The Murder Room

by Michael Capuzzo

“This is strictly proprietary,” Walter said as the double-bolt lock sprung and the case hissed open. “Not to be discussed outside this room.”

  “I saw that attaché on Mission: Impossible,” Stoud teased. “I don’t believe it’s for country gentlemen.” He knew the classic Zero was fashionable with spies, federal agents, and pretentious film noir directors—but that Walter, with justification, used it to guard information that had proved extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.

  “Information can be harmful when you’re not ready for it,” Walter said. “Dostoevsky said there were some ideas you could eat, and some that ate you. These are devouring ideas.”

  Nested in the rich leather interior, protected from dust and moisture by the neoprene gasket-sealed case, was a stack of photographs of the corpse of Terri Lee Brooks with the knife sticking out of her throat. Under the stack were simple manila files.

  Walter’s subtypes.

  He and Bob Keppel, the famous Washington State investigator, had spent years refining their grand theory of murder investigation. They would soon publish in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology a paper, “Profiling Killers: A Revised Classification Model for Understanding Sexual Murder,” that would be internationally hailed as a landmark analysis and working system of murder investigation. Walter since the 1980s had been lecturing about murderer personality traits to detectives, prosecutors, and forensic specialists all around the world, from Hong Kong to London to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

  It was a dream as old as the human condition, to understand the heart of darkness. To see the broader patterns. Walter hated to admit it, but his method was perfectly described in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in London in 1887, in the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, who explains to his roommate, Dr. John Watson, what a “consulting detective” does: “. . . we have lots of Government detectives and lots of private ones. When these fellows are at fault they come to me. . . . They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able . . . to set them straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first.”

  In analyzing thousands of murders, Walter and Keppel discovered the most violent murders, sex murders, were invariably committed by one of four personality types. These distinct personalities inevitably expressed themselves, could not help but express themselves, their traits, desires, and learning curve in the murder itself. The crime scene was a vast canvas; the detective had merely to read the signature. Or, as G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1910, “The criminal is the creative artist, the detective only the critic.”

  The thin man returned from the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee, and Walter and Stoud both lit fresh cigarettes. Shortly after noon, they began the descent.

  The first personality type of murderers identified by Walter and Keppel was the most common, the power-assertive or PA killer. Walter nicknamed this type the John Wayne–style killer. He bristles with machismo, muscles, tattoos, guns, girlie magazines, a pickup truck. He preens over his automobile. Among his signatures, he strikes massively to the head to overwhelm his victim, much like the first big bite of the great white shark. He disposes of his victim like trash, his power needs fulfilled. This is a man of ironclad principles (no character, but firm principles). For instance, if he’s raping and strangling a woman and she suddenly dies, he pulls out hurriedly because “he doesn’t want cops to think he’s a pervert,” Walter said. “Only a pervert would fuck a corpse.”

  “Leisha Hamilton is a classic female PA,” Walter continued. “Scott Dunn unwittingly involved himself in an intolerable insult to power, and the PA annihilated him and disposed of him to sate her power need.”

  Tim Smith, her collaborator in the murder, represented the seemingly gentler second type, the power-reassurance killer. He’s the Caspar Milquetoast killer, Walter said, lost in his own imagination. Instead of a brute grab for power, the PR killer achieved power through fantasy. This was the high school geek who skittered along the sidewalk robed in black, and turned horror movies into reality. This was the Gentleman Rapist who fantasized a strange woman was smitten with him, assaulted her with the line “Here I am at last, baby, open your wings,” Walter said, and flew into a murderous rage when “she let him know he wasn’t the best thing since sliced bread.” Unlike the John Wayne type, who scrupulously cleans the crime scene to avoid detection, this killer leaves a mess. Satiating the fantasy and rage is all that matters. James Patterson employed this type in his thriller novels, featuring characters such as Casanova and the Gentleman Caller in Kiss the Girls. David Dickson, the shoe-fetishist, was a power-reassurance personality who thought himself irresistible to women. When his fantasy was shattered by Deborah Wilson’s resistance to his charms, he murdered the Drexel student.

