“That's why I decided to go with the group to his house, if he wasn't at work the odds of catching him would be at home or on the way home. I knew that if I really wanted to find the 'why's' as to what made Petr Dombrowski operate, I might not get them from him anyway, but from where he lived. I had wanted to see the place where he sat at night plotting his demented revenge on his past tormentors. He might never speak at all considering what Sister Anastacia had told me, so the physical evidence would have to help me learn what I wanted to know.”
The psychology of a murder had become Carly’s passion. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was the driving force in his career. While solving the puzzle was important to him, the real reason he even played the game was an intrinsic desire to know the ‘why’s’ of human behavior. In discovering Petr Dombrowski, Carly discovered himself.
“He still wasn't home by the time we arrived, but we went in anyway. We had surveillance keeping watch, so if he came into the area we would get him one way or another. Going into his house was the most terrifying experience of my life, worse than anything I ever encountered as a beat cop. I wasn’t afraid for my safety as much as I was afraid to see the highest level of evil as it existed in reality. I felt as if I was walking into Satan's lair, the bowels of hell, the inner sanctum of a truly mad man. I had seen what he had done to those women, it was unnerving to get so close to the workings of that mind.”
“Sort of like finding out the bogie man really does live under your bed?” Sully asked.
“Exactly, but at first there was nothing evil about the place. As we approached the house the first thing we noticed was the yard was conspicuously neat, if not overly so. Hedges were trimmed perfectly; the grass was edged uniformly along an unbroken walkway. The two story house while older was extremely well kept, its paint was updated, the windows had been painstakingly cleaned. Obviously the person who lived here was meticulous and thorough, and had time on his hands. Walking inside, on the ground floor, it appeared to be quite normal. It was pretty Spartan and reflective of an older bachelor's lifestyle. Much of the furnishings were outdated and worn, like they had been left over from his mother's home. The house had that smell you find in an older person's house too. Closed up, with a trace of cooking odors that weren't recent in nature.”
Wanting to let the others know how he felt at the time, Carly added for effect, “From a detective's point of view, the first impression was disappointing. The only thing that caught any of our attention was the lone crucifix on the dining room wall.”
“Upstairs in the bedrooms the scenario was altogether different. Obviously this was where he lived, where he spent much of his time.”
“The first bedroom might have been his mother's, the master bedroom. It had that sense of neatness about it, that one would expect from an older parent. It looked as if it had been untouched for years. It was almost like a museum. A second bedroom was obviously Dombrowski's. It was messy with lots of tools, food containers, and junk lying about. The bed wasn't made. Taped to the wall was a yearly calendar with every first Friday circled in red.”
“I had a sense that the upstairs was scripted to be like anyone's family home. Dombrowski's room was the child's room. It was small and messy like a kid's room.”
“When we went into the third bedroom, I was bowled over by the most bizarre religious display imaginable. Splashed across the walls, ceiling and floor were deep scarlet color paint. Mounted around the room were full-sized 'Stations of the Cross'. Actual 'Stations' from a church, not replicas mind you, but very large, very authentic 'Stations”.
“Where did he get them?”
“We eventually learned, that Dombrowski had stolen them from his own parish church about two years before he started his murder spree. There were a number of other religious items there that Dombrowski had stolen also, such as a chalice, a priest's robe and a rather ornate crucifix.”
Diane made a note in her book as Carly mentioned this. Her note taking had been random, but he noticed as he spoke she might find something of special interest and scribble furiously as he talked. Carly like the fact, she as he did, favored old fashion note taking with pen and paper.
“Alongside each of the 'Stations' were crude drawings of Jesus which showed his genitals, Mary with her breasts exposed, priests with body parts missing, men having sex together. Dirty words were scribbled everywhere. Epitaphs had been written in a childish scrawl throughout the room. They said, things such as, ‘Mommy is a whore', 'Fuck Jesus', 'Penis Killer'. They were everywhere...walls, floors, even the ceiling.”
“Later the lab determined that there were blood and semen samples smeared on the floor and walls. They were all from Dombrowski flagellating himself and masturbating.”
A low whistle came from a corner of the office, “That’s one sick bastard!”
Carly could only nod in agreement. “It was extremely distressing and demented from a personal point of view. It was also extremely fascinating from a behaviorist's point of view. Keep in mind, I was right in the midst of my master's program when I stumbled onto this. From a scholarly point of view this was the Rosetta Stone of insanity.”
“After about an hour of standing in the room just looking at the work that Dombrowski had done, muttering in hushed tones like choir boys in church, we left to search the basement and the rest of the house more thoroughly.”
“While the upstairs was where Dombrowski fueled his pathos, the basement is where he equipped it. We found leather pieces matching the thongs used in binding the women. There were tons of city-head nails lying about, there were rags with bloodstains from his clean-ups. We discovered at least two hammers with traces of blood. Old clothes with blood samples were stashed in corners. We found newspapers that had reported each murder, with the more gruesome details highlighted.”
