In a sentimental mood, he would open the well-thumbed paperback of Les Misérables and discuss the classic nineteenth-century novel of the French Revolution in light of the ongoing debate on whether law enforcement should be punitive or redemptive.
“This is my favorite scene in all literature,” he would say. It was the famous moment when Jean Valjean, the thief who steals to feed his family, is caught by the gendarme stealing a basket of silver from old Bishop Myriel, who had sheltered the ex-con for the night. Valjean is hauled before the bishop for punishment, but the bishop says there has been a mistake, he gave Valjean the basket of silver as a gift but the ex-con forgot the silver candlesticks, which the bishop now hands over to him. The thief is stunned by the force of forgiveness, and the bishop says, “Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money to become an honest man. Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”
Fleisher could not read the passage without looking up, his eyes wet with tears.
“This is what I want to do with my life. I want to devote my life to what really counts, redeeming the suffering, fighting the battle of good and evil. I want to be a force for good. I want to buy souls.”
• CHAPTER 22 •
THE DEATH ARTIST
No woman was so young, blond, and lovely, no feeling so pure, no night so exciting as Tuesday: Polish vodka, pale Eastern European skin, dazzling white light that cleansed the darkness.
If it was Tuesday, it must be Joan.
It was Tuesday evening in the art studio and home of Frank Bender, the Casanova of the Caliper, the Da Vinci of the Dead, the greatest forensic artist who ever lived.
Bender was laughing with unadulterated, adulterous joy. His laughter rang from beneath the floor in the center of the warehouse, from the underground room, the pit. He was five foot eight, slim and muscular, an ex-boxer with a leprechaun’s grin and light hazel eyes of manic intensity. MOM was tattooed on his arm from his days in the Navy, a scar sliced his lip from a beer-bottle fight, and just above his groin was a butterfly tattoo he had displayed in public, dropping his drawers for a comely barkeep.
Now in his fifties, Bender was making a living doing commissioned sculptures for clients around the world and diving into the Delaware River’s polluted waters to repair damaged tugboat propellers. In the dark cold waters of the river he was like nobody else, feeling blindly the nicks on the blades with the gift of his hands. In his studio, laying hands on the bones of the murdered dead, he felt his psychic visions and molded clay busts of the decayed and unidentified dead, of fugitive killers. Seven Most Wanted killers were sitting in jail, and many more victims had been avenged, because of Bender’s gift for seeing dead people. His forensic art had provided Bender with fans around the world. He was profiled on 60 Minutes; Esquire named him “Man of the Month.” Cops were awed and spooked by his wizardlike powers. The work occasionally involved opening graves and cutting off the heads of corpses like some Dracula avenger, being chased by gangsters, and checking through airports with a head in a suitcase. Bender needed, he said, to “download the horror.”
He did that best on Tuesdays. Tuesdays were Joan days, and from evening through dawn Wednesday, Bender “downloaded the horror” with her. The pit was sacred space, blindingly white, perfect. They went together naked, hand in hand, down the white wooden stairs, past the white sign painted with black letters, WHITE HIGHWAY CAFÉ. It was white walls, a white bar, and white barstools with a red 1952 model Chevy, a car from his childhood, on a painted highway running down the bar. They sipped Polish vodka, listened to Brubeck, Johnny Rotten, blues, any damn thing. They drank, danced, and made love all night long. He was nearly sixty, and his all-night Bacchanalias gave him more energy than did a good night’s sleep. “It’s how I restore my innocence,” he said. Meanwhile, his wife slept peacefully in their room next to the old meat locker.
Shortly before dawn, he climbed the white stairs into the dim studio gallery. It had been a flawless evening. In the gloom he went to the stove and put water on to boil for coffee. He lifted the lid on the big pot and gave a stir; the head was coming along fine. Joan wrapped her arms around him from behind. Bender lived life ordered purely by his own desires. He didn’t own a watch, and the clocks in the place kept their own separate times. The Norman Rockwell calendar was fifty years behind. Friends had to tell him what day it was. Or he measured time, like Tuesday, by trysts. He floated in a timeless ether of his art, “the mistress I was born to serve,” as one of his role models, Michelangelo Buonarroti, once wrote.