  It was early evening, and Walter was sipping a glass of wine; Stoud’s thick hand held a can of beer.

  For half an hour repartee and ragged laughter had penetrated a blue haze of smoke that drifted toward the crown moldings, as Rigoletto echoed through the parlor. Now they grew quiet. The tragic figure of Terri Brooks, beaten, strangled, stabbed, and asphyxiated, looked up from the nineteenth-century cherry side table.

  “It’s an anger killing,” Stoud said. “All the violence, the percussion.”

  “Indeed. This is darker, moving downward on the scale.”

  It was the third type, the anger-retaliatory or AR killer, the first personality type to begin to take pleasure in the killing beyond the simple satisfaction of power. Stalking the victim from a distance, like predator chasing prey, and covering the victim’s face were two important AR signatures. Walter called the AR the O. J. Simpson–type killer.

  “Although of course,” Walter said that evening, “we know that O. J. is an innocent man.” Stoud chuckled.

  “This is classic AR, absolutely classic,” Walter said, “followed by a clumsy attempt, after the murder was done, to stage the crime as a robbery.”

  The first sign of anger and passion was overkill, he said, as if Brooks had nine lives and the killer tried to extinguish them all. Next was the killer’s choice of intimate, close-up weapons—a knife, a lead pipe, and as an asphyxiation device, his bare hands. “If you and I have a dispute over my salary, and I decide to kill you, I’ll run and get my gun—it’s a power dispute; the killing can be clean and more emotionally remote,” Walter said. “But if it’s an affair of the heart, a betrayal, the murderer needs percussion, the cutting, stabbing, and beating, to achieve gratification.”

  The AR killer’s pièce de résistance is to conceal the victim’s eyes. The killer of Terri Brooks did it with a plastic bag.

  “In hundreds of cases I’ve looked at, an anger-retaliatory type will never allow the victim to view egress,” Walter said. “It’s a final expression of rage. A romantic relationship gone wrong is by far the most likely probability here. It’s the most logical because the overwhelming feature of the crime is the specialized—if you please, identifiable passion—and when you generally have passion, you have to have a reason for that passion, and sex is probably the most common one.”

  Walter quickly developed a profile of the killer. “He’s an underachiever, but not without charm she finds quite appealing. She’s a nice strong woman, all the things he likes. He likes that tension back and forth, she allows him to be the immature little boy who never has to grow up. When she tires of his limits, in truth he’s a user and a loser, she thinks she’s ending her problem by getting rid of him, telling him to go peddle his papers, but now she inadvertently has signed her own death warrant because she’s no longer going to be there for him to use.”

  He took a sip of wine. “Remember, with the AR the relationship isn’t over until they say it’s over. He’s quite pathological about it. Whether she wants to break it off or not, she doesn’t realize the fact of the matter is, he’s going to continue. He’s a parasite to her and has been all along, it
just takes a more urgent, darker form. The coup de grace was ‘I don’t want you.’ When she cuts him off, he can’t stand it; that’s the justification. He feels righteously indignant. She has done him harm, therefore he has a right to kill her, therefore he hasn’t any guilt.”

  The killer, Walter predicted, would be a low achiever in his late thirties, unkempt, stuck in the old neighborhood, working at a menial job, living with his mother. Walter’s profile explained why Terri Brooks let her killer in a locked door after 1:30 in the morning.

  “She knew and trusted him,” Walter said. “It was her boyfriend.”

  The fourth type of killer he was not prepared to discuss. “It’s the most complex and diabolical, the most difficult type of killer to catch, the greatest of human nightmares. It’s the black hole at the end of the continuum.”

  • CHAPTER 46 •

  IN THE WORLD WHICH WILL BE RENEWED

  Riding through the stone gate of Ivy Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia in his black sedan, Fleisher was happy the boy was moving up in the world. Around him were the immense tombs and obelisks of the great and notable: Charles Duryea, who invented the gasoline engine; gospel singer Marion Williams; Roaring Twenties tennis star Bill Tilden. The mausoleums of the wealthy towered over the simple stones and crosses of the masses. Through the good offices of undertaker Craig Mann, whose father buried the boy the first time, Fleisher and the Vidocq Society had secured from the Ivy Hill cemetery prime real estate near the gate for the boy, a place among the favored dead.

