The Murder Room

by Michael Capuzzo

  Smith was absent from work the day of the murder, Walter said, and Hamilton can’t account for her activities that day, although her memory is extraordinary for the days around it.

  The murder itself was a monstrous affair, Walter said. Scott was incapacitated with poisons, imprisoned and restrained and tortured for two days before his death, Walter believed. “This kind of killer typically uses a gun to restrain or intimidate, but close-up weapons, the kind that caused all this splattering and gives the killer emotional satisfaction, to pummel, cut, utterly destroy the victim until the killer’s fear of vulnerability is sated, and power restored. There would have been a lot of ‘You think you’re leaving me now, bitch, try this.’ What the absence and presence of evidence at the crime scene tells us is Scott intolerably challenged somebody’s power base, and paid with his life.”

  After the murder, Walter said, Leisha and Tim had sex together that night in the apartment. “A little thank-you from Leisha,” Walter said. “But only after they had removed the body and cleaned up.” He smiled wickedly. “Even they have standards.”

  Detective English shook his head sadly, acknowledging the depth of evil, and sat back with an audible sigh. He was persuaded by Walter’s profile of Leisha Hamilton as a psychopath—he saw why Jim Dunn had termed Walter’s insights “miraculous.” But the young detective didn’t buy the wide conspiracy, and the others weren’t nearly as impressed. All the cops knew Hamilton was withholding information; all of them considered Smith a suspect. “They were Texas polite,” Walter said. “But the whole thing was too ethereal for them.” None of it would matter, anyway, the cops said, to the DA, Travis Ware. As Sergeant McGuire told Dunn, “I have seen Ware cut people right off at the knees when he feels they don’t have a strong case. Believe me, you don’t want to talk to Travis Ware.”

  Walter wasn’t listening. He was ready to see the DA. “Let’s do it,” he said. “I don’t like to fuck around.” Reluctantly, the cops led him to the office of the top lawman in Lubbock County, Texas.

  The district attorney’s office was large and redolent of masculine power. Travis Ware, six feet tall, dark-haired, and impeccably attired, rose from his high-backed leather chair behind a huge polished wooden desk. In a remarkable display of dominance, he hitched one expensive black leather shoe up on the desk, towering over them with the flamboyance, Walter thought, of a matador. Leisha’s not the only PA in the room, the profiler thought, amused. Let’s see who gets gored.

  Walter, Detective English, Sergeant McGuire, Lieutenant Dean Summerlin, and Captain Frank Wiley, head of Crimes Against Persons, sat in five small chairs positioned around the district attorney’s huge wooden desk like pawns around a king. In a glance Walter evaluated Ware—fortyish, reasonably good-looking, expensive gold watch peeking from under the cuff. Ah, narcissism, he thought—a weakness.

  For twenty minutes, the DA talked about himself. As if to match Walter’s experience with Scotland Yard, Walter thought, he discussed his education abroad in England and the many brilliant murder prosecutions that “attested to his greatness.” Appealing to the DA’s sense of vanity, the profiler offered, “Yes, there are indeed many connections to England in this room,” and casually mentioned a “quite brilliant friend,” Dr. Richard Shepherd of London, who had helped him with the case.

  Ware said brusquely, from his elevated pose: “Well, you’ve asked for this meeting. What do you want?”

  Walter snapped back, “We want charges filed against Leisha Hamilton and Tim Smith in the murder of Scott Dunn.”

  The DA scoffed. His voice filled with condescension, as if addressing schoolchildren, he said, “You don’t have a murder charge. All you have is a missing person. You don’t even have a body. Without a body you don’t have a murder. Come back to me when you have a body.”

  The profiler removed his horn-rims and glared. “If you want a goddamned body, I’ll give you one. It’s right here, in Dr. Shepherd’s report.” His face flushed with color, Walter stood and dropped on the desk a slim blue-bound report titled “Forensic Pathology and Analysis of the Crime Scene in the Murder of Roger Scott Dunn.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “It’s right here,” Walter said. “Dr. Shepherd’s report proves conclusively that Scott Dunn died in that room, and was murdered.”

