The Murder Room

by Michael Capuzzo

  Bender took up the brushes that had started him in the art world. He began painting again. A watercolor of Jan as a smiling ghostly presence floating above a green field; a stark Gothic sketch of a black-and-gray wasteland above which triumphantly rises a tall church (St. Peter’s Church, the shrine of Saint John Neumann, the miracle worker); a man making love to a young woman on a train.

  He’d made seven paintings inspired by Jan when she first got sick, and put them on his Web site with a one-line legend: “And she survived!”

  On Halloween 2009, the couple that had had their wedding reception in a graveyard celebrated their thirty-ninth anniversary with the gusto of a first date. They drank and danced to “Nobody Does It Better.”

  “They’ve had a rich life,” their daughter Vanessa Bender, thirty-eight, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We wish they had more time.”

  Frank said he wasn’t afraid of death. “I can’t say, ‘Wow, I wish I had done this or that,’ because I realize what I’ve done. If I go in eight months, I’ll still feel fulfilled.” Death wasn’t something foreign; he’d had his hands on the Reaper for years. And there was a lot of good karma waiting for him wherever it was he was going.

  “My father would rather see a victim identified than make money,” their daughter Lisa Brawner, forty-four, told the Inquirer. “It drives my mother crazy, but I know when he gets to heaven, people will be lining up to thank him.”

  “In all my dreams,” he said, “the dead protect me.”

  That night in the mansion, with the lights and the music floating out over the river, it still all seemed like a dream to him. A friend, VSM Barb Cohan-Saavedra, the former assistant U.S. attorney, warmly congratulated him on his award. She said she always thought of him as a wizard.

  “We always knew you were Merlin,” Fleisher quipped. “I’m glad somebody announced it officially from the podium tonight.”

  A speaker had told them that men, and now women, had met at round tables to battle evil for a thousand years. There was evidence for a historical King Arthur. Yet, why, he asked, had the Arthurian tales featured three men? Why had these archetypes lasted for ten centuries? Looking at Fleisher, Bender, and Walter, he said there was always in the old stories a wounded king struggling to save the wasteland; his right-hand knight to destroy evil; and the wizard, Merlin, a seer who introduces the life of the spirit, transcendence of good and evil, but is bewitched and finally entrapped by women. Bender grinned, and laughter rippled in the room.

  Why did the king keep the seat next to him empty? It was the Perilous Seat, fatal to all but a knight worthy of the journey, who could claim the Holy Grail. More laughter. Fleisher, they knew, kept the seat next to him at the round table empty as a memorial to his late brother-in-law Sal. “That was Sal’s seat, and I loved him. There was nobody like Sal.”

  “It’s perfect!” Cohan-Saavedra said. “Frank is Merlin. Richard is Lancelot, and Bill is the Fisher King.” She turned to Bender. “Frank, next year you’ll have to come dressed in a long robe and a tall wizard’s hat.”

  “If I make it next year.”

  She hadn’t heard. He told her his news, and she didn’t hesitate a second. “Frank, you’ll make it.”

  Two men stood nearby, at the edge of the conversation. One short, one tall, both white-haired. Kelly and McGillen were quiet that night. Their table felt empty. Weinstein was gone, having died quietly in his sleep on his seventy-eighth birthday, and Earl Palmer, too. The Vidocq Society Boy in the Box investigative team was the two of them now. Life was pills, prayers, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They were slowing down. But they didn’t stop.

  There was a gentle wistfulness about the two old Irishmen, but they were ironweed stubborn. They declined to share the police skepticism about Mary. They had finally talked to the owner of Mary’s old house, who was terrified about what her children and the neighbors would think, into letting them see the basement.

  On a fall day when the children were at school, Kelly, McGillen, Detective Augustine, and two police crime technicians arrived at the house in two unmarked cars. The basement walls, floor, and drain seemed just as Mary described. So did the side door that led outside, blocked by shrubs as it opened onto the driveway. Kelly took pictures and the crime tech measured everything. “Those beams show where the coal bin used to be,” said Kelly, who’d tended a coal furnace as a child. “Do you see?” Extra ceiling beams formed a rectangle that looked like it once supported the walls of a coal bin. Augustine said they could go ahead and dig into oil company or real estate records to see if the house once had a coal furnace, but it didn’t matter if they proved that, too. It just didn’t add up. The police closed the case. The old men of the Vidocq Society smiled and nodded, but they knew in their hearts that Mary told the truth.

