her lower half. A Sardonicus smile was carved into her face. Portions of her breast and thigh were cut out. A rose tattoo, or perhaps a rose-colored birthmark, on her leg had been removed and the skin containing it shoved up her rectum. The crime scene was exquisite, emulating as it did artwork of the grotesque aesthetic school. The murderer wanted everyone to see the beauty in this unthinkable ugliness.

  It is typically more common just to pose bodies in order to shock. One of the most vivid examples of this occurred in Florida with the gruesome murders of the “Gainesville Ripper,” who turned out to be Danny Rolling. During the late summer of 1990, five students from that college town were found murdered and mutilated in their apartments. Most famously, one coed’s head was severed and placed on a bookshelf facing the door.

  Mrs. Marcia Corbino, Jon Corbino’s widow and author of the crime scene magazine article, had thought that she would be among the first to be interviewed by police, but it wasn’t until February 11 that Detective David Grant knocked on her door.

  Years later she remembered some of the police officer’s questions as “mystifying.” She explained that the article in Sarasota Magazine had been an excerpt from her book A History of Visual Art in Sarasota. She talked about Ben Stahl, explaining who he was. Corbino told Grant that many of Stahl’s paintings had been stolen in the late 1960s from the Museum of the Cross. Stahl died in 1987. She gave the investigator contact information for Stahl’s children. His son, she said, still sold his father’s paintings every once in a while.

  She was also asked by police about another magazine found at the scene, probably New Magazine, but not about the one that contained her article.

  Mrs. Corbino still didn’t know that her magazine article had been referenced by the killer when creating the crime scene. At no time did she get the impression that the policeman who questioned her had any idea who she was.

  After she learned of her unique role in the murder case, she wondered if the killer read the magazine that he’d used. Had he made a conscious decision to leave the magazine open to a particular page? If the killer spent some time in the gallery after Wishart was dead, perhaps he had time to do some reading. She felt guilt. She knew it wasn’t rational, but she couldn’t help it. It was because of that guilt that she decided to write about the murder, a story called “A Mecca for Murder,” which was eventually published in a literary magazine.

  “I tried to answer the unanswerable question of why? Why did it happen to her, and why did it happen here? It all seemed out of synch with the universe,” Corbino said.

  For the rest of February and into March, Detectives Grant and Glover received copies from crime analyst Bruce Steinberg of all loitering, prowling, and burglary reports in Sarasota dating back three months before Wishart’s murder. They then checked out each one: Where was the guy now? Where was he when Wishart was killed? Since this was a transient crowd, many of these individuals didn’t have solid alibis. Police asked them for voluntary DNA samples.

  During spring 2004, Detective Sensei DelValle worked on possible leads found in Wishart’s address book, handwritten, and on her home and work computers. Nothing.

  Jack Carter’s investigation carried on throughout the summer of 2004. He used the victim’s financial records and personal effects as the basis of his investigation.

  It had been months and the investigation into Joyce Wishart’s past had yielded little. It was a frightening prospect for an investigator, but it was appearing more and more as if the answer did not lie with the victim. It seemed that this was a randomly selected victim killed by what may be a serial killer at the very start of his career.

  If the rough surgery performed on the victim by the killer was an attempt to remove DNA, the effort was in vain—and the DNA end of the investigation continued full-speed ahead. One suspect who wouldn’t give a voluntary DNA samples had to be tricked. DNA material was confiscated from a cigarette butt and the top of a soda can.

  Meanwhile, the FDLE’s psychological experts carefully considered every known factor of the murder and came up with a general description of the man whom police were looking for. He was white, had a maturity level in the early thirties, was well groomed, was likely to have moved from job to job, lacked sincere relationships in his life, and—though he might be able to mask it in public—held a contempt for society.

  Police were six months into the investigation, and had checked out more than four hundred leads without success, when it happened.

  The case broke.

  On July 26, 3:30 P.M., Detective Glover received a phone call from a very excited analyst at the FDLE Lab. She was Suzanna R. Ulery, and she had great news.

  “We’ve got a match,” she said.

  “What’s the name?”

  “Elton Brutus Murphy.”

  PART II

  ELTON BRUTUS MURPHY

  Chapter 8

  The Orange Groves

  This is the story of Elton Brutus Murphy’s life. For the most part it’s Murphy who’s telling it; and from what we can tell, most of it is true. Murphy admits that he wasn’t entirely candid at times, but it was nothing personal. He knew that prison officials would be reading this book one day and he didn’t want to be “locked up even worse than I am now.” He was very appreciative of the interest in his story and hoped that what he had to say would help contribute to a “dynamic and compelling work of literature.” He wanted you to imagine it was a movie called Invitation to Murder, with special effects, maybe animation, and a soundtrack of mind-blowing Pink Floyd records and the anthems of Bon Jovi. Perhaps the director could squeeze into the soundtrack his favorite song of all time, “Beds Are Burning” by Midnight Oil.

  Elton Brutus Murphy was born in Wauchula, Florida, on February 3, 1957. He was the son of Elton Murphy Jr. and Betty Jo Murphy. His childhood home was a pastoral scene: a lovely two-large-bedroom cement block single-story house painted a pastel color, nestled under two huge oak trees.

  How rustic was it? “Chickens and roosters roamed our yard,” Murphy explained. “We had two monkeys during my youth, and a female goat that my dad milked daily. Dad would drink the goat’s milk, but the rest of the family preferred cow’s milk. There was a donkey and two horses, one regular and one miniature.”

  His dad drank and his parents fought constantly: mostly verbal, some physical. There was some scuffling with the old man before the firstborn son eventually left the house, no injuries or anything like that.

  “I only remember one whipping in my life from my father.” It occurred
when he was ten or eleven. “Just on the bottom,” Murphy said. “It wasn’t like my dad beat me up.”

  His dad taught him practical stuff, paid him for the work he did, and made him start a savings account at the bank.

  The fights between his parents were what he remembered most. His parents had endurance and could fight all night. Murphy couldn’t remember a good night’s sleep until he was maybe ten years old.

  Predictably, his favorite childhood book was a forget-your-troubles fantasy entitled The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, written by Eleanor Cameron. It was about the adventures of two boys named Chuck and David who visited the planet Basidium in their homemade spacecraft.

  The family didn’t use “Big Elton” and “Little Elton.” They called the boy “Brutus,” after his middle name. Murphy was known as Brutus to most people for most of his life.

  When his parents fought, it wasn’t just yelling. Stuff was thrown, smashed. One time his mom and dad were arguing and fighting over a .22-caliber pistol and the thing went off.

  “I just knew one of them had been shot, but thank God neither of them were,” Murphy said.

  According to Murphy, his father was a drunk and a coward. Another brouhaha when Brutus was ten resulted in Betty Jo calling the sheriff’s department. When the deputies arrived, his dad was hiding beneath the marital bed. As deputies coaxed the father out from under the bed, and then held him at bay, Brutus and his mom packed their stuff and got the hell out.