“We investigated the murder quite strenuously over a two-year period,” Sergeant Cloud of Falls Township told the gathering from the podium. The police had logged more than two hundred interviews, interrogated twelve suspects, and catalogued ninety pieces of evidence. “But after all that, we came up with absolutely nothing.”
The restaurant safe was ransacked after the brutal murder, prompting the police to investigate the crime as a “robbery gone wrong” rather than a deliberate murder. They had never changed their focus.
Walter rolled his eyes. He had sipped enough coffee and heard quite enough from the police. But he kept his own counsel as he appraised the ferocious killing. It’s not a goddamn robbery, he thought. Any fool can see that. It was murder in triplicate. That was the point of the killing. But why? Who wanted to kill Terri Lee Brooks again and again and again?
The robbery theory gained traction with the police because as far as they knew, the young woman had no enemies, or at least none with enough animus to kill her. A native of Bucks County, she had graduated from the University of Maryland planning to seek a career in human resources, but after waitressing during summers in college, she followed her heart home and into the restaurant business. Brooks had recently been promoted to assistant manager of the Bucks County restaurant, confirming her initial excitement at joining the restaurant chain that was owned by the Marriott Corporation, with plenty of opportunity to grow.
Brooks was alone in the restaurant long after closing on February 3, 1984, sitting in her back office, doing paperwork. She had just locked the outer glass door after letting out the two “closers”—teenagers who helped clean and prepare the restaurant for the next day; the inner glass door locked automatically behind her, offering double protection. It was after midnight, an unseasonably warm and foggy winter night.
The roar of traffic on U.S. 1 had quieted. The empty glass-walled restaurant glowed in the night, a cube of light in the misty darkness. Brooks often stayed late, focused on leaving the restaurant in perfect shape for day manager Joe Hampton.
Sometime after midnight, she heard knocking.
At about 6:15 in the morning, still dark in late winter, Hampton arrived to open up the restaurant. He was surprised to find the outer door unlocked. The inner door was locked as usual, and he turned the key and entered. Near the door was a pair of moccasin-style shoes he recognized as Terri Brooks’s. Next to the shoes were her keys. He walked into the kitchen. Large swaths of blood were smeared on the floors and walls, mixed grotesquely with the kitchen grease. Terri was behind the counter lying on her back, brutally murdered. Police were admittedly stunned by the violence of the killing; indeed, Walter thought, they failed to understand it.
Vidocq Society Member Hal Fillinger, the noted medical examiner, had performed the autopsy in 1984, and recalled every gruesome detail. It appeared from the pattern of wounds that Brooks had been trying to leave, with her winter coat on, when a violent assault sent her purse, keys, and cigarettes flying. The killer repeatedly banged her head on the stone tile floor with tremendous force, immobilizing her. Then, sitting on top of her, he began to strangle her. He fractured her hyoid bone, a small U-shaped bone atop the Adam’s apple that helps produce swallowing and speech and is often crushed during strangulation. But that didn’t kill Terri Brooks. She struggled violently for her life, which prompted the killer to reach for the butcher knife. The cuts and slices on her hands indicated she had thrown her hands up in vain to stop the knife. It cut her throat and severed half of her spinal cord. A second knife thrust severed the spinal cord completely and with such force the knife blade stuck in the tile floor, pinning her throat to the ground.
Paralyzed but still alive, she must have heard the killer foraging in the restaurant supply area. He returned with the clear plastic trash bag, and wrapped it completely around her neck and head. It was Fillinger who noted the condensation inside the bag, indicating Brooks was still breathing and looking up at her attacker as he asphyxiated her.
As the corpse hovered above them in the gray light of afternoon, tall, broad-shouldered ex–major-crime homicide detective Ed Gaughan’s lantern jaw flushed in contrast to his sandy hair, the only sign he gave that he wanted to take someone out. Gaughan was friends with Sergeant Cloud, who had shared his frustration with the Brooks case while the two were watching their sons play football for Pennsbury High School. Gaughan convinced Sergeant Cloud to bring the case before the Vidocq Society.
