The Murder Room

by Michael Capuzzo

  “I just gave you the polygraph test, and you can tell them anything you want, but you and I both know you did it,” he said. He let that sink in a moment. “I just have one question. Did you kill her for drug money, or was it a lovers’ spat and she came at you with a knife and you defended yourself? The clock is running and you don’t have any more time.”

  Keefe said, “Neither.”

  Gordon’s eyes flared. “Listen, don’t insult my intelligence.”

  “Neither.”

  Gordon scowled. “OK, if you’re telling me it’s neither, I know you’re lying. Therefore I have to assume it’s the worst-case scenario: You killed her for the drug money. There’s no reason to talk to you anymore.”

  Gordon propelled his bulk from the chair, stood up, and walked out, shutting the door behind him.

  As Gordon emerged, the chief sent Whitney and his partner back in. The young cops were itching to close the case they had worked so hard on. Meanwhile, Gordon conferred with Fleisher. It was time, the two Vidocqeans agreed, to use the technique Fleisher called “The Everything Must Go Sale.” Getting a confession was the ultimate sales job, Fleisher said.

  “You’re convincing a guy that it’s better to confess and go to jail for twenty years than to say nothing and walk free,” he said. “It’s the all-time sale. You’re convincing him he needs the very last widget the company has made, when in fact there are seven million more gathering dust on the shelves. Time is everything. You gotta act now; the clock is ticking.”

  He and Gordon discussed possible approaches. “We have DNA evidence,” Fleisher suggested, “and if you don’t tell us what really happened by midnight, we’re going to have to go with it. We’re going to have to nail you.”

  Gordon looked at his watch. They had less than a half hour to go. Whitney and his partner were still in the interrogation room with Keefe, getting nowhere. Gordon grabbed the biggest guy in uniform he could find, a sergeant, and pulled him aside. “I want you to go into the room and say, ‘Mr. Gordon came out, he says you did it, we don’t want to talk to you anymore,’ and walk out.” The sergeant went in, made his announcement, and came out.

  Less than a minute later, patrolman Whitney came out of the interrogation room, grinning widely. He’d gotten the confession. “Keefe confessed. It was a lovers’ spat. He says he was trying to defend himself.” The suits and uniforms congratulated him as cheers filled the hallway.

  Gordon quietly pulled the young officer aside. “I want you to go back in and take his cigarettes from him, turn your chair so you’re parallel at the table, right across from him, and tell him, ‘Bullshit. There’s no way a woman gets stabbed twenty times, suffocated, and beaten; it’s not gonna work as self-defense.’ ”

  Whitney returned to the room and three or four minutes later emerged with a report. “As soon as I turned the chair and sat across from him, his head went down, his body gave in, and he admitted he killed her for money to buy drugs.”

  Gordon nodded. “Good work. Now I want you to go back in and take a statement, name, birth, graduated, such and such—start from the beginning and then everything he did that night. I want it written down he’s confessing of his own free will, no threats or promises of anything. Ask him, why did he confess? In court it’ll be attacked—why would a person voluntarily give a confession against his own interests? So we need him to write down what his interests are—why did he confess?”

  Whitney went back in. Minutes passed, the door stayed shut. The group in the hall fidgeted nervously.

  Half an hour later he came out waving a handwritten confession and cheers went up in the hallway, louder now. The DA and deputy DA, the chief, Sergeant Cloud and his officers, and Gordon, Fleisher, and Gaughan were shaking hands, slapping backs, high fives all around. The Vidocq men felt excited to be part of the team. Rivalries and criticisms melted away instantly with success; they were all human, it was a natural part of the process. The VSMs said the cops had done a great job.

  The charge would be first-degree murder, the DA said with an air of triumph. The deputy DA grinned as she studied the written confession.

  “Didn’t these cops do a great job?” she said.

