by J P Tompkins
Sometime during our sophomore year, I told her about Amanda. She told me she wasn’t going to bring it up, but that I sometimes woke her in the middle of the night, talking in my sleep, and that sometimes it was as though I was trying to yell but it was coming out in a whisper. I was embarrassed and I apologized over and over, but she assured me it didn’t happen every night, and that she wasn’t upset about it. She said she would be mad, though, if I kept saying I was sorry and if I let it make me feel bad, now that she understood why I was doing those things in my sleep.
After graduation, she moved here permanently, wanting to live in a bigger city. She’d been an education major, and now she teaches middle school. The restaurant job is something she does most Saturday nights during the school year and full-time during the summer months.
I took a job at a small paper in a small town in Georgia after we graduated. A little more than a year later, I landed the job here and moved back.
Just before I started covering this case, before it took over my life, I went on exactly two dates, both of them set up by Erin. Neither date was disastrous. There was just nothing there, no reason to even consider seeing either one again.
Two is a bad sample, I know, but for me personally, it was a one hundred percent failure rate.
I was glad they had gone that way. I hadn’t set out for them to fail, didn’t do anything to sabotage the experiences, but when they didn’t go well, I felt a sense of relief rather than disappointment. Now, I could tell all concerned—family and friends—that I had gone out and done some things socially, but they didn’t work out. The encouragement from those close to me could stop. At least I had tried.
The truth was, and is, I always find myself looking at people, mostly men, out of the corner of my eye. Figuratively, for the most part, but sometimes literally. I wonder what’s really going on in their thoughts. Who are they, really? Who are they when no one’s looking? What are the thoughts they have that they don’t want anyone to know?
I have zero interest in dating these days. Considering how much the story has consumed my life, I doubt dating would go any better. Nobody wants to hear the details of sadistic serial murders over their pan-seared scallops.
Erin, having just recently escaped from her relationship with Paul, has no interest in dating, either. That’s another thing that makes this current situation doable.
“I don’t want to date, I don’t even want to think about men for a long time,” she said one morning when we were in the kitchen. She’d been here about three days at that point and it was the first time she brought up that evening at the bar. “You were right. I should have believed you.” She apologized and started to cry. I told her she owed me no apology.
Erin also doesn’t talk about the case much, which gives me a nice break when we’re together.
But she brings it up now, as we eat.
“I wish I could have gone to the rally last night. A few people I work with were there. It’s all they talked about today.” Her phone rings again. She has the same reaction as earlier and she sends the caller to voicemail. “Anyway, I hope they catch this evil monster.”
“He’s not evil or a monster,” I say before I can stop myself. Not because I don’t believe it, but because I’d rather not talk about it right now.
She looks surprised. “What? You don’t think he’s evil?”
And now I have to explain what I mean. “No. Not the way you meant it there.” I put my fork down and lift my glass and take a sip of water. “People do bad things for all kinds of reasons, but they’re not possessed, they’re not monsters, they’re not anything other than the person you see on the sidewalk or sit next to in a movie theater or talk to in the break-room.”
“So, you’re saying everyone is a psycho.”
“I’m saying human beings can do some seriously horrific things. I’ve seen it too many times. It could be anyone. And I believe that’s why people talk about evil, and monsters, and whatever else they come up with to deny the reality that people like this guy are all around us. People who are on the edge. People who can snap at any moment. It’s not pleasant to think about.”
Erin looks a little surprised at what I’ve just said, but I think she gets it. Even if she doesn’t agree with me, even if she wants to view the world as if it were in some kind of epic Good versus Evil struggle, at least she knows I don’t want to hear it. I’ve covered too many stories, seen too many cases—this current one, especially—to deny reality.
“Huh,” she says. “I never thought about it that way.”
I drink without replying.
She shakes her head. “That’s actually worse, the way you describe it.”
“It is. But it’s the truth.”
“Well, now there will be two of us not sleeping tonight.”
Chapter 4
Just a few more minutes, I tell myself. It’s 11:45 and I’ve been working all evening. I’ll take the pill at midnight.
For the last half hour or so, I’ve been doing something I’ve done a number of times—browsing Instagram accounts. Beth Callahan’s is private, as is Kristi Stroup’s. But Janelle Morris and Payton Donnelly made theirs public. I’m not looking for anything specific when I scroll through their pictures. I might have during the early stages of covering this case, but not anymore. Now, I look at them only because I can’t stop myself.
There’s something about looking at the pictures of these girls. Not just any pictures. These are the ones they wanted people to see, the ones they selected to tell a story about themselves, the ones they cropped and applied filters to, making them just right for presentation.
It’s exactly what I dislike about social media. For the most part, these profiles are carefully curated versions of what someone wants everyone else to think their life is like. This is why I don’t have any personal social media accounts. I only have the ones Neil requires us, as reporters, to have. And even those, I only use for snooping on people or receiving messages, and sometimes tips, from readers.