  He should be here in hallowed ground, Fleisher thought, with other children.

  It was November 11, 1998, Veterans Day. The morning sky was dark and brooding. It had rained all night on the hills of the nineteenth-century graveyard, darkening the stones and cenotaphs. The old detectives in dark coats and fedoras gathered around the fresh hole in the ground. Among them were Weinstein, Kelly, and McGillen; the young policemen of the winter of 1957 were disguised now as old men. A large black headstone, carved with a lamb symbolizing innocence, stood on the prominent new gravesite. The new burial plot and stone were donated, and the Vidocq Society paid for the reburial at Ivy Hill.

  The small casket was a pearly white with a beveled lid. Weinstein, who carried the body to the police car long ago, now joined Fleisher in bearing the coffin from the hearse to the grave. A bag-pipe wailed “Going Home,” the old Negro spiritual:

  Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a goin’ home . . .

  It’s not far, jes’ close by,

  Through an open door . . .

  Mother’s there spectin’ me,

  Father’s waitin’ too;

  Lots o’ folks gather’d there,

  All the friends I knew.

  Fleisher placed the casket on the hydraulic platform. Now the boy lay as close to the sun as he had been since 1957. His only family was two generations of cops.

  The old stone, HEAVENLY FATHER, BLESS THIS UNKNOWN BOY, had been set in the foreground of the new one at Ivy Hill.

  Fleisher wept.

  The commissioner moved to a makeshift podium and tried to compose himself. More than a hundred people stood around the grave, including District Attorney Abraham and an executive from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children from Washington, D.C. The media people stood at a distance across the road. In the crowd was a fifty-one-year-old woman nobody knew. She held a bouquet of blue carnations from the children who rode the schoolbus she drove. “I was ten when it happened, and I never forgot him,” said Rita O’Vary. “The poor little guy. Somebody has to know who he is.”

  The old cops sat in folding chairs before the coffin. The clouds broke. Sun bathed the grove of rhododendrons and oak, and the cops said it was a good omen.

  Fleisher reminded himself of the reasons to be hopeful. The reburial was only part of their effort, only the beginning. Hundreds of new leads had poured in since America’s Most Wanted aired the special show on the Boy in the Box. Host John Walsh had revealed Bender’s speculative bust of what the boy’s father might look like.

  Eight days earlier, the Vidocq Society’s lawyers obtained a court order to allow exhumation of the boy from his grave in Potter’s Field near Mechanicsville and Dunks Ferry roads in northeast Philadelphia, and to move him ten miles to the historic Ivy Hill Cemetery. A backhoe had lumbered up to the grave in Potter’s Field, and, after the stone was removed, opened the grave deep enough for the diggers with shovels, who scraped down to the lid of the coffin, then worked wide straps under the coffin. The backhoe lifted the boy’s coffin out of the earth for the first time in forty-one years. The diggers cleared dirt from the coffin, and carried it into the back of a waiting ambulance. The FBI’s evidence recovery team had done its work.

  A woman from the neighborhood, in her fifties, had walked sadly away. She had come to watch, to let the boy know “we didn’t forget.” She was ten when the boy was found, and prayed for him her whole life. Like a lot of neighbors, she left flowers and toys. She thought of the boy as her little brother.

  The ambulance drove to the morgue. The coffin was set on a worktable in the medical examiner’s office. As Kelly watched the lid being pried off, he thought, Rem Bristow should be here. Kelly crossed himself when he saw, remarkably, the boy after forty years had not been reduced to dust. Such preservation was seen by ancient Christians as a sign of the Almighty. The boy was a small pile of bones within the rags of the suit a detective’s son had long ago donated. A technician worked through the pile of dust and bones and found a tooth. It would be tested for DNA. With the boy’s DNA soon in hand, if a suspect or family member emerged, they could learn, at last, the boy’s name—and the name of his killer.