  Later that morning, the DA held a press conference to announce an arrest in the county’s longest-running cold case. Surrounded by beaming cops, Rubenstein praised the police chief and his officers and their “dogged” and “high-tech” work. “These things don’t happen by accident,” he said. “It takes good police work. You can’t imagine the man- and woman-hours put into this.” Headlines in all the regional papers sung their praises. Betty Brooks said she was shocked but “relieved” and applauded the wonderful police work. The New York Times saw the arrest as nationally significant because of the use of a daring new technology; as the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “What really cracked the case were the DNA tests the police had done.” Chief Conoline noted that coroner Halbert E. Fillinger Jr. was “a great pathologist” for having flawlessly saved the skin and hair samples that provided the DNA evidence. A week later, the Families of Unsolved Murders Victims, a local support group, honored Detective Sergeant Cloud, Officer Whitney, and Deputy District Attorney Lori Markle for their outstanding achievement. Rubenstein said he would seek the death penalty.

  Nowhere was the Vidocq Society mentioned.

  Sixteen months later, on June 5, 2000, Bucks County judge John J. Rufe sentenced Keefe to life in prison without parole for the murder of Terri Brooks. Keefe had pled guilty on the advice of his attorney, who said the evidence against him was so “overwhelming” the most they could hope for was to avoid the death penalty. Keefe refused to address Brooks’s parents directly, who said they were not surprised, and were satisfied with the outcome. In a related civil case, the Marriott Corporation, owners of Roy Rogers, paid Brooks’s sister, the administrator of her estate, $675,000 in a wrongful death settlement; $276,322 of the settlement went to the attorneys.

  Nowhere were VSMs mentioned.

  Fleisher admitted his disappointment in a Vidocq Society Journal column, headlined, WE KNOW WHAT WE DO . . . AND DID.

  He praised the Falls Township Police Department, and especially Sergeant Cloud, now a Vidocq Society Member, for its “great work.” Yet, “It still hurts me that members who selflessly volunteer their time and expertise are not always publicly appreciated,” he wrote. “Whoever said, ‘Success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan,’ knew of what he was speaking.”

  Fleisher said the case was a reminder to VSMs to “stop and remember what we are really about in the Vidocq Society and who is our ultimate client. The client was, is, and will always be the truth. And our client is an unforgiving one.”

  He signed the column:

  Bill Fleisher, VSM, Commissioner.

  Veritas Veritatum (“Truth begets Truth”).

  • CHAPTER 49 •

  THE HAUNTING OF MARY

  In the darkness before dawn in her Ohio home, Mary turned in the coils of a nightmare. When she opened her eyes she was sweating. She got up and went into the kitchen, but the nightmare followed her. Even in waking hours now, she couldn’t escape it. She tried to calm herself, apply reason to the problem. She was in her fifties, a scientist, a Ph.D. chemist with a logical, orderly mind that had fueled an impressive executive career at one of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies. “I was always good in the sciences,” she said. “You can trust science. It yields up its secrets, if one keeps looking. Science can play tricks, but it doesn’t lie.” But this problem didn’t respond to logic; it was at the farthest end of the spectrum from reason. She lived alone. It was terrifying. The horror had trailed her her whole life, but she’d managed to repress it. Now this demon of memory was demanding notice. The ghostly hollow eyes stared back, wherever she looked.

  Before sunup, she picked up the phone and called her psychiatrist.

  Early that morning of February 25, 2000, the psychiatrist called from his Cincinnati office to the Philadelphia Police Department and
asked for homicide. He had a murder to report. Or rather, his patient, who had been wrestling with the memory in therapy for many years, had a murder to report, forty-three years after the fact. Her brother had been killed on February 25, 1957, by her mother. She had witnessed it, been an accomplice to it. She needed to unburden her soul.

  The officer took the information. The report was filed with the hundreds of other leads that had come in, especially after the America’s Most Wanted episode.

  Kelly and McGillen were struck by the dates, surely more than coincidence. Mary called in her confession on the anniversary of the murder of the Boy in the Box. It was exactly forty-three years after the boy was killed. The memory of her brother was haunting her, she said. She wanted to talk to the police. Sergeant Augustine, and VSMs Kelly and Joe McGillen called the psychiatrist to see if the woman would come to Philadelphia. No. Perhaps the cops could travel to Cincinnati. No. Suddenly, the woman panicked. She said she couldn’t talk about it. Not yet.

