The Murder Room

by Michael Capuzzo

  She probably read to him. Hansel and Gretel would have given her pleasure. The fairy tale, stale and locked in a children’s book in the library, was one she brought to life in her own house.

  “Get up, you lazy bones, fetch water and cook something for your brother,” the witch cried. “When he’s fat I’ll eat him up.”

  Gretel cried and cried for she could do nothing to save Hansel.

  The appeal of Jonathan was to snuff out a man when he was just developing. Destroying him will be the ultimate sexual pleasure, but she prolongs it by slowly degrading him. “She has him dependent, fearful, degraded, she’s created an image of him and now she’s trying to destroy the image, and he just becomes a prop. Everything that went wrong in her own life, she had a wonderful whipping boy.”

  The narrow misshapen head indicates “she did a lot of head pressure, squeezing his head real tight with hands or implements or a vise, keeping him immobile in a head harness. She probably had a fair amount of bondage, tying up, whipping him, taking him out of the box, someplace where he was unseen. She had sex with him. She’s getting off as she’s doing this.”

  She despises him for his innocence, youth, and his failure. “He’s likely retarded, has surgical scars from his first year of life so he’s damaged goods. He was told by his parents, he’s trash, a throw-away child. She knew what she wanted. She knew she needed a sex toy, and instead of choosing a dildo or a plastic doll, which they didn’t have then, she could have a real live one and it didn’t make any difference. Now you see how they view other people. Other people simply don’t exist.”

  When the nightmarish headlines begin about the Boy in the Box, she follows it closely, getting high from it. At the library and in church she says, “Isn’t it terrible about that boy?” Her power feels ever more expansive; she is aggressing not only against the boy but the police department, the entire community of Philadelphia, and the Main Line especially.

  By the time of the boy’s death, Mary’s mother had moved deep into the Helix and was on the high cusp of bondage and discipline. “He’s bonded in the basement, chained down, secured in that box.” Advancement down the scale is unpredictable; it can take weeks, years, or mere hours. The puncture scars on Jonathan’s body indicate that the next phase was starting—picquerism—when suddenly on an afternoon in 1957 the mother became a murderer. It was clear to Walter that the mother, having teased out her pleasure over years and then suddenly discovered the exhilarating rush of killing, “would have chosen another victim in short order, and dispatched him much more quickly.”

  The Main Line librarian, he believes, was a serial killer in the making.

  The hatred of innocence continued unabated, of that there is powerful evidence. Shortly before her death, the aging mother asked her daughter, now a young woman, if she could share her bed sexually one more time. The daughter refused, engendering rage from the old woman.

  “So the mother was the perfect killer,” Walter said. “There’s only one problem with this scenario.” He took a long draw on a Kool.

  “She didn’t do it.”

  He smiled coolly in the gloom of the parlor.

  “But I know who did.”

  • CHAPTER 54 •

  DEATH IN THE TIME OF BANANAS

  Late one Sunday night, the week before Christmas 2004, Walter was drinking wine and watching ultimate fighting on cable when he received a call from the police department in Hudson, Wisconsin (population 8,775), a small town on the St. Croix River west of Minneapolis–St. Paul. Was it too late to call? The officer sounded nervous.

  “Not to worry,” Walter said.

  “Erickson is dead.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “They found him at the church.”

  Walter listened quietly. He had visited Hudson two weeks ago to consult with the police on the biggest cold case in the small town’s history—the double murder at the O’Connell Funeral Home nearly three years earlier.

  On February 5, 2002, funeral director Dan O’Connell, thirty-nine, one of the town’s leading citizens, and his assistant, college intern James Ellison, twenty-two, were found shot to death in the funeral home in broad daylight. The police were astounded. It was as unthinkable as a spaceship landing in the river and little green men swimming ashore. In Hudson, folks only saw such things on TV, or read about them in the city newspaper.

