I was probably accorded this honor because, unlike Sheriff Taylor, I don’t have to run for office. Fortunately, I’d had quite a bit of experience in working with reporters in LA.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said. “How much of the crime scene detail can I disclose? Do you want me to say he was burned alive while locked in a cage hung from a juniper?”
“Mike, you’re in charge, but I think the word is out about the cage. Go ahead and tell them the method of death. Our medical examiner has ruled that it was a homicide by burning. You should have the press conference before the funeral, but too late for the morning news shows.”
“Was there any news from the welder about the cage?” I asked.
“Now that was a surprise. I had Pete Pierce from the welding shop out on Old Highway 66 take a look at it. He brought along his father who retired from the business more than ten years ago. They both agree that the welding method is quite old. The welds show some signs of age, and no one would use those welding techniques anymore. They think the cage was made from cutting up a car hood or trunk, but the shocker is they are sure that it is more than fifty years old. Oh, and they said that the cage was formed using a basket weave pattern of steel strips. That made it a lot more difficult to construct than would be needed to do the job. They thought that might be significant.
The Pierces decided that a professional welder made it more than fifty years ago. However, it’s not been out in the open hanging from that juniper for fifty years since there’s not much rust. Even good stainless steel would show more weathering than this cage shows after fifty years in the open. We sent samples of the weld and metal to the FBI.”
I wondered what the cage had been used for before it was moved to that plateau for the barbaric crime. “Fifty years old?” was all I said.
“For tomorrow’s funeral, Governor Garman, two of her staff, the bishop, and the Jesuit boss from LA will all be coming on a state airplane,” the sheriff said. “They should be at the Sedona airport at 2:00 tomorrow. I would like you to pick up the bishop and Jesuit, and I’ll take the governor and her aides in my Explorer. The governor and bishop do not want any contact with the press, so we are taking them directly to the church. After the funeral we’ll brief them and then take them back to their plane.”
After my call to the sheriff, I asked Rose to see if we could rent the largest auditorium at the Harkins Theater for a press conference at 10:30 tomorrow. When I found it was available, I called the sheriff’s assistant in Flagstaff and asked her to let the reporters who had called Sheriff Taylor know about the press conference. I contacted each of the reporters who had left messages and informed them about tomorrow’s press conference and funeral arrangements. After returning all the calls, I headed home for dinner.
On the way, I stopped at the car wash in west Sedona. I had never had a bishop in my car, but I figured it should be clean. At home, Margaret and Kevin were having a glass of wine on the deck. I told both of them about tomorrow’s press conference and funeral. There might be some national press coverage. I already had three requests for TV news cameras to be set up outside the church.
After the wine, we went to the Monsoon for dinner. Kevin told us funny stories about his life at his fraternity house at the University of Texas. He was good-natured company with a great sense of humor. When we got home, I went to bed early. Tomorrow was going to be a long day. I dreamed of witches on broomsticks flying across the full moon in the autumn night. I dreamed of Jesuits, inquisitors, and pagans in white robes.
CHAPTER 12
It was Thursday November 4, the morning of Father Sean’s funeral. Margaret was still sleeping when I got up at 4:00 to prepare for the press briefing at 10:30. I felt confident about the press if I was thoroughly prepared because I‘d held dozens of press conferences in Los Angeles. I was much more anxious about the briefing for the bishop of Phoenix and the governor of Arizona. I had not even seen a bishop close up since my confirmation ceremony forty years earlier, and I had never met a governor.
Margaret was up when I left for the office. She planned to bring Kevin to the funeral this afternoon. Kevin had never met Father Sean, but he felt a kinship with him in death. The church would be full, and access to the church parking lot would be limited to official vehicles and the press. I arranged for Margaret to have a pass that would let her drive into the parking lot with Kevin. He was an official visitor as far as I was concerned. If he hadn’t found the body the morning after the crime, the perpetrators would have had a chance to cover up the murder. In that isolated spot, the buried body might never have been found.
The dawn was beginning to turn the eastern horizon purple, as I drove to the office. The full moon looked huge as it set in the western sky. It gave enough light to see the dramatic black shapes of the area’s buttes and mesas. They looked slightly sinister on this cloudless pre-dawn morning.
At the office, the night duty officer said good morning and gave me a note to call the sheriff at home after 7:30. The sheriff had left the message at midnight. I assumed he also wasn’t sleeping well. There was some nagging problem in the back of my mind regarding the steel cage; it was fifty years old. The grove of ponderosa was at least that old, and the circular shape of the grove of trees that surrounded the huge juniper seemed unnatural.
I made fresh coffee and went into my cube to review my files on the case. There was a two-hour time difference between Sedona and the FBI Lab in Virginia, so I put in a call to see if there was any new information on their part of the investigation. I reached an FBI scientist who I knew from several previous cases. He was surprised to hear from me at that early hour, but he did have some new information.
