The Murder Room

by Michael Capuzzo

The state police believed it was a robbery. But then why did the robber(s) abandon the silver plates? And why, Walter asked, were two bank-deposit bags, with cash inside, left on a dining room chair in the house? Police had no answers to that. The Watauga County sheriff surmised it was a grudge killing. But he knew of nobody with a mortal grudge against the Durhams.

  The pressure to make an arrest was intense. Newspapers all across the mountains printed the horrors. North Carolina governor Bob Scott joined local business leaders in offering a reward for an arrest leading to conviction. United Press International broke the news that in her frantic last phone call to her son-in-law, Mrs. Durham had said, “We have three niggers here.” The next day, the Watauga County sheriff told UPI, “We have some good clues and we hope to have early arrests. And we definitely are investigating blacks.”

  No black men were ever charged. A month later, the sheriff rounded up three Asheville men in their twenties who were part of a burglary ring. The trio was charged with first-degree murder in the commission of a robbery, but the three men were quickly released for lack of any evidence putting them at the crime scene.

  “I would argue that the system worked,” Walter said, to the extent that “innocent men were not prosecuted.” Nobody was ever brought to trial for the murders.

  As Walter concluded, Fleisher stood and opened the floor to questions.

  Was robbery a motive for the murders? a federal agent asked.

  “No,” Walter said. “On the contrary, it was rather clumsily staged to look like a robbery. But it was a killing all about power and control.”

  What about the son-in-law? another VSM asked.

  “It’s interesting that all was not well in the marriage,” Walter said. “The Durham family was pressuring their daughter to leave Hall.” The couple eventually divorced after the murders.

  “But police never considered him a major suspect,” Walter said.

  What about Cecil Small? someone asked. Wasn’t it odd that a neighbor who just happened to be a private eye was the only witness to the crime scene outside of the family?

  Walter raised his left eyebrow to a fine point. “I have my doubts about Small,” he said. “There’s reason to question his general credibility. For the last thirty years he’s told anyone who listened that he knows who killed JFK, and it wasn’t Oswald.” Guffaws swept the table.

  The story beggared belief, but Small had insisted so loudly that a Hispanic man had assassinated JFK that FBI agents finally interviewed him in 1967, Walter said.

  Small said he and his wife were in their pickup truck in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, on their way home to their Georgia trailer from a western trip with their little dog. Suddenly they found themselves riding in JFK’s motorcade. Small saw the first lady stand up and heard his dog bark the instant the president was shot (the dog always barked at gunfire). Then he saw a short Cuban or Mexican man cross in front of his truck, running away holding a rifle with a scope partially hidden in a bag. Minutes later, Small happened to give a pleasant young hitchhiker named Lee Harvey Oswald, whom Small believed couldn’t have done it, a ride to the library from the Texas Book Depository.

  According to FBI records, agents decided not to further investigate because Small’s memory of Dallas streets and landmarks wasn’t accurate.

  “That’s quite a witness,” a federal agent said. “Maybe he knows where Elvis is living now.”

  So who killed the Durham family? a VSM asked.

  Walter grimaced. “I have a theory. We’ll see if the state police are savvy enough to go forward with it.”

  O’Kane was agitated. “It was a gruesome case,” he recalled, hardly appropriate for a social club. He and the other investigators were fundamentally men of action, not words; if you put an unsolved triple murder, a grave injustice, in front of them they naturally wanted to solve it. O’Kane was convinced Walter knew who the killer was, but there was nothing the vaunted members of the Vidocq Society could do about it unless they conducted their own private investigation.

  As they left, Walter was disappointed that there had been so few questions from such an esteemed group of investigators. He attributed it to “natural caution. This is the first time we’ve done this, and they don’t know much about it. The guys were pretty much just following along with what I told them.”

  William Gill, the decorated special agent in charge of Treasury agents in three states, sat silently through the presentation, stunned by Walter’s knowledge. After a lifetime in the military and law enforcement, he realized with a start that “homicide investigation is a very specialized field”—one he knew nothing about. “In Treasury, I’m a white-collar guy—mostly bribery, extortion, white-collar crimes. We follow the money, just like the IRS special agents. I don’t do homicides. I don’t do blood splatter.”