  The victims were respected people with no known enemies who hadn’t engaged in any risky behavior, such as drug dealing, that could have set them up for murder. O’Connell was one of Hudson’s most prominent businessmen, a leader of the Catholic Church, a paramedic, and active in the Rotary Club, the Boy Scouts, and YMCA fund-raisers. He had been named King of the North Hudson Pepper Fest. Ellison was an upstanding young man with few local ties. There was no robbery, no motive for the double murder in the quiet small town.

  As the police struggled to find suspects, O’Connell’s sister, Kathleen, heard from a friend about the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia. The local Star Tribune, in Minneapolis, said they were a group of “volunteer super sleuths” and “cold-case cowboys” who tackled murders that “stymied local law enforcement across the nation” and solved 80 percent of them. Willing to “grab on to anything for answers,” Kathleen O’Connell e-mailed the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia, pleading for help. She received a formal reply that, out of respect for local police, the society would not consider a murder case until it was at least two years old. On the second anniversary of the slaying, with the Hudson police still thwarted, she wrote again, and was approved. “The Murder of Daniel O’Connell and James Ellison” went on the Vidocq docket as Case No. 133. The society paid for Hudson lieutenant Paul Larson to present the case in the Downtown Club over lunch on April 15, 2004. The case “had Richard’s name all over it,” Fleisher said, and indeed Walter took an immediate interest and flew out to Hudson to assist.

  Fleisher was convinced the case had attracted a strong collective commitment, the passionate heat “absolutely required” to solve a cold murder. “There’s a family very interested in their loved one’s case, a police department willing to go that extra distance, a prosecutor who’s willing to cooperate to get the job done, and the media willing to pay attention to the case,” he said. “You need all of it to get the job done.”

  The famous profiler from Philadelphia arriving in Hudson was front-page news in the weekly Hudson Gazette. Walter was pictured grinning and standing alongside the young cops he quickly took under his wing. He used the story to plant seeds of doubt in the suspect. “We know more than the killer thinks we do,” he said, employing one of his favorite lines. “If I were him, I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”

  In the first two days Walter read the case file, interviewed the cops, and considered the seven suspects of some interest to the police, none of whom stood out in their minds after two years. As the young cops trailed him around town, they, too, began smoking Kools.

  “Gentlemen, it’s plain to me,” he announced. “It’s the priest.”

  The suspect was Roman Catholic priest Ryan Erickson, thirty-one years old, who had a powerful motive to silence O’Connell. The funeral director, a leader of the Catholic Church, had confronted the priest the day before the murders about his alleged sexual abuse of boys. O’Connell didn’t like Erickson, whose tenure in the church had been disappointing, and threatened to force him out of the church if the charges were true. Walter advised the police to bring the Reverend Erickson in for questioning, and interrogated the priest himself. During questioning by the police and Walter, the priest had been reduced to tears. “He’s our guy,” Walter said afterward. “The double murder is executed just this way, all power, the removal of a threat.”

  But now on the telephone, the officer sounded anxious. After Erickson told people that the police considered him a suspect, the priest had killed himself. Parishioners found him that Sunday morning, December 19, before early mass at St. Mary of the Seven Dolors Church in Hurley, Wisconsin, a town
of 1,800 people near Lake Superior, where Erickson had been transferred to lead the parish. Churchgoers were confronted with the sight of the priest in full vestments hanging from the porch of the rectory.

  Walter let out a low whistle.

  Case manager Fred Bornhofen would record Case No. 133 in Vidocq Society records this way: “Investigation revealed that a Roman Catholic priest became a prime suspect and R. Walter assisted in an interview and a confrontation. . . . Fr. Erickson was found hanged in front of his church. . . . Erickson was suspected to be a pathological liar, embezzler, gun enthusiast, and a pervert.” Case closed.

  But it wasn’t so simple. Erickson had left a suicide note in which he denied killing anyone. Investigators didn’t have anything on him, he wrote in the note. “None of my guns matched, no DNA of mine was found, and no one saw me leaving the funeral home.”