After exchanging greetings, the FBI chemist explained what the lab had found. “The blue fat that you sent had some interesting properties. The blue color was from indigo dye, the most common blue dye. It’s used in blue jeans and many other fabrics. However, this indigo was unusual. Most indigo is made synthetically nowadays. The dye in this fat was a natural form that was refined from a plant. Even natural indigo is still fairly common. Huge amounts are still made by the old techniques in India. I was able to extract a small amount of two types of DNA from the sample. The fat was from a sheep. It is unprocessed raw sheep tallow. The dye did not come from the Idigofera tintoria, the tropical plant that produces almost all of the natural indigo dye. It came from a northern European plant that has smaller quantities of the same blue dye, indigotin. The common name of the plant is woad. It was a rather big dye crop in prehistoric Europe continuing through the medieval period. It’s no longer cultivated, but it grows wild in England and northern Europe. The synthetic substitute is so much cheaper, that indigo has not been processed commercially from woad in centuries.”
“Woad? Do you have any idea where this type of indigo was produced?”
“My guess is that it was homemade. There were traces of non-sudsy, sparkling ammonia in the sample. A commercial process would have been cleaner. Woad would grow well in any climate similar to northern Europe or in a greenhouse. When I did a computer search, I did find one place where woad indigo is sold commercially, a small fabric and dye shop at Lower Eashing, in Surrey, England. I’ve e-mailed the local police to check on any shipments to the western US.”
“The candle wax produced a similarly unusual result,” he said. “It was beeswax colored by Rubia tinctorum, the madder root. Madder also grows wild in northern Europe and England. It is available from many small natural dye shops. There are too many possible sources to do us much good. Both the indigo and madder were common dyes in prehistoric Europe.”
These natural dyes were consistent with the Druid connection to the ritual murder. If the murderers were being consistent with the Druidic ritual, they might want to use the same dyes as the ancient sect in their barbarous rite. “Is there anything else you’ve learned?”
“There’s one more interesting fact. The tissue sample that your medical examiner shipped us has a high concentratio
n of the drug MDMA, better known by the street-name of Ecstasy. The high concentration was in the liver sample, but there was no trace of it in the bone sample. That would be consistent with a high one-time dose, not regular use. In this high concentration, MDMA would make it easy to persuade the priest to go somewhere with someone he wouldn’t normally trust. It might have made him unable to resist the abductors or express his own will. I’m sorry to report that we have found nothing useful on Father Sean’s hard drive. He used very good security for a priest. I don’t have a report on the metal cage sample yet.”
I thanked my friend for the quick response and the information and asked that he fax the written report to both Sheriff Taylor and me.
I called Sheriff Taylor at home. He was awake but sounded sleepy. I gave him the FBI lab update.
“At least that’s consistent with your theory of the case,” he said. “I had a call late in the day yesterday that sent me down to the records storage warehouse for a good part of the night.”
In a weary voice the sheriff said, “I got a call from George Cook yesterday. He was the sheriff of Coconino County when I first joined the Flagstaff police in 1980. He left office over twenty years ago. I didn’t know he was still alive until I got his call from the Peaks Senior Living Community. Cook had heard about the Father Sean murder and wanted to tell me about a case from thirty years ago.”
The thirty years ago was the part of the conversation that caught my attention. I thought of the age of the tree in the sacred circle and the age of the metal cage.
“I was being polite to a guy who served the county for many years,” he said, “but the more old Sheriff Cook said, the more I became concerned. After our conversation, I went to find the old records. I’ll give you the condensed version of what I learned, but you should review the old files in detail. I’ll bring them to Sedona when I come down today.”
The sheriff had my complete attention. He was serious about a connection to a crime from thirty years ago.
“Sheriff Cook told me of the Flagstaff Halloween disappearances. The late sixties and early seventies were a time of heavy drug use and hippie influence in Flagstaff. Transients and dropouts were common in the county. There were several communes in the area that were the center of this hippie scene. Sheriff Cook got involved when a kid who lived at one of these communes near Mormon Lake turned up missing. Although these young people often moved on without notice, this case seemed different. Everyone at the commune was convinced that the missing young man had somehow met with foul play.”
Sheriff Cook had taken the case seriously, and Sheriff Taylor was too. He explained that the young man had disappeared from the Safeway parking lot out on Highway 66 while he was waiting for his girlfriend to get off work. The car was left with the keys in the door, but the young man, Curt Franklin, was gone. This was October 31, 1972. Franklin was never found, but in the course of the investigation, Sheriff Cook found a pattern. There were young men reported missing on each October 31st of the previous four years. All were transients with no local family connection.
When Sheriff Cook checked older records, he found disappearances of young men year after year with only a couple of breaks. There were railroad workers, lumberjacks, hobos, but never men with strong ties to the community. Sheriff Cook was convinced that there was a serial killer in the Flagstaff area, but he never found a trace of what happened to the victims every Halloween. Sheriff Cook’s grandson is on the Flagstaff police force, and when he mentioned the Father Sean Murphy case to his grandfather, the former sheriff called the current sheriff.
“The age of both that circular ponderosa grove and the sacrificial cage had me wondering if this crime was the first use of that pagan ceremonial location. Sheriff, did the missing people continue after the 1972 case?"
