A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  At times, he would apply the techniques he had learned from his pickup books. Once, when Amy didn’t respond quickly enough, he sent her a message on Facebook: “If you are open to talking, I’ll be keeping my Facebook page up for a little while longer. If not, go fuck yourself with a giant wall-socket-powered vibrator held up with a stack of books, which you probably never read.” A good neg—throw her off base, then close with another message revealing emotion and understanding: “When we were together, I told you that I felt as if something was missing in my life. I’ve finally begun to scratch the surface in finding out what it was. It’s complicated. But then again, people like us are complicated beings. Much more than you realize,” he wrote.

  In August 2010 he began seeing Carla, a twenty-eight-year-old from Denver. One day he took her to Green Mountain Guns, a family-owned shop in a mini-mall. He showed her a pistol he was hoping to buy: a small black-and-silver .380-caliber Ruger.

  Later that month, on August 10, he raped Sarah. After leaving Sarah’s apartment he pawned his and Masha’s wedding bands. He went to the Department of Motor Vehicles and got a new driver’s license. Then, he made a final stop: Green Mountain Guns. Using his new license—and paying $328.13 in cash, including the $200 he stole from Sarah and the money from the rings—he bought the Ruger.

  When he got home, he stashed a pair of Sarah’s underwear in the black guitar amp in his bedroom.

  He texted a photo of his new gun to Carla.

  He had two trophies.

  —

  In October 2010, he got a new roommate to help pay the bills: his younger brother, Michael. Anybody walking down the street could see they were related. He was thirty-two, weighed 220 pounds, stood six feet two, and had blond hair and hazel eyes. Michael was thirty, weighed 230 pounds, stood six feet two, and had sandy blond hair and green eyes. They sometimes got mistaken for the same person.

  But the outward similarities concealed deep differences on the inside. They were family. But they weren’t close.

  Sometimes he found Michael irritating. Michael loved sports. Worshipped the Tennessee Titans. Hung a giant Tennessee football flag in his room. Visited the house’s back room at least once a day to check on his fantasy football and basketball teams. He tried to warn Michael: Professional sports were for the weak-minded. They were a waste of time, “made to dumb people down.”

  That was the thing. Michael was a conventional guy. He’d served in the military after high school. Once out, he wanted to play college basketball. He found an outlet at York College, a small Christian school in a small town rising from the flatlands of southeastern Nebraska. After graduation, he didn’t find much use for his business degree, so he moved back to Colorado and supported himself by delivering furniture. He decided to stake his future on the most regular of regular-guy jobs: He enrolled in barber school at Emily Griffith Technical College in Denver. That was how he thought of himself: just a normal dude. He had a steady girlfriend, a churchgoing woman he knew from high school. They had a big group of friends. They liked going to restaurants and movies. His guiding philosophy was far less complex than his brother’s. “I’m just gonna live my life and find what makes me happy.”

  Michael knew that his brother was different. “Deep, deep guy, very deep,” is how he described him. “He’s smart as hell.” His older brother didn’t drink. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t do drugs. “He doesn’t have a lot of friends,” Michael would say. “I don’t even think he has a best friend.” His older sibling pretty much kept to himself, locked away in the back room at 65 Harlan Street with his computer. He never let Michael see what he was doing. He insisted they each maintain separate accounts. “I don’t look at his stuff, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t look into mine,” Michael would say.

  Michael was impressed by his brother’s brains. But there was something off about him. He lined the bookshelf with strange books about symbols, ancient religions, secret societies. He’d occasionally discuss weird conspiracy theories. His brother, he’d say, just didn’t think like regular people think. “As far as like normal society stuff, like normal society way of thinking, he’s like way out there.”

  As an example, he’d point to the new woman his brother began seeing that fall. She was an “out there” woman.