I look at a picture of Janelle Morris on her eighteenth birthday. She’s laughing with friends as she holds up two balloons, one shaped like “1” and the other “8.” In another picture, she’s hugging a dog and the caption reads: “#LoveOfMyLife!” There are prom pictures. There are pictures of her moving into a dorm. Pictures of her getting her first apartment. Pictures of her with co-workers, out on a boat on a bright happy day.
I look at Payton Donnelly’s account, which has just a few pictures. There she is graduating from college. In another, she’s a bridesmaid. There are several of her holding her newborn nephew.
It’s hard to look at these and not have the crime scene photographs pop into my head. But they do. Every time.
I close the app, put my phone down and pick up my laptop to check something else I’ve been keeping up with recently.
Not long after the murder of Janelle Morris, I came across a true crime message board—a virtual hive of Internet detectives, buzzing with discussions about new and current cases, as well as cold cases, anything that gets traction on the boards.
People post news articles, crime scene photos, interview transcripts, anything they can find on the web. There’s also no shortage of theories, some compelling, others outlandish. Conspiracy theorists are swiftly mocked right off the site.
Murder is the most popular topic, serial and spree killers, especially.
Browsing the topics that first night, I found a discussion thread about Beth, Kristi and Janelle, started just a few days after Janelle’s body was found. This topic fell under the heading of potential serial killer cases. There weren’t many entries in the thread, but it had been viewed over a thousand times in just a few days.
I bookmarked the site, thinking I might check back at some point. Now I check it every day and I’ve come to recognize the regulars on the site.
Like the person who goes by “morningcoughy.” Clever username, I thought, the first time I saw it. Even in a forum like this, where th
e topic is dark, they manage lightness sometimes. But this person is very serious, to the point of making a FAQ for the forum, as well as writing numerous long, detailed posts on the cases that interest them.
Then there’s “caseace22,” who actually isn’t much of an ace when it comes to this case. This is the person who likes to argue. Their intentions seem good, as are those of most people who are members of this forum, but the abrasiveness this person displays toward those who disagree with him (her?) can derail a good discussion thread.
And there’s “MyRedBlanket.” This person posts the occasional link to a new story, or asks a basic question, but he (she?) most often plays the role of encourager. “Nice post!” “Very interesting!” Sometimes even just “Wow!”
There are some stats at the bottom of the homepage, showing the number of registered users, currently just over 17,000. From what I’ve seen, the number of people who actively participate in the discussions looks to be less than two hundred.
The stats also show how many people are looking at the site at any given time. Sometimes I look at those numbers and wonder: Is he here? Is the killer one of the people who registered for a username? Is he among those who post about the case? Is he logged in when I am?
I try to picture him as he browses the site. Is he looking on his phone, a tablet, a laptop? Sitting in a living room? Is anyone in the room with him? Is he in bed like me?
Or maybe he’s not looking at the site when I am. Maybe he’s outside somewhere, in a neighborhood that’s not his own, moving from shadow to shadow, planning.
It’s thoughts like these that make me drift away from whatever I’m doing. I catch myself staring at a wall, lost in possibilities. And usually, I find my forefinger hurting as a result of a habit I have when I’m nervous or deep in concentration. My thumb presses into the tip of the finger, the nail digs in hard, leaving a mark.
I don’t know exactly when this started, but it dates back to the months following the abduction and murder of Amanda, when I would stay up late, sometimes all night, thinking about what I saw and what I did and didn’t do on that rainy day all those years ago.
I catch myself doing it right now. I stop, look at my finger, and see the red indentation left by my thumbnail.
I scan the list of messages on the board again and think about the people who frequent the site. They fall into three groups, I figure.
Group One: Those who have a genuine interest in seeing these cases solved.
Group Two: Those who like the mystery, the puzzle, and want to figure it out or at least be a part of the solution.
Group Three: Those who are morbidly curious.
No matter which group, they all have something in common. There are things they don’t know. Lots of things—details of the crimes that haven’t been made public; persons of interest who have been investigated, sometimes under surveillance, but have been cleared and spared the pain of having their names made public; official theories of the case; victimology reports; suspect profiles.
They haven’t seen any of that. But I have, thanks to my source.
Members of the site also don’t know my theory, because I’ve never shared it with anyone other than the police, who tell me they looked into it and there’s no reason to believe it has any merit. But I think they’re wrong.
Activity on the site is slow tonight and it’s almost midnight, so I shut down my laptop. I go into the bathroom to get the pill. When I turn on the light, I’m struck by my appearance. Not the eyes; I was expecting that, after Erin making a big deal of them earlier. This time it’s my hair. I haven’t made time for a hair appointment in a long time since this case started, and it had been a while even before that. So as the months went on, as my hair got longer, I no longer tried to do anything with it. I simply pulled it back in a ponytail. It quickly became part of my routine and I stopped even thinking about it.