  Kelly and McGillen kept in touch with the psychiatrist. They wrote on Vidocq Society stationery. They called. Not yet, the psychiatrist said. He refused to press his patient. She had to volunteer it, he said. She had to heal. It was a tremendous leap of faith to decide to go public. Suddenly the psychiatrist cut off all communication with the Vidocq Society; his patient was regressing. Kelly and McGillen were polite, understanding. Fleisher was stunned by their persistence, “classic shoe-leather stuff, great old-fashioned detective work.” But like the previous half century of efforts on the case, nothing had come of it.

  Mary needed more time, years more time, to sort it out.

  • CHAPTER 50 •

  THE CASE OF THE MISSING FACE

  When a weary Frank Bender picked up the phone in his studio and heard the voice of a young New York detective excited about an impossible murder case, he was tempted to say, “The wizard is not in. No miracles will be performed tonight.” But Keith Hall, the twenty-five-year-old detective from Manlius, a small town outside of Syracuse, said that after banging his head against the impenetrable cold case for two years he’d just had a revelation. He knew that nobody on earth could solve the murder but Frank Bender of Philadelphia.

  “My wife and I knew it as soon as we saw your work on America’s Most Wanted the other night, a rerun of the John List case,” Hall said. “I told Kathy, ‘This guy’s a genius. I’m going to call him in Philadelphia. He’s our last hope.’

  “Frank, we need you.”

  Bender was intrigued. He liked to be told he was an irreplaceable genius as much as the next guy, and he heard in Hall’s voice “sincerity, a real good guy, a tremendous passion to solve the case.” When Hall explained that his small police department couldn’t pay Bender the $1,500 he now asked for his busts, not one cent, that about sealed it. Money was tight and Jan might not be pleased, but pro bono work appealed strongly to Bender’s conviction that money shouldn’t matter as much as art or justice.

  “Tell me about the case, and we’ll see.”

  The scant remains of a skeleton had been found in a shallow grave in woods that ran along a farm outside Manlius, Hall said. At first they thought it was a nineteenth-century farmer or Revolutionary soldier, but the corpse was dated as more recent, perhaps twenty years old. The skull had been smashed, and it was clearly a murder. They were the small bones of a female, possibly a victim of notorious serial killer Arthur Shawcross of Rochester who killed and mutilated eleven Rochester prostitutes from 1988 to 1990. The Genesee River Killer’s reign of terror sent frightened Rochester hookers fleeing the ninety miles to Syracuse.

  That was about it.

  If Bender could reconstruct the skull and police could learn its identity, they might be able to track down the killer, Hall said.

  “Can you mail me the skull? ” Bender asked. Well, that was the problem, Hall said. He could mail a photograph, but there really wasn’t a skull. The skull, such as it was, was a U-shaped collection of bones framing the face. But there was no face—no eye, nose, mouth, or cheekbones. It was a donut skull—mostly hole.

  “Send me what you have,” Bender said.

  As soon as he saw the picture of the donut skull, Bender thought, I can’t do this. How could he rebuild the surface of a face without bones? Not wanting to give up easily, he consulted with a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., for another opinion, then another expert at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. All agreed: It’s impossible. Nobody can do it. Don’t even try. If you try, the implication was, it’ll be perceived as an act of stupidity or hubris; it’ll make a mockery of the profession of forensic reconstruction. “It’s impossible,” Bender told Hall. But the young detective wouldn’t hear of it. “Frank, I know you can do it.”

  “OK, you win,” Bender said. “I’ll do it, but I’ll only ask for money if you make identification.” Hall enthusiastically agreed.

  On October 19, 2000, Detective Hall, a burly, fair-haired twenty-five-year-old, stood before the Vidocq Society luncheon at the Downtown Club. Up flashed a PowerPoint image of the Skull with the Missing Face on the screen. Bender beamed at Hall, a bright, outgoing, no-nonsense cop he liked even more in person.

  Walter fairly gasped.

  “Frank, what the hell are you thinking?” he hissed to his partner one seat away. “Or are you relying on your sixth sense instead of your brain on this one?”