  Her name was Calyxa Buckley.*1 She was thirty-two. She had grown up in the San Miguel Basin, a region of broke mining towns and blank prairie in southwestern Colorado. She had joined the Navy when she was eighteen, but hated it, deserting after a year. She returned to Colorado, where she was arrested, accused of burglarizing a drugstore and gas station in the tiny town of Norwood. She wound up living with an older man named Chuck Travers.*2 They hopscotched through trailer parks and single-story motels in hardly there towns dotting the deserts of Navajo country in eastern Arizona. Chuck got jobs as a mechanic. Calyxa concentrated on writing a manifesto based on Hopi theology. She called it the “Theory of Everything.”

  Calyxa and Chuck had been together for thirteen years and considered themselves a married couple. They also embraced polyamory; both would regularly date and have sex with other people. So it wasn’t strange when Calyxa took an interest in a man from Colorado who contacted her through Craigslist. At first, they conversed by email. Eventually, they switched to the phone. The conversations lasted hours. Movies. Books. Pillow talk. The two became “closer than brothers,” Chuck thought.

  Calyxa decided to fly to Colorado to meet her new man in person. Chuck, a former Marine, had worked in signals intelligence. He considered himself skilled at vetting people. He had his own phone conversations with the Craigslist stranger. He found him intense, private. His final analysis: The man was “intelligent, well read, a sadist and a megalomaniac.” But safe enough for Calyxa to begin dating. In October 2010, Chuck drove her to Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, a six-hour round trip from their room at the Desert Inn just off old Route 66 in Holbrook, Arizona, population 5,053.

  He picked her up at the airport in Denver for a two-week stay with him at 65 Harlan Street. She had high, sharp cheekbones, a thin face, and a narrow nose. Her hair was dark, curly, with long ringlets falling past her shoulders. Her eyes, which she sometimes lined with dark mascara, could appear almost sunken, menacing. She knew that the world was a complex place, filled with powerful and secret groups that exerted control over the masses. He’d found a woman who understood the world as he did. He felt a thrum of connection. “I like her a lot,” he’d say.

  His brother, Michael, had the opposite reaction. Calyxa unnerved him. He called her “weird and organic and into conspiracy theories.” She held long, hushed conversations on the phone that he overheard. She talked about alchemy and archetypes and the infinite. She hinted that she was a high-ranking member of a powerful secret society. One night, Michael went out with Calyxa and his brother. His brother warned him that they had to be careful. Calyxa was off the grid. Not even the government knew about her—she had no Social Security number. A discreet protective detail shadowed her. They even followed her to Colorado. Michael promised his brother not to reveal anything. “I don’t want to end up dead.”

  From what Michael understood, his brother thought he belonged to an elite, enlightened cadre who knew how the world really worked, and used that truth to dominate the quotidian and the ordinary. Michael knew it sounded crazy. But he believed it. “I’ll tell you right now it’s not like a bunch of bullshit,” he’d tell people who doubted his older sibling’s fevered diagrams of hidden societal power structures. “I know it’s real from being around him. Like, it’s not just a bunch of garbage.”

  Michael knew, too, that his older brother shared with Calyxa a deep interest in the occult. He consulted The Magus, a nineteenth-century grimoire on Kabbalah, the influence of the planets, and the natural magic of unctions, amulets, charms. He considered himself an expert in the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of mystic writings dating from AD 200. He prided himself on being a discerning reader. He didn’t much like a Christian Neoplat
onic rendering of the Hermeticum that he had read, he told one friend. “I’ve seen other versions on the web that have—at least in my opinion—better translations from the original Greek.”

  He was fascinated with numerology. He filled notebooks with scrawls of pagan symbols. He hunted difficult-to-find texts for study: the forty-two Books of Thoth, containing the entirety of Egyptian theosophy. He embraced modern science that supported his social theories, like The Superorganism, by Bert Hölldobler and Harvard’s E. O. Wilson, describing the hierarchical societies of insects. Hypnotism intrigued him.

  He wanted to document his insights with a blog. He played around with different names for it. HiveTheory. ThatWhichIs. PrimalMind. TribeTwoZero. His topic, he wrote to a friend, was “spirituality, the occult, philosophy, etc. Pretty much just a regular blog with my thoughts on it.”