  “We see the boy in three weeks, Bill,” Kelly reminded Bill Fleisher. “The fifty-second year.”

  It was just the three of them now at the grave every Veterans Day, the anniversary of the reburial. The park cemetery was gray in the fall, but they brought armfuls of bright flowers. They stood at the tombstone and said a few words to one another and to God. Then they took pictures standing together behind the stone. There were years of pictures like a family album, once five and now three of them standing with the boy in their fedoras and military caps and autumn smiles, guardians of something nameless. It was a private ceremony; the media and public were not invited. They were carrying on Rem Bristow’s thirty-seven years of work, the blue unbroken line. Sometimes Kelly went alone, an errand of joy. The old man leaned down and kissed the stone. “I’ll see you soon, Jonathan.”

  Fleisher wasn’t convinced that Mary had told the truth. But he believed “we’re going to get it. The case is solvable.”

  Walter wrinkled his nose, as if he smelled sentimentality. “I know who killed the Boy in the Box,” he said, “and Mary’s mother isn’t it.” Walter said it was the young college student who discovered the boy but delayed reporting it for days because the cops had already been hassling him about being a Peeping Tom. The cops at the time couldn’t have understood the significance of the sexual perversion, the signs of the pathology in the suspicious man who discovered the body.

  The student admitted he’d spied on the unwed mothers of the Good Shepherd Home, Walter said, and the newspapers in the 1950s didn’t publish the rest of the story: Hidden behind the tree line the young man masturbated as he watched the women across the street. “First, the guy’s an admitted liar and he’s a pervert. The police gave him a rough time about the peeping, but nothing came of it.” With his sexual perversion, he had already entered the Helix, the “House of Sadism.” He was on the growth curve of the sadistic killer.

  “This is the guy who found the body,” Walter said. “I don’t believe in coincidences. As it happens, he’s still alive. He’s in his eighties. He’s had a long time to revel in the memory of raping and killing the boy. In fact, he’s still taking pleasure from it. The murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is.”

  Fleisher looked over his shoulder to make sure no society women or laymen were in earshot. The Murder Room had unexpectedly rematerialized in the foyer of the Pen Ryn. Sexual sadism hadn’t been on the menu.

  “Joe, I’ve got a job for you.” Walter turned to his friend Joe O’Kane, the burly, bearded crooner, poet, and federal agent. “I know where the killer lives. Are you game?”

  O’Kane tonight had been singing sad Irish songs he wrote himself to a lovely blond woman, singing with a power that caused her to hold his hand, close her eyes, and tremble with the ancient trails of the O’Kanes. His eyes gleamed with Tullamore Dew, “the milk of my race.”

  “I’m there,” O’Kane said in his strong tenor.

  Walter had a simple plan. They’d park the Crown Vic on the crowded block in the small eastern Pennsylvania city. He saw it in his mind’s eye. He and the hulking O’Kane would knock on the row house door. An old man, living alone, would peek over the chain, white-haired, probably de
crepit and smelling of booze, face tight.

  The killer would most assuredly refuse to invite them in. With O’Kane behind him, Walter would set aside his Victorian manners. There was a child to remember, a child who would be a man of fifty-five now, probably a husband and father. It didn’t matter how many years had passed, who forgot or remembered that the boy had ever existed, what the movies and TV news said, who cared or who didn’t. There was fundamental decency at stake. “One is never too old to do the right thing.” He would push his way in, decline a seat if offered. His face would become stone, the prison stare he’d developed in Michigan long ago. Unsmiling, his eyebrow raised up like a blade, he would say, “My dear fellow, it’s high past time you and I had a man-to-boy chat.”

  “Rich, can I come with you?” It was Bender.

  Walter startled. Bender had already taken one of his well-publicized long shots in the case, and missed. His speculative bust of what the boy’s father might look like had gone out on America’s Most Wanted and a thousand other media outlets like a note in a bottle. It had been a decade, and nothing came back.

