Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  He joined the base dive club, the Reef Roamers, and dove in the ocean at least once a week for the entire time he was there. One of the best things about the club was access to underwater cameras.

  “I shot hundreds of underwater photos, including shots of the various shipwrecks along the ocean floor off Bermuda,” Murphy said.

  In 1977, his life took an unexpected turn. That year, he was sent back to Pensacola for some advanced photographic training.

  “I wasn’t there long, just long enough to meet Elaine Crabtree and fall in love with her,” Murphy remembered.

  His friend Mark Klothacus introduced them.

  “Back then, I was a deeply devout Christian, and so was she. We met at United Pentecostal Church.”

  The church taught the Bible standard of full salvation, which was the absolute essentiality of repentance; baptism was immersion for the remission of sins; the speaking of tongues as the “Spirit gives utterance.”

  Brutus and the woman saw stars immediately, and their initial romance was brief. He had to return to Bermuda after a week. Once returned to the base, he couldn’t get his mind off her. He recorded a marriage proposal and mailed the cassette tape to Elaine; she agreed. Several months later he returned to Pensacola to be married.

  The groom was twenty; the bride was twenty-two. He recalled a beautiful ceremony, at the same church where they’d met. A beautiful sun-drenched white church on Sun Valley Drive, right across the street from an equally sunny gas station.

  Both sets of parents were there, as well as a contingency from the church’s congregation. Best man was fellow navy photographer’s mate second class (PH2) Mark Klothacus, the same man who’d introduced them.

  The honeymoon was brief, in more ways than one. The vacation was short and the romantic glow quickly faded. The new couple moved to Bermuda and lived in base housing. They were together for three years.

  “For the first two of those years, we were Seventh-Day Adventists,” Murphy said.

  That group believed that God’s greatest desire was for worshippers to see him clearly—not so much to see his face, as some thought, but to see the quality of God’s character. As worshippers experienced God’s love, they came to see their own lives more clearly as well.

  “For the third and last year together, we mutually agreed to become vegetarians,” Murphy added. “The preacher’s wife, also a vegetarian, taught Elaine how to cook a variety of nonmeat dishes.”

  Murphy was the one who ended the marriage.

  “I allowed the devil to get to me,” he later said. He flew to the Norfolk, Virginia, Naval Base for about a week. There he made contact with a woman in the navy he’d worked with in Bermuda. She’d been reassigned to Norfolk and they got together a couple of times in her dormitory room on the base.

  Brutus confessed to Elaine that he had sinned and had brought pain upon their marriage through the act of lusting after other women.

  Contrary to his wants and needs, Elaine initially forgave him for his lust and stayed with him. She was definitely not getting the hint. For three weeks Brutus had to save up all of his meanness and say every nasty thing he could think of before Elaine agreed to leave Bermuda.

  “She moved out on our third anniversary, in 1980. She returned to Pensacola, and I have not seen her since—not even for the divorce,” Murphy said.

  She did try to make a collect call a couple of years later, but Murphy didn’t accept the charges. But, even in 2011, he knew her current address, including her remarried name and an alias she used sometimes. With his vegetarian-cooking wife gone for good, Murphy spent the rest of his time in Bermuda living the footloose and fancy-free life of a single man.

  Rid of Elaine, and swinging, Brutus rented an off-base apartment and dedicated his leisure time to entertaining a string of tourist women—oh, my—and one naval wife. Oh, the naval wife!

  While teaching his photography class, Murphy had a student who was a “delightful-looking twenty-eight-year-old wife of another naval photographer.”

  Her husband, apparently, lacked the patience to teach his own wife how to take photos. She needed college credit, so she took Murphy’s class, and they hit it off right away.

  “I could tell that she liked me a lot, right from the start. She kept looking at me as if I were an icecream treat she wanted to eat,” Murphy boasted.

  At one point during the course, Murphy informed his students that he did a lot of underwater photography as a hobby—and that he was a scuba-diving teacher before he was a photography teacher. After that class his favorite student asked him if he would teach her underwater photography. She said that she already knew how to scuba dive because she and her husband enjoyed diving on the many wrecks off Bermuda.

  “We own an underwater camera, but I don’t know how to use it,” she said.

  Brutus happily agreed to go diving with her, and to teach her how to use her own and other underwater cameras. He met her at the front gate of the Bermuda Naval Base, and got her a visitor’s pass. She brought her own scuba equipment and camera with her. He was familiar with her camera, a Nikonos, because he’d once owned one just like it. He had his own equipment ready, so together they drove out to the NASA tracking station, which was connected to the base.

  “Before we went into the water, I gave her about an hour class in underwater photography, including specific instruction in using her camera,” Murphy said.

  They changed into their scuba equipment and entered the water. They only had to go out about sixty feet from shore, and they were in forty feet of water surrounded by a beautiful coral reef and many tropical fish—lots of stuff to take photos of.

  The other man’s wife began taking photos, and Murphy got close to her in the water so he could assist her in setting the controls. Murphy had his own camera with him, and he took some pictures of her taking pictures.

  “I could tell by her facial expression that she was having a blast,” Murphy said.