  Calyxa visited 65 Harlan Street again in November. This time, she stayed for a month. He hoped to build their relationship into something more permanent. For the first time since he’d met Masha, he felt an emotional connection. And he still wanted to have kids. “It’s been a long, long time…since I’ve been that much into a woman,” he’d tell people. When he was with her, he was a different person. It astonished him. He didn’t look at pornography. He didn’t go out prowling. She kept him calm. The monster never stirred. “Her and I were so compatible and I was so comfortable with her that I didn’t even think about it,” he said. “I had no reason to think of anything else.”

  Calyxa, though, had different ideas. She told him she wasn’t interested in a deeper relationship. She had her book to write. Her husband abided in his desert solitude. It was time to move on. She turned—suddenly, unexpectedly—into an ex-girlfriend. She left on December 15.

  He was alone again.

  “She could have helped me,” he thought to himself. Instead, she was like the woman in the song he used to play for his mother, “Little Wing.”

  That’s all she ever thinks about,

  Riding with the wind.

  —

  On January 5, he raped Amber.

  He hid another pair of panties in the back of his guitar amp.

  The cycle began again.

  * * *

  *1 Pseudonym

  *2 Pseudonym

  10

  GOOD NEIGHBORS

  January 25, 2011

  * * *

  Westminster, Colorado

  Hendershot and Ellis had worked together a long time. They shared an old joke. In case of a particularly boring meeting—and there were plenty of those in the police business—the trapped person would ask for a favor. “Send a text asking me to leave the meeting. Add ‘911’ to make it seem urgent.” It was a mutual escape plan, albeit one they had never actually deployed.

  So when Hendershot got Ellis’s message—it even included the “911”—Hendershot assumed it was a joke rescue mission. Hendershot had spent the morning at a mandatory training meeting in Westminster’s city hall. Funny, Hendershot thought. But the next second, she realized it was no ruse.

  Ellis had big news. She told Hendershot she had just received photographs of the glove and shoe prints left at the scene of the attempted rape in Lakewood. The criminalist who uncovered the prints was a friend: Sheri Shimamoto. The pair had bonded at a two-week training course at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Shimamoto was part of the blue web—Denver’s loose-knit network of law enforcement analysts.

  It made perfect sense that Shimamoto had discovered the prints. She had a thing about shoes. She owned fifty pairs—including five sets of Adidas Superstars, the three-herringbone-striped shell toes coveted by sneakerheads around the world. Before she began doing police work, her favorite job had been working retail at Lady Foot Locker. Shimamoto held a degree in mathematics. But her shoephilia had led her to specialize in shoe identification when she became a criminalist.

  Shoe prints weren’t as good as fingerprints, of course. They weren’t unique to a person. But with a little luck, they could tell a story about the bad guy that might help identify him. A shoe print could indicate a particular brand—a Nike or a Merrell. And certain marks—a nick on the heel, a wear pattern on the sole, a high arch—could leave behind impressions that a crime scene technician could link to an individual pair of shoes. To determine the origin of a shoe print at a crime scene, Shimamoto would spend hours on Zappos.com, the Internet shoe superstore that featured lovingly detailed images of the soles, uppers, and sides of thousands of shoes. Or she would go to the local mall and hang out at shoe stores. It was all research to get her closer to the perpetrator.

  Shimamoto had searched for shoe prints when she arrived at the scene in Lakewood, dusting the floor around the bedroom and kitchen with a bichromatic powder that revealed traces of oil or dirt left by fingers or shoes. She found four distinct impressions that looked like they were made by a tennis shoe. She found another similar shoe print in the wet dirt outside the bedroom window. When she dusted the window to look for fingerprints, she found instead what she thought was a glove print.

  A glove with a honeycomb pattern on the palm.

  As soon as Ellis pulled up the images that Shimamoto sent her, she recognized the pattern. It matched the size and shape of the strange honeycomb marks that she had discovered on the railing behind Sarah’s apartment. At the time, she wasn’t sure what had made the marks. Now, she told Shimamoto, she knew. Shimamoto was so excited that she raced out to a Dick’s Sporting Goods store, where she discovered a pair of soft, black Under Armour gloves. The fingers and palm featured a raised grip in the shape of a honeycomb.