The Falls Township Police Department threw all its resources at the crime, Cloud said. The killing made headlines in the local newspapers, and the Marriott Corporation put up a $5,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the killer or killers. It quickly became evident to police that it was a “robbery gone wrong”—terribly wrong. Brooks had interrupted the robbery in progress and tried to stop it, triggering her death.
Looking for the robber who, facing resistance, had become a murderer, police interviewed fifty past and present restaurant employees. They zeroed in on an employee whom Brooks had discovered stealing from the cash drawer, and another employee at a Roy Rogers restaurant in Philadelphia who had threatened her. Both were cleared. They talked to an old boyfriend in California, and ruled him out.
They tried to link Brooks’s killing to a spate of similarly violent fast-food robberies in the region and beyond. In April 1985 at a Philadelphia Roy Rogers only twenty miles away, fourteen months later, the day manager opened up to find the night manager stabbed to death, the safe empty. They contacted police in Massachusetts, Maryland, and California, where similar crimes had occurred, and interrogated suspects in all similar robberies they could find. On the tenth anniversary of the crime, a local television station crime watch program featured the case. The police received “lots of calls and our investigators ended up all over the place,” to no avail.
Shortly after 1:30 in the afternoon, Sergeant Cloud concluded his presentation. “We appreciate your ears,” he said. “We also appreciate your brains.” The room seemed to exhale, gathering itself for the inquiry. The first suggestions from Vidocq members focused on DNA testing, a technology unknown in 1984. Could the killer’s DNA be harvested from the victim’s body and articles found at the scene, including the knife and hair follicles in her hand? Cloud would look into it.
Fleisher, Bender, Walter, Gaughan, and Fred Bornhofen whispered among themselves and called out their opinions almost as one. The consensus was the police department had botched the focus of the case from the beginning, fourteen years earlier.
“Initially the investigators seemed to have gone after robbers,” Gaughan said. “Any time somebody was locked up who had committed a robbery like that, they were there interrogating the guy. They basically didn’t focus the investigation properly. A robber wants money, to get in and get out; he’ll kill if he has to but this was a more complex type of murder.”
Bornhofen wrote later, “It’s overkill and not the type of murder done by a robber. Even a rank amateur like me could see the case for what it was.”
Gaughan, looking sympathetically at his friend Sergeant Cloud, said the police had to start over. They had to interview everyone again, as if Terri Brooks had just been killed. This time, the Vidocq Society would be there to help.
Walter stood. “My colleagues are quite right. Robbers don’t swath the head of a victim in plastic. As it happens, this is the peculiar signature of a very complicated and dark personality subtype. It’s not a robbery at all. It’s a murder. The murderer staged the robbery to throw the police off. He succeeded, until now. We know quite a lot about the killer already.”
Walter paused. “In the information game, answers are meaningless. You have to ask the right questions, and the question is: Who cared enough to kill her three times?”
His rakish smile pierced the gloom.
“For whom did Terri Brooks unlock the door?”
• CHAPTER 44 •
FROM HEAVEN TO HELL
The sweet hymn to Jesus awakened Walter abruptl
y. He was snoozing in the parlor of his Greek Revival mansion when the glorious notes of “Lift High the Cross” floated in on the spring air. He put on his glasses and stood on the porch glaring at the offending Gothic tower of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, diagonally across the street. It was time to teach the Episcopalians a lesson.
Wearing jeans and a red sport shirt, he pulled the Briggs & Stratton mower out of the garage, filled it with gas, and mowed the front lawn—as he did every Sunday when the choir reached full song, whether the grass needed it or not. He was “quite pleased” as the rattling old mower drowned out the choir, and the clatter crossed the street to the opened stained-glass windows of the stone church. “The Episcopalians are perfectly loathsome neighbors,” he later wrote to a friend. “When they get going on Sunday I must answer back with as loud a noise as I can muster.”