  They were in the water for about an hour. They surfaced and climbed out of the water. They sat together on the lava rock, their feet dangling into a tidal pool. He made her review what she had learned, and he explained in greater detail the usage of different types of underwater cameras.

  “All of a sudden, out of the blue, she told me she had an ulterior motive for getting me alone,” Murphy said. “She asked me if I had a wife or a girlfriend.”

  He said he was separated from his wife; she was back in the States. She said she was happily married to a good man, who was twenty years older than she was—not that age made a difference, of course. And she’d been faithful to her husband for the entire six years of their marriage.

  “It’s just that I’m beside myself from thinking about you,” she said. It happened right away. Her eyes had started to twinkle the first time she laid eyes on him, on the first day of photography class, and they had been twinkling ever since. “I don’t know how you feel about me, but I would really like to be with you. I would like you to make love to me. Oh, God, I can’t believe I just said that out loud! Please tell me that I didn’t just make a fool out of myself.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Brutus said, with a comforting tone. “And I am very flattered that you find me interesting. Well, I guess our photography lesson is over.”

  He smiled at her and made his move. He embraced her and made love to her right there in the tidal pool.

  “It was great, and so was she,” Murphy said.

  After that, Murphy and the other guy’s wife met a few more times, always in Murphy’s small apartment. They had wine and piña coladas and fantastic lovemaking. After that, the woman said she needed to call it quits, needed to get back to concentrating on being a good wife.

  “It was fun while it lasted,” Murphy said. “Great memories.”

  He played hard, and he worked hard. His service to his country was lauded. He received several letters of appreciation for a job well done.

  “I was awarded the Good Conduct medal and the Navy Achievement
medal,” Murphy said. The latter was for doing an excellent job as the petty officer in charge of the Atlantic Fleet Audio/Visual Facility. His rank at that time was actually E5, petty officer second class.

  After all of those millions of photos Murphy took of naval ceremonies, now he got to be the subject of just such a photo, proudly receiving his medal. The photo ran in the Bermuda Skyliner.

  Brutus Murphy was discharged honorably in 1981, and, largely because of the skills he’d learned while in the navy, made a seamless reentry into the civilian world. He quickly got a job in Clearwater, Florida, processing film in a darkroom.

  Chapter 11

  Mary

  His love life didn’t suffer, either, now that he was out of uniform. On Clearwater Beach he met a beautiful woman named Mary Border. They were both in the water swimming, riding the waves.

  He asked her what she did for a living and she had to answer him several times because he had water in his ears. She got right in his face and said, “I cut hair.” It was love at first sight for him. He wasn’t sure how she felt about him. When they did meet, there were times when he thought she liked him, and then there were times when his insecurities took over and he thought he was just fooling himself. But she did like him.

  She was model gorgeous, statuesque, five-ten, so tanned, naturally blond hair as golden as the Florida sunshine, very slender, and muscular.

  As was true of all of his relationships, once it started, it progressed quickly. They saw each other pretty much every day. They mostly went to the beach and strolled slowly along the wade at night, so the ebb of each wave splashed across the tops of their feet.

  They’d been lovers for about a month when he popped the question. He proposed in his car, which was parked just outside Fort DeSoto Park. She said yes, and they became engaged.

  A couple of weeks later he bought her a ring.

  He and his new fiancée moved into an apartment together at Indian Shores. It was a large complex called the Indian Pass Apartments. There were several hundred units, with a pool in the courtyard. The apartment was right across the road from Indian Rocks Beach. It was a one-bedroom unit, with a small bath, living room, and kitchen, about five hundred square feet. There was a small porch, where they could step outside and look at the water.

  Brutus went to work for Reedy Photoprocess Corporation, where he maintained the film processors and printers. Reedy was comprised of two companies. The parent company was in Minneapolis, run by president Stan Reedy.

  In 1980, Reedy purchased a small processing lab at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street South in Pasadena, Florida. The lab was comprised of many small rooms, with each step in the processing and printing procedure done separately. There was one room for correcting, another for processing. As custom printing was a Reedy specialty, each enlarger had its own separate room. At the end of the hallway were the “chemical mix” room on one side, where Murphy spent the bulk of his time, and the bathroom on the other. In the front there was a small area for customer pickup. The largest room was the office.

  Many years later, Brutus Murphy’s coworker at Reedy, Paula Burfield, had nothing unkind to say about him.

  “To me, he was always sweet,” she said. “Very pleasant.”

  No indications that there was anything odd, nothing a little bit off. He worked in the lab in the back and dressed casually, usually wearing a normal pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She remembered thinking at the time that he was “rather nice-looking.”

  Another Reedy employee who remembered Murphy was Lynn Bushner. He was “fine. Very nice. Perfectly normal.”

  She said that many of his duties were janitorial. In addition to keeping the machines in working order, he also swept up the place. Neither Burfield nor Bushner remembered Murphy ever processing film.

  Murphy worked at Reedy for about six months. He enjoyed the job, but there was no money in it.

  “Mary was making three times as much as I was, cutting hair,” he said.

  According to him, he spontaneously quit one morning. According to his former coworkers, he was fired after getting into a “tiff” with someone.