  “Frank, what the hell you talkin’ about? You’ll be haunting me soon. Even more than you do now.”

  Bender stared at him, grinning like a cat, a cat with a secret. He said nothing.

  Walter flushed. “See,” he said, turning to the commissioner, the judge of truth and lies. “What’d I tell you? He’s such a flimflam artist I won’t believe he’s sick until he’s in the grave. He’s the type who would make a deal with the devil and beat it.”

  “You guys.” Fleisher smiled and shook his head. “The greatest show on Earth.”

  The three of them stood in the parking lot. The night was overcast, no stars. From the great house came the sound of voices, men talking. The lights were going out. The river was black, indistinct, an inky mass with land and sky. When the moon flickered on the water you could see it, wide and slow, moving in the dark.

  Bender said he’d gotten full veteran’s benefits now from his time with the Navy, just as if he’d retired from it, because of the cancer.

  Fleisher grinned. “Frank, with your fucking luck, you’ll get recalled to Afghanistan.”

  They all laughed.

  Fleisher looked up. He felt a touch of winter. “A beautiful night.” Bender’s voice was reverent. “It’s the form of nature. Can you see it, the harmony?”

  “Bah.” Walter blew cigarette smoke into the night air.

  “I’ll pray for you, Frank.” Fleisher and Michelle were getting in the car. “We all will. We love you.”

  “Thanks, Bill.” He waved.

  It was just the two of them, still standing.

  The thin man coughed. Bender looked pale to him in the moonlight.

  “I still won’t pray for you,” Walter said. “But I’ll cross my fingers.”

  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS •

  The Murder Room is a history of the pro bono crime-fighters of the Vidocq Society of Philadelphia, focusing on the federal agent, forensic psychologist, and forensic artist who founded the society and more than a dozen murder cases Vidocq Society Members (VSMs) investigated from 1990 to 2009. The story is drawn from hundreds of interviews with homicide detectives, federal agents, forensic pathologists, anthropologists, dentists, and many other forensic scientists; police and court records; newspapers, magazines, television, radio tapes and transcripts, diaries, Web sites, e-mails, books, and theses, published and unpublished. In a story as complex as this one, my debts are great.

  My deepest gratitude goes to federal agent, private eye, and Vidocq Society commissioner William Fleisher; forensic artist Frank Bender; and forensic psychologist and criminal profiler Richard Walter. The Murder Room is the story of the Vidocq Society but it is also a partial biography of these three men, the society’s founders. With Fleisher, leading the way as commissioner, Bender and Walter gave me unprecedented access to the Vidocq Society, including its luncheon investigations in the Murder Room, board meetings, case files and archives, and discussions not open to the public. The three men made themselves available for more than a thousand hours of interviews across more than five years.

  With Fleisher and Walter, I attended a forensics-law enforcement program at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, featuring two days of lectures by Vidocq Society Members, including Haskell Askin on forensic dentistry, Fleisher on truth detection, and Walter on the personality subtypes of sex murderers—a lecture I heard Walter give many times, to universities, at forensic conferences, and to more than a hundred prosecutors at the Philadelphia district attorney’s office. The three founders also gave me access to their personal lives, from Christmas dinners and New Year’s Eve parties to the people closest to them. Special thanks for the time and recollections of Michelle Fleisher and Elizabeth Fleisher; Gloria Alvarado, the Vidocq Society’s office secretary; Jan Bender; Joan Crescenz; the gifted editor Vanessa Bender; Nan and Morris Baker; Beverly Fraser; and Richard Walter’s extended family.

  I am in debt to the Vidocq Society board of directors for its support, especially former U.S. Customs special agent Joseph M. O’Kane; former assistant U.S. attorney Barbara Cohan-Saavedra; polygraph examiner Nathan J. Gordon; and former Philadelphia major-crimes homicide detective Ed Gaughan. Gordon and Gaughan, Fleisher’s partners in the Keystone Intelligence Network detective agency, were particularly helpful in reconstructing old cases. Board chairman Frederick A. Bornhofen, the former naval intelligence officer, gave generously of his time explaining the history of the society, as did O’Kane. William Gill III, the former U.S. Treasury agent and supervisor, former IRS inspection agent Benjamin Redmond, ex-Philadelphia chief inspector of detectives John Maxwell, and English professor and former hostage negotiator Donald Weinberg were also generous with their time and recollections.