  “Hmmmm,” Walter said. “It sounds less like the plea of an innocent man than a criminal defense argument. He’s unwittingly admitting guilt. It seems the supposed man of God lived a divided life between his professed image and his rather tawdry personal secrets. When events threatened to expose the charade, he refuses to take responsibility, killing to silence it, and when that doesn’t work, committing suicide.”

  “Any thoughts on what we should do?” The police considered Erickson the prime suspect, but they were concerned about the ramifications of his suicide before he was charged, tried, or convicted. The department wanted to somehow resolve any questions and close the case. Walter had the novel idea of bringing the case to court posthumously.

  “But first things first—good riddance to bad rubbish.”

  The officer smirked. The Hudson police had never worked with anybody like Walter.

  “By the way, Richard, we found a bunch of ripe bananas in the priest’s apartment. But we know he didn’t like bananas.”

  Walter chuckled. The priest had read the newspaper, he said, and risen to the challenge.

  “He used them as a timer, and as it happens I was right. He shouldn’t have bought any green bananas.”

  • CHAPTER 55 •

  THE MIRACLE ON SOUTH STREET

  Bender was walking along a remote lake on a sunny day. In woods along the shore he saw an old white Cadillac overgrown with vines, the trunk open. He went to investigate. The car had a vintage Jersey plate, the color of yellowing teeth, with the 1930s-style black block letters, GARDEN STATE. The license number swam away as he tried to read it. The trunk was empty, but he saw clearly the bloodstains on the carpeted face of the wheel well. He walked back to the lake and out onto a narrow wooden dock over the shallow blue-green water. Just under the surface a man was floating on his back, naked, his skin a rotted gourd, his black hair swirling in the current, the red dot of a bullet hole through his forehead. His eyes were wide open, bright blue. The lips were moving.

  “Help me,” the lips cried. “Help me.”

  Bender startled awake from the dream. An hour later, a New Jersey coroner called, a friend, looking for help in identifying a body. It was a new one.

  “A wet one?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I had a dream. A man in the water. I’ll let you know what I find out.” What I find out when I talk to him again.

  Bender walked with the dead in his dreams. He felt comfortable with them, embraced, at home. They called to him, shielded him, welcomed him. But mostly they pleaded. It was a gift and he didn’t ask its source. He submitted to it without question. You had to do what you were made to do; this was why, in his youth, he was repulsed by art hanging on walls. He was the advocate of the dead, the voice for the voiceless who walked between worlds.

  He told Walter about the man in the water. His partner scowled. “Frank, I’m not often intrigued by mob killings. I like challenges. Mob hits are all the same, all power, as nuanced as a tire iron to the head.” The dream of the man in the water stopped. But others came—the girl in the steamer trunk, the man hanging in the tree, the boy shot through the temple—crowding his nights and pushing into his days.

  Now in his late sixties, Bender was increasingly sensitive to the shadowy realm of dreams. He felt like an instrument being finely tuned with age. Yet he was also more modest and wary of his gift. It spooked him sometimes that he just didn’t know how he knew things. Once, while sculpting a statue of a policeman standing heroically in a New Jersey park, a memorial to the courage of fallen officers, he had reluctantly included on the statue the badge number of the young officer he used as a model. “I warned him against it. It was a memorial statue, and it just felt like bad karma.” Shortly afterward, the young officer was killed.

  Bender never used the word “psychic”; admit to that and he’d never work again. Cops and forensic intellectuals like Walter were the ultimate hypocrites: They mocked seers, except when they used them to spectacular result. Bender was more fully immersed in the world of the flesh than anyone he knew, but somehow it wasn’t his purpose.

  That summer he found himself praying to God for the first time in his life. He had been given a single hard flame of purpose. Jan had been diagnosed with a fatal cancer, and Bender had abandoned all his other projects for the single task of keeping her alive.

  The nonsmoker’s lung cancer had rapidly metastasized. Jan had left her job, and stopped chemotherapy after one session, saying it wasn’t worth the pain. Doctors at two city hospitals performed numerous tests and said she had weeks, perhaps months, to live. Bender held her through long sleepless nights of screaming pain; the morphine wasn’t helping. She was making plans to move into a hospice.