  Murphy enrolled that same day in the barber school at Sunstate Academy in Clearwater. It was his idea to make the move, but Mary supported him 100 percent. He paid his tuition by using his GI Bill money.

  While attending Sunstate, Murphy’s eye for the ladies began to roam again. The lover he remembered best was an emancipated seventeen-year-old named Amber.

  “The sex was without delay, and it was good,” he said.

  He stayed with Amber for a couple of weeks before he dumped her to go with another student. He broke off his engagement with Mary so he could pursue without guilt.

  He had lived with Mary Border for a year and a half. He felt that life was filled with opportunities, and she was stifling that. She became pretty upset when he told her he needed his freedom.

  Murphy sometimes still wished that he had married her.

  “Absolutely gorgeous,” he reminisced.

  Brutus graduated from Sunstate in March 1983. On April 6, he received his Florida barber’s license. His first job as a hairstylist was in downtown St. Petersburg, working at Pedro’s Tonsorial Parlor.

  The parlor was not far from Jannus Landing, an open-air concert venue now known as Jannus Live. He only stayed at Pedro’s for a couple of months before he found a better-paying job, working freelance at Starlight Park Barber Shop in Largo.

  At the Starlight, Murphy worked for the owner, a guy named Bill Mills, and his immediate supervisor was Alia Benson. Longtime Starlight employee Gary Crowell remembered how the shop looked back then, with its light blue interior, three matching chairs, and mirrors on the back wall.

  The shop was part of a strip mall at the corner of Park Boulevard and Starkey Road—a very busy intersection, sitting next to a pawnshop/jewelry store. The plaza wasn’t big, but sometimes it had juicy gossip. One owner went to jail for paying a cop to kill his ex-wife.

  Brutus remained at the Starlight Barber Shop until early 1984, when he and his brother, Dean, invested together in a pair of hair salons in St. Pete: A Hair Emporium. The salons—Brutus ran one, Dean the other—were top-notch, but neither location was that great. They never did make much money.

  And that was the way life stayed for a few years, until Brutus was twenty-eight years old and started to feel the old wanderlust again.

  Chapter 12

  The Madness

  Sometime during 1984, while living and working in St. Pete, Brutus Murphy raped a woman. That was the start of it: “the madness”—what Murphy would come to call his “bizarre behaviorism.”

  It enveloped him and rendered him irresponsible.

  That was the first time he felt his own personal Mr. Hyde persona ooze out of his psyche. He didn’t know how to explain it, but a curtain closed on his normal self.

  He was still in the plane, but he was no longer the pilot.

  He thought maybe it was caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. His conscious mind became subservient and his subconscious rose to dominance.

  Murphy’s neophyte madness was not the only chemical affecting his behavior.

  “I was very drunk,” Murphy recalled.

  He was soaring. He had a strong chemical high, “a feeling of grandiosity in my psyche that I never felt at any other time.”

  He met the girl in a joint called the Crown Lounge, where they sometimes had B-list (maybe C-list) rock concerts: acts a full decade or more past the peak of their popularity.

  “I brought her home and she fell asleep,” Murphy explained. “She was wearing a skirt and panty hose. I took a scissors and cut off her panty hose and then I raped her. I told her about it in the morning, and she just laughed and said it was okay. She was a really good sport about it.”

  According to Murphy, she then told him that he would have to pay for his selfishness. There would be no more cutting of panty hose with scissors. He had to have sex with her again—this
time so she could enjoy it. So they had a little morning delight.

  It’s not uncommon for American veterans to become nostalgic over their time in the service, but it was particularly bad for Murphy.

  He’d had maybe the greatest-of-all-possible military experiences in Bermuda. Compared to cutting hair in strip-mall Florida, making beautiful underwater photos and dealing with top-secret film was tons more glamorous and adventurous.

  He decided that the thing he needed to make his life complete was to become a Navy SEAL. Murphy sold his salon. Brother Dean kept his and continued cutting hair.

  “I reenlisted in the navy for six years, and was able to reenter the service at my old rank, E5 pay grade as a photographer’s mate, petty officer second class,” he said.

  A few weeks into his Navy Veteran Training in Orlando, Murphy took his fitness test for the SEALs and, on the second try, passed it. To pass the test he had to swim five hundred yards in under twelve and a half minutes, do a minimum of forty-two push-ups in two minutes, fifty-two sit-ups in two minutes, and eight pull-ups (no time limit). The last stage of the test was the toughest. Wearing boots and pants, a candidate had to run a mile and a half in under eleven minutes.

  After completing that training, he was sent to the Naval Special Warfare Group One and Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) Training in Coronado, California. For seven months he worked as a photographer directly under the master chief of the command, a SEAL named Cliff Hollenbeck, who was a real hero, with a Silver Star and a Bronze Star to show for it. Murphy again loved the photography work because of its variety, for he took photos throughout the command, including in the SEAL Compound.

  “The most interesting assignment was to go up in a CH-46 double-rotor helicopter with a bunch of SEALs and shoot photos of them rappelling out the rear of the chopper. I also photographed them fast-roping out of the bottom of the helicopter.”