“Yes, I’m afraid that they did,” he said. “The trail is not as clear, but maybe every second or third year, there was a local disappearance from Flagstaff, from Williams, or from the Navajo Reservation on October 31. In the missing years, the victims might have come from somewhere else, or just have been guys driving through town. I don’t want this part of the story mentioned at your press conference, but I think we need to do some more investigation of the grove and the area of the Rim near it. We may be looking for the remains of many previous victims. There’s already ten inches of snow in that area, but I don’t want to wait until spring to search it. We’ll look for good weather sometime this week or next and see what we can find.”
The sheriff concluded by saying, “Mike, I’ll see you at the office after the press conference.”
It was clear that the sheriff did not want to be seen by the press. He was leaving that up to me. Of course, facing the press was not physically dangerous; however it pumped the same level of adrenalin into my system as a gun battle. I was OK with the assignment only because I had gotten through other difficult press briefings.
After the disturbing news from Sheriff Taylor, I called the Arizona State Crime Lab to find out if they had anything new on the case. They’d identified the tire prints found along the closed forest service road. One was from a tire that is commonly sold as a replacement tire for mid-size pickup trucks. The Firestone tire was new, and the print was useful enough to be good evidence if we found the vehicle. It was a common tire, and there were more pickup trucks in Coconino County than passenger cars.
The second set of prints was a Goodyear tire commonly used on large Ford sports utility vehicles. The lab reported that the small tire track, which I found much closer to the crime scene, was from a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. These small vehicles fit inside the bed of a pickup truck. They can also have significant cargo capacity and could have transported the steel cage or an inert Jesuit priest. Although ATV’s were common in northern Arizona, we could investigate ones with significant cargo capacity that would fit into the bed of a mid size pickup truck.
The boot print was interesting. It was from a man’s Salomon Contragrip sole. There was little wear on the tread and that model had only been made for two years. Although it was a man’s boot, it was only a seven and a half. It was a small man or a boy. It was hard to believe that a boy was present at the crime, so I decided that we needed to look for a man who had small feet and could afford $150 hiking boots. Since the Salomon was an expensive boot, it was not sold at discount stores. There would only be a couple of places that offered them in Coconino or Yavapai Counties, and we’d have a good shot at finding all of the seven and a half boots sold in the area since this model was introduced. I was pleased with the information from the crime lab. Now we had tangible evidence to investigate that might prove useful.
CHAPTER 13
I spent the remaining time before the 10:30 press conference preparing my presentation. I paced back and forth in the hall outside my office, thinking of every possible question and how I might answer it. I needed a good way to say that we were making progress without it being an outright lie. At least we had the hard evidence of the tire tracks and boot print. I also wanted to play down the pagan connection.
It occurred to me that I had not read the newspapers this morning in my haste to get to the office. I asked Rose to bring me the Flagstaff, and Phoenix papers. She brought in USA Today and The New York Times in addition to the local ones. All had the Sedona Priest Murder on the front page. The New York Times reported it as a small article below the fold, but it was major headlines in the other papers. There was a photo of Father Sean, probably from a book jacket, in the USA Today. Several articles referred to the Jesuit as a modern martyr for his faith. The pagan connection was public information now. The Arizona Republic showed an aerial photo of the circular grove where the body was found. The dark green of the ponderosas showed as a vivid black circle against the recent snow. The lighter green of the juniper showed as a gray blob in the center.
I read each article, trying to anticipate questions at today’s press conference. The press knew that Father Sean was attempting to minister to Sedona’s New Age
and pagan citizens. No one had reported any details of the murder scene except for its location in a circular grove of trees. They were making a big deal of the murder occurring on Halloween.
The papers did not report that Father Sean was burned alive in a metal cage. Since the sheriff had told me to explain the cause of death, I figured that there would be new headlines tomorrow. The Flagstaff paper reported that Kevin Riker, a hiker from Texas, might have witnessed the crime. I was not pleased that his name was in the paper.
At 10:15, I drove to the Harkins Theater where Rose had scheduled the press conference. I was surprised to find every TV station in Phoenix setting up their remote transmission vans. I had not approved the live broadcast of the press conference, but I had not thought to prohibit it. Los Angeles coverage of one of my murder cases had never been this intense. I had assumed that it would only be newspaper coverage.
When I parked my white Coconino County Sheriff’s Explorer, a crowd of reporters surrounded me. I recognized several of the TV reporters, but I only knew the local Sedona Red Rock News reporter, Meg Hull. I said good morning to Meg and ignored the questions from the rest of the crowd. I told the crowd that the press conference would start promptly at 10:30, but that I had time for an exclusive interview with Meg before we started.
Meg grinned as we entered the theater together, pleased to be singled out. We found a quiet place to talk for ten minutes. There were several things I wanted to bring out in the conference, and I wanted a chance to plant a couple of questions with Meg. I answered several of Meg’s questions and then mentioned the two things I hoped that she would ask at the press conference.
First, I wanted Meg to ask about the Sedona connection. So far, there was nothing to indicate that the perpetrators were from Sedona although Father Sean had been a priest here. The murder did not occur in Sedona, but in a very remote area of the Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness.
The Dead Priest of Sedona Page 6