“Without considering the madness upstairs, we had enough physical evidence laying around in plain view throughout the basement to convict and execute Dombrowski easily if any of the blood samples matched the victims'.”
“He obviously never expected anyone to get this close to him. The first reaction from any of us, was either he thought he was too clever, which really wasn't the case with someone whose self-esteem had been trampled on as a child, or he didn't care which wasn't remotely true considering the passion on display upstairs, or he was just so mad, so insane that a cover-up just didn't occur to him. Believe me the latter turned out to be the absolute truth.”
“I once had a psychology professor tell me that the surest sign of insanity was when one didn't bother to hide the behavior. Dombrowski wasn't hiding a thing, he just hadn't been discovered up to that point.”
“Before we left, the second squad arrived at the house. Since Dombrowski wasn't at work, there wasn't a lot for them to do there. They found relatively little there to suggest he was the murderer. They confiscated some of the tools and had called in the lab boys to go over the smithing shop with a fine toothed comb. On the surface however, it appeared we wouldn't find too many clues there. His work van wasn't there. We thought the vehicle might have been a treasure trove of clues as he probably used it to transport his victims and the paraphernalia he used in the killings.”
“We waited for what seemed to be an eternity. We wondered if he knew. Our worse fears were he had seen us and ran. Since it was a Wednesday before a first Friday my partner figured that Dombrowski was out making arrangements for his next victim.”
“All of us felt that we didn't have the option of waiting too long, if my partner Dave had been right we couldn't sit still while he was out snatching another woman. We had the DMV information on his vehicle, so we opted to put out the APB for him city and statewide. We got the chief's office to order up roadblocks around the LoDo area.'
“The Chief Inspector had considered going on TV to run his picture and ask for the citizens to help us, but once we weighed the brutality of his crimes and the terror of the populace, we decided against it. After all it could spook him if he saw it an
d make him run, it could spook the people of Denver and make them run, or we might end up with some kind of amateur vigilante group getting in the way or killing the wrong guy.”
“The fears of a leak with the APB were the greatest issue. The possibility for keeping the lid on the media had its limits. You must remember that we essentially had put every law enforcement officer in the state on alert. So sooner or later one or more of them would leak something to the press. Granted Dombrowski would have been hard pressed to escape or even elude the type of manhunt we had set up, however he had been acting with impunity for seven months. We did not want him going out in one last murderous spree. Plus, we wanted him alive. That was important to all of us. This man had done the city wrong. He made fools of us. We wanted him to get his share of the justice system, in the most punitive way possible.”
“From the moment the APB went out, time seemed to stop for all of us. We set up a command post at Dombrowski's house while we began bagging the evidence, taking pictures and trying to nail every detail imaginable. We waited for the hopeful word that he had been apprehended on his way home.”
Diane interrupted, “I cannot imagine you all having to wait any longer. You had him, yet you didn’t. How did you last those final moments?”
“The moments seemed like hours, and an hour became an eternity as we imagined him snatching yet another victim or having a CB or a scanner and finding out about the dragnet we laid out throughout Denver, all of Colorado, southern Wyoming and even western Kansas.”
“Like my finding Sister Anastacia, we backed into capturing Dombrowski, the famed 'Crucifixion Killer'. When we got word of his location we had to laugh, a patrol car spotted his van at an urgent care center on the north edge of the city. Our murderous maniac really was sick, that's why he took off work. When the man stepped out of that office, he met a squad of SWAT snipers, nearly thirty-five uniformed patrolmen, almost twenty detectives, plus enough police brass to start a band.”
“Believe me when I say he went quietly.”
Chapter Five
Carly was sorry he hadn't been in on the bust itself, that would have been a true stroke of luck, after all no one could predict when and where the police would get Dombrowski. Just getting him was the critical issue. Being in on the arrest would have been asking too much even for the man who broke the case from finding the motive to learning the killer’s identity. It didn't matter though, he got his share of the glory at every turn. As he waited for the arrest, the contents of Dombrowski’s house offered him more than enough material to complete a behavioral study of Petr Dombrowski for his master's thesis.
Once the arrest had been made, Carly and most everyone from the house went downtown to take part in the booking. He was not hesitant to leave, as he was to return to Dombrowski house many more times in the days and weeks to follow, but only once would he get to see the maniac who caused the city so much pain formally booked on murder charges.
About three hours after the arresting officers brought Dombrowski into the station, Carly finally got to see him. As he recounted the experience to Diane and her people, he felt himself sweat. His palms grew damp as he remembered the oddity and the horror combined within the person of Petr Dombrowski.
Barely acknowledging his audience, Carly talked almost in a stream of consciousness as he remembered that first meeting. “Strange fellow, to understate it.”
Dombrowski had barely spoken. He responded only to 'yes' or 'no' type questions. With a nod he had indicated he understood his rights. He said 'no' when asked if he wanted a lawyer, but the police had brought two or three of them in from the public defender's office anyway. They wanted to do this by the book and they did, in every way, in every detail. There was no way he was going to go free because the police could not track the technicalities of the law. It had been hard for them to know if he actually was willing, but he seemed to be accepting of the questions put to him. Carly and the others would find it was hard to tell if Dombrowski was naturally compliant or if he had just resigned himself to his fate. He said so very little, no one who questioned him or talked with him over the next days and weeks ever got an exact read on his actual frame of mind.