I open the bottle of pills and fish one out. Dr. Benson said to take it while I’m in bed, ready to sleep, because it can be fast-acting. Well, here I am, in bed, ready to sleep, looking at the pill.
I don’t want to think about it too much, or at all. I don’t want to second-guess and not take it. I need sleep.
I toss the pill into my mouth, then sip from the bottle. Until the medication begins to work, I stand no chance in stopping my mind from running through the case.
Chapter 5
Kristi Stroup was the killer’s second victim, but the first to die. A recent college graduate, she had decided to stay here for the summer rather than go home to Georgia.
She spent the last hours of her life jogging on a park trail and then at home, alone. Until he showed up.
The autopsy revealed that she’d been sexually assaulted and her cause of death was strangling. There was very little water in her lungs, so she was already dead when he placed her facedown in the bathtub. The killer had cut a lock of her hair. Only a few strands were found, which meant he took most of it with him.
Her boyfriend was a suspect only briefly, and only by the police. Her parents didn’t think for a second he was responsible. They told me so.
Two days later, I got a call from Cole Curtis. “There’s something you need to know.”
Cole was a fifteen-year veteran of the police department who had been sidelined two years ago after being injured in the line of duty one night when a simple traffic stop turned into a violent clash.
The driver cut the wheel and hit the gas as Cole approached, backing into him, breaking both of his legs in multiple places. The driver of the vehicle was caught about an hour outside of town by the Highway Patrol, a mobile meth lab in the trunk.
That was almost three years ago now. Cole is still with the department. During his medical leave, he took online classes and got an IT certificate. Now, after some turnover in the office, he’s the Chief Information Technology Officer for the department.
I had interviewed Cole and his then wife, Heather, for a long feature article on him after the accident, but just before it went to publication, he asked me not to run it. He didn’t want that kind of attention, pointing out the fact that many others in his line of work faced tougher challenges than he faced, some lost everything, including their lives. I honored his request.
We kept in touch during his recovery. He and Heather got divorced about a year after the accident. He told me their marriage was doomed, anyway. The accident didn’t have anything to do with it. If anything, it delayed the inevitable.
Since then, our jobs cause our paths to cross sometimes, but not often. Getting a call from him wasn’t strange, but this one was the most important yet.
“There’s something they’re not telling you, or the public,” he said, “and it’s pissing me off.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“You can’t use my name,” he insisted.
“I won’t.”
I heard him suck in a deep breath and exhale slowly. “All right. They collected semen from this Stroup girl. It matches with the Callahan case.”
I’d been lying down on my couch, drifting off while watching some mindless show on TV. I sat up, jolted wide-awake from the information he was sharing, realizing this story was bigger than I or anyone outside of law enforcement knew.
I called my editor, Neil Elliot, and told him what I’d just learned. He’d never asked about my anonymous sources before and didn’t this time either.
Cole gave me copies of the Beth Callahan file, complete with pictures taken of her in the emergency room. Red-faced, tangled hair, bruising already forming around her wrists where the electrical cord held her arms behind her back.
Being the only survivor, police had hoped she would have some kind of description of the attacker. She didn’t. Only a rough guess as to height and weight. The case notes said she never got a look at his face. He’d worn a ski mask and she never got a good look at his eyes to determine their color. The attacker didn’t speak until it was over, and when he did, it was through clenched jaw: “I’m gonna let
you live so you can tell everyone what’s coming.”
The only people she told were detectives.
When Cole gave me the case file, I knew I had to speak with her. My first attempt was by phone, and she promptly hung up on me when I told her who I was and why I wanted to speak with her.
I waited a couple of days, then tried again. This time, she didn’t hang up right away. But she also didn’t say anything. She just listened as I explained that it was not my intention to sensationalize what had happened to her.
I told her I thought it was important for her to speak publicly, that she might be able to save lives by doing so, and she could speak through me without having to be on camera or hold a press conference. I thought I’d made a pretty good case and I waited through at least twenty seconds of silence before she hung up.
She didn’t want to talk to me. Understandable. But I still had the information from the file.
My story hit the website late on a Sunday night.
◆◆◆
Janelle Morris, the third victim, was twenty-four when he took her.
Neighbors knew something was wrong when they saw her dog, Polly, outside and alone, nervously running from the front of the building to the back, over and over again, barking, leash trailing behind her. This was just after midnight.
A couple of Janelle’s neighbors she was friendly with took Polly to the front door and found it unlocked. They opened it, called for Janelle, but got no answer, went inside and found her.
The autopsy report mirrored Kristi’s: Janelle had been sexually assaulted, strangled, bound with electrical cord, left facedown in a full bathtub, a lock of hair cut from her head.
Janelle’s parents didn’t want to talk at length, but I did get something from her mother, a quote that would become the end of the story. She told me they had taken Polly to live with them, and unless Polly was sleeping or eating, she spent most of her time sitting by the front door.