  The new black stone said, AMERICA’S UNKNOWN CHILD.

  Fleisher said the boy was “a symbol of our nation’s abused children, missing children, and murdered children. We are validating this little boy’s life. Our mission is to go forward from this day and put a name on that tombstone.” A priest, a pastor, and a rabbi commended the boy’s soul to God. Weinstein, seventy-two years old, stood and described finding the boy’s body on February 25, 1957.

  “I saw all his pain and his suffering and his anguish,” he said. “It was as though he was speaking to me: ‘What happened? Why?’ And that was an answer I couldn’t give.” In a faltering voice, Weinstein said the Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer—“in the world which will be renewed . . . He will give life to the dead . . . and raise them to eternal life.”

  As the hydraulic groaned and the little coffin disappeared into the ground, Weinstein snapped to attention and gave the boy a military salute. Then he hugged a police sergeant, and then gripped Fleisher as if he would fall.

  Kelly’s prayer was simple: Dear God, what more can I do? Tell me and I will do it.

  As the sun illuminated the little grove of fresh earth, Weinstein sat in a folding chair with his head in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably.

  “C’mon, Sam,” Fleisher whispered as they held on to each other. “We’ll solve it.”

  Fleisher had told the stonecutter to leave room on the serpentine black surface for a name.

  • CHAPTER 47 •

  “CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’VE FOUND YOUR KILLER”

  As if the murder of Terri Brooks had happened only yesterday, Detective Sergeant Cloud started the case at the beginning, visiting her father and stepmother at their home in Warminster. George and Betty Brooks easily accepted the idea that the case was now newly open; for them it had never closed. The couple had been interviewed by the Falls Township police fourteen years earlier, but were pleased Sergeant Cloud wanted to talk to them.

  Sergeant Cloud explained that he was new to the case and starting over. He had hundreds of pieces of old evidence, a thick case file, Walter’s profile, and not much else.

  George and Betty said they remained determined to find their daughter’s killer.

  “Hopefully, that son-of-a-gun is still out there walking around and something happens that will bring him ou
t of his hole,” Betty had recently told the Trentonian newspaper, when the reporter called to see what she thought of the Vidocq Society’s involvement. The newspaper headline had read ROY’S RIDDLE: CAN GROUP CRACK CASE ?

  Betty reiterated her conviction that Terri had been killed by her boyfriend. “I thought it was the boyfriend all along.”

  Her husband, George, quickly disagreed. “They were engaged,” he said, shaking his head. He just couldn’t see it. But Betty said she’d had a funny feeling when the boyfriend showed up at their house to give them the terrible news that Terri had been murdered. He expressed his grief, but something was not right. They’d seen him only one more time in the ensuing fourteen years, and that incident still bothered her, too. Two weeks after Terri was buried, they ran into him on the street. “He made a point of letting us know he had a date,” Betty said.

  Sergeant Cloud held up his hand to clarify the point. He’d committed the case file to memory, all two hundred interviews, and the Brookses weren’t making sense. The police had eliminated Terri’s boyfriend as a suspect almost immediately fourteen years ago. Unable to pin it on him or any of Terri’s coworkers, they quickly saw the crime as a robbery gone wrong.

  “The boyfriend had an airtight alibi,” Cloud said. “He was in California at the time.”

  Betty’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “Not that boyfriend! There was another guy.” Terri had already broken up with the guy who went to California. There was a new one.”

  “What was his name?” Cloud asked.

  She shook her head. She couldn’t remember. She’d barely gotten to know him during the eight months he was engaged to her daughter. “He was not the type that would come over to the house,” she said. But a few minutes later, a surname came to her. “O’Keefe, I think.” She couldn’t recall a first name.

  Thanking the couple for their time, Sergeant Cloud drove back to the Falls Township Police Department and asked around about O’Keefe. He got blank stares. He ran the name through the computer and came up empty. Frustrated, he called his friend Ed Gaughan, the private eye, at the Philadelphia brownstone headquarters of the Vidocq Society, and asked him about “O’Keefe.”