The Murder Room

by Michael Capuzzo

  Faragalli learned that the parish housekeeper had seen someone kneeling in a pew a few minutes before Carol entered the church. He was eager to learn the identity of this “mystery witness,” but his attempts to extensively interview church staff were quashed by Monsignor Paul Baird, the leading cleric at St. Mark’s, who refused to let police interview the reverends Joseph Sabadish or Michael Carroll.

  But police had already interviewed Father Sabadish once before. Monsignor Baird withdrew cooperation, and now they began to focus the investigation on Sabadish. Sabadish had been extremely nervous and evasive during the interview. He gave an alibi that police easily discredited. The priest said he had been a few blocks from the church on West Circle, making his rounds on the annual parish visitation, during the time of the murder. But the surviving investigator interviewed by reporter Mullane said that Sabadish had lied.

  “He left a note at one of the houses that showed he was on West Circle a couple of hours before the murder,” the investigator said.

  In 1962, a clerk at a Bristol shoe store told the police that Sabadish came into the shop shortly before 4:30 that afternoon—when Carol was apparently already dead—acting strangely. Nervous and distracted, he asked the clerk for the time, and also asked a bizarre question in a shoe store, “Do you sell underwear?” The clerk noted that Sabadish was wearing a wristwatch and knew the time. Police believed Sabadish was trying to create an alibi for himself. And they became increasingly suspicious of the priest’s possible sexual perversions when they obtained receipts for purchases he had made at an upscale ladies’ lingerie shop.

  They were still looking at other possible suspects. But the night before Halloween, a week into the investigation, Chief Faragalli received disturbing information that made Sabadish the primary suspect. A married woman in nearby Fairless Hills told police that Sabadish had threatened to rape her three or four weeks before Dougherty’s murder. She knew Sabadish from years earlier when she lived at a home for unwed mothers where he was the chaplain. Now on the telephone he had made sexual advances, including a threat that he wanted to rape her. Sabadish said she needn’t worry about becoming pregnant because he was “sterile.”

  Furious, the woman’s husband called Sabadish and confronted him, while taping the phone call. Sabadish admitted making the obscene telephone calls and sexual threats. He apologized and promised not to do it again. Chief Faragalli had obtained the tape.

  When Sabadish was making his rounds on parish visitation, the chief and a detective picked him up in an unmarked car and took him to the Bucks County Courthouse in Doylestown, where a county detective gave him a lie detector test. The priest passed the polygraph.

  After that, police turned to other suspects they considered equally compelling. A town drunk admitted he killed Carol. Later, it was discovered that the man was mentally ill, and furthermore a Bristol cop had coerced his confession. A local convicted child molester rose to the top of the list, but he proved he was in another state at the time of the murder.

  At the Vidocq luncheon, the police said that Frank Dougherty could not forget how the church had shunned him and his wife after Carol’s murder. Father Sabadish refused to make eye contact with him. Neither Sabadish, Reverend Carroll, nor Monsignor Baird called on the family to comfort them. When Dougherty asked Sabadish in the church confessional, “Father, am I wrong in assuming a priest could have killed my daughter?” the priest stood up and left the confessional.

  Police never questioned Sabadish again. “We had no concrete evidence to tie Sabadish to the murder, except that he was very evasive during the interrogation,” said the surviving investigator.

  Shortly after the polygraph, Sabadish was quietly transferred from St. Mark’s with no explanation to parishioners. He returned months later, again without explanation from the monsignor. Five years later, he was transferred to St. William Parish in Philadelphia. Then followed more than a dozen transfers in eighteen years within the archdiocese in eastern Pennsylvania. In recent weeks, Mullane, the reporter, had tracked down Father Sabadish, now in his seventies and still employed by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia as a chaplain at a Montgomery County Catholic hospital. Mullane asked the aging priest if he killed Carol Ann Dougherty. Sabadish vehemently denied it, calling it “an absolute, positive lie.” He denied that he had made obscene phone calls to a Fairless Hills woman, saying, “That’s news to me,” and called police detectives “crazy.” After the newspaper stories were published he called Mullane, furious, and called him “anti-Catholic.”

  Now the Bristol police were seriously considering other suspects as they reopened the investigation. The Vidocq Society urged police to test the semen, pubic hairs, and a badly smudged fingerprint left on Carol’s plastic hair band, presumably the killer’s.

  After the luncheon, Fleisher left the City Tavern determined to solve the case. “It was the priest,” Fleisher said. “We all knew it was the priest.”

  Within days, the Vidocq Society had formed a task force to bring the killer of Carol Ann Dougherty to justice.

  • CHAPTER 34 •

  WHAT I WANT TO HEAR ARE HANDCUFFS

  The light in the room was storm cloud gray, and ice glistened on the sidewalks below the municipal building. A bitter north wind beat the windows of the detective division of the Lubbock Police Department. The man from Philadelphia had not enjoyed his week on the high plains of West Texas. He had sat in the police car grimly staring at cotton fields rolling under black judgment-day skies. Goose hunting country, they said. It’s a fucking wasteland is what it is, he thought. You can see a pimple on a cat’s ass. He detested the bone-chilling cold but was warmed by a Lubbock Avalanche-Journal story open on the desk:

  SUPER SLEUTH CALLED TO SHED LIGHT ON BIZARRE DISAPPEARANCE.

  It was the front-page story that touted his arrival, followed by a second front-page story in the Avalanche-Journal that had made him something of the talk of the town.

  INVESTIGATOR EXPECTS TO CRACK DUNN CASE.

  Walter had confidently declared that Lubbock police would soon solve the case of Dunn’s disappearance. After spending one day studying the case, interviewing suspects, and talking to police, Walter promised that the “nasty and clever” killers’ eighteen months of gloating would soon come to an end. His analysis of the murder indicated that the killers were “smart” but made “mistakes.” They unknowingly revealed their patterns to him, leaving “trails, bits and pieces” that would be their undoing.

  “Success will be based on two things,” he said. “A) The case merits success, and B) I don’t like losing a case. I have a bulldog mentality, and what I want to hear are handcuffs, and I want to do it right. . . . If I were the suspect, I wouldn’t feel comfortable. I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”

  Now at eight o’clock that morning in December 1992, Walter sat down with a police corporal, sergeant, and detective to discuss the Dunn case. The thin man looked fresh and energized in his blue suit, his blue eyes shining above the French tricolor pin on his lapel. Tal English, the tall, twenty-seven-year-old detective, had an aw-shucks manner that matched his sandy hair and cowboy boots; he and Walter had bonded working the case for months over the telephone. The older man had croaked, “Young man, we’re going to go into the jaws of hell and bring this case back out.” Corporal George White, distinguished-looking with gray in his dark hair, and Sergeant Randy McGuire, large and bald, sat stoically appraising the profiler. They all got along in an atmosphere of mutual respect, but the two veteran cops had not seen eye to eye with the “super sleuth” from the Vidocq Society in their previous meeting.

  After the cops’ courteous Texas welcome, which Walter always appreciated, he got right to his point: They should immediately take the case to District Attorney Travis Ware and press for murder charges. Walter wanted the charges filed against Leisha Hamilton and her neighbor and lover Tim Smith, fiercely jealous of Scott, whom he believed was an accomplice.

  Corporal White and Sergeant McGuire took a long look
at the man from Philadelphia. The case had been a top priority for a year. Jim Dunn was a hometown boy, a hall-of-fame alumnus of local Texas Tech; his best friend was still his old college roommate W. R. Collier, president of the largest locally owned bank in Lubbock. There was great public interest in the gruesome disappearance of a prodigal son in a cloud of sex, blood, and duct tape, and the police had invested thousands of man-hours. Murders were relatively rare in the Texas city of 186,000 people, but they were reading about this one over coffee from Plainview to Dallas to Jacksonville, Florida. The police wanted nothing more than to solve it. They liked Walter, and he them—“they were all great guys”—but they just couldn’t see how a petite, charming twenty-eight-year-old woman had orchestrated a vast conspiracy of lies and cold-blooded murder.

  Walter tried to convince them.

  “This case is like shaking hands with smoke,” he said. “It’s a matter of you can see it, you can smell it and taste it, but it’s difficult to get your hands around it.”

  Walter urged them to look at the crime scene, the killing room with blood halfway up the walls and splattered on the ceiling. They all agreed Scott Dunn had no doubt died in that room. The point of departure was that with no body and no weapon there was no case, according to the police. Without that foundation of physical evidence, it wasn’t possible to bring murder charges under Texas law, as the DA never tired of reminding them.

  Walter saw it differently. “I say, OK, we don’t have a body. Its absence is a clue. Let’s use that to move forward.”

  The problem, as he privately saw it, was that “cops are concrete. They think in structure. The whole investigative process is structural, and wisely so. Traditionally, you work from the inside out on a case. You work from the evidence forward. Here you don’t have a body, you don’t have the primary evidence; that’s it, end of story. So in this case one must work from the outside, the pathology, back to the crime scene.” He smiled to himself at the small irony that it was eccentric Eugène François Vidocq, in nineteenth-century Paris, who first had the gall to reveal broader and deeper patterns to the straight-thinking gendarmes.

  “The police are correct in that what we have at the crime scene is vital,” he said to himself. “One must always remain rooted in the facts of the case, but one must think differentially, not just linearly. Unfortunately, there are not many people who are capable of it.”

  He took a sip of his coffee, which was already cold. “Sometimes, gentlemen,” he said, “what’s missing is more important than what’s present.” He held up the photograph of the blood-soaked room revealed by the luminol. “What’s here and what’s not here?” he asked. “A minimalist version of the crime is left, but the essence remains.

  “Something dire happened in this room,” he continued. “It was a bloodbath, and the careful cleanup speaks to a very careful, elaborate plot. The murder is very purposeful, not recreational.” At the word “recreational” eyebrows rose, and he explained: “A Bundy type who chose a random victim and killed for sadistic pleasure would have left a far messier, more symbolic crime scene. So the killers knew Scott.” He let that sink in a moment.

  “As it happens, the carefully organized crime, cleanup, and the brutal destruction and disposal of the body point to a power-assertive, or PA, killer,” he went on. “It’s a recognizable type I’ve dealt with many, many times. The killing is all about power—not the acquisition of power through fantasy but a John Wayne–type power, the macho direct assault—simple, in-your-face, incapacitate, restrain, torture, kill, throw away. ‘I win, you lose’ kind of power.” A cold smile crossed Walter’s face. “The whole thing just reeks of PA at all levels.”

  He asked them to examine Scott and Leisha’s relationship. Scott was twenty-four, a ladies’ man, handsome, bright, cocky. He would have seen Leisha as a stimulating challenge. She was an older woman, also very bright, sexy, flippant, and “fun in the sack, without giving much thought to her essential character as a manipulative, Mata Hari figure.

  “Leisha had a long litany of situation lovers, husbands, one-night stands, wanted and unwanted children,” he continued. “She had six children without knowing who was the father of several of them.” His voice took on a sarcastic edge. “She told police she only loved the ones conceived in love.” He paused to let that take root.

  “Leisha would have seen Scott also as a challenging conquest, and a link to money, his father’s wealth. But like a lot of twenty-four-year-old men, Scott had found someone to take to bed, not home to meet Mom and Dad. Scott was rebuilding his life, and when he found a ‘decent’ girl, the real thing, it was time to dump Leisha Hamilton.”

  The day Scott’s would-be fiancée called and Leisha answered the phone sealed his fate. “Nobody dumps Leisha Hamilton. Oh, no.”

  Walter’s complexion took on a grave cast. “When we look at Leisha’s history, we recognize that she absolutely cannot stand rejection, that loss of control. She has a series of short-term relationships which are not monogamous because she needs not so much to conquer men as emasculate them. Scott is a relatively strong-willed man himself. He sees this rather malevolent, vixenish woman whom one wouldn’t mind having an affair with, but he wouldn’t want to introduce her to his parents. Now he has Jessica and he’s gathering strength. He doesn’t need Leisha anymore. If anything is going to get you killed, it’s to reject the psychopath and say, ‘I’m better than you are.’ ”

  His voice turned dour. “All her behavior points to a psychopath. She’s just a power-hungry witch who chooses men younger than herself and tries to seduce and control through sex and intimidation. She found one that didn’t play, or played for a while, but it was his game not hers, and she simply wasn’t going to tolerate the insult and the challenge to power.”

  Walter believed Leisha had ensnared some of Scott’s coworkers, who were caught in her web of intimidation, in a conspiracy to murder him. There was powerful resentment of Scott at his job, “a lot of competitiveness, rivalries, and jealousies with coworkers.” Not only was Scott the star “stereo cowboy” and the handsome face on the shop’s TV commercials, he was cocky and brash. “He rubbed it in, got in their faces about it without realizing the risky game he was playing,” Walter said. Walter speculated that the shop was stealing and reselling its stereos, a common racket. “Scott would have gotten in their faces about that, too. One more thing to trump them with.” The week before he disappeared, Walter reminded them, “He and his boss had a fistfight out behind the shop.”

  The police were tracking down Leisha’s numerous ex-boyfriends, but Walter believed the suspect list was short. “Few people had access to Scott.” The sequence of events leading to Scott’s murder began with a party at his boss’s house. Leisha was at the party, but Scott arrived with a tall, gorgeous blonde. Walter believed the blonde performed oral sex on the other men. “When I asked them they all denied it, but a lot of eyes hit the floor,” he said. At the end of the evening, he believed that Scott had trumped them all. “You think you guys are so smart, that was a transvestite! Needless to say, they were not pleased.” The revelation of that indiscretion would have ruined the life of at least one of the men at the shop. “Thus a crime already planned became a crime of improvisation and opportunity,” the profiler said.

  Scott became seriously ill with the flu at the party, too sick to stand, Leisha said. Walter saw it differently; the murder conspiracy was already in motion. “I believe he was poisoned, organophosphates, something from under the sink. His extreme sensitivity to light and noise is telling.” Scott slept on the sofa at the party house, and the next afternoon, Leisha showed up and brought him home. A neighbor saw Leisha supporting the weak, stumbling young man as she led him into the apartment. It was the last he was seen by anyone other than Leisha or a coworker. Leisha said she went out to get soup and a thermometer to nurse Scott that night and the next day. When a coworker came by in the morning to pick him up for work he was still too ill. It was the last time anyone saw him alive.


  It was a simple enough matter for Leisha to call on neighbor Tim Smith, a young, submissive evangelical Christian, to help with the murder. Smith had flooded her with a series of fawning love letters that included, “If only Scott wasn’t around, we could be together.” Duct tape from a roll in Smith’s apartment was used to patch the blood-soaked carpet that had been cut away and replaced in the killing room.

  “This is a classic setup for a PA killer,” he said. “Just classic. A female PA relies on sexual performance and seduction, but if her power base is threatened, she will resort to violence. She’ll typically enlist trickery to disable a stronger male and/or acquire a sympathetic and weak accomplice. Leisha did both. And the PA killer classically needs to brag or flaunt the killing to claim credit, and inserts him- or herself into the investigation to exert control and power and prolong the fantasy of the murder.”

  Calling attention to herself was Leisha’s big mistake, Walter said.

  “How do we find out about the crime? We find out when Leisha calls Jim Dunn. She’s laying the framework, not only shaping the investigation—she knows ultimately Jim’s going to look for Scott—but she’s also exhibiting her own insatiable greed for power. She’s already done in the son; now she wants to do in the father, too. Then she tried to be coquettish with the detectives, casting herself as the wronged woman, calling them all the time with new information, pretending to be afraid of Tim Smith. She moved in with Smith so she could continue to set up her dupe to take the fall. This need for stimulation is quite insatiable for a psychopath, the ego gratification to prove they’re smarter than anyone, the gotcha.”

  In the Avalanche-Journal story on Walter’s arrival in town, Leisha was quoted as saying Smith was a “suspect” in Scott’s disappearance, and had been “fiercely jealous of her relationship with Scott.”