Carly took a deep breath, Diane nodded reassuringly knowing recounting these events were not easy for Carly. As he spoke, the memories poured forth.
“At first when I saw him through the one-way mirror, I thought he was overtly nervous, as his eyes darted about like a frightened rabbit's. They never stopped moving. On the other hand, his voice was remarkably calm. It had a resonance of tone in a deep bass. When he spoke the occasional monosyllable, he did it slowly and distinctly, with very exact enunciation. He always said 'yes' or 'no', instead of the usual, 'yeah' or 'nah'. He sat almost motionless the whole time we questioned him. He never fidgeted in his seat. He never asked for cigarettes or coffee. He never even asked to go to the bathroom or for a break. He ignored the public defenders even when they spoke to them. He didn't whine or ask for any of the usual things detainees always seem to want when we bring them in for questioning. A real iron man, he was.”
“Or at least that’s what you thought, wasn’t it?” Diane asked, knowing Carly had eventually concluded something much different eventually.
“At least at first,” he replied quietly.
“During the first round of questioning, I sat in an observation room and watched. We had brought in a team of departmental sharpshooters when it came to that sort of thing, as well as people from the District Attorney's office including the D. A. himself. Hell, I was surprised the mayor didn't show up, but she had sent someone down from her office to observe, just for good measure.”
Dombrowski had been fascinating to watch, particularly as a physical specimen. He reminded Carly of a gnome or a dwarf from a child's fairy tale. He couldn't have stood much more than five foot five or so, but he weighed over two hundred pounds. “None of it was fat,” Carly admitted almost admiringly.
Showing his eastern European heritage, he had legs which were wide and heavy, evidence of the years of hard and solid labor as a smithy. His massive shoulders and arms couldn't be hidden by the cheap flannel shirt he wore. Out of his shoulders jutted a large balding head without the benefit of a neck, as if the slope of his collarbone rose straight up to meet his ears. It would have been impossible to imagine him wearing a tie or even buttoning the collar of his shirt as his neck was so thick.
“Sarcastically, I remember telling my partner at the time, Colorado was fortunate it still didn't do hangings, as it would have been impossible to snap that neck.”
Dombrowski’s face was as plain as a thumb, wide without a crease or a crevice, like a piece of leather. The flattened nose and wide thick lips barely broke the plain of his swarthy face. Underneath his thick dark eyebrows, his dark brown eyes moved constantly, almost rhythmically. They were the only evidence of a storm within the monolith of Petr Dombrowski.
“It was the face of an everyday working man, plain and simple. A nondescript visage at best, almost an 'everyman' kind of look. It was hard to imagine how he could might have looked as he ranted and raved in that room of dementia in the upstairs of his house. I could never have pictured him while in the throes of a killing. That face didn't seem capable of expressing the necessary passion to act as he had.”
When he was asked his name, he didn't respond, but when asked if he was Petr Dombrowski he said, 'yes'. The same held true with his address and all the other routine questions. The pattern of 'yes-no' speech made it hard to interrogate him as the questioner had to make sure the inquiry was constructed in such a way that the answer could only be a yes or no. There was no way the detectives could spring more open-ended questions on him, as he didn’t respond.
As long as the police provided the information he would affirm or deny it, but never did he self-initiate anything in response or even by way of side commentary. When it came to asking him if he had murdered the women, he gave the same affirmative response he had given when asked about his nam
e. Nothing changed in his voice or expression as he confessed his responsibility to the most heinous of crimes Colorado had seen. The police found it hard to believe, then or now, that they had seated before them one of the most volatile and lethal men in the country. The intensity and passion was not there.
“Did you get to interrogate him?” Diane asked.
“Yes, Once the departmental inquisitioners finished and they had the signed confession in hand, they allowed us amateurs a shot. When I got my chance to interview him, I was far more nervous than he was. I intended to ask him why he had done what he just confessed to, but I never got the question out of my mouth. As I fixed my eyes to his, their rapid movements confused me. It wasn't a casual act nor was it one of fear as I first thought. It took me a second to follow the visual path he made with his eyes. In the fastest of motions, he would stare at my forehead, my lower chest, my left shoulder, then my right shoulder and then repeat it again and again, non-stop.”
“At that moment, I knew he was guilty and totally mad. I knew it right then and there. The son of a bitch had been using his eyes to mark each and every one who talked with him with the sign of the cross over and over again. The bastard had been sizing up all of us for a crucifixion.”
The crash of a coffee cup as it slipped from the hand of a shocked detective broke the nervous silence in the room.
“Clean that up,” Sully barked. His order seemed out of place for the little man. Carly knew what he had said surprised them all. The insanity of Dombrowski had bubbled just below the surface. The only way it would stop would be with death.
MemoryMen Page 10