“Have you finished being psychopathic yet?” Stoud grinned as he stepped on the porch, where the thin man was sitting, his face a sheen of sweat, sipping an iced tea in the sudden quiet of a late spring morning.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it, that people want to sing in church on Sunday morning?”
“Indeed.” Walter laughed. “As you know, I don’t make a very good victim. And I’m not feeling terribly charitable toward Christians at the moment.”
Walter had just returned from Lubbock, Texas, where he’d watched Tim Smith, a devout Evangelical Christian, be tried for the murder of Scott Dunn as Leisha Hamilton’s accomplice, a year after Hamilton was convicted of Dunn’s murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Smith’s attorney had portrayed the cold-blooded killer as a clean-cut, young, Christian family man, with a wife and three-year-old son, who had never done wrong until he met the conniving Hamilton. Members of Smith’s church had mobbed the courthouse, calling for Christians all over the city to pray for him to be found innocent. “The nincompoops filled the courthouse wailing that the killer was an exemplary fellow in church,” Walter said. “It had an effect on the trial. It wasn’t good.”
Smith, thirty-five years old, slim and blond, was a poetic, submissive young man who had been easily seduced by Hamilton, who “used men like you use a handkerchief,” prosecutors said. He trailed Hamilton around like a lovesick sophomore, following her to the Copper Kettle just to look at her work as a waitress, and deluging her with love letters filled with jealousy of Scott. Smith believed if Scott Dunn “was out of the way everything would be bliss and happiness” with the woman he loved, according to the state.
Smith had been deeply involved in the murder for some forty-eight hours, prosecutors said. He cut away sections of blood-soaked carpet from the bedroom to hide evidence, helped wrap Scott’s body in rolled-up carpet with duct tape, helped dispose of the body and clean up the crime scene. Fibers from the bloody carpet were found on a roll of duct tape in Smith’s apartment.
According to Walter, Hamilton set Smith up to take the fall in an old-fashioned murderer’s scam.
After the killing, while Leisha was toying with the cops, playing the role of a wronged but helpful young woman, she moved in with Tim Smith to finish setting up the dupe.
Smith, believing his romantic dreams had come true, had instead lived a nightmare, subjected to walking in on his girlfriend having sex with other men, and being beaten by her for questioning it. Acting ever eager to help find Scott’s killer, Hamilton told police she was afraid of her new boyfriend. She showed them Tim Smith’s love letters, addressed to “Dear Green Eyes” and signed, “Superman” or “The Flash,” letters that called Scott a “snake” and an “asshole” and demanded she choose between them. “If only Scott wasn’t around,” Smith wrote, “we could be happy together.” Hamilton confirmed to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that her boyfriend was a “suspect” in Scott’s disappearance. He had been “fiercely jealous of her relationship with Scott.” The police soon considered Smith a primary suspect.
Moving in on her prey was exciting for Hamilton. “This need for stimulation is quite insatiable for a psychopath, the ego gratification to prove they’re smarter than anyone,” Walter explained to Dunn. “The ‘Gotcha!’ ”
Walter had rattled Smith in a private interview, squeezing him to reveal what had happened to Scott’s body.
Smith had refused to say. He said he “couldn’t turn on the others . . . it wouldn’t be Christian.”
“Is it Christian to commit murder?” Walter demanded. “Is it Christian to cover it up?”
Tim Smith didn’t reply.
Walter watched the trial at the Lubbock County courthouse with Jim and Barbara Dunn, and the three of them exulted as Smith was convicted of the first-degree murder of Scott Dunn. After six years, justice was finally being served. Walter felt vindicated. Though he had once again been prevented from testifying as a profiler, Rusty Ladd, the prosecuting attorney, praised him for helping the state zero in on Smith as Hamilton’s chief accomplice. Leisha would never have gone to jail, Tim Smith never would have been convicted, if it wasn’t for Walter, the prosecutor said.
Smith was sentenced the next day. He faced ninety-nine years or life in prison for his involvement in Dunn’s prolonged torture, murder, dismemberment, and disposal. Hamilton had received twenty years. Walter had hated to tell Dunn, but the truth was that Hamilton could be out in less than a decade for good behavior.