  I would like to especially acknowledge the contributions of the late Dr. Halbert Fillinger of Philadelphia, aka “Homicide Hal.” One of America’s great forensic pathologists, he was the old lion of the Vidocq Society and his presence pervades this book.

  I’d like to thank all the members of the Vidocq Society (VSMs) for their help and forbearance as I watched them investigate murders and chatted with them over lunch. Being in the Murder Room for an afternoon of cuisine and crime is like attending a symphony orchestra, and this book is the story of all VSMs. I’d especially like to thank the society’s chaplain, Bill Kelly, a retired Philadelphia Police Department latent fingerprinter, and Joe McGillen, the retired Philadelphia medical examiner’s investigator, for their recollections of the Boy in the Box; Frank Friel, the Philadelphia homicide captain and police chief of Bensalem, Pennsylvania, for his memories of numerous cases and police investigation in general; Philadelphia captain of detectives Laurence Nodiff for his recollections of the Marie Noe case; California cold-case investigator Richard Walton, for taking me through his reconstruction of a 1920s murder; former U.S. Customs agent Frank Dufner for his remarkable memory of numerous federal cases; document examiner Robert J. Phillips for his frank discussions about JFK’s handwriting; Arizona forensic pathologist Dr. Richard Froede for describing his autopsy of CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley, kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by Hamas and Islamic jihadists.

  Thanks to former FBI agent and VSM Robert Ressler, and Washington State investigator and forensic professor Robert Keppel. These two prominent members of the first American generation of criminal profilers, colleagues of Richard Walter, gave generously of their time and insights into crime assessment and profiling. VSM Steve Stoud, a profiler with the Pennsylvania State Police, put into clear perspective Walter’s theories in the history of profiling—and Walter himself, to the furthest extent humanly possible.

  The story of the Vidocq Society was lodged mostly in memory and oral history, but the efforts of the society’s former publicity director Richard Lavinthal, English professor Weinberg, science officer Dr. Jolie Bookspan, and her husband, Paul Plevakas, have led to publication of the excellent quarterly Vidocq
Society Journal, now converted to digital format by editor Plevakas. It was an important source for the book.

  In many hours of interviews, Jim Dunn shared with me his passion and years of effort to find the killers of his son, Scott, culminating in Jim’s relationship with Richard Walter that secured justice. Homicide detective Keith Hall, now with the Onondaga County (New York) sheriff ’s office, was an important source of his work on the Case of the Missing Face with the Manlius (New York) Police Department, as was officer Thaddeus Maine. Homicide detective Tal English of the Lubbock (Texas) Police Department gave invaluable help on the Dunn case. Amateur investigators Robert Mancini of Ohio and Mike Rodelli of New Jersey, both mentored by Richard Walter, shared their research on two of America’s most notorious unsolved serial killer cases—the Butcher of Cleveland and the Zodiac Killer, respectively.

  My thanks go to Nancy Ruhe, executive director of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children (POMC), who helped me understand the formidable issues facing families victimized by murder. With Richard Walter, a former POMC board member, I attended a POMC national convention in Cincinnati, and saw firsthand a scale of suffering not widely known or imagined. Retired Tampa doctor Bob Meyer and his wife, Sherry, shared with me their anguish and their bravery in facing and solving the murders of their daughter Sherry-Ann Brannon, thirty-five years old, and grandchildren Shelby, seven, and Cassidy, four. California forensic pathologist and POMC leader Harry Bonnell also helped me understand this tragic American underground.

  I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Richard Shepherd, leading forensic pathologist in London and Liverpool and author of Simpson’s Forensic Medicine, at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) convention in Chicago. At the AAFS convention, I also met and interviewed John DeHaan of Vallejo, California, the premier fire, arson, and explosions investigator in criminal cases around the world and author of Kirk’s Fire Investigation, and Vernon J. Geberth, retired lieutenant-commander of the New York City Police Department and author of the detective’s bible, Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques. All three men contributed significantly to my understanding of cold-case investigations.