  Bender, sitting quietly with a loopy smile, ignored him. The artist loved a challenge, and this was shaping up as maybe his biggest ever. As he studied the photo, he could feel the sensation like an electric charge searching for ground—the nameless dead calling him. He lived for that feeling.

  “I figure it’s better to try something, Rich,” he said, “than to try nothing at all.”

  “Frank, be honest. Are we playing God again?”

  Bender grinned. “Rich, I forgot to tell you. Manlius asked for help from the FBI, and the bureau refused. They said there wasn’t enough material to do a profile. They said it was impossible.”

  “Hmmm.” Walter arched his left eyebrow, and his eyes shone with a fierce light. He looked up at the photo and down at the police report. In addition to the face, the left arm and hand, left pelvic bones, left leg and foot were all missing. He himself had seldom seen a case with less to go on. Perhaps it would be interesting, he thought, to profile a murderer based on tiny fragments of bone found in a grave many years after the crime, and nothing else. Perhaps it would be fun.

  “This was an ideal place to hide a body,” Hall said. The corpse was found buried in a shallow grave in an isolated patch of woods alongside an abandoned farm outside Manlius. Manlius, the wealthiest burg in Onondaga County, is a bedroom community of Syracuse with 31,000 people spread over a wide and picturesque rural area of hills, pastures, woods, and lakes. Named for Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, the consul of Rome in 390 BC, the prosperous town is composed of three small villages, one of which, Fayetteville, has a proud history as the boyhood home of President Grover Cleveland, as well as the first magazine publisher of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the noted suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage (whose son-in-law L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is said to have used her as the model for the Wicked Witch of the West).

  Thus the town’s first murder in a quarter century was shocking, unseemly, not what one expected of the good people of Manlius. It was not committed by or against one of them, they hastened to add, or even within the village limits. It was done by outsiders, “out there.”

  The grave was hidden in the woods some four and a half miles east of Fayetteville and an equal distance from either of the other two villages in an unincorporated area—a barren spot locals know as “the middle of nowhere.” The nearest road was impassable in the snow and ice of winter, and in the summer a visitor had to walk through a cornfield to reach the woods. It was there that the ex-con Robert Updegrove, a transient, as locals were quick to mention, was hunting deer without a license on the morning of Saturday
, November 29, 1997.

  By midday, he was sitting on a log having a smoke, rifle on his knee, when he saw something small and white lying in the brush and leaves. He thought it was a cigarette, he later reported to police. But when he reached down to pick it up, it was hard; a bone, a fragment of a human skull. Updegrove had disturbed the grave.

  Hall ordered the remains guarded overnight. After determining the grave was “nonhistorical,” they began excavation the next morning, Sunday, November 30, in a murder investigation. The Manlius detective regarded Updegrove as an immediate suspect. To cover the fact that he was hunting illegally, the convicted felon concocted a story that he was looking for his lost dog, not for deer. Updegrove denied involvement in the murder, but Hall wasn’t convinced. Updegrove rented a cottage on one of the abandoned farms, so close that Hall could almost see it from the grave site. Had Updegrove just discovered the bone fragment? Or had he put it there many years earlier and returned to memorialize the murder, enjoy his trophy, and flaunt it to cops?

  Hall and his men dug up the grave with their hands for five days until their fingers were numb with cold, uncovering only a partial skeleton, indicating the work of animals or a depraved human.

  The remains were so sparse they were extraordinarily difficult to identify. A Cornell University forensic anthropologist claimed to identify a raccoon bone. Another noted anthropologist said it was a child, before Dr. Anthony Falcetti at the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory in Gainesville, Florida, identified the bones as belonging to a small, slight woman in her midtwenties to early thirties, probably of mixed race, about five foot five, 100 to 110 pounds. The bones indicated she had suffered from poor nutrition as a child. All of it supported Hall’s hunch that the young woman was a prostitute—and possibly Shawcross’s victim. Hall sent her description to all the national crime databases in the United States and Canada, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. There were no matches. Two dozen police officers swept the area with metal detectors and rakes, examined nearby trees for bullet holes, and collected bird nests for possible hair samples woven in. They came up empty.