  Next step: the shoes. Ellis examined the photo that her fellow criminalist Kali Gipson had taken after spray-painting the footprint behind Amber’s apartment in Golden. They looked nearly identical to the ones that Shimamoto had lifted from the mud beneath the bedroom window in Lakewood. Matt Cole, Galbraith’s partner, shipped an image of the prints to a shoe-identification website for law enforcement. A match came back: The prints were from a pair of Adidas ZX 700 mesh shoes. They first started selling in stores after March 2005.

  When Hendershot saw everything that the two criminalists had linked together, she knew: The man who attacked the woman in Lakewood on July 6, 2010, had to be the same person who had raped Doris and Sarah.

  Hendershot put in an immediate call to the Lakewood Police Department.

  —

  It was the strangest case that Lakewood detective Aaron Hassell had ever been assigned. He had been called out to an attempted rape at a home in a nicer neighborhood. The caller, a woman named Lilly, reported that a man in a black mask had attacked her while she was sleeping. When she called out for help, the man had gone to another room to check if anyone was home. Lilly seized the chance to escape. She dove out a window above her bed. She fell seven feet and landed headfirst, cracking her ribs, breaking a vertebra in her back. In intense pain, she’d staggered next door to her neighbors’ house and banged on a door to wake them.

  When police arrived, though, they found no signs of forced entry at the house. No pry marks on the doors. No windowpanes smashed. The doors were all locked. So, too, the windows. Hassell talked with four neighbors, none of whom had seen or heard anything unusual. Technicians recovered no DNA. “There’s no evidence anywhere,” Hassell thought.

  That wasn’t quite true. Shimamoto had turned up the shoe and glove prints. They didn’t match anything that belonged to Lilly. But neither did they point to any suspects—or even confirm that an attack had taken place. A gardener took care of Lilly’s yard. Workmen came to the house every now and again. And she had an elderly male friend who occasionally stayed at the home. Any of them could have left the prints.

  Lilly presented her own mystery. She was a free spirit. She made all sorts of unusual requests. She called Hassell to report that since the attempted rape, her cat had scratched at people wearing black boots. Perhaps the police should be looking for someone with black boots. “She felt this was information that could be u
seful to the investigation,” he wrote. She had a Russian artist friend draw a sketch of the attacker based on her description and asked Hassell to distribute it to the press. The drawing was of a man with a mask covering his face, except for a slit showing blue eyes and blond eyebrows. There were no other features that would help a person recognize the man in the sketch. Hassell declined to hand it out. On another occasion, she asked Hassell to canvass gyms around Denver in search of a well-built, six-foot-tall white man with blue eyes. “That’s going to be a lot of guys,” he told her. More than two months after calling police, she suddenly remembered that a strange wireless network had popped up on her computer before the attack. It was named “Pure Evil,” she said.

  Finally, she asked Hassell for a hypnotist to interview her in a trance state. Hassell contacted an investigator for the Jefferson County district attorney’s office who was a licensed hypnotherapist. The trio met on a windy day in October at the Lakewood police station, some three months after the attack. The investigator began the session with a common technique to induce hypnosis. Imagine you’re in an elevator, he told Lilly. You’re going down, down, down.

  She stopped him. No, I’m not, she told him. She had her own technique. I’m walking through a meadow, she said. She asked the investigator to allow her to act as a medium. She could speak for the cats, the squirrels, and the trees who witnessed the attack. Under hypnosis, Lilly described scenes she had not previously recounted, nor could have witnessed. She reported seeing how the attacker had snuck into her house through the garage. How he had stood and watched her through her windows.

  Lilly’s trance-induced insights did not impress Hassell, nor the investigator. The investigator “told me he did not feel it was a productive session,” Hassell wrote in his report. Lilly wasn’t hurting the investigation. But to Hassell’s mind, she sure wasn’t helping.