  Bender’s partners were devastated for him and for Jan. Fleisher wept. All of them were feeling mortal. The Vidocq Society, now seventeen years old, was beginning to lose its old lions. Renowned pathologist Halbert E. Fillinger Jr., seventy-nine, said by many to embody the highest virtues of the Vidocq Society, died in June 2006 of complications from Parkinson’s disease. Fillinger, who worked as a pathologist for more than forty years, performed more than 50,000 autopsies, and helped solve hundreds of homicides, was nationally mourned in the forensics community. He was still working as the Montgomery County coroner the week before he died.

  In May 2004, Detective Samuel Weinstein, the first officer on the scene at the Boy in the Box crime in 1957 and head of the Vidocq Society team still investigating the death, became the latest in a long blue line to follow the boy. Fleisher eulogized him as a “man among men,” a World War II combat Marine who served as a Philadelphia police detective for thirty-five years and voluntarily served with honor seven times with the Israel Defense Forces, including the tank division, making parachute jumps with the IDF while in his seventies. “Rest in peace, my friend,” Fleisher said. “You are in a far better place.”

  Ressler, one of the FBI’s pioneers of modern criminal profiling, suffered from a rapidly advancing form of Parkinson’s disease. Walter was distraught. With Ressler in a wheelchair and unable to come to the phone, and his coauthor Keppel slowed by major heart surgery, his peers in the first generation of great American profilers were seriously ill or dying. “Who will I have to talk to?”

  Fleisher had blacked out while at the wheel, with his wife and two daughters in the car, going sixty miles an hour on an expressway in upstate New York. He came to just in time, but was increasingly worried about his health and his weight. Walter lost days every winter to lung ailments.The training of Stoud took on a new imperative, as he felt his decades of heavy smoking closing in.

  Walter was especially moved by Frank and Jan’s plight.

  “Frank, I won’t pray for you,” he said, “because that’s not what I do. But I will bake some cookies and come down to Philadelphia and we will smoke and drink and enjoy life together. We will all have a marvelous time.”

  That morning in July 2007, Bender returned to the only job he had allowed himself while supporting Jan through her battle with cancer. It was, ironically, a death mask, one of the crowning works of his career.

  B
ender had been commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church to sculpt the death mask for Saint John Nepomucene Neumann, the nineteenth-century Bishop of Philadelphia and the first American male saint. Neumann had died in 1860 and was buried in the basement of St. Peter’s Church at the corner of Fifth Street and Girard Avenue. The body was being fitted with new vestments, a new Episcopal ring, pectoral cross, and the new mask to mark the bicentennial of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

  The body of the saint, now 147 years old and wearing the bishop’s miter and white robes, lay in a brightly lit glass case beneath the altar of the old Baroque stone church. Thousands of people from around the world visited the national shrine, pressing their hands against the glass and praying for intercessions, for favors and miracles. It was the intact skeleton of the saint, except for small bones that had been reverently removed many years before and cut into tiny pieces and set in very small, glass-covered containers that priests carried, sometimes set in crosses. These were the relics of the saint.

  Bender, feeling a bit like Michelangelo, who had labored for popes, had to be approved by the Vatican itself to perform the sacred act of touching the body of a saint. Cardinal Justin Rigali, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, oversaw the opening of the saint’s casket and the exchange of the Episcopal garb. Bender was rebuilding the face from a single nineteenth-century photograph of Neumann.

  That morning he gently caressed the plaster contours of the face again, and felt the familiar sense of awe and mystery he found hard to describe. Surely it was not the face of God he was touching, but to millions of people around the world, it was the next best thing.

  He was pleased with his work. The Redemptorist Father Kevin Moley, the pastor of St. Peter’s, was coming to visit the studio that day to inspect his progress. Bender loved to talk to Father Moley about the amazing miracles attributed to the saint.