Now the jury deliberated for about an hour. Timothy James Smith received no jail time at all for first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to ten years’ probation and a $10,000 fine.
Dunn was stunned. He couldn’t conceive how “Tim Smith, convicted of murdering Scott, was free to walk the streets of Lubbock” and did not have to reveal the location of Scott’s body.
Because Smith had no prior criminal record, the jury had the option of probation.
Walter was outraged.
“It would appear that the jury attempted to do God’s work of forgiveness at the sentencing,” he later wrote. “In these matters, it would seem the jury should leave God’s work to God, and do the work of the State of Texas. Unfortunately, the jury allowed Timothy James Smith to benefit unfettered from the murder for which all life has been cheapened.”
Walter was concerned about Jim Dunn.
Within days of the trial, the aggrieved father threw himself on Smith’s mercy, now that the killer was “beyond harm,” begging to Smith to reveal, even anonymously, the location of Scott’s body. “Please . . . let him have the decency of a proper burial,” he wrote. “Look at your son, who is alive, then contact me. In your heart you know the right thing to do. . . . I will be waiting for a message from you or your intermediary. Send it to Box 986, Morrisville, PA, 19067.”
Dunn also returned to taking phone calls from Leisha Hamilton, hoping to learn where his son was buried. Hamilton kept calling the grieving father from her prison cell, toying with his emotions. Dunn was a wreck. Leisha had murdered the son; now she was destroying the father.
“Stop talking to her,” Walter said, scolding him. “You’re dealing with a classic psychopath. The murder is not over with the killing. The murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is. The murder’s not over for her. She’s still enjoying it. Don’t feel hate toward Leisha. It weakens you. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is neutrality, ‘I don’t care.’ If you ignore her, she will lose her hold over you.
“Damn it, Jim, she got your son. Don’t let the killer take another victim.”
The quest to find his son’s body to put under the stone was destroying him.
Dunn sat quiet while Walter lit a Kool, and watched the plume of smoke disintegrate over the porch.
“But it was quite fascinating,” he said. “Here you have Leisha Hamilton, the dominating, power-driven killer, controlling and using submissive Tim Smith like a dog, seducing him into murder, setting him up to take the fall. The jury sees right through her, is repulsed by her, she goes to prison. Then you have Tim Smith, whose submissive nature makes him Hamilton’s hapless victim, usin
g that very quality to turn the tables on the jury. He’s no less psychopathic, but he’s dreamy, poetic, and the jury falls for his charming-nice-young-Christian-man act.”
He stood and looked across the street at St. Paul’s, rising quietly now from its grove of old trees.
“I’m probably more agnostic than I am an atheist, but in any event, even if one doesn’t believe in God, in our line of work one must have substance, structure, strong faith, character.” He snuffed out the cigarette. “It used to be that people had character; now houses have character and people have personality. That won’t do. The eternal things, the good, the true, the beautiful, must be unbreakable.”
“One must have standards,” Stoud said, grinning.
“One must.”
“One should.”
“I do,” Walter said, “and mine are quite low.” They were laughing now.
Walter laughed himself into a coughing fit as he walked into the house.
• CHAPTER 45 •
THE DESCENT
The thin man sat in a wing chair with his hard green pack of Kools, battered metal ashtray, and ceramic coffee cup resting on a walnut side table from nineteenth-century Lyon. The coffee cup, a gift from an admiring Midwestern homicide squad, was inscribed “When Your Life Ends, Our Work Begins.” The parlor, dim at midday, was crowded with antiques; the front door was attended by the bust of a French knight, a chevalier of the last century, lit by an enormous red Chinese paper lantern.
The afternoon was quiet but for the ticking of the grandfather clock and Walter spinning the triple-digit combination on the steel-ribbed, aircraft-aluminum briefcase. It was the classic 1940s-style Zero Halliburton, the near-indestructible model that protects the U.S. president’s nuclear codes and red button.
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