  Gill dourly reflected on the irony that “Fleisher had gathered together these extremely talented people to examine murders and the majority of them are not homicide investigators.” An irrepressible optimist, the Treasury ASAC was confident that he and the other federal agents would make significant contributions, drawing on their own expertise. He decided the league of extraordinarily diverse talents was, like most things new and unusual, hard to grasp because it was a product of pure inspiration, “the simple genius of Bill Fleisher.”

  Gill decided to test that genius at the very next meeting. At his request, the Vidocq Society examined the brutal execution of IRS agent Heidi A. Berg, shot to death six years earlier in suburban Virginia while jogging. Berg was a bright, athletic thirty-year-old woman from the Midwest who was slain in broad daylight. Her murder had never been solved. Virginia-based IRS special agent James Rice, whom Gill had assigned to the case in 1984, came to Philadelphia to present it with his former boss.

  “Everyone has a case they can’t let go,” Fleisher said to Gill. “This is yours.”

  Gill took the case personally. “A sadder thing I’ve never seen,” he said. Gill was head of the IRS Internal Security Division for the Mid-Atlantic region of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. He was responsible for protecting IRS employees and investigating threats and assaults against them. When Berg’s murder landed on his desk in Philadelphia, he felt his blood pressure spike.

  Early on the morning of August 12, 1984, Berg was jogging through a park near her home in suburban Merrifield, Virginia, about ten miles west of Arlington. Berg, a dark-haired young woman wearing athletic shorts and a T-shirt, was a highly disciplined IRS agent and a habitual runner. She was a reserved woman from Wisconsin, a devout Christian, gave anonymously to charity, and dreamed of writing children’s books. She hadn’t an enemy in the world, police thought.

  But at 6:30 that morning, just a few minutes into her jog, she was shot six times in the back with a handgun. She ran a few steps before collapsing and died where she fell, on the grass in front of an American Automobile Association building, where her body was discovered by a passing motorist. A single assassin apparently ambushed her, for reasons unknown. “She was executed by an excellent shot who emptied the gun on her,” Gill told the VSMs. “Someone really wanted Heidi Berg dead.”

  He assigned Agent Rice and eight other veteran IRS agents in Virginia to the case. Rice became obsessed, spending parts of vacations working on the murder.

  The crucial question hadn’t changed in six years: Who wanted to kill Heidi Berg? Police had no idea. The murder made no sense. As Fairfax County prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. put it, “Of all the people who jog in Fairfax County, you wouldn’t find many less likely to be the target of a homicide.” They even suspected a professional assassin may have killed the wrong woman.

  Gill didn’t see it that way. “There were thousands of reasons someone would want to kill Heidi Berg,” he said, “each one printed with George Washington’s portrait.”

  Heidi Berg was an IRS revenue officer, a difficult, dangerous job, Gill said. She was essentially an unarmed, civilian bill collector for the IRS. “When people really do
n’t pay their taxes and have had a lot of opportunities, letters, the revenue officers have to go out and knock on doors and do seizures,” Gill said. “Everybody hates the IRS, and if you say ‘bill collector for IRS’ you’re doubly hated. We had a high incidence of threats against revenue officers, and a few assaults.

  “Naturally,” Gill said, “we assumed the killing was tied to her work.” In fact, Berg had recently been threatened in her job as a revenue officer based in Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia. The threats had seemed serious enough that she received a transfer to the Washington, D.C., office and a less contentious job as program analyst.

  But it was a dead end. “We pretty much exhausted the idea that it was job-related. We were reasonably sure it wasn’t anybody in her case files.” Then they found entries in Berg’s diary about a secret boyfriend, unknown to her friends or family. Her secret boyfriend was an FBI supervisor, a married man. Agents got excited when they learned the bullets that killed Berg were of “the same caliber issued by the FBI at the time,” Gill said. “It looked very promising. We went down that alley aggressively.”

  FBI internal security gave the potential suspect a polygraph test, but it was inconclusive. Agents also gave polygraph tests to the man’s wife and his son, who was off at college. “It ruined the guy’s life for a while,” Gill said. “Bad luck for him that she maintained a diary.” The FBI supervisor was eliminated as a suspect. Another dead end.

  “It’s a very frustrating case,” Gill said. “We had ten good agents in that office and a lot of money to spend. But we couldn’t get anywhere.”

  So who killed Heidi Berg?

  Richard Walter cleared his throat to speak, and Gill leaned forward. “Everyone seems to think if she’s pretty and young it was sexually driven,” Walter said. “I don’t see evidence for that. The killing is consistent with the angry taxpayer theory—Heidi is just disposed of, thrown away like trash, a killing all about power, which is what money represents. The gun is all power. But if everyone in her case files has been ruled out, the probability is she is a stranger to the killer. She was there and he had the needs and weapon and did her, a variant form of a drive-by shooting.”

  The group fell silent. But why kill her? Bender asked. Walter frowned. “He may have tried to put the make on her and she said no, and he didn’t have the ability or testicles to take her down, so he satisfies himself with the gun. It’s also possible that he’s impotent or whatever else and that’s the most he can do, he feels isolated and he wants to take somebody out, and she’s a good-looking girl.”

  The thin man smiled coldly. “We don’t like to imagine these fellows out there. They’re the sharks in the harbor. That’s why it’s a high risk to go running alone, to be isolated at six o’clock in the morning in a park, on a pathway—particularly for an attractive girl.”

  Gill’s face lost color. He didn’t doubt Walter, but it seemed a tragic, absurd end to Heidi Berg. The questions from the VSMs had seemed relatively weak. Someone had actually asked Gill if he had checked Berg’s phone records. “Of course,” Gill had shot back. What were they accomplishing?

  The next month was even more disappointing to Fleisher. On the morning of Tuesday, July 3, 1984, Donna Friedman, thirty-three years old and eight and a half months pregnant, left her two young children with a babysitter and went to her regular obstetrics appointment. Friedman, a doctor’s wife, was due the second week in August. She received great news from her obstetrician, Dr. Robert S. Auerbach. The baby was a “perfectly formed, healthy baby boy,” Dr. Auerbach said. “She was very happy and doing beautifully. She said that she didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl. She had only wanted it to be healthy. She lived for her other two children so completely.”

  Leaving the doctor’s office, Friedman said she had some shopping to do. First Friedman, who was redecorating her suburban Philadelphia home, went to All-in-One Linens to inquire about bedroom curtains. Then it was on to Toys“R”Us to look for a stroller for her brother’s newborn son, a gift for the child’s bris. Unable to find the special stroller, she called her brother at about 1 P.M., and he suggested she go to Cramer’s Juvenile Furniture on Frankford Avenue, which was advertising the stroller. She bought it with a credit card, and asked a clerk to help carry it to the trunk of her car. The store clerk watched her drive away at 3:30 P.M.

  When she didn’t return home by 4:15, her husband, hematologist Dr. Alan Friedman, was worried. Donna was always punctual and knew she had to be home to relieve the babysitter for Scott, eight, and Lee, four. The couple also planned to attend a 6 P.M. birthday party for Dr. Friedman’s grandmother at a local restaurant. When his wife didn’t show up for the party, Dr. Friedman called hospitals and the police.

  Police began an urgent search for the missing woman. Dr. Friedman spent two days retracing his wife’s steps. At 8:25 P.M., Thursday, police found the family’s 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass parked on Ogontz Avenue, a few blocks from the Cheltenham Square Mall. Blood was seeping out of the trunk. Friedman and her unborn child were both found dead in the trunk. The young mother had been bludgeoned to death with two blows to the skull, then shot twice in the back of the head, “for good measure,” the police said.

  Fleisher choked up listening to Philadelphia Police Department detective Frank Diegel describe the case. Fleisher had grown up not far from the Friedmans. At the funeral service for mother and unborn child, people wept and cried out in anguish. The rabbi had told the story of a man who cried over the death of a loved one.

  “Why do you weep?” the man’s friend asked. “Your tears will not bring back your loved one.”

  “That is why I weep,” the man replied.

  A week after the murders, the Philadelphia Daily News offered $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction “of the person or persons responsible for the murder of Donna Friedman and her unborn child.” Family and friends of the Friedmans offered a separate $10,000 reward. Homicide detective Diegel had a primary suspect, but the police investigation foundered. The money was never collected. No one was ever arrested for the crime.

  The Vidocq Society discussion was spirited. The society helped focus and reenergize Diegel on his primary suspect, whom VSMs were convinced had killed the pregnant woman. But in the weeks that followed, Fleisher was deeply frustrated. “We know who did it, but it was never pursued by the police. It was stonewalled, and we don’t know why.”

  Fleisher said they were taking on a Sisyphean task if they tried to solve cold murders. Police often interviewed the killer within forty-eight hours of a murder, but if they didn’t recognize him, the case dried up fast. Memories faded. Evidence disappeared. Other cases clamored for attention. Once a case officially went cold, the difficult turned nearly impossible. “There are good reasons a case doesn’t get solved in the first place,” Fleisher said. “You have to deal with those.” It took a highly motivated DA and police department, and often a passionately involved family, to blast a case from the ice. On top of all that, the Vidocq Society lacked police power to arrest and subpoena. Their power was brainpower. “We almost always know who did it,” Fleisher said. “But to find a solution, get an arrest and conviction, the stars would have to be aligned.”

  Gill, the high-ranking Treasury agent, left the Friedman case with a humbling lesson. While he was busy chasing Mafia kingpins, “A lot of people in this country get away with murder. A lot more than I thought.” A restless mood seemed to grip the VSMs. Was the point of the exclusive club to expose difficult truths and break hearts? It wasn’t at all what Fleisher intended.

  • CHAPTER 25 •

  THE BUTCHER OF CLEVELAND

  Yet to Fleisher’s surprise, the Vidocq Society grew quickly and dramatically, and just as quickly gained a remarkable reputation in and out of law enforcement. By the fifth meeting, on April 18, 1991, the size of the society had more than doubled to sixty-two members. The buzz about the dining and detective club reached the media. A New York Times reporter had asked to attend the fif
th ratiocinative luncheon. The Vidocq Society, he later wrote, “may be the only club in which real sleuths try to solve real crimes for recreation.”

  The new VSMs were, if anything, even more prominent. The director of Brigade de la Sûreté, the French equivalent of the FBI founded by Vidocq in 1811, signed on, making the trip to Philadelphia from Paris. So did FBI agent Daniel Reilly, an organized crime expert from Long Island. Agent Reilly wanted to relax from his job of tracking “really horrible, no, make that repugnant people.”

  New VSM Charles Rogovin, a Temple University law professor and criminologist, knew something about cold cases. He sat on the select congressional committees that investigated the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Yet he was now eager to help the everyday cop “who’s got a tough nut to crack. An old case is very tough to deal with.” The virtue of the Vidocq Society, he believed, was that “if the assigned investigator is working as hard as he can and he runs out of trump, sometimes it takes an outside investigator to say, ‘How about this?’ ”

  Rogovin looked around the room proudly at the record turnout for the fifth meeting. “This is not a collection of English club members,” he said. “You’ve got some seasoned people here.”

  Cuisine and crime that day would be served at the Dickens Inn, a small colonial tavern, built in 1788, facing the broad cobblestone boulevard of South Second Street. The society had left the Naval Officers’ Club, finding it insufficiently atmospheric for their deliberations, in addition to which some VSMs voiced concern about privacy. The new digs were an intimate English pub named in homage to Charles Dickens, who actually visited Philadelphia. The Times reporter was taken by the irony of the setting, noting “waitresses dressed in eighteenth-century barmaid uniforms brushed past a detective who remarked, ‘She was shot to death on a Sunday.’ ”

  Fleisher was excited. The setting matched his vision for the Vidocq Society, and so did the case. He had finally scheduled a classic murder case that detectives could discuss and debate over a leisurely repast. It was the 1930s Butcher of Cleveland, who had committed the ghastliest series of murders in American history. The Butcher tortured, dismembered, decapitated, and drained the blood from more than thirty men and women from the 1920s through the Great Depression and beyond. Seventy years later, the murders, which had stumped hundreds of lawmen including Eliot Ness, remained unsolved.