As they sat sipping coffee under the curling Rockwell, the phone rang.
The murky skylights were graying the studio with early light. He could dimly make out the rows of human heads; the women with smudges of red lipstick and rouge and pleading eyes that seemed alive; the wolflike faces and vacant, hollow eyes of sadists, hit men, mass murderers. The mute chorus of the doomed. Visitors were awed, or spooked, by his collection of skulls. It was a sensory overload of darkness. But this was only a museum. They should only see inside his head; that’s where the action was, the active cases, the crowds. The dead appeared in his dreams with their ruined faces, crying for justice, mouthing the names of their killers.
He let the phone ring, running through the possibilities. The hit men who’d vowed to kill him seemed to be placated for now. No husbands were after him at the moment. His father-in-law wasn’t chasing him with a rifle anymore. Things were relatively calm these days. Still, he had a bad feeling. It was nothing he could put a finger on.
His partners had warned him about the physical dangers of murder investigations. Stare into the abyss and it could darken your whole being. Turn away from the pain and suffering, if you were one of those called to it, and you lost your mind. He was the latter. The cops saw it in him. Fleisher said, “We’re all driven to find justice, driven to a fault.” He had been swallowed by it. He was a simple happy-go-lucky sex-loving artist and all-around charming manipulative lothario before he was recruited for something higher. Recruited by fate. He’d never noticed the news racks, the radio, the talk of the abduction and murder of innocents jamming the airwaves of his city, of every metropolis. The numbers meant nothing to him; it was the tortured eyes of the first murder victim that did it, that recruited him, snatched his soul.
The telephone testified to the change. His tape machine, once filled with girlfriends, was crammed with messages from cops, reporters, medical examiners, grieving families seeking help. And here was the rub: The calls wounded him. Injustice made him angry. It pissed him off. But it angered all of them. That’s what kept him going. It angered all of them.
He knew as he listened to the phone ringing under the watchful gaze of the heads that morning that things would never be the same, no matter how many women he bedded. Until the world was a better place, until he did something to knock sense into it, he’d have that bad feeling.
Things were going good. It was just that bad feeling.
He picked up the phone and said, “It’s five in the morning, asshole.”
• CHAPTER 23 •
DREAMS OF MORPHEUS
Richard Walter slept easily in his antique Chinese bed.
He’d retired with a head full of wine. As his head hit the pillow, he said aloud, “And now I enter the arms of Morpheus.” In Greek mythology the three sons of Hypnos all produced dreams. But Phantasos generated tricky, unreal dreams and Phobetor fearsome nightmares.
Morpheus spun the clear-eyed dreams of heroes.
He cherished his solitude.
“I married once, too long ago to recall or discuss. I shan’t make that mistake again. As it happens, I simply loathe cats, dogs, and children. A child should never be present to hear what I have to say.” He had consciously sacrificed the pleasures of life “to be one of the five best in the world.” He believed it was a profound sacrifice,
his life a journey marked by loss. “But it is those scars that give us character, that make us who we are.”
He made coffee in the darkness before dawn. The sky was still black when he called Philadelphia.
“Frank? ”
“Richard!” came the manic shout.
“It’s Wednesday morning, remember?”
“Right, Joan and I danced all night. Nineteen sixties rock and Polish vodka. We had an incredible time!”
“Frank, what the fuck are you thinking? Did you sleep at all? Are you alone?”
“Uh, well, no. Joan is leaving soon.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “Christine’s husband is driving her over this morning.”
Walter frowned. “Frank, you’ve had quite enough sex for one twenty-four-hour period. Make a pot of coffee. And try not to let your little head do all the thinking until I get there.”
Bender howled in delight. “Rich, man, you’re just jealous!”
“I think not,” Walter said. He hung up.
The sky was leaden and filled with snow. It’s dark, it’s cold, I’m miserable, the weather is evil, he thought as he swept acorns off the engine block where a squirrel was nesting for the winter. It’s not good. As he drove to the airport and the cabin pleasingly filled with cigarette smoke, he started to feel better. In the cloud of smoke his small blue-white-red gold pin on the lapel of his suit, the badge of les couleurs, rooted in medieval heraldry, was scarcely visible. Each man had a purpose in life, Walter believed; his was to identify, torment, and defeat the most depraved psychopaths on Earth. To be good at it, to be one of the five best in the world, he had rid himself of distractions, had married his profession. Destroying evil gave him the greatest pleasure.
The sky was dreary and the colors of the chivalric code, glory and justice, gods and kings, glittered dully as the old Ford sped down the highway.
• CHAPTER 24 •
A CASE THEY CAN’T LET GO
On the afternoon of Thursday, September 27, 1990, Joe O’Kane took a bite of chicken almondine and a sip of hot coffee, and looked down at three decaying corpses with their heads plunged into an overflowing tub.
“Nice lunch,” O’Kane said, dabbing the corners of his mustache with a cloth napkin. He gingerly passed the photograph down the banquet table in the Navy Officers’ Club. “I hope this club has a budget for Tums.”
The big federal agent was dressed to kill. He was the picture of a brawny, dandified Irish cop in a custom-tailored, three-piece Italian suit and black alligator cowboy boots. Clipped to a wide, silver-buckled belt was a small Beretta pistol, his “Sunday going-to-church gun.” His big silver beard was neatly trimmed—the final touch that made him Kenny Rogers’s double. With the husky build of a former semi-pro football player and a sweet tenor voice, O’Kane sang at weddings and parties as the country crooner. Special Agent O’Kane was loquacious, brilliant, cocky, a self-described “two-fisted drinker.” He’d signed up for the Vidocq Society for a few laughs. There were enough tears on the job.
O’Kane was in the prime of a major law enforcement career. He’d been a key man on covert operations all over the world. Despite his accomplishments, O’Kane never forgot that he was blue-collar Irish, son of a Kensington millwright, product of a high school education, and proud of it. He was one of Customs’ “Mustangs,” the Army term they borrowed for the Horatio Alger grunts who made it to the top on merit. “None of us waltzed into some fancy job out of college,” he said. The Irishman had a wild, rebellious streak; he’d grown his beard just to piss off a supervisor who insisted he be clean-shaven, and it became a permanent part of him. He followed his own muse. The burly cop was a poetry lover who’d read thousands of novels and had written three thrillers for kicks. “Chesterfield put it best,” he said. “The Irish are a merry race and surely they are mad, for all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad.”
The last thing he needed was some uptight, buttoned-down agent trying to re-create the FBI over lunch. He wanted to have fun! He was the first man Fleisher approached about joining the society.
“Bill, that sounds great but I’m not a big joiner,” he said. “I don’t join the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police]. I don’t join the Sons of Ireland. These people get carried away with themselves; everybody’s got an agenda. I don’t need any of that in my life. Tell me we’ll have fun. If we can sit around and have lunches and have fun with the guys, I’ll do it. If everybody takes themselves serious as a shoelace, I don’t need that. I’m working twenty-three hours a day on major cases against the scum of the earth. I don’t need that over lunch.”
Fleisher promised a good time. “He said we’d sit in an elegant room over lunch and talk about Billy the Kid, hundred-year-old crimes, we’d bring in experts on Jesse James, even a session on Meriwether Lewis and Clark,” O’Kane later recalled. “I said, ‘OK, I’m in. Sign me up.’ ”
Now, at the Vidocq Society’s second luncheon, the very first case they formally discussed was a triple murder in North Carolina as serious and senseless as In Cold Blood. In fact, the 1972 massacre of the wealthy Durham family in the western Blue Ridge Mountains reminded O’Kane of Truman Capote’s description of the Clutter family slaughter in Garden City, Kansas. It was hardly his idea of a relaxing midday repast.
“What, do they expect me to solve this before dessert? This isn’t fun.”
“No, ’tis not any fun in this kind of case,” Richard Walter sniffed. “Except, of course, for the killer. One can discern from this crime scene that for this kind of personality, it’s the satisfaction of a mission accomplished, a job well done. Oftentimes, the uninitiated fail to grasp how much pleasure is involved for the killer.”
Walter was standing at the head of the banquet table presenting the unsolved case to a couple dozen VSMs. The mass murder had baffled the police for eighteen years, and recently Walter had been hired by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to review the cold case. “It’s a wonderful case,” he said as he passed around crime-scene photos and case documents. “There’s all sorts of drama here.” Fleisher thought it sufficiently cold and fascinating for the Vidocq Society to discuss.
Walter looked down at the case file while gathering his thoughts. “As it happens, the killer was rather obvious,” he said. “This kind of killer always thinks he’s smarter than he really is.”
The Durhams were a quiet, respected, affluent family that, according to police, had no known enemies, Walter said. Bryce Durham, fifty-one, his wife, Virginia, forty-six, and son Bobby Joe, nineteen, had moved from Raleigh two years earlier to Boone (pop. 13,472), the Watauga County seat in the state’s far western mountains, ninety miles northeast of Asheville. Bryce owned a local automobile dealership, Modern Buick-Pontiac. They were conservative, devout Christians.
On the evening of Thursday, February 3, 1972, Bryce left a 5:30 Rotary Club meeting and returned to the dealership to pick up his wife, a secretary at the family business, and son, a student at nearby Appalachian State University, for the ride home. After his last class, Bobby Joe had driven his Buick sedan to the dealership and left it there to join his parents in the GMC Jimmy. A major snowstorm had blown in, and they all climbed into the four-wheel-drive SUV.
Sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 that night, the Durhams reached home, the SUV slowly climbing the icy road to the large brick split-level atop a steep hill. The family settled down for a quiet Thursday evening of dinner and television. Outside, the house was nearly invisible in the blowing snow. It was a night to stay indoors. But the killer knew the local roads and mountains and the Durham house, Walter said, and proceeded through the storm.
That night, Troy Hall, the Durhams’ son-in-law, and his wife were quietly watching TV in a trailer home four miles from the hilltop split-level. At 10:30, the phone rang, and Troy picked it up. On the other end was the barely audible voice of his mother-in-law, he told police. “Help,” she begged, whispering as if afraid of being heard. Intruders were in the house, she said, and they “have got B
obby and Bryce.” Then the phone went dead.
Hall told police he thought the call was a practical joke. He immediately called back, certain his in-laws were all fine, but he got only a busy signal. Growing concerned, he and his wife pulled on their coats and jumped in the car—but the car wouldn’t start, so they asked a neighbor, private detective Cecil Small, to drive them through the storm. It took the three of them twenty minutes to reach the Durham house at the top of the hill. Hall told his wife to stay in the car while he and Small, his handgun drawn, checked out the house. At 10:50, the son-in-law and private eye discovered the bodies and called police.
The crime scene told the story of domestic tranquillity suddenly shattered. The house had been ransacked. In the living room stood three glasses of soda and a half-eaten plate of chicken on the coffee table in front of the sofa, next to Bobby Joe’s solitaire cards. A large patch of blood stained the carpet. Virginia had died from strangulation, the coroner determined. A short piece of nylon cord still encircled her neck. Bryce and Bobby Joe had deep rope burns scarring their necks, a clear attempt to strangle them, but their cause of death was drowning. All their faces were badly bruised. The water was still running, overflowing the tub.
From the beginning, the police were confused. They launched a massive manhunt through the snow-covered mountains of western North Carolina. Within minutes, they found the Durhams’ GMC Jimmy, which the killer had stolen to make his escape. It was abandoned a mile away from the house on a snowy, deserted road known only to locals. The car’s lights were on and the motor was running. On the backseat was a sack of silver plates stolen from the Durham residence.
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