  Walter had asked Detective English to have a forensic pathologist examine the crime scene to determine if enough blood had been spilled to indisputably have caused the death of a six-foot-two, 170-pound man. Dr. Sparks Veasey, the Lubbock County pathologist, had refused the job, saying there wasn’t enough information to reach a conclusion. At Walter’s direction English had mailed a large package with copies of the entire case file, photographs, and bloody carpet samples to Walter’s friend Dr. Richard Shepherd, forensic pathologist at Guy’s Hospital, London, England, internationally known consultant to Scotland Yard. “Dick’s brilliance is unsurpassed,” Walter said. “And he owes me a favor.”

  After studying the sprayed blood on the south and east walls, ceiling and doorknob of the bedroom, Dr. Shepherd wrote that the “by far most likely cause” of the blood spatter was “repeated blunt trauma.” Furthermore, “The distribution of the spraying of blood is entirely consistent with the victim lying on the floor while the blows that resulted in this spraying were struck.” Although the amount of blood lost was impossible to calculate, the blood spatter indicated Scott Dunn was forcefully and repeatedly bludgeoned about the head and such blows to the brain were “the prime cause of death in such cases.”

  As DNA testing indicated the bloodstains were 958,680 times more likely to originate from the offspring of James Dunn than from anyone else on Earth, Dr. Shepherd concluded that bloodstains in the room:

  “(1) have not resulted from a natural disease process; (2) are entirely consistent with the infliction of multiple blows from a blunt instrument or instruments; (3) are entirely consistent with those blows being delivered with a force of sufficient strength to cause death; (4) that a child of James Dunn has suffered severe multiple blunt trauma injuries while in the corner of the south and east aspects of this room, and these injuries resulted in the death of that individual.”

  The report was signed: “Richard Thorley Shepherd, B.S.C., M.B., B.S., M.R.C.C. PATH, D.M.J., senior lecturer and honorary consultant in forensic medicine. United Medical Schools of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s, Guy’s Hospital, London.”

  The DA looked up from the report, his chin set in defiance. There still was no body in the case, he said. “I’m not sure what Texas law would say about this.”

  “I just happen to have that section of Texas law with me,” Walter said, grinning.

  Ware issued a wan smile. “I thought you might.”

  Walter opened a statute book and read, interpreting as he went. “In essence, Texas law says we have to have A) a body, B) part of a body, or C) a confession with corroborative evidence. We have B. We have blood; blood is connective tissue; ergo, we have part of a body.”

  Ware leaned back in his chair, tenting his fingers. He stared at the profiler.

  “All right,” he said. “You’ve got a murder.”

  For an instant the thin man’s smile flashed triumphantly, but his voice was soft.

  “As it happens, I agree.”

  • CHAPTER 35 •

  THE CONSULTING DETECTIVES

  The three men huddled in the smoky light of a Philadelphia pub, discussing their coldest cases.

  Bender said he had been asked to do a facial reconstruction of John Wilkes Booth. It could help solve mysteries surrounding President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.

  Walter was chosen as the profiler on an eight-person forensic all-star squad, including Los Angeles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, investigating Jack the Ripper on the one hundredth anniversary of the murders. “It was quite easy. The murders show a clear learning curve not understood in 1888, and only Montague Druitt was capable of it.

  “The Home Office begged me no
t to make a fuss about it.” He smiled. “Kill the mystery, and there goes all that tourism.”

  “Good work, men. Maybe you two can figure out who killed King Tut,” Fleisher cracked, holding up a Philadelphia Daily News. “Meanwhile, check out the twentieth century.” The June 9, 1993, headline in the tabloid newspaper said: FETISH MURDER? KILLED BY FOOT FETISHIST? DREXEL STUDENT WAS SLAIN IN ’84.

  Walter picked up the story: “A twenty-year-old Drexel University student, strangled more than eight years ago, was killed for her white sneakers,” he read.

  “No kidding,” Bender deadpanned. “That sounds like an interesting case.”

  “Good for them,” Walter said. “Justice is done.”

  The day before, Philadelphia police homicide detectives had arrested David Dickson Jr., a thirty-three-year-old U.S. Army sergeant and former Drexel University security guard, at the Army office where he now worked as a recruiter. Police charged him with “murdering Drexel University student Deborah Lynn Wilson in November 1984 because of his fetish for women’s white sneakers.”

  Walter raised an eyebrow and read on.

  Wilson may have been murdered after she dozed off in front of the computer in Rendell Hall—and caught the guard trying to remove her Reebok sneakers.

  “Law enforcement sources” said Dickson was believed to have a “foot fetish” and “gets enjoyment from smelling women’s sneakers and socks.”

  “Clever of them,” Fleisher said. Walter smiled.

  According to accounts in the Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dickson had been a suspect all along, but police never had enough evidence to arrest him. They decided to take a fresh look at the cold case but weren’t getting far until “investigators learned of his alleged foot fetish and linked it to the fact that Wilson’s sneakers and socks were missing.” For eight years, investigators thought the missing footwear was important, “but they didn’t know why. Then, in 1993, police said they found a clue in the files of the U.S. Army.”

  Dickson had been arrested and court-martialed for the theft of women’s sneakers on an Army base in Korea in 1979. Army Sergeant Gwendolyn Garrett-Jackson, who now lives in Birmingham, Alabama, was prepared to testify that Dickson broke into her quarters on the Korean base and stole her white sneakers, video camera, and other belongings. Based on the Army court-martial, police obtained warrants to search Dickson’s apartment on City Avenue and his storage bin at the Philadelphia Navy base.

  In both locations, police seized more than a hundred pairs of women’s white sneakers, all used, and confiscated seventy-seven videotapes of women wearing white sneakers. The tapes were pornographic, including sex scenes of women in white sneakers, and women fondling other women’s feet. There were shots of Dickson’s Florida vacation to Disney World, with the camera trained on his female partner’s feet, and a scene in a fast-food restaurant where the camera was focused on women wearing white sneakers. There was a home-shopping commercial for a cross-country ski machine showing a woman on the machine wearing white sneakers, and a naked store mannequin wearing white Keds.

  Dickson’s foot fetish was not a harmless fetish, the prosecution said, but a sexual deviancy that led him to psychopathic behavior. Three years after Wilson’s murder, police said, Dickson was fired from a maintenance job at the SmithKline Beecham pharmaceutical company after admitting he had written a love letter to a female chemist, asking her to leave him her sneakers. Three other women were prepared to testify they believed Dickson had broken into their apartments to steal their white sneakers.

  Dickson’s ex-wife told police Dickson “was obsessed by, and drew sexual satisfaction from, women’s feet, sneakers, and socks . . . when she came home from work, tired and wearing sweaty sneakers, her husband removed her shoes and rubbed, kissed, and fondled her feet and toes.” She saw him masturbate in their home while watching aerobics tapes of attractive young women exercising in white socks and sneakers. When she found other women’s sneakers in her closets on several occasions, her husband said “he was giving them to Goodwill.”

  Police had shattered Dickson’s alibi for the murder. He claimed he’d been talking to his girlfriend on the telephone at the time of the murder and “forgot” to check on Wilson and take her to her car. Yet the woman, now his estranged wife, testified that Dickson phoned her only once that evening, for fifteen minutes between midnight and one in the morning, when Wilson was alive. She also testified that she received a frantic phone call from Dickson saying, “Felicia, you’ve got to help me. You’re my alibi. You’ve got to help me.”

  Reached at her home in Woodbury, New Jersey, Dorothy Wilson, Deborah’s mother, said the family felt “very, very thankful . . . it’s been eight and a half years. . . . We just can’t say enough for the Philadelphia Police Department and district attorney.”

  A Drexel spokesman said the university was “gratified” by the “break in the long-standing Deborah Wilson case.” Police credited a grand jury for recommending Dickson’s arrest on murder charges after an eighteen-month investigation. The police homicide special investigations unit and the district attorney’s office investigated the case extensively. Chief of Detectives Richard Zappile said he “feels very sorry for the family of the victim and we are glad that this case has finally been resolved.”

  The Daily News said “it was not clear why the old murder case was reopened, although the special homicide investigations unit periodically goes back to take a fresh look at unsolved slayings.” The Wilson family hired a private detective to work on the case, police said.

  The Vidocq Society was not mentioned in any of the stories. Nor was the investigative luncheon at the Downtown Club, or any individual VSM.

  “Let’s remember we’re consulting detectives,” Walter said, “not crime-solvers. That’s what the police do. We’ve done our job.”

  “It’s just like The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” Fleisher said. Walter glowered at him.

  Fleisher ignored him. Sherlock Holmes, he said, was accused by the police of stealing credit for solving the theft of an important naval treaty from the Foreign Office.

  “His reply is a classic. ‘On the contrary, out of my last fifty-three cases my name has only appeared in four, and the police have had all the credit in forty-nine.’ ”

  “That’s us,” Bender said.

  “I don’t have any problem with it,” Fleisher said. “We’re territorial and tribal animals. It’s a very, very natural phenomenon. I saw it in the government all the time, squads competing for cases like children with sibling rivalries, agents competing with each other. It’s prize envy.”

  “The fact is, we can’t work for the approval of others,” Walter said.

  “There’s a better way to say this,” Bender said, raising a shot glass of vodka.

  “Virtue is its own reward.” Fleisher had a lopsided grin.

  “Stoli is its own reward.” The sculptor threw back the shot and smacked the empty glass on the bar.

  Two years later, in December 2005, David Dickson Jr., thirty-five, would be convicted of the second-degree murder of Deborah Lynn Wilson, the twenty-year-old math major at Drexel University, so he could steal and sniff her white Reeboks and socks.

  A jailhouse snitch told the court that Dickson had confessed “the whole story” of the murder to him in prison, where Dickson was known as “Dr. Scholl.” Inmate Jay Wolchansky, serving thirty to sixty years for a string of burglaries, said that Dickson told him he had asked Wilson for a date, but the student rejected him. During his late-night rounds on November 30, 1984, Dickson, a martial arts expert, attacked her in a basement classroom by grabbing her hair and hitting her on the head.

  As she fell to the ground, Dickson, who once boasted of his ability in ligature strangulation, told Wolchansky that he choked her with one hand. She fell unconscious and he removed her sneakers and socks, smelled the sneakers and rubbed her feet. When she groaned awake, Wilson choked her to death. Then he “had his way” with her feet, rubbing them against
his face.

  Dickson had said he killed Wilson because she “deserved it, and he had a fetish for white tennis shoes.” He told Wolchansky that he kept the sneakers for about a year “and would masturbate with them from time to time.” A psychiatrist testified that Dickson kept women’s white sneakers in plastic bags to preserve the smell for his fantasies.

  Wolchansky, thirty-three, denied he was in line to receive any reduction in his term for his testimony. “It bugs me that people do that [sniff sneakers]. I’m not a violent man. . . . To know how that lady was killed, Miss Wilson, disturbs me. I pray for her every night.”

  The testimony perfectly matched Walter’s profile of a power-reassurance killer, a Gentleman Rapist type lost in a dark fantasy world, an illusionist who explodes in rage when his fairy tale shatters. He’s imagining that the victim will fall in love with him at his approach but “he knows goddamn well in reality the chances of that, the chances of him ever even getting a hard-on, are very slim.” Wilson was “ just shoes and socks to him.” When she fought back, it was a power loss. “He took what he wanted and got power reassurance. In his mind, he triumphed.”

  Dickson said he was innocent. He told the court he enjoyed sniffing women’s feet but said he never used violence to enjoy his fetish.

  Common Pleas judge Juanita Kidd Stout sentenced Dickson to a mandatory life sentence.

  Deborah’s parents, Dorothy and Joseph Wilson, said they went to their daughter’s grave and told her the news. “The wound has been closed,” said Dorothy Wilson. “It’s settled. Maybe she can rest now.”

  PART FOUR

  BATTLING MONSTERS

  • CHAPTER 36 •

  TAKE ME TO THE PSYCHOPATH

  Lubbock police detective Tal English drove the unmarked car through the breezy Texas spring morning, with Richard Walter smoking in the passenger seat. They pulled into the parking lot of the Copper Kettle, a popular lunch